Events Archive

VIDEO RESCHEDULED FROM SPRING 2020 In our concern for the more than human world, many discussions have focused on individual animal suffering and threats to entire species. What happens when we instead ask questions about what meaningful relationships between humans and animals are possible, what…

In a rapidly expanding information age, to whom do publicly funded national computer networks belong and how should they be used? The founder of the Free-Net movement will propose a community-based model that he believes will make global networks like the Internet and the National Research and…

Naming the age cohorts began as a connivance with niche marketing, but before long the media turned it into an explanation of American economic history under global capitalism. Cultural critic and pioneer in age studies, Margaret Morganroth Gullette shows how new characters creep into the social…

The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (VHF) was established by Steven Spielberg to videotape interviews with Holocaust survivors all over the world. Over 50,000 interviews have been conducted resulting in video archives that would take almost fourteen years to view as an entity. Now…

Christine Guth considers some of the ways in which Hokusai's celebrated 1831 woodcut Under the Wave off Kanagawa, popularly known as The Great Wave, has participated in American popular culture during the past twenty-five years. She focuses particularly on the role of the museum store in mediating…

African people have dealt in currencies for at least a millennium. The struggle to understand the long history of those currencies is intertwined with two others: over the terms for understanding money in general and over the basis for Africa's originalities in the modern world. This lecture is…

We are besieged by what seem to be new mental illnesses. We wonder which ones of them are affectations, cultural artifacts, clinician-enhanced, or copycat syndromes, and which ones, as we briefly and obscurely put it, real. We are profoundly confused about an entire group of mental disorders,…

THIS LECTURE WAS CANCELEDBiotechnology is the new queen of the sciences.  Once mathematics ruled, then physics: now it is biotech.  The old sciences changed our sense of the world: the new ones are changing our sense of ourselves.  It is an exhilarating time, but also a scary one.  We are…

From the New Deal to the 1990s, Dona Cooper Hamilton and Charles V. Hamilton demonstrate the many ways in which the civil rights movement fought not only racial segregation and discrimination but also to support social and economic justice for all Americans.  From the NRA and WPA to the Great…

VIDEO American composer John Harbison, one of today’s leading musicians, will speak about his work as composer, conductor, and scholar for the arts, including his influences from literature (in particular, the poetic responses to the Orpheus myth) and his work on the music of J. S. Bach.   In 2008…

In the 1950s, a parchment map depicting "Vinland," near present-day Labrador or Newfoundland, surfaced in Europe.  Now housed at Yale University, this map has been the subject of intense controversy: is it the earliest map of North America or is it a modern forgery?  Using radioactive carbon dating…

Michael Harper, called "one of the dominant poetic voices of his generation," will read from poetry spanning a career of three decades. REUBEN, REUBEN I reach from pain to music great enough to bring me back, swollenhead, madness, lovefruit, a pickle of hate so sour my mouth twicked up and would…

Some studies suggest half of all published research findings are false, and many results from biomedical research labs can’t be reproduced by other scientists. The consequences of this are far from trivial. Most ideas for new drugs fail to pan out because the underlying science turns out to be…

In an era when tribal and ethnic strife have become the focus of unrest on nearly every continent, Tribal America has a unique opportunity to make a significant contribution to global society.  How have traditional Native American tribal methods of consensus-building been used to facilitate…

Although the Women’s Movement and the Civil Rights Movement achieved great gains in the 20th century, it is also true that our societies remain unjustly stratified. Individual and institutional injustice are just the tip of the iceberg: they are the expression of deeper and less tractable sources…

A Four-Part Series Nutrition, Exercise, and Bone Health: The Calcium Controversy   In conjunction with: College of Applied Life Studies, College of Medicine, School of Human Resources and Family Studies, Department of Health and Safety Studies, Department of Kinesiology, Division of Nutritional…

Being a young person today is considerably more complex and unpredictable than it was even a half-century ago. For example, older children and adolescents tend to spend much less of their leisure time with adults and much more of it with their peers. Many young people hold down jobs in addition to…

Born and raised in Chicago, Larry Heineman was inducted into the Army in 1966, served as a combat infantryman In Vietnam, and returned home "radicalized." Paco's Story, a novel about the homecoming of a Vietnam veteran, won the 1987 National Book Award, while Close Quarters has been called "the…

For artists to give each other gifts or exchange their pictures has always been a sign of mutual appreciation. Paul Klee exchanged many works during the course of his friendship with artists like Alfred Kubin, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger, Emil Nolde, and…

Anna Akhmatova is one of the most beloved poets in the Soviet Union. However, publication of her complete works has long been suppressed in her own country as a reaction to poems written during the Stalinist purges of the 1930 and 40s. Judith Hemschemeyer, herself a distinguished poet, has recently…

In the 1950s and 60s, while many marched in the streets, sat-in at lunch counters, and participated in freedom rides in the south, the Leadership Conference coordinated a campaign of 30 organizations to make simple justice the law of the land helping to pass The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and…

For a decade, journalist Paul Hendrickson investigated the life of Robert McNamara, the brilliant, technocratic architect of the Vietnam War. Hendrickson became haunted by a man he came to see as blinded by classic American ambition and arrogance. Hendrickson?s McNamara biography--a finalist for…

Ralph Bunche, the first black Nobel laureate (for Peace in 1950), was one of this century's pre-eminent African-American intellectual and political leaders. Charles P. Henry, author of Ralph Bunche: Redefining the American Other and editor of Ralph J. Bunche Selected Speeches and Writings, covers…

Janie Hernandez-Perez has rightfully gained prominence in his country as a preservation architect, restoring many of Cartagena's colonial and early republication period buildings.  Instrumental in having Cartagena recognized as a World Heritage city through UNESCO (one of only two such cities…

Seymour Hersh, whose New Yorker stories uncovered details of torture at Abu Gharib prison in Iraq, discusses his work and addresses the state of U.S. journalism in an age of rampant media consolidation.  An investigative reporter since 1969 when he broke the My Lai story and subsequent cover up…