September 2015
Andrea Wulf – The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
In The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, author Andrea Wulf reveals the extraordinary life of the visionary German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and explores how he created the way we understand nature today. Though almost forgotten today, his name lingers everywhere from the Humboldt Current to the Humboldt penguin. Humboldt was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether climbing the highest volcanoes…
Find out more »October 2015
Joan Richards – Images of Mind: Reason, Logic and the Divine in Victorian England – NY HoS Series
Speaker: Joan Richards, Professor of History, Brown University As Professor of Mathematics at University College London , Augustus De Morgan was a leader in England’s move towards becoming a secular society. UCL welcomed students independent of their religious commitments. At UCL, religion became a private concern, to be pursued at home; in the public world of the university, knowledge was to be pursued independent of religious convictions. Maintaining this division required absolutely fundamental adjustments in the views of knowledge of…
Find out more »November 2015
Rebecca Woods – Lively Technologies and Suspended Animation
Speaker: Rebecca J H Woods, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, gives a talk on "Lively Technologies and Suspended Animation." Chair: Alondra Nelson, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies and Dean of Social Sciences, Columbia University The British Empire in the nineteenth century witnessed two population explosions: a human one at the heart of the empire and an ovine one in the Australasian colonies. While commentators in the metropole worried about how to feed their growing (industrialized, urbanized) population, producers…
Find out more »Criminal Decision-Making Among Adolescent Offenders: Implications for Deterrence
Speaker: Tom Loughran, Associate Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland Researchers and policymakers know very little about how serious adolescent offenders perceive the threat or experience of punishment. Professor Loughran will present key findings from the Pathways to Desistance study, which followed more than 1,300 serious juvenile offenders for seven years after their conviction. He will consider how this study’s findings shape our understanding of the factors that affect a youth’s decision to persist in or desist from crime.…
Find out more »Nick Wilding – Forging the Moon; Or, How to Spot a Fake Galileo – NY HoS Series
Speaker: Nick Wilding, Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library, and Associate Professor of Early Modern History at Georgia State University The integrity of the historical record is a prime concern for any historian. It follows that the art of detecting forgeries is crucial to our craft. Early modern print materials have generally been held above suspicion as a technologically impossible, or at least unprofitable, subject for forgery. But the emergence in 2005 of…
Find out more »December 2015
Movie Screening: Climate – Make It Work
A documentary by David Bornstein, 51 minutes, 2015 Paris Climat Make It Work is an initiative launched by Sciences Po and partner institutions in preparation for the upcoming Conference of the Parties international climate negotiations in Paris (COP21). Led by Laurence Tubiana, the Special Representative of France for the COP21, and French philosopher Bruno Latour, the initiative culminated in a gathering of 200 youth and students from around the world in May to partake in a public simulation of the…
Find out more »Harriet Ritvo – Mixing or Matching: Hybridization and Taxonomy in the Nineteenth Century and After
Harriet Ritvo, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at MIT, gives a talk on hybridization and taxonomy. The possibilities offered by hybridization or crossing engaged the energies of animal experts from stockbreeders to zookeepers in the 19th century; it also attracted the fascinated or horrified attention of the general public. Motivations were equally various, from the pragmatic desire to improve agricultural breeds to idle curiosity. Since the results (and non-results) of these activities were unpredictable, they also provided a way of challenging the limits…
Find out more »Climate Change and the Scales of Environment
Buildings are responsible for nearly half of all energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the United States today. This startling link between climate change and urbanization should spur architects and scholars of the built environment to rethink everything about the way they practice and teach. And yet, it hasn't. Climate change is too often addressed in schools of architecture and design in terms of technological solutions and their implementation—from "green" building techniques to the myriad challenges of fortifying metropolitan centers…
Find out more »Henry Cowles – How the Other Half Thinks: Human Science in the Gilded Age – NY HoS Series
Speaker: Henry Cowles, Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine and of History, Yale University How do I know what you think—or that you think at all? This is the so-called “problem of other minds,” a philosophical puzzle that gained new meaning in the Gilded Age. Under the star of evolution, American practitioners of the human sciences probed a range of “other minds” for common elements. These human scientists came to agree that, across gaps of age, gender, race, class,…
Find out more »January 2016
Setting Out on the Long Path of Renewal: Reflections on Pope Francis’s Encyclical
Reflections on Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si' (On Care for Our Common Home) with Sean Cardinal O’MALLEY, Archbishop of Boston; Jeffrey SACHS, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University; and Rebecca VITZ (moderator), Instructor in Spanish Studies, Villanova University. This event is organized in collaboration with the Research Cluster on Science and Subjectivity in the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. To download the invitation, click here: Setting Out on the Long Path of Renewal “What kind of world do we want to leave…
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