Category: Lectures

Kuna Taravdel is an engineer and has over 30 US patents. He has given invited talks on classical music and history at Rotary Clubs, Toastmasters’ Clubs, Kiwanis International, The Rainier Club, and other institutions in the Pacific Northwest and Canada.

March Lunch Lecture at Piatti in University Village
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
11:30 Lunch, followed with a lecture by Kunal Taravade
Dvorak and the New World Symphony

Dvorak’s New World Symphony, written during the composer’s short tenure in the United States in 1892-1893, is a unique and inspired blend of homegrown American musical influences – Native American and African American – and Dvorak’s own sensibilities recalling his native Bohemia. Brimming with tuneful melodies, bursting with passion, and bubbling with emotion, this paradigmatic Romantic symphony, ranked among the greatest of the genre, captures the vibrant spirit of a new nation about to make its mark on the world.

Big Apples, Big Business: How Washington Became the Apple State

UWFA Lecture Series with guest speaker Professor Amanda Van Lanen
Link to the Zoom video (in Dropbox)

Why do so many apples in the grocery store look the same? And why do so many come from Washington?

In this talk, Amanda Van Lanen explores how Washington became the top apple producing state in the country, and how, in the process, it transformed apples into an industrialized commodity. Many regions in the West attempted to grow apples, but in Washington, big apples became big business thanks to the work of:

• Scientists
• Investors
• Irrigators
• Railroad corporations
• Marketers
• Apple growers

How does the history of Washington apples reflect larger changes happening in the American food system—changes that continue to affect our environment and the way we eat today?

Amanda L. Van Lanen is a Professor of History at Lewis-Clark State College and the author of The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture. She earned a Ph.D. in history at Washington State University, and blogs about food history at historyreheated.com. Van Lanen lives in Asotin, Washington.

UWFA Annual Spring Luncheon and Lecture at the Seattle Yacht Club

Speaker: Dori Jones Yang

An award-winning author, journalist, and speaker, Dori Jones Yang worked for eight years in the 1980s as Hong Kong bureau chief for Business Week, covering China during the pivotal years when it went from isolation to engagement with the outside world. In her latest book, When the Red Gates Opened: A Memoir of China’s Reawakening, Dori brings to life this transformative time in history and in her personal life.

Educated in history at Princeton and in international relations at Johns Hopkins, she now lives in Kirkland and has written eight books. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, she has traveled throughout China for over forty years and spoken about her books across the United States, as well as in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Most recently, she has also spoken about contemporary China on cruise ships and in Greater Seattle.

At our spring luncheon, Dori spoke on China’s worldview, values, and ambitions. Based on its unique history, China’s values differ from those of the West, where its economic modernization and military build-up have ignited worries. Dori clarified these differences and explained why, in her view, it’s vital that we try to understand China’s perspective on world issues in order to be prepared for that worldview in negotiations and to work from a baseline both sides can understand.

About Dori Jones Yang

Dori joined Business Week in 1981 and worked there for fifteen years, as an international business editor in New York, bureau manager in Hong Kong (1982–1990) and bureau manager in Seattle (1990–1995). She covered the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in June 1989.

After marrying Paul Yang in 1985, she began writing under the byline of Dori Jones Yang. She worked as West Coast business and technology correspondent for U.S. News & World Report from 1999 to 2001. Her website is https://dorijonesyang.com/.

Speaker Recommendations

UWFA relies on word of mouth to recommend speakers. We are not a political organization and do not advocate one political view over another. We have had wide ranging lectures on history, science, and travel from around the world as well as about famous people but have always strove to be apolitical.

If you can recommend a credentialed speaker who can speak to the topic that is of interest or concern to you, please let us know.  Email uwfacaux@uw.edu with your recommendation, and please include a link or email to more information about the speaker.

To join UWFA, please email joinuwfa@gmail.com.

Marjorie Merriweather Post and her treasured Museum in our nation’s capital, Hillwood Estate

Presenter: Dagmar Shannon
When: Wednesday February 12, 2025 from 1-3pm
Where: Zoom (Join UWFA to attend)

Dagmar Shannon will talk about a fascinating woman and a treasured Museum in our nation’s capital, Hillwood Estate. She will be talking about Marjorie Merriweather Post of the Post cereal family. Marjorie Merriweather Post bought Hillwood in 1955 and soon decided her home would be a museum that would inspire and educate the public. Her Northwest Washington D.C estate endowed the country with the most comprehensive collection of Russian imperial art outside of Russia, a distinguished eighteenth-century French decorative art collection, and twenty-five acres of serene, landscaped gardens and natural woodlands for all to enjoy.

Our speaker, UWFA member Dagmar Shannon is no stranger to us. She belongs to over half of the UWFA Interest Groups, and has served as Editor of the Newsletter, Chair of the Holiday Tea, Program Chair, President and Co-President of our organization.

She was born in Duisberg, Germany. It was her own early interest in traveling that brought her to the United States in the first place. As a 17 year old high school student Dagmar participated in a school exchange program and came to Seattle to attend Lincoln High School. She lived with the Shannon family, and met their son, Bill, who was a UW student. They were married in 1967. She and Bill are world travelers and are instilling their love of travel to their 5 grandchildren. When each grandchild turns 10, he or she gets to go on a European trip with Bill and Dagmar. What lucky grandchildren. Dagmar documents her travels with detailed stories of history and culture and is an accomplished photographer.

