There’s something irresistible about an anniversary. Maine’s bicentennial, the centennial of women’s suffrage, the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence: All invite public commemoration. But what are we doing when we mark these anniversaries? Celebrating our past? Interrogating it? Something else entirely?
Presented in partnership by the Maine Humanities Council, Maine Suffrage Centennial, and Maine Historical Society.
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Photo by Jen Sorkin[/caption]
On May 7, 2019, Maine author Monica Wood was awarded our 
Professor of English at Wellesley College, Timothy Peltason writes and teaches on nineteenth and twentieth-century British and American literature and Shakespeare. His essays on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, focuses on its relationship to Wilde’s life, its origins in earlier Victorian literature, and its extraordinary afterlife in 20th and 21st century literature and culture. He has also written a sequence of web-based commentaries on five plays by Shakespeare and other essays about the place of value judgments in contemporary academic criticism.
Each year, on the third Saturday in October, 
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Khaled Fahmy is a Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. With a BA in Economics, an MA in Political Science from AUC and a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford, Fahmy taught for five years at Princeton University, then for eleven years at New York University before joining AUC in Sept 2010. He is currently the Shawwaf Visiting Professor in Modern Middle Eastern History at Harvard University. His research interests lie in the social and cultural history of modern Egypt. Specifically, he has been conducting research in the Egyptian National Archives for the past twenty years on such diverse topics as the history of law (Islamic shari’a), medicine and public hygiene. He is currently finishing a manuscript on the social and cultural history of Egypt in the 19th century as well as an edited book on the history of Egyptian law from the Mamluks to the present. Since the outbreak of the January 25 Revolution, he has been a regular contributor to Egyptian and international media.