September 2017
Allison Werner-Lin – How Parents Understand and Act on Uncertain Prenatal Genetic Test Results
Rm. 405A and B, Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research 10th Floor, Presbyterian Hospital (PH) Building 622 W. 168th Street Speaker: Allison Werner-Lin, PhD, LCSW Prenatal genome-wide testing, such as chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA), increases the possibility of identifying uncertain results associated with variable or unpredictable phenotypes, including the possibility of neurocognitive impairment. How do prospective parents prepare for the birth of a child after learning these results? How do they approach parenting? What supports do they need to cope with distress? …
Find out more »Sidney Hankerson – Writing a New Story Together: Confronting Mental Health Disparities with Community Partnerships
This lecture will highlight an innovative, community-focused approach to delivering mental health services.
Find out more »Jeannette Wing – Using Data for Good: What does it mean?
The Data, Ethics, and Decision-making Speaker Series presents Dr. Jeannette Wing, the new director of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, on "Using Data for Good: What does it mean?"
Find out more »Material and Institutional Aspects of Field and Discipline Formation
How do fields, disciplines, and larger formations such as “the sciences” or “the humanities” come into being? What roles do objects, institutions, and materialized concepts play in these processes? These are some of the questions addressed by this two-day exploratory workshop on September 25-26, 2017.
Find out more »Pierce Salguero – Chanting as Literature: Contemporary Buddhist Medicine
This lecture series will explore the enigma of how what we write relates back to the experience of bodies, healthy and unwell. Our speakers will explore how the medical humanities build on and revise earlier notions of the “medical arts.”
Find out more »Anne-Lise François – Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season
If the Anthropocene names the geological epoch defined by the radically destabilizing effects of human activity on geophysical processes, this talk asks about the continued relevance of other, relatively unchanged seasonal cycles and patterns of fluctuating intensities and regulated dearth and abundance (both cultural and geophysical).
Find out more »John Tresch – Barnum, Bache, and Poe: American Science and the Antebellum Public
This talk will explore how the sharp increase of printed matter and an elitist movement to unify knowledge through centralized institutions in the 1840s influenced Barnum, Bach, and Poe, therefore changing the relations of science and public in this early phase of industrialization.
Find out more »Priscilla Wald – Cells, Genes, and Stories: HeLa and the Patenting of Life
754 Schermerhorn Extension 1200 Amsterdam Ave Speaker: Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English, Duke University The by now well-known story of Henrietta Lacks imparts human drama to the development of the first immortal human cell line. But there is another drama that, despite scant critical attention, raises significant questions that continue to trouble genomic research and the biotech industry. What is driving the legal, political, and ethical debates concerning the HeLa cell line and other creatures of the…
Find out more »Federica Coppola – Emotions, Criminal Brains, and the Guilty Mind
This lecture explores how the neuroscientific teachings about the role of emotions in moral decision-making and antisocial behavior might lead to a rethinking of our orthodox understanding of criminal culpability, as well as of current criminal justice policies and practices.
Find out more »C. Richard Johnson, Jr. – Weave Maps and Rollmates: Computational Analysis of European Old Master Canvases and Early Chinese Silk Paintings
One way of connecting paintings is to establish that they are painted on two pieces of fabric originally from the same roll. Using Thread Count Automation, and the visualization of the results as weave maps, provides evidence of rollmate pairings from the 15th - 19th centuries and may be applied to silk paintings from the 12th – 13th centuries as well.
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