February 2017
Amy F. Ogata – Industry, Aluminum, and Orfèvrerie in Second Empire France
Amy Ogata will be giving a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Wednesday, February 15 from 12:15 to 1:15 pm, at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Her talk is entitled "Industry, Aluminum, and Orfèvrerie in Second Empire France."
Find out more »Global Perspectives in Histories of Music Theory
The monochord, an instrument featuring a single stretched string, is perhaps the oldest known musical and scientific instrument. Records of its usage date back to the Sumerians, and it played an important role in the mathematical and musical explorations in Greek and Chinese antiquity. This evening excavates the history of the monochord in a global perspective by drawing together concerns in measurement, classification, and craft across East Asia and Europe. Music theorists Guangming Li, Joon Park, and David Cohen each examine how early philosophers used the monochord to address musical and mathematical problems from the sixth century BCE to the fifteenth century.
Find out more »Joseph LeDoux – “Have We Misunderstood Fear and Anxiety?”
Eminent neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (New York University) will speak about his new book Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (Penguin 2015).
Find out more »The John K. Lattimer Lecture – The Marrow of Tragedy: Disease and Diversity in Civil War Medicine
Health care in the U.S. Civil War is often depicted as gruesome, with amputations (sans anesthesia) as the centerpiece of horror. In actuality, hospitals could be sites of healing, although there were significant differences between North and South. In this lecture, Margaret Humphreys highlights the variations among medical loci during the war, an analysis that illustrates the aspects of "good health care" that made a difference in the survival of Civil War patients.
Find out more »Stephanie Dick – After Math: Reasoning, Proving, and Computing in Postwar United States
With a focus on communities based in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, this talk will introduce different visions of the computer as a mathematical agent, software that was crafted to animate those imaginings, and the novel practices and materialities of mathematical knowledge-making that emerged in tandem.
Find out more »Making & Knowing Laboratory Open Day
Come see the Making & Knowing lab, where the project is reconstructing historical artisanal, technical, alchemical, and craft techniques from the 16th century. As a research cluster of the Center for Science and Society, the Project brings together participants from the humanities, arts, and sciences to foster new connections and insights through interdisciplinary research, teaching, and knowledge exchange.
Find out more »The Science of Jazz: Linking Music & The Structure of the Universe
For the third year, Jazz at Lincoln Center presents one of our most popular events: Science of Jazz. This unique and intimate evening explores the dynamic connection between the sciences and jazz in this special lecture series. This year’s edition will feature physicist and musician Stephon Alexander in conversation with saxophonist/composer María Grand. Alexander and Grand will use musical samples to illustrate how a physicist – or a jazz musician - approach the process of experimentation. Attendees will discover how some leaps in Physics operate like Jazz solos.
Find out more »Matthew Jones – Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage
In Reckoning with Matter, Matthew L. Jones draws on the remarkably extensive and well-preserved records of the quest to explore the concrete processes involved in imagining, elaborating, testing, and building calculating machines. He explores the writings of philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople, showing how they thought about technical novelty, their distinctive areas of expertise, and ways they could coordinate their efforts. In doing so, Jones argues that the conceptions of creativity and making they exhibited are often more incisive and more honest than those that dominate our current legal, political, and aesthetic culture.
Find out more »March 2017
The Space in Between – NYC Science, Art, & Culture Conference
Until recently, art and the humanities in general have been perceived as mutually exclusive disciplines compared to science. Over the past several years, however, there has been increasing interest in bringing these fields together to explore overlapping themes and methods. Scientific breakthroughs in areas like biochemistry, particle physics, and genetic research have radically changed our view of the world, and simultaneously more and more artists have started to work with scientific areas of research, technologies, and methods in the field of “sci-art,” often in collaboration with scientists.
Find out more »Neuroscience in the Body: Perspectives at the Periphery – Seminars in Society and Neuroscience
Moderated by a current Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, this discussion will extend across practices distinguished by disciplinary and cultural boundaries to explore neuroscience at the periphery of the body.
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