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.

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."

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.

Now that the next U.S. President is known, what are some options for people who want major change in national policies both domestic and foreign, in the direction of justice, peace, and environmental sustainability?

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.

Professor of Economics John Caskey provides a non-technical overview of the cause of the current financial crisis, emphasizing how a decline in housing prices can lead to a system-wide freeze in the availability of credit and a potential recession. He also discusses what the government has done to try to unfreeze credit markets (as of Oct. 10, 2008) and speculates on what the government might try to do in the future.

Professor Tyrene White describes the regulatory framework within which China's NGO's have begun to operate and the strategies sometimes used to be allowed to
register. It challenges the standard typology that divides NGO's into those that are government-organized NGO's (or GONGOs), and those that are genuinely non-governmental.  Using the case of the Amity Foundation, one of China's leading and most successful social service NGO's, she shows the difficulty of completely disentangling state and society NGO origins.

Assistant Professor Ben Berger examines democracy’s history and looks at its future. Too many contemporary theories of democracy are premised on a widespread yearning for more politics, more deliberation, more activism.

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.

Most robots are programmed to solve a particular task, but cannot adapt to new situations. In this talk, Professor Lisa Meeden describes an ongoing project to create a more general-purpose robot that can learn about the world on its own.