Upcoming Events

SPRING 2023

Please contact Gail Larose at glarose0@gmail.com for Zoom link details.

Wednesday, April 12, 2023
7:00 pm EDT via Zoom
(please contact Gail Larose at glarose0@gmail.com for the Zoom link)

Richard Van Loon on David Thompson

David Thompson (1770 – 1857) was a British-Canadian fur trader, surveyor and cartographer described as the greatest land geographer ever produced. Over his career, he travelled 90,000 kilometres, mapping 4.9 million square kilometres of North America along the way. Thompson has been described as the “greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced”. 

Richard Van Loon is past president of Carleton University and past chair of the Council of Ontario Universities. He holds a BSc in chemistry and an MA in political science from Carleton and a PhD in political studies from Queen’s University. He joined Carleton in 1970 as assistant professor of political science and has held faculty positions in the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton where he is now professor emeritus and in the Faculty of Administration at the University of Ottawa. He was associate deputy minister of Health Canada and of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and held several assistant deputy minister positions in the Canadian federal government. He was the first Carleton alumnus to become president of the university.


Dr. Van Loon’s current research interests include federal-provincial relations, particularly related to post-secondary education, quality assurance and instructional methodology in post-secondary education and the history of the Ottawa River.

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

7:00 pm EDT via Zoom
(please contact Gail Larose at glarose0@gmail.com for the Zoom link)


Josh Beer
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light” – senile thoughts and memories from a lucky life- Part I (stay tuned for Part II coming in November 2023).

A famous Greek maxim said: “Count no man happy until he has passed the boundary of life free from pain.” In this talk Josh Beer will tempt fate by claiming that his life has been lucky. Born in WW II to working class parents who had no more conception of the inside of a university than the far side of Jupiter, Josh seemed destined to leave school at 15 and inherit a Victorian bakery which provided a kind of education unavailable to most people.  Still scarcely literate at the age of 14, what preserved him for a different fate were two things: Latin and his fantasies about 19th century Russian literature.  All his life he has been conscious of being a divided self: a traitor to his origins and his inadequacies as a scholar. Only in retirement has he been able to find voice to reconcile these contradictions. It is also a story of love and madness.

Josh Beer is an adjunct professor at Carleton University, after having taught there for 50 years. On his retirement he founded and is currently a co-chair of OSFAS. His book Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy was published in 2004 and his article “Tradition and Ambiguity: Deceit and Heroic Action in Sophocles’ Electra” in 2020.  His latest article on the influence of the Athenian plague on Euripides’ Hippolytus was published in October 2022 in the magazine of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, Argo.  For over twelve years, he directed students of the College of Humanities in dramatic readings of Greek tragedy which were highly praised, not least by His Excellency Eleftherios Anghelopoulos, the former Greek Ambassador to Canada.

.