Registration begins April 1 for more than 85 spring semester courses through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Duke. Classes begin April 14 at locations across Durham.
For a nominal membership fee, adults can join campus life, registering for courses that touch on travel planning on the internet, photo restoration or the fine art of pleasure reading.
OLLI at Duke's spring course subjects include the American Dance Festival, Quaker life in North Carolina History, and interfaith religious life. For the full list of April-May courses, click here.
The Duke program is part of national network of more than 117 campus-based Osher chapters. Instructors shape their courses around their own expertise and passions and teach in a relaxed classroom environment. There are no tests, papers or grades.
Here are some course highlights from the spring semester:
* Two Duke theology doctoral students will teach a seminar class beginning April 17 surveying the history of visual images of Jesus Christ over the past 2,000 years. Tanner Capps, whose research focuses on 16th-century iconoclasm, and Jacki Price-Linnartz, a student of theology and the arts, will lead this discussion of Christian art and the changing face of God.
* Tyler Atkinson, a Duke Divinity graduate and an aspiring clawhammer banjo player and songwriter, will lead "Ecclesiastes & Twentieth-Century Literature: How T. S. Eliot and Company Teach Us to Read the Bible." Atkinson suggests that the very form of Ecclesiastes, a contentious book throughout its history, invites reading the book through literary lenses.
* Frequent OLLI instructor Melisa Mills, who has also taught Ethics in Science in Duke's freshman Focus Program, returns with "Love 2.0: The History, Science and Practice of Our Supreme Emotion." The class will examine the research of UNC-Chapel Hill psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson, who studies human love from a multidisciplinary approach.
* Jodee Nimerichter, director of the American Dance Festival, and Gaspard Louis, director of ADF's Creative Movement Program, will offer an inside look at the history of modern dance and the 80-year-old festival. Each class will include 45 minutes of creative movement designed for non-dancers.
* "Native American Views of Land: Space and Place as Sacred" will be offered over six Thursdays by Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill grad Lisa Aldred, a former associate professor in Native American studies at Montana State University. She worked among the Navajo, Hopi, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow and other tribes. Aldred says one focus for the course will be what indigenous traditional sacred ecologies might teach mainstream America about today's environmental issues.
* Durham native Riverdave Owen, a naturalist and herbalist, continues his series of OLLI offerings on the trees of the Duke campus watershed with Tree Camp Along Sandy Creek. Participants will gain a better understanding of the natural history of Piedmont North Carolina.
In addition to the classes, OLLI sponsors social events, guest speakers, short trips and a host of special interest groups, ranging from two book clubs and a photography group to the New Horizons Band and Chorus.
For more information about OLLI course offerings, go to http://www.learnmore.duke.edu/olli/.