Zoar Speaker Series

April 1st, 2023 at 11:00am
Location: Zoar Church
Note: There will be a musical performance following this presentation.

About the Speaker: Dr. Paul T. Barte has been a member of the music faculty at the Ohio University School of Music since 1997, where he teaches organ and harpsichord, organ literature and pedagogy, and music history classes. In 2016, he created a course on Wagner and The Ring, which culminated in taking the class to Washington DC to see the Washington National Opera’s production of the cycle. He was the 2005 recipient of the OU School of Music’s Distinguished Teaching Award. In addition to his academic responsibilities, he also serves as University Organist. From 1990-97, Barte was on the music faculty of Idaho State University in Pocatello. He is a Minnesota native and earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota, where he was an organ student of Heinrich Fleischer and Dean Billmeyer. Studying with George Ritchie, he completed a master’s degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1987. He began doctoral studies in organ performance at the Eastman School of Music as a student of Russell Saunders in 1987. He graduated with a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Eastman in 1995, having completed a dissertation on the keyboard manuscripts of Johann Christoph Bach (1673-1727) of Gehren, a second cousin of J. S. Bach. The dissertation was written under the supervision of Buxtehude scholar Kerala Snyder.
He has performed extensively in the United States and abroad. Recent performances include recitals on the world-famous Mormon Tabernacle organ. Barte has also presented recitals and workshops at Regional and National conventions of The American Guild of Organists (AGO) and the Music Teacher’s National Association (MTNA). He also gives concerts in costume, portraying Johann Sebastian Bach.

June 3rd, 2023 at 11:00am
Location: School House

About the Speaker: Dr. Brian Matthew Jordan is Associate Professor of Civil War History and Chair of the Department of History at Sam Houston State University. He is the author or editor of five books on the Civil War era, including Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, which was a finalist (one of three runners-up) for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History. His most recent book is A Thousand May Fall: Life, Death, and Survival in the Union Army, which was a Main Selection of the Military History Book Club and earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Jordan earned his Ph.D. at Yale University and serves as the Book Review Editor for The Civil War Monitor. His more than one-hundred reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Daily Beast, Civil War History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, and The Civil War Monitor. Dr. Jordan is a native of northeastern Ohio.

October 7th, 2023 at 11:00am
Location: School House

About the Speaker: Tom O’Grady sailed as a deck worker on the Great Lakes aboard the ore carrier, S.S. Middletown, a sister-ship of the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald. He served two years in the armed forces with a tour in South Korea. He surveyed for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. In 1984 he launched the first comprehensive curbside recycling program in the state of Ohio in Athens County, and has been promoting waste reduction and sustainable economy for forty years. He served as a gubernatorial appointee on the advisory board of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Recycling and Litter Prevention. O’Grady has also been an instructor of Observational Astronomy in the evenings at Ohio University for thirty-seven years. He has spent the past twenty-five years as a student of Ohio heritage researching its natural and cultural geography and settlement – from the mound builders to the barn builders, Ohio canals, and several of its interesting characters and their stories. He is a founding board member of Friends of Ohio Barns and serves on the board of Ohio’s Hill Country Heritage Area. Tom has been heading up the leadership of the Athens County Historical Society, now the Southeast Ohio History Center, for more than 20 years.