McCartney and his band gave a sold-out concert at Charlotte’s Time-Warner Cable Arena on July 28. Among the topics discussed were McCartney’s wide-ranging musical interests and social activism.

Frontani’s 2007 book, The Beates: Image and the Media, received a CHOICE award as an “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2008, and he wrote a chapter for the Cambridge University Press’s The Cambridge Companion to The Beatles.
 

The chapter, “The Solo Years,” provides, in the words of the editor, “one of music criticisms most extensive and thorough examinations of the bandmates’ solo output…. Frontani enumerates the artistic highs and lows of the ex-Beatles’ solo careers (and) affords special emphasis to the manner in which the former group members both struggle with and venerate their accomplishments as a musical unit during the 1960s.”

Frontani’s book, “The Beatles: Image and the Media” (University Press of Mississippi, 2007), was selected as a CHOICE “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2008.

Her presentation, “A Yearning for Home: American Rural Communities in Mid-Twentieth Century Art and Literature,” begins at 6 p.m. in Yeager and will be preceded by a reception in the Isabella Cannon Room from 4:30 to 5:45 – students and faculty welcome.

Kasson is a professor of American Studies and English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has taught since 1971. She is chair of the American Studies Department; her teaching focuses on the intersection of history, literature, and visual culture. Her books include Artistic Voyagers: Europe and the American Imagination in the Works of Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Allston, and Cole (Greenwood, 1982), Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (Yale University Press, 1990), and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (Hill & Wang, 2000).

She received her B.A. from Radcliffe College and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She also serves on the Board of Governors of UNC Press (Chair), the Board of Directors for the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke (Vice Chair), and the Advisory Board of the Institute for Outdoor Drama. She has worked with secondary schools from Alabama to Washington State, and has participated in education partnerships with the National Humanities Center and the North Carolina School of Science and Math.

Frontani described the album and the image of the Beatles within the context of Rolling Stone magazine’s promotion of the counterculture, the importance of the album to the legitimization of rock and roll as an art form, and the centrality of the Beatles to the magazine’s legitimization of the counterculture lifestyle among a growing readership. He further described the ultimate break of the magazine, and the Beatles, with New Left radicals in the United States and Great Britain.

“The Beatles: Image and the Media” is a cultural history of the evolving image of the band in the United States in the 1960s, and explores how the Beatles’ evolving media image related to cultural and historical forces. Applying a critical theory and cultural studies perspective, the book describes the transformation from that of safe teen heartthrobs to one that had absorbed the fashion and consciousness of the burgeoning counterculture. By the end of the decade, the Beatles were using their interviews, media events, and music to comment on issues such as the Vietnam War, drug culture, and civil rights. Despite this transformation, the band’s image never strayed from its essential mantra of optimism.

Critical theorist Douglas Kellner, George F. Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, calls the book “the best study to date of the Beatles’ reception in the United States, the creation and circulation of their media images as a young British rock sensation, and debates over their popularity and influence.”

Frontani’s book is published by the University Press of Mississippi.

B.A. and M.A., (Double B.A. in History and Political Science; M.A. in History—focus on modern Middle East), Ohio State University; M.A., Critical Studies, University of Southern California School of Cinema and Television; Ph.D., Mass Communication, Ohio University. Teaching focuses upon cultural history and criticism. Research interests focus on music, film and cultural criticism.

The application process:

In order to be considered eligible to be a Periclean Scholar, you must:

• Complete (or be taking) Global Studies 110
  
• Have a GPA of 2.5 or above
  
• Submit a letter of recommendation from a Global Studies professor or current Periclean Scholar (Classes of 2006 and 2007)
  
• Submit a letter of interest to the Mentor for the Class of 2008, Dr. Michael Frontani. Include such things as projects you have been involved with, special areas of interest and any ideas you may have generated regarding Project Pericles
  
• All application materials are due by March 18, 2005, and must be submitted in hardcopy (no emails).

All applicants will be notified by April 1 if they will be invited to be Periclean Scholars and can then register for the GST 272 (Periclean Scholars) class.

Once the Class of 2008 has been formed, there will be a joint meeting of the Periclean Scholars classes of 2006-2008.

Send Application Materials, queries, etc., to:

Dr. Michael R. Frontani

Office: 216B McEwen

Office Hours: Tuesday, Thursday—9:45-11:30; Wednesday—10:30-12:00; and by appointment.

Phone Number: 278-5664

E-mail: mfrontani@elon.edu