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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Visiting Lang Professor George Lakey presents a multi-dimensional strategic framework for change.  Based on research but guided by vision, the framework offers meaningful actions for the next four years for people with diverse gifts and backgrounds seeking unity of collective strength.

But those theories, while well-intentioned, fit poorly with empirical evidence of most citizens’ expressed preferences. Not only now, but since the days of ancient Greece, democracies have struggled to keep citizens’ attention and energies focused on political affairs. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, widely (but wrongly) considered to be an unqualified optimist for American “civic engagement” in the Jacksonian era, worries about the elusiveness of citizens’ attention and energy.

So while popular governance has almost always been a story of “attention deficit democracy,” Tocqueville gives us strategies for engaging citizens more effectively. Berger closes by examining the 2008 presidential election and asking whether Barack Obama’s charismatic appeal will be only a temporary stimulant or an opportunity to re-engage citizens with political institutions and each other.

What defines a "good death?" What happens when a young person dies suddenly? How do mothers, fathers, and siblings make sense of the unexpected passing away of a son or a brother? What discourses do people draw on to explain such a loss? Based on recent ethnographic research in a low-income neighborhood in Cairo, I examine the role of religion in offering people a set of ideas and discourses that they can actively utilize to understand and accept mortality in general and unexpected mortality in particular.

Unlike Western societies, where death is usually hidden and relegated to specific isolated spaces, death in Egypt is a public occurrence that mobilizes families, networks, and communities. Sharing in praying, carrying the coffin, participating in the burial, paying condolences, and respecting the memory of the dead and the feelings of his/her relatives are expected from neighbors, relatives, and friends. At the same time, death is widely discussed by men, women, and children and addressed by religious figures in the media and local mosques. In fact, death is the most commonly addressed topic by different sheikhs in weekly lessons in local mosques, TV religious programs, numerous audiotapes, and various books and booklets.

The death of young men in particular, which is usually sudden and tragic, is the focus of much attention. Religious figures often view the increasing number of such deaths a minor sign that the Day of Judgment is approaching. They repeatedly explain the notion of "good ending" (husn al-khatima), which all Muslims should to aspire to and work to secure. They also vividly describe the meaning of a "bad ending" (sua' al-Khatima), which should be avoided at all cost. On the other hand, we have family members, relatives, and friends, who link the timing and nature of death, the place of burial, and testimonies by others who attend the washing, praying, carrying, and burying in their attempts to present the passing of the loved one as a "good death." This lecture explores how these different actors selectively appropriate religiously and socially supported ideas, texts, and views in their attempts to attach positive meanings to the death of young men and present it within the highly cherished notion of "good ending."

Pieter Judson '78 asks whether Austria-Hungary was truly an empire. He argues that how we answer this question shapes the way we view contemporary East-Central Europe. If, as most people do, we see the world through a nationalist lens, then we will categorize Austria-Hungary as a classic empire, one that ruled over several "captive nations." After the break up of Austria-Hungary in 1918, nationalist activists propagated just such a myth of Austria-Hungary as an imperial "prison of nations" in order to legitimize their new states of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Twentieth-century social scientists too were invested in seeing Austria-Hungary as an imperial entity, one that had held together the complex ethnic mosaic they thought of as Eastern Europe. Finally, nostalgists pining for the lost world of fin-de-si???cle Budapest, Prague, or Vienna also promoted memories of Austro-Hungarian culture as particularly imperial in nature. All these views, Judson argues, are wrong-headed, originating in our need, like that of the nationalists, to see Eastern Europe in terms of well-defined nations and cultures. Austria was in fact a genuinely constitutional state with no ruling nation and no oppressed minority nations, but also one with no national identity.

Professor Murphy also discusses why public school education in many American cities, is for minority parents, an intellectual, social, and economic death sentence for their children, and why Dewey’s ideal of ideological ground fell to the neo-conservatives while the progressive shattered into fragments after the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Strike.

"From the perspective of a typical bacterium or virus, the human body is a perfect incubator: constant temperature, filled with nutrients, bathed in moisture! So why are we still around? How do bacteria sense the presence of a host's immune response? How can both the bacterium and host survive? We'll consider these topics from a co-evolutionary and inter-dependent point of view," Vollmer says. "As well, we will explore the concept that there are many beneficial bacterial commensalisms, upon whom our lives depend. My talk will provide an overview to the intertwined worlds of humans and microbes. It will also include examples of how microbiology is an ideal vehicle for promoting science literacy throughout the Swarthmore curriculum."

"Philosophers have traditionally classified mathematical knowledge as 'a priori' and scientific knowledge as 'a posteriori,'" Baler says. "In other words, mathematics can be done without leaving one's armchair, while physics cannot. In this lecture I challenge both sides of this traditional picture. On the one hand, are there such things as 'mathematical experiments' and what kind of role might they play in mathematics? On the other hand, can conclusions be justifiably reached about the nature of the physical world that do not depend on observation or experiment?"

The lecture is intended for a general audience and no specific mathematical or scientific background is presupposed.

