Gannon University Announces The Continuation Of CHESS Speaker Series

Gannon University’s College of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences 2023 CHESS Speaker Series continues this month with a new lecture.

This year’s CHESS Speaker Series emphasizes making connections in all its forms. From reconnecting with each other at the scale of the interpersonal, to forging connections across academic fields at the scale of the interdisciplinary, to exploring the interconnectedness of nations at the scale of the global. This year’s series will help Gannon continue to emerge from the isolation of the pandemic and renew prior social bonds even as we learn about and forge new ones.

The next event in this series, Endangered Alphabets, will be held at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 8 in Gannon University Waldron Campus Center, Room 219. During this event, Tim Brookes, founder of the Endangered Alphabets project, will discuss the importance of preserving scripts that have been abandoned or suppressed while also drawing attention to global issues of cultural endangerment.

Brookes’ work to preserve endangered scripts has resulted in remarkable wood carvings which both preserve these alphabets and share culturally significant phrases. Using Endangered Alphabets as his lens, Brookes will guide the audience through an exploration of the cultural impact on language, progress, globalization and indigenous cultures when writing systems become extinct. The card and board games Brookes has created will also be on display.

This lecture accompanies an installation of Brookes’ Endangered Alphabets wood carvings in Nash Library. The exhibit will be open to the Gannon and Erie communities through Monday, March 27.

This event is being sponsored by MacDonald, Illig, Jones, & Britton, LLP.