Welcome to ESU Happy Hour! The ESU has planned a series of programs to connect and reach out to our members through programs that are engaging, fun, and informative on a wide variety of topics. Happy Hour programs bring to you guest speakers live and free of charge.  Speakers may also suggest a unique cocktail for you to create and enjoy at home. These programs are designed so ESU members and guests can learn and interact with our outstanding speakers. Many speakers will provide exciting participation opportunities with fun give away books and products at the end of each program.

We invite members to suggest topics for future ESU Happy Hour Programs at this link. Cheers!

Perhaps our best teacher on the nature of power – how it is acquired, exercised, and lost – is none other than William Shakespeare. An incisive observer of human nature, Shakespeare educates us on the qualities that make a successful leader and warns how power can corrupt a leader’s moral compass. Four centuries after his death, Shakespeare’s plays continue to inspire and relate to a 21st-century audience, and we can learn more about our contemporary political leaders through the lens of his characters. Join our next ESU Happy Hour as Dr. Eliot Cohen compares some of the most memorable leaders of Shakespeare’s plays to their real-world contemporary counterparts. Tracing the art of power from its acquisition to decline. This ESU Happy Hour is sponsored by the ESU Boston Branch. ESU Happy Hour programs are online, free, and open to all members and the public. Registration is required.

The 1990s found agrarian societies in Pakistan undergoing profound transitions, not unlike the American South in the first part of the twentieth century. William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” captures the stark confrontation between waning Southern aristocracy (the Compson family) and the ascendant middle class represented by the Snopes family.

Dr. Saima Sherazi will take us through the experience of coping with societal change, especially when that change occurs in a setting with entrenched social hierarchies and gender roles. That setting could be rural Pakistan, or the American South of the 1920s. In either place there is upheaval – urbanization and industrialization collide with traditional dynamics of gender and class.  Dr. Sherazi will share her experience of teaching Faulkner in an all-girls college in a still conservative Pakistan – far removed from the American South, but nonetheless undergoing similar social upheavals. This ESU Happy Hour is sponsored by the ESU Central PA Branch. ESU Happy Hour programs are online, free, and open to all members and the public. Registration is required.