February 2018
Sari Altschuler – The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States
In this lecture, Sari Altschuler will be talking about her new book on the history of the medical imagination. In reframing the historical relationship between literature and health, The Medical Imagination provides a usable past for our own conversations about the imagination and the humanities in health research and practice today.
Find out more »Michael N. Shadlen – How the Brain Decides, Thinks, and Creates
What was once the purview of psychology and philosophy is now a staple of biomedical science. And by elucidating the underlying neural mechanisms that make all this possible, Dr. Shadlen hopes to identify new strategies to confront the neurological and psychiatric disorders that impair cognitive function.
Find out more »Paul C. Johnson – An Automaton’s Interiority: Ajeeb in Brazil, 1896
Professor Johnson considers the attraction to human-like automatons. The goal of this essay is not to intervene in the already-extensive literature on the automaton whether as thing or concept, but rather reconsider the body of work on the automaton from a distinctive point of view, namely that of the "religious" appeal of nearhumanness.
Find out more »Ways of Knowing Cities Conference
Technology increasingly mediates the way that knowledge, power, and culture interact to create and transform the cities we live in. Ways of Knowing Cities is a one-day conference which brings together leading scholars and practitioners from across multiple disciplines to consider the role that technologies have played in changing how urban spaces and social life are structured and understood – both historically and in the present moment.
Find out more »Presidential Scholars Research Symposium
Our 2016 Presidential Scholars will discuss their cross-disciplinary research and new findings on topics in Society and Neuroscience.
Find out more »Gene Kogan – Machine Learning in the Composer’s Future Toolkit
In this talk, Kogan reviews the evolving application of machine learning to computational and new media art, with an emphasis on audio, demonstrating how new approaches to software can augment and counterpoint the normal compositional process.
Find out more »Jennifer Alexander – Technology, the Supernatural, and Social Gospel
How and why does the supernatural become productive, political, visible, and sensible – and how does it disappear? The organizers of the Lecture Series posed this question, and this talk addresses it in concrete, material terms, asking how debates about the supernatural origins of the universe appeared in post-war European debates about industry, industrial society, and human social needs.
Find out more »Cinnamon Bloss – Consumers, Citizens, and Crowds in the Age of Precision Medicine
This presentation will showcase a series of empirical studies that aim to both inform ethical questions raised by biomedical citizen science, as well as suggest areas for future research.
Find out more »Jeremy Ward – Science in the Media, a Neoinstitutionalist Approach: Diversity and Boundary-making in the French Coverage of the 2009 Pandemic Flu Vaccine’s Safety
This workshop series is primarily designed to assist advanced graduate students with their ongoing research projects. The workshop aims to expose participants to original approaches to social studies of science and technology, but also to expose students to solutions to common challenges of academic work.
Find out more »Leticia Fernández-Fontecha – Hysteria from the Archives
Join us on February 19, 2018 for a coffee hour, poetry reading and discussion of Hysteria from the Archives, a collection of poems written out of late 19th century sources on hysteria.
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