October 2015
Healing When there is No Cure – Neonatal Comfort Care
Neonatal Comfort Care: A unique medical care program for babies with very short life expectancy NewYork Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital is home to one of the most renowned neonatal intensive care units, staffed with specialists who provide critical care to newborns to help them get better. Some infants, however, are affected by life-limiting conditions or terminal illnesses. We believe that, no matter how brief each baby’s life is precious and need to be welcomed and cherished. Through our Neonatal…
Find out more »The Arthur Mitchell Project Symposium – Day 1
Columbia University has acquired the archives of Arthur Mitchell, the first African American Principal Dancer in a major US ballet company. On October 26-27, 2015, we honor the 60th Anniversary of Mr. Mitchell join George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein, and the New York City Ballet in transforming the ballet landscape and cultural horizon. Scheduled are two days of programming including a film chronicling Mr. Mitchell’s life and career, a conversation with Mr. Mitchell and reflections from his former NYCB colleagues, Dance…
Find out more »The Arthur Mitchell Project Symposium – Day 2
Columbia University has acquired the archives of Arthur Mitchell, the first African American Principal Dancer in a major US ballet company. On October 26-27, 2015, we honor the 60th Anniversary of Mr. Mitchell join George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein, and the New York City Ballet in transforming the ballet landscape and cultural horizon. Scheduled are two days of programming including a film chronicling Mr. Mitchell’s life and career, a conversation with Mr. Mitchell and reflections from his former NYCB colleagues, Dance…
Find out more »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 »Frederick Douglass Opie, “Zora Neale Hurston’s Work on Food-Based Prescriptions for Illnesses: A History”
Speaker: Frederick Douglass Opie, Babson College Zora Neale Hurston’s writings reveal an interest in natural prescriptions for the health challenges suffered by camp workers and plantation laborers. She also talks a great deal about natural remedies for poisoning. She incorporated what she learned about poisoning and natural remedies into her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and other writings. Hurston writes, “Folk medicine is practiced by a great number of persons sawmill camps, the turpentine stills, mining camps and among…
Find out more »Irina Podgorny – Traveling Charlatans in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
The charlatan (or quack) is a historical character defined by his itinerant existence. Traveling from one marketplace to another, dealing in exotic objects and remedies, organizing shows and exhibitions, performing miraculous cures by appealing to the healing power of words and medicaments, charlatans have traversed Europe since medieval times. Far from being confined to certain countries or regions, they were everywhere, repeating almost the same sales strategies, the same words, the same sequence of performances. This lecture presents the network…
Find out more »November 2015
Understanding Cognition through Development: What Do Animals, Children, and Science Have in Common? – Seminars in Society and Neuroscience
Speakers: Kristin Andrews, PhD, Associate Professor of Philosophy, York University Diana Reiss, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Hunter College Peter Gordon, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University Moderator: Ann-Sophie Barwich, PhD, Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Columbia University What is cognition? Enquiry about the architecture of the mind has been approached from different perspectives in neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy. Cognition involves a plethora of complex processes such as learning, inference-making, and anticipation. Comparative studies of animal behavior and…
Find out more »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…
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