Past Presentations
2021
In North American barn swallows, Hirundo rusticate erythrogaster, ventral coloration is the target of sexual selection such that males with darker plumage experience higher reproductive success. Cross-fostering experiments demonstrate that plumage color, while heritable, is also impacted by environmental conditions during early development (i.e, while nestlings are still in the nest). Given its role as a sexually selected trait, we are investigating information that might be conveyed by this coloration. Specifically, my students and I are examining the role of nest temperature during both the incubation and brooding period on color development as well as hatching success and nestling survival.
Zoom Link.
2020
The Gebel el-Haridi, an area of cliffs on the east bank of the Nile just north of modern Akhmim, was the focus of three seasons of survey sponsored by the Egypt Exploration Society and partially funded by Truman State University in the 1990s. This paper, the result in part of research conducted during a sabbatical year, discusses the Ptolemaic and Roman quarries at the site as well as an enigmatic building constructed in front of one of these quarries, which fits the elements of an Early Christian monastic settlement.
Virtual format through Zoom here.Writing Historical Fiction
Jocelyn Cullity’s two novels of historical fiction, set in 1850s India before England took over the country, focus on the actions of powerful women at pivotal moments in Indian history. Jocelyn will discuss the historic roles played by these women and the challenges involved in finding their stories. The talk will include a look at the historical novel form from a craft perspective and also a short reading.
Jocelyn Cullity is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the BFA Program in Creative Writing in the Department of English and Linguistics. Amah & the Silk-Winged Pigeons won the 2018 American Book Fest Best Book Awards for Historical Fiction, and was one of twenty recommended Commonwealth books by the 2018 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The Envy of Paradise, the sequel, was published in the USA in November, 2019.
2019
While American education institutions have increasingly divested themselves from academic debate instruction, academic debate culture is experiencing a meteoric rise in China. Government mandates require English majors to take a speech and/or debate class and intercollegiate debate competitions have become a high-stakes activity. The promotion of persuasive speaking and academic debate, however, poses significant pedagogical, ideological, and cultural challenges in a culture that values harmony, sees importance in the preservation of personal “face,” and views critiques of government policy with caution. This presentation will explore the unique challenges posed when teaching argumentation in an intercultural context while drawing insights about promoting ethical deliberative behaviors here at home.
Dante’s Divine Comedy—an imaginary journey through the Christian afterlife—is one of the most important epic poems in Western Literature. The Inferno, the first book, tells of Dante’s adventures through Christian hell. In the fifth canto of the Inferno, Dante meets two lovers who are destined to be together for eternity. Their story is based on true events that would have been forgotten in time. But by weaving it into his poem, Dante immortalized the names of Paolo and Francesca whose story throughout the centuries has inspired innumerable works of art, music, and theatre. Antonio Scuderi, Professor of Italian, will read and explicate Inferno V, focusing on Dante’s use of imagery and themes from both the classical and medieval worlds.
2018
Exploring and Preserving Truman State University’s Collection of Great War Propaganda Posters
Designed to arouse the passions of contemporaries, Great War propaganda posters provide unique opportunities for exploring the thoughts, emotions, and actions of the American nation at the time of its participation in the global conflagration. In commemoration of the World War I centenary, Amanda Langendoerfer, Associate Dean of Libraries for Special Collections and Museums, and Jason McDonald, Assistant Professor of American History, recount the origins, preservation, and historical significance of Truman State University’s extensive and impressive collection of propaganda posters.
Dr. Charles Gran presents excerpts from his sabbatical project, and discusses its development. End Times is a postmodern, multimedia, musical revue exploring the secret knowledge behind apocalyptic mythology with a couple of impetuous cheerleaders skipping towards destruction. Directed by David Charles Goyette and led by pianist Rachel AuBuchon, the Forum will feature performances by a cast of Truman singers and actors.
Quantum mechanics is notorious for being weird and nonintuitive. It is perhaps surprising then that it is also a powerful tool. A quantum computer has the potential to solve problems that are beyond the capability of any classical computer that could be built. Quantum cryptography is a method for encoding messages in such a way that is, in principle, unbreakable. Both of these technological advances take advantage of the “weirdness” of quantum phenomena.
The canonical example of quantum weirdness is the so-called wave-particle duality of a photon, especially as expressed in the double-slit experiment. I will use the wave-particle duality of the photon as a starting point to present an explanation of quantum weirdness in its simplest form by considering quantum states that can only take on two different values. I will then explain quantum entanglement and how to use it for quantum cryptography. To finish, I will indicate why a quantum computer has the potential to be more powerful than a classic computer.
