Lecture abstract: Although the famous ideas and creators get most of the attention, nearly all human creativity is mundane: the countless hobbies, projects, and passions that allow people to spend time doing something creative in everyday life, be it knitting scarves, writing poems, making jewelry, or decorating cupcakes. This talk peeks into the surprising world of ordinary creativity. Using experience-sampling methods that measure people's creative ideas and actions where and when they happen, we find that creative activity in daily life is utterly pervasive, a source of positive emotion, and a way to build satisfying skills and relationships. All told, ordinary creativity reveals something special about our motivation to be creative.

Speaker bio: Paul Silvia is the Lucy Spinks Keker Excellence Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A past-president of APA Division 10, he applies ecological assessment methods to study creativity and the arts in people's real-world environments, and he has written books on the psychology of interest and on conducting daily-life research. He has an unseemly number of quirky hobbies.

The E. Paul Torrance Lecture, sponsored by the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia's Mary Frances Early College of Education annually brings together scholars, professionals and creative artists to discuss a wide range of topics and themes that are informative about the nature of creativity. It was established in 1985 to honor Dr. E. Paul Torrance, a native Georgian and pioneer in research on the identification and development of creative potential.

The event is scheduled to take place in-person at the University of Georgia (Athens, GA) in the Auditorium of the SPECIAL COLLECTIONS LIBRARIES. 

The lecture is open to the general public and free to attend.

Please register for the event if you plan to attend the Torrance Lecture (so that catering costs can be appropriately estimated and seating plans be accurately drawn up).

In the event that public health-related travel restrictions come into effect in early-to-mid-November, the Torrance Lecture will be delivered online as a Zoom webinar instead (details of the same will be communicated to all registrants).