Contact: Michael DeLuise / Ginny Greenberg
(516) 463-6818/6819 [email protected]
Hofstra University Plans Major Conference:
THE VISION OF ELEANOR ROOSEVELT:WORLD CITIZEN AHEAD OF HER TIME
Thursday, September 30 through Saturday, October 2
Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY ... The Hofstra University Cultural Center and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute are planning a major three-day conference on the life and work of Eleanor Roosevelt this fall at Hofstra. The conference, The Vision of Eleanor Roosevelt: World Citizen Ahead of Her Time, will feature scholars, political leaders, journalists and interested citizens and students from around the world. Additionally, granddaughter Anne Eleanor Roosevelt and biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook have agreed to participate. Other grandchildren, confidants and colleagues of President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt have been invited to participate in the conference, which is taking place September 30 through October 2, 1999.
According to conference director Linda Longmire, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Hofstra's New College division, there will be panels focusing on Mrs. Roosevelt's relationship with the media, her contributions to the human rights movement, her commitment to education in the United States, personal reminiscences of those who knew her and sessions with her biographers and videographers.
Some stage presentations for the conference are planned. Eleanor's Gift is a work that was commissioned by New Heritage Music from composer Chen Yi to honor Mrs. Roosevelt and her work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 50th anniversary of that document. It has been performed previously only in San Francisco and New York City. Tentatively scheduled is a concert/staged reading of the musical Eleanor: An American Love Story.
(Anna) Eleanor Roosevelt was born in 1884. She was a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of Franklin Roosevelt, whom she married in 1905. She was very involved with the League of Women Voters, the Women's Trade Union League and other women's causes within the Democratic Party. When FDR was elected to the presidency in 1932, she became an influential member of his administration. She created the mold of an involved, outspoken, and caring First Lady. After her husband's death in 1945, President Truman named her U.S. delegate to the United Nations where she chaired the commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1961, President Kennedy reappointed her to the UN and named her the first Chair of the President's Commission on the Status of Women.
Throughout her life, Mrs. Roosevelt was an advocate for civil rights, the nation's youth, the poor and the unemployed. After her death in 1962, UN Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson eulogized her by saying "...She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world."
For additional information on The Vision of Eleanor Roosevelt: World Citizen Ahead of Her Time, please call the Hofstra Cultural Center at (516) 463-5669 or the University Relations Office at (516) 463-6818.
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