"In my lecture, I discuss the global context for the emergence of modernism in Japan in the 1920's and 1930's, as well as the ways in which Japanese modernist poetry deployed the distinctive qualities of the Japanese written language," Gardner says. "Although the prewar Japanese state could be characterized as both authoritarian and imperialist, the 1920's were a time of relative political liberalism and cosmopolitanism. This was also a period of rapid urban growth, as well as the rise of communications and transportation technologies such as radio, cinema, and aviation that seemed to shrink the size of the globe. Among the dizzying cultural developments of this period was the emergence of new types of literature in Japanese that we can identify as modernist and avant-garde, inspired in part by such European avant-garde movements as Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. In my talk I will look at the work of four modernist poets, and show how each of them positions his work in terms of Japanese literary tradition, Western cultural hegemony, and Japan's expanding empire in East Asia."

"Twelve years after the first discovery of planets outside our own solar system, we now know of more than 200 extrasolar planets," Jensen says. "This is enough to allow us to start to see emerging patterns that may yield clues to how Jupiter-like planets form, though current techniques are not yet able to detect Earth-like planets. I discuss what we have learned so far from our study of extrasolar planets, and the prospects for detecting Earth-like planets in the near future."

"Why does Greek mythology figure centrally into some of the most pivotally modern works in the performing arts? If we have lost a romantic, sentimental attachment to ancient Greece as a cultural ideal, what significance can Greek myth have for us?" asks Ledbetter. "In this lecture I discuss Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, Martha Graham's Night Journey, and Balanchine's Apollo and show that, in different ways, each of these works employs a kind of classicism that - somewhat paradoxically - evokes the ancient past specifically for purposes of modernizing its art form."

"We live in a breakthrough period for 'nonviolent struggle,' when pro-democracy movements are using it to overthrow dictators and human rights advocates are using it to save lives during civil unrest," Lakey says. "My question is: how can this social technology be made even more powerful for achieving justice, democracy and peace?

"I argue that it's time to view nonviolent action not just as an overall concept but to break it into three different applications, and I'll argue further that these applications are different from each other in important ways. By 'nonviolent struggle' I mean an approach to waging conflict in which the protagonist uses methods of protest, intervention and/or noncooperation without the use or threat of injurious force. It's often called 'people power.' Researchers are struggling to keep up with the increased use of people power around the world, the better to understand it."

"What is perception for? Here I argue that perceptual systems work very hard to improve the precision of perceptual discrimination — to the point that the metric accuracy of perception is often sacrificed in favor of precision," Durgin says. "This principle is illustrated by many illusions that reveal the way perceptual systems alter their coding spaces when they adapt to contingencies — such as those that exist in the multisensory array of visual, vestibular, kinesthetic and auditory information produced during walking. Because walking is so common, our perceptions are actually distorted during walking so as to make us more sensitive to the perceptual information that we can expect to receive as feedback. As a result, we are highly tuned to walk accurately but our conscious experiences of the individual sensory variables (e.g., optic flow speed) are often biased and inaccurate during walking."

"When and why does western fiction become difficult to read? My lecture takes on this question," Weinstein says. "Modernist writers of unknowing refuse to tell the West's favorite story: that of a hero or heroine moving through trouble and eventually coming to know. I explore how we in the West came to tell that favorite story, why we have cycled and recycled it for over two centuries. Then, around the turn of the last century, a group of thinkers and writers-Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, and Freud among them-worked to reshape our very sense of the human drama. They revised our most commonsensical ways of understanding ourselves in space and time and among others. The aim of the lecture is to explain why they are so difficult to read. No less important, I'll try to persuade my audience that their difficulty is invaluable."

"For a majority of the world's languages, resources such as bilingual dictionaries, syntactic parsers, and morphological analyzers are sparse or non-existent because they are expensive to manually create, both in time and money," Wicentowski says. "Unfortunately, complex tools such as voice-recognition and machine-assisted language translation rely heavily on the existence of such resources. This talk will focus on my work in developing automatic methods for acquiring morphological analyzers directly from data with minimal human supervision."

"Shakespeare's plays were famously ubiquitous in 19th-century America: as burlesques, as minstrel shows, as circus performances, as variety theater, and as high culture, sometimes all at once," Johnson says. "This paper examines the role of Edwin Booth, the great late-century tragedian whose brother shot Lincoln, in the formation of a distinctly elite Shakespeare, as narrated by a supporting actress named Kitty who had a terrible crush on him."

"The research presented in this paper focuses on literal and figurative representations of movement and displacement in Francophone West African film," Yervasi says, "and shows how cinematic stories of displacement embody the problems of contemporary postcolonial relations: the problems of neocolonial economic policies, cultural alienation, and the attendant issues of constituting nationhood in opposition to their colonial past. The films, Ousmane Sembene's Borom Sarret [The Wagoner] (Senegal, 1964), Djibril Diop Mambety's La petite vendeuse de Soleil [The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun] (Senegal, 1999), Moussa Touré's, TGV (Senegal, 1997), and Mweze Ngangura's Pièces d'identités [ID] (Democratic Republic of Congo, 1998) reflect three dominant thematic patterns from the mid-1960s to the present: local travel from village or suburb to the city; movement between African nations; and travel out of Africa, in other words, patterns of escalating proportion: migration, displacement, and diaspora."