Join UWFA to attend

Welcome UWFA and UWRA members, guests and friends to the Scholarship Celebration Dinner

What: Dinner, followed by a Lecture by Mary Branom “Adventures in Azerbaijan: experiences of a later-in-life Peace Corps Volunteer”
When: Wednesday, November 6, 2024, 5:30 pm
Where:  Piatti Italian Restaurant  in University Village
Cost: $55 per person

We hope you will join us for our Annual Scholarship Celebration and Lecture. We will introduce and award scholarships of to 3 deserving UW undergraduates and hear their inspirational stories.

Our speaker will be UWFA member Mary Branom. As she was approaching retirement, she discovered that the Peace Corps was looking for older volunteers. She was selected to be an English Teacher Trainer in Azerbaijan and will tell us about her experience.

To join UWFA, please send an email to joinuwfa@gmail.com. Open to all UWFA and UWRA members.

This is a time of rapid, positive change in the field of Alzheimer’s disease. There has been enormous progress in developing biomarker tests that can detect Alzheimer’s disease reliably in living patients, at the earliest symptoms, and even before that. And there are finally new medicines being approved that slow down the processes underlying Alzheimer’s disease. These developments will be a focus of Dr. Grabowski’s talk today. Dr. Thomas Grabowski is a neurologist and Washington, where he currently leads the Alzheimer’s disease clinical and research programs.  Dr. Grabowski holds the Tim B. Engle Endowed Professorship for Brain Health Innovations.

He took his Neurology residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital.   He went on to a research-oriented fellowship in behavioral neurology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of
Iowa.   He was recruited to University of Washington in 2009, as the Director of the UW Integrated Brain Imaging Center.  In 2012 he also became the Director of the new UW Medicine Memory and Brain Wellness Center, which established the leading Center of Excellence in Alzheimer’s disease in the state of Washington and the greater region including Alaska, Idaho, and Montana.  This clinic currently sees more than 1000 new patients and 4000 total visits annually, and involves doctors from Neurology, Psychiatry, and Geriatric Medicine.

A special feature of the Memory and Brain Wellness Center is the nationally unique Memory Hub, a memory and dementia-focused community center that includes not only the UW Memory and Brain Wellness programs, but also important community partners like the Alzheimer’s Association and important state-funded programs that reach doctors, and communities statewide.  The Memory Hub is a nationally unique program that has developed and flourished under Dr. Grabowski’s leadership.

And since 2016 Dr. Grabowski has also been the Director of the UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, one of the longest established NIH ADRCs in the nation.

Decolonoscopy: Exploring My Role as a Tribal Ambassador Bridging Two Cultures” By Don Motanic, Board President for the Wisdom of the Elders, Inc.

Don is a 1978 UW graduate with a degree in Forestry Engineering.  He had a 42 year long career as a Forest Engineer and Forest Manager with the Bureau of Indian Affairs that included living and working with the Yakama Nation, and the Umatilla and Spokane Tribes.

He will talk about fostering successful collaborations between two cultures, each with contrasting economic and linguistic values.  He will also discuss the challenges and successes in bridging cultural differences facing his family and connections between tribes through the years.

You can read more about our speaker in the UWFA January 2024 newsletter. The newsletter can be found on our website, https://www.washington.edu/uwfa/uwfa-newsletters.

Scholarship Celebration Dinner and Lecture at Piatti’s in University Village Wednesday, November 8, 2023, Dinner at 5:30pm, followed by a Lecture by Dagmar Shannon “Waterways of the Tsars, a Travelogue”

We hope you will join us for our Annual Scholarship Celebration and Lecture.  We will introduce and award scholarships of $7000 each to 3 deserving UW undergraduates and hear their inspirational stories.

Our speaker, Dagmar Shannon, a longtime UWFA member, is a gifted photographer and storyteller.  She and her husband have traveled to all 7 continents and almost 100 countries. This trip to Russia stands out as a favorite.  You will enjoy the trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow as Dagmar takes us up river and through many lakes, canals, and locks while we enjoy the history, palaces, riches of Russia.

Margaret O’Mara: “The History of Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America” Wednesday, February 8th, 1pm

Please join us as Margaret O’Mara presents a Zoom lecture on the history of Silicon Valley and how it spilled over into the Pacific NW as described in her latest book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. This is the true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America. Long before Margaret O’Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government–and always had been–and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley’s success actually was.

Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O’Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University.

Margaret O’Mara, who received her B.A. from Northwestern University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, is the Howard & Frances Keller Endowed Professor of History at University of Washington and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. She writes and teaches about the history of U.S. politics, the growth of the high-tech economy, and the connections between the two, and is the author of two previous books Cities of Knowledge and Pivotal Tuesdays.

UWFA Lecture: Judy Bentley “Walking Washington’s History”
Monday, April 11, 1pm, 2022

Judy Bentley “Walking Washington’s History” Part One

Judy Bentley “Walking Washington’s History” Part Two

Our speaker today is historian and hiker Judy Bentley.  She has teamed up with veteran guidebook author Craig Romano to describe hikes for adventurers of all abilities along trails on the coast, over mountains, through national forests, across plateaus, and on the banks of the Columbia River in the second edition of Hiking Washington’s History.

For thousands of years people have traveled across Washington’s spectacular terrain, establishing footpaths and roads to reach hunting grounds and coal mines high in the mountains, fishing sites and trade emporiums on the rivers, forests of old growth, and homesteads and towns on prairies. These traditional routes have been preserved in national parks, restored by cities and towns, salvaged from old railroad tracks, and opened to hikers by Indigenous communities.  Her talk today about her book will offer a look at some of our state’s most fascinating historical trails.

The new second edition of Hiking Washington’s History is available at independent bookstores such as University Bookstore, the Elliott Bay Book Company, Island Books, Brick and Mortar Books, and online at Amazon..