Lecture Previews
Alienation to Revolution: Sonali Pahwa
Today at 4:30 p.m.
Gregg Hall (Porter Hall 100)
Sonali Pahwa will discuss “From Alienation to Revolution: Youth and the Performance of Citizenship in Egypt.” Pahwa is a lecturer at Carnegie Mellon’s Qatar campus and a cultural anthropologist whose work includes research in youth theater, drama therapy, and arts programs in Egypt.
She has also worked for Al-Ahram Weekly as a culture journalist in Cairo.
The Humanities Center Lectures: Identities in Conflict
Tuesday at 4:30 p.m.
Adamson Wing (Baker Hall 136A)
Mieke Bal, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences professor of the University of Amsterdam, will give a lecture titled “The Recognition of Migrants Video, Migration, and Heterotemporality.”
Bal will explore how video art can give viewers a clearer comprehension of migratory culture through analysis of several video works and the experience of time.
He will proceed in this “oblique and dialogic manner because video as an artistic medium can, arguably, provide an experiential understanding of what such a multi-temporality means.
“The phenomenon I refer to as multi-temporality: the experience of it, heterochrony.” The lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for the Arts in Society, the Humanities Center, and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a grant from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council.
Adam Zaretsky Lecture
March 15 at 5 p.m.
Kresge Theater, College of Fine Arts
Adam Zaretsky is an artist, court jester, mad scientist, and misbehaving ethicist working in the world of bioart. Zaretsky was banned from leading a workshop at the 2010 Ars Electronica Festival where members of the public would have used a gene-gun to alter the evolutionary trajectory of otherwise normal zebrafish.
Zaretsky’s work pulls from art history, philosophy, science, and pop culture in order to question the very notions of those categories. Zaretsky is currently completing his Ph.D. in art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The Science of Wisdom: Stephen S. Hall
March 17 at 4:30 p.m.
Gregg Hall (Porter Hall 100)
Stephen S. Hall will present a lecture on the history of psychology’s exploration of wisdom and the intersection of science and society in books, magazines, and essays. His most recent work, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience (2010), will be the emphasis of his lecture.
Previous works include Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys — and the Men They Become; Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension; and A Commotion in the Blood: Life, Death, and the Immune System. Several of his works have received a “Notable Book of the Year” acknowledgment from the New York Times Book Review.
Within his profession, Hall worked as an editor of the New York Times Magazine, in addition to being a contributing writer from 1997 to 2000. His journalistic pieces have also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, New York, Science, and Scientific American. Hall teaches science journalism and explanatory journalism at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism and hosts writing workshops at New York University’s Carter Institute of Journalism.