Isn't a German Jazz pianist somehow like a Japanese Yodeler? Cornell Visiting Professor Hans Lüdemann discusses the role of a creative musician in society and examines questions of identity. The lecture includes adventurous improvisations and some brand new pieces of music created at Swarthmore College.
Ana Celia Zentella, Lang Visiting Professor of Social Change, is a recognized leader in building appreciation for language diversity and respect for language rights. Her research shows that fluency in Spanish and English is both a product and facilitator for students who spend years living and studying on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. It is also the most visible cultural marker of the identity of students who frequently travel between San Diego and Tijuana. Interviews in Spanish and English with eighty transfronterizo college students indicate that, despite their proficient bilingualism, many struggle with language and identity conflicts. The cultural and social obstacles transfronterizos encounter in ESL programs, including criticisms of their Spanish by Mexican citizens and feelings of shame about their Spanish-accented English may undermine their avowed commitment to Spanish. Her research has led her to advocate for educational and governmental language policies in the USA and Mexico that build on the principles of anthro-political linguistics.
Professor of Biology Amy Cheng Vollmer is devoted to increasing science literacy. She finds that the impact of microbes and microbiology on society is manifold: medical, environmental, as well as on the geochemical history of the earth itself. Using microbiology, Vollmer communicates the process of research and discovery - the content and application of science - to many audiences beyond her Swarthmore classroom, including those who attended her talk during this year's Alumni Weekend.
Krystyna Zywulska is perhaps best known as the author of Przezylam Oswiecim (I Survived Auschwitz), her candid and moving account of life and death in the extermination camp Birkenau published immediately after the war. Less known, but no less important, are Zywulska's songs and poetry created during her imprisonment. These works not only offer valuable insight into the daily experiences and cultural activities of prisoners in the Nazi camps, but also reveal the unlikely birth of a literary and satirical talent.
In both this lecture and article, Assistant Professor of Music Barbara Milewski examines a selection of Zywulska's camp songs and the contexts in which they were created. She also considers the stylistic qualities that lent Zywulska's post-war writings their force and the extent to which they were developed in the works she created in Birkenau.
Milewski is at work on a book devoted to exploring amateur, unofficial music-making in the Nazi camps through the lives and compositions of three survivors. She is also the co-producer and translator of the annotated disc Ballads and Broadsides: Songs from Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1940-1945.
For a generation, the United States, along with most of the West, was in the thrall of an ideology that asserted that the magic of market competition held the solution to every problem. But even the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, knew that this ideology is false-a lesson we are learning anew in the current financial crisis.
Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action Barry Schwartz argues two things. First, markets have their place, but that place isn't every place. And second, even in their place, to work properly, markets depend on nonmarket values that market competition actively corrodes.
In the last 50 years, Antigone has often been mobilized in fights against tyranny. In Manipur, a state in India’s Northeast, demands for self-determination, labeled "insurgency" by the Indian government, have grown in number and in violence, and the Indian Army is a forceful military presence. Citizens have been shot in the street, young men have been picked up for "interrogation" and tortured, and women have been raped and killed by the Army.
There have been many translations and adaptations of Antigone in Manipur — including one in which Creon wore the Indian flag as his headgear. Assistant Professor of Theater Erin Mee describes how, in these productions, Antigone is about the conflict between regional autonomy and national stability. These productions have been used to articulate and celebrate regional culture, and to establish a regional identity that is distinct from, if not in opposition to, the national identity and culture imposed on Manipur’s citizens by the Indian government. As such, they mount both a cultural and political resistance to the national government.
Professor of English Literature Philip Weinstein's new book, Becoming Faulkner, explores the relationship between Faulkner's troubled life and the kinds of trouble he learned to convey so powerfully in his novels. "The process of his 'becoming Faulkner' was fraught with untimely decisions and unmastered experiences," Weinstein says. "If he had led the life he wanted, he would not have written the books he wrote."
Weinstein's talk draws on the third chapter of the book, "Dark Twins," and charts Faulkner's immersion, as a man and as a writer, in a sea of racially unmanageable waters. "His testimony is all the more telling," Weinstein adds, "for the fissures it reveals."
The historical narrative of the American Civil War and Reconstruction has most often focused on the “promise” of the nation’s “Second Revolution” and the “splendid failure” of the federal government to secure land for and protect the civil rights of black Americans in the moment of Reconstruction. Embedded within this narrative, the story of black freedmen and women is retold as a sorrow song – a tale of hopes raised and then dashed. Historian Allison Dorsey explains how the legend of Mustapha Shaw challenges this narrative.
Shaw - who escaped slavery and ran to the fight for freedom, who soldiered as one the United States Colored Troops, and who, in the face of the federal betrayal still rose to become an independent entrepreneur and landholder - encourages us to rethink the black past. Courageous, defiant, and financially savvy, Shaw represents the often overlooked first generation of black middle class land holders in the post-Civil War South.
The idea that we will play, work and live our social lives within computer-driven "virtual worlds" has been a staple in cyberpunk science-fiction for some time. Recent news stories may suggest that this is close to becoming reality. Corporations and institutions have been setting up virtual offices or branches in the virtual world known as Second Life. Low-wage sweatshops where employees collect resources within the game World of Warcraft which are then sold for U.S. dollars to American and European players have been spreading in southeastern China. In the game EVE Online, thousands of players are engaged in an ongoing war which has sometimes spilled out into other online media that are not directly associated with the game.
Professor of History Tim Burke explores the evolution and implications of massively-multiplayer online computer games. The media hype about virtual worlds has often been excessive, but they are both an interesting media form that has exciting creative possibilities and a novel opportunity to study and think about the way that human societies form, organize, and become richly complex.
For more on the pervasiveness and changing nature of gaming culture, check out Second Skin, a documentary written and produced by Victor Piñeiro '00. The film is touted as one of the best docs of 2008.
Reverend Thomas Bayes’ view that belief is a basis of probability has led to the development of methods for repeatedly rubbing conditional probability distributions together in such a way so that they give birth to information drawn from a corresponding joint probability distribution. This information can interact with our beliefs to form a comprehensive inference about parameters that shape our world. Professor of Economics Philip Jefferson uses these methods to examine the relationship between consumption and income as embodied in a famous hypothesis by Professor Milton Friedman.
