Learn about research, creative activities, and other scholarly engagement by faculty colleagues across campus. Lunch is provided.
2016 Spotlight
Thursday, January 28: 12:00 noon – duPont-Ball Library 25L
Institutional Change and Tuberculosis Control in Shanghai’s Rural Counties: 1958-2003
Dr. Rachel Core, assistant professor of sociology
While the system was in place in China’s rural counties from 1968-83, China’s Cooperative Medical System (CMS) was widely attributed with bringing about a decline in infectious diseases. In 1983, the CMS collapsed in much of China, when rural communes were dismantled, which led to backsliding in health indicators; however, this presentation will argue that the CMS in Shanghai’s rural counties did not collapse. Instead, it continued providing tuberculosis control throughout the 1990s.
Monday, February 22: 12:00 noon – duPont-Ball Library 25L
Race, Risk, and Ebola Panic
Dr. Melinda Hall, assistant professor of philosophy
Deepening construction of African persons as inherently risky or vulnerable is an unintended consequence of public health discourse in the United States and abroad surrounding risk prevention in the case of Ebola virus disease (EVD). Meanwhile, those in the West conceive of themselves as risk managers of these populations, rather than as vulnerable themselves; this illicit binary feeds into public health management decision-making. In this discourse, race becomes a floating signifier for risk and vice versa. I approach these issues within the context of analyzing risk, risk aversion, and risk analysis philosophically in the framework of deconstruction and post-structuralism.
Thursday, March 24: 1:00 pm (note time) – Hand Arts Center
Opera as Policy in Russia During the Reign of Nicholas I: The First Decade
Dr. Daniil Zavlunov, assistant professor of music
1825-1835 was the formative decade of Nicholas’s reign, laying the cultural policy foundation for the remainder of that reign, and charting the course for opera in Russia for the rest of the century. In my presentation, I explore Nicholas’s role as enabler and shaper of opera—the genre to which he assigned a crucial function in the realization of his broader cultural policy. Drawing on new archival documents, I survey the rapidly evolving policies governing the Imperial Theaters system, changes to theater censorship, professionalization of the musical establishment in Russia, and construction of new performance spaces.
Thursday, April 21: 12:00 noon – duPont-Ball Library 25L RSVP
Featuring Dr. Joshua Eckroth, assistant professor of computer science
Iterative Abduction
In the field of Artificial Intelligence, abduction is a pattern of inference in which an agent seeks an explanation for an observation or report. Iterated abduction is a variety of abduction in which evidence is acquired and explained over time. The long-term goal is to maintain highly plausible consistent explanations for as much of the evidence as possible. Maintaining plausible explanations can be challenging, particularly when future observations contradict the agent’s beliefs. In this case, some beliefs must be contracted in order to make sense of the observations. We develop a logical formalism for this process as well as a computational implementation.
2015 Spotlight
February 27: 12:00 noon – Sage Hall 257
Examining Poverty, Homelessness, and Education
Rajni Shankar-Brown, associate professor of education
Homelessness is a complex dilemma that annually affects over 3.5 million lives nationwide. Although the United States is considered one of the wealthiest nations in the world, it is estimated that one in three children live in extreme poverty. Furthermore, families with children are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population. In this interactive presentation, Dr. Rajni Shankar-Brown will share pieces of her research on poverty, homelessness, and education. She will discuss the use of bioecological systems theory as a framework to understand child poverty in the 21st century and share the diverse voices of children experiencing homelessness. Her research findings illuminate there multifaceted experiences of children living in extreme poverty and explore implications for educational research, policy, and practice.
March 27: 12:00 noon – Rinker Auditorium, LBC
Searching for Ukrainian Tangos….or, everything you wanted to know about Soviet culture, but were afraid to ask.
Mayhill Fowler, assistant professor of History
My talk will explain how a summer grant led to the discovery of a fascinating document in a cramped Moscow archive. In 1940 Evgenii Petrov wrote a screenplay called Quiet Ukrainian Night, which told of friendly socialist competition between Ukrainian folk orchestras and a star-crossed love match all neatly resolved by an apparatchik in the Ukrainian Arts Administration. This unpublished and unproduced film offers a lens on my book project, Beau Monde: State and Stage on Empire’s Edge, Russia and Soviet Ukraine, 1916-1941 by tying together several themes, including the search for Ukrainian tangos. In my talk I will explain my book project, the project of writing a book, and what historians do all day in archives.
April 17: 12:00 noon – Sage Hall 257
The Branding of Malevich: the Dissemination and Ratification of his Oeuvre in the West
Ekatarina Kudryavtseva, assistant professor of Creative Arts
I will address the historiographical significance of the way in which the artworks of the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) circulated in the West. One of the distinctive characteristics of Malevich’s art is its belated incorporation into the Western modernist canon through a network of dealers, gallery owners, collectors, and museum curators who participated in its dissemination and ratification. The goal of my research is to bring this peculiar condition into relief by exploring the role of commercial art institutions in promoting Malevich’s name in the West, and examining the financial as well as art historical impact of this activity.
Hint: there is little correlation between “quality” and value, because life is so fundamentally unfair.