7:30 PM // Performance of A Tale of Two Cities

Post-Show Community Conversation in the Event Room – Second Floor

Emory professors Vialla Hartfield-Méndez and Kim Loudermilk, both experts in narrative and how storytelling works, will explore with the audience the recycling and re-framing of Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities in this play, thinking together about narrative strategies (writing, directing, acting choices, staging, costumes, the language of colors, and more) that help us to re-imagine this story as relevant to our current moment and our own stories.

Presented in partnership with the Center for Ethics at Emory University and the Emory Public Humanities Graduate Course. Community Conversation discussions are free for ticket holders. No RSVP required.

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BIOS

Kim Loudermilk, Director of the IDEAS Fellowship and Undergraduate Program in American Studies at Emory University

Kim Loudermilk received a PhD from Emory’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts in 1997, after completing an MA in women’s studies from Wichita State University and a BS in journalism from Oklahoma State University. Loudermilk joined the faculty at Emory in 1998; her teaching focuses on social movements and the media, advertising, contemporary cultural studies, and issues in higher education. In addition to her teaching, she directs the American Studies program, which offers a thriving interdisciplinary major and minor. She also helped to develop and direct the IDEAS (Interdisciplinary Exploration and Scholarship) program, which seeks to bring interdisciplinary thinking to students from across the campus and to promote the value of the liberal arts. Prior to coming to Emory, Loudermilk was a Brittain Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she taught classes in composition, technical writing, and public speaking. In addition to her faculty work, Loudermilk served as an administrator at Emory University for a decade. From 2000 to 2003, she was assistant vice provost in the Office of the Provost, where she coordinated Emory’s reaccreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and directed the university’s faculty development programs. From 2003 to 2010, Loudermilk was the senior associate dean for academic planning at Emory College and coordinated strategic, financial, operational, and infrastructure planning for the college.

Vialla Hartfield-Méndez, Director of Engaged Learning and Professor of Spanish at Emory University

Vialla Hartfield-Méndez has served as Director of Engaged Learning at Emory since 2009, first in the Center for Community Partnerships, and currently in the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence. As Professor of Pedagogy in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, where she continues to teach, Vialla has developed robust partnerships with the Latino/Hispanic community and created courses and course components that integrate community engagement into the curriculum. She is Senior Faculty Fellow in the Center for Ethics, previously directed the Emory Scholars Program, led Emory’s strategic Community Engaged Learning Initiative, and has established a national reputation in community engaged pedagogy, especially through her leadership of Emory’s hosting of the 2014 conference of Imagining America and her close collaboration with the Cultural Agents Initiative and Pre-Texts at Harvard University. Vialla holds a PhD and MA in Hispanic literature and culture from the University of Virginia and a BA from the University of Southern Mississippi. She is the author of Woman and the Infinite: Epiphanic Moments in Pedro Salinas’s Art (Bucknell UP), and numerous articles on Hispanic literature and culture, campus-community engagement, curriculum design, and faculty governance.

Learn more about A Tale of Two Cities.