Author Marilyn Yalom will present a lecture “What’s the Chess Queen Doing in an All-Male Game?” on Thursday, November 2, at 12 p.m. in the Hampton Room of the Malott Commons, Scripps College. A book signing will follow the event. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Malott Commons Office at (909) 607-9372.
Marilyn Yalom’s most recent book, The Chess Queen (2004), is an examination of the history of the chess queen, the only female playing piece, and the corresponding history of female power. Yalom follows the development of the game from its beginnings in India and the Arab world to its emergence in the Middle Ages in Europe, supplementing the history with anecdotes on significant queens, empresses, and countesses. She has lectured on this topic at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The New York Public Library, and The British Museum.
She is also the author of A History of the Breast (1998), a cultural history of 25,000 years of ideas, images, and perceptions of the female breast in religion, psychology, politics, society, and the arts. A History of the Wife (2001), traces the institution of marriage and conceptions of “the wife” throughout history. Her next book, on the history of cemeteries in America, will be published in 2008.
Yalom is a senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender at Stanford University. She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in French and has a master’s degree from Harvard University. She completed her Ph.D. studies at Johns Hopkins University in comparative literature. In 1992, she was decorated by the French government as an Officier des Palmes Académiques. The Ordre des Palmes Académique is presented to citizens of France and others who promote the language and culture of France. Yalom lives with her husband, psychiatrist and author Irvin Yalom, in Palo Alto, California.