Beyond Bohemia Talk and Slide Presentation

Mary Jane Treacy, professor emerita of modern languages and literatures at Simmons University, will tie the Cape’s Bohemians back to their days in Greenwich Village and to contemporary painters and their works.

Since 2005 she has been involved with Reacting to the Past, a national group of scholars writing interactive role-playing simulations for university history and political science courses. Her work with Reacting took her to New York, literally as well as intellectually, leading her to write Greenwich Village 1913: Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman, now in a second edition, Paterson (New Jersey, but just seventeen miles away) 1913: A Strike in the Progressive Era, and Harlem 1919: A Question of Leadership. Her academic training in Hispanic Studies also led to a simulation on the aftermath of political violence in Argentina, Argentina 1985: Questions of Memory, Truth, and Justice. She has taught Spanish and Latin American literature as well as courses in women’s and gender studies, first-year college seminars, and the honors program, which she directed for over a decade.

Now living on Cape Cod, she is thrilled by the current interest in the East Coast’s bohemia and the rebels who came to view Provincetown, Truro and Wellfleet as Greenwich Village’s “summer suburbs.” She is currently researching how these first bohemians shaped and were shaped by their Cape experiences.