The Illinois State University Fall Speaker Series offers a wide variety of topics, including the art of tattooing, Cuban children airlifted to the U.S., early women at Illinois State (Normal) University, memoirs from a New York Times best-selling author, generational and innovation issues facing the Millennials and a CEO who left his job to become a teacher and founder of an inner-city charter school.
Milwaukee academic librarian Amelia Klem Osterud will present Behind the Curtain: The Tattooed Ladies at 2 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 23, on the sixth floor of Milner Library.
Osterud is working on becoming heavily tattooed, just in case she ever wants a second career as a tattooed lady. She has a master’s degree in history from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and writes and lectures on the subject of tattooing. Osterud is the author of A Life of Her Own Choosing: Artoria Gibbon’s Fifty Years as a Tattooed Lady, published in the Wisconsin Magazine of History in 2006, and the novel The Tattooed Lady: A History.
Carlos Eire, one of 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children airlifted to the U.S. in the early 1960s, will talk about his book Waiting for Snow in Havana at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept 30, in Braden Auditorium. A book signing will follow his presentation.
After bouncing from one foster home to another in Florida, Eire spent two years with an uncle in Bloomington (1963-1965), before reuniting with his mother in Chicago. He is now the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia and spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of War Against the Idols, From Madrid to Purgatory, A Very Brief History of Eternity and the forthcoming Reformations: Early