2017
For a fifty-year stretch in the seventeenth century, Spanish Franciscan missionaries lived on the Hopi mesas on a more or less permanent basis. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 brought that occupation to an abrupt halt. Spanish documents recently translated as part of the Hopi Documentary History Project, and published alongside interviews in 2015 in the first volume of Moquis and Kastiilam: Hopis, Spaniards, and the Trauma of History (University of Arizona Press), offer new insights into what that period of Franciscan presence meant from both a Spanish and Hopi perspective. I will outline this tumultuous history from 1629 to 1680, discussing key documents and collective memories that clarify our understanding of the Hopi-Franciscan relationship while simultaneously raising new questions. I will also discuss work on volume 2 of Moquis and Kastiilam, expected to be completed by the spring of 2018.
“Dialogues on Color” will be a presentation of Aaron Fine’s work on color theory resulting in a book of that title. This book - being an inter-genre mixture of creative nonfiction, fiction, and coloring book pages – is available to read free online, or purchase at cost, at www.arenotbooks.com Providing an intellectual history of Western attitudes towards color, the organizing aim of the book is to reveal the ways cultural context shapes our theories of color, not excluding those we link to Newton’s work with the prism and think of as objective and universally true.
For this presentation the author proposes to host a mixture of activities, mingling his own lecture style with staged readings done by theatre or debate club students in the voices of Newton, Goethe, Tom Sawyer, and others. There will also be opportunities for the audience to color in their own color theory coloring book pages, and to win a drawing for one of five complimentary copies of the book “Dialogues on Color”
Our national health care system is a complex patchwork of institutions which have originated in different historical moments, retaining to some extent, cultural understandings and institutional characteristics that were prevalent at the time they were created. This includes more traditional medical practices and hospitals, community health centers which originated with the War on Poverty and the more recently developed Health Maintenance Organizations. In this research I am investigating how changes in the regulations governing relationships between patients, health care providers, insurers and government agencies initiated by the Affordable Care Act are shifting the distribution of risk associated with illness and injury across these stakeholders, and changing the interactions between doctors and their patients. This is a multipart qualitative study which investigates how different types of primary care providers in rural and urban areas are grappling with innovations in regulations, performance standards and funding arrangements, including pressure by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to move towards becoming Accountable Care Organizations. This work is part of a larger project examining changes to public institutions with the shift from Embedded Liberalism best represented by the New Deal to Neoliberal policy-making which was first initiated by the Reagan administration in the 1980s but continues to reform our public and non-profit sectors today.
Lloyd Pflueger, Dept. of Philosophy and Religion
The Isha Upanishad is a secret poetic discourse on the nature of God, karma, and the ritual prayer and enabling enlightened passage from this life. It is fairly simple linguistically yet cryptic and open to a variety of philosophical and theological interpretations. Because it is profound, polysemic, and central to most Hindu religious traditions, and quite short, it is a perfect text not only to muse upon, but to educate Western students of Indian philosophy and religion. In this lecture I discuss the problems of translating this text and creating a textbook in which undergraduate students without the knowledge of Sanskrit language, can read the famous text in the original Sanskrit and immerse themselves in the traditional exegesis and speculation on this text.
From the 1880s to the 1940s, dozens of African American newspapers were established in the Midwest, by editors whose progressive politics encouraged activism among their readership. These newspapers provided a wealth of material about Black American music and its audience reception, allowing us to understand more fully the role that music played in African American communities in our region.
For more than 70 years Pete Seeger was a key figure in American musical and left political culture; his appeal and general cultural values transcended sectarian politics. When he died in 2014 most of the online commentary, both official and unofficial, minimized or ignored his roots in U. S. Popular Front (1935-1940c.) culture and began instead with a story of his defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he claimed the First Amendment, not the Fifth in his defense. All this is well and fine, but by leaving out the Old Left Popular Front years we can't understand either Seeger or the continuing role of the Popular Front's cultural ideology in American life and culture; the stress on the value of cultural pluralism, egalitarianism, and democracy.This meant a fight for industrial unionism, anti-racism, and anti-Fascism that continues to influence the left today. Seeger was a central cultural figure in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the environmental movement, and Occupy Wall-Street.
I will examine Seeger's career with the goal of illuminating the issues of cultural history it raises, not to merely summarize it. If the Popular Front years are forgotten so is the fact that Pete Seeger and the Weavers' were at the top of the popular culture Billboard charts in the early 1950s. That is why and when HUAC thought he mattered. He was not a marginal figure. He fought his way back into popular culture and appeared on the Smothers' Brothers singing an anti-Vietnam war song and ending his blacklisting. In Seeger's last years Bruce Springsteen and other rockers with connections to the folk revival (there were a lot of them) sought to celebrate him in concert and on compact disc. Seeger the folk revivalist was always a part of popular culture
It is also important to understand how he created his own legend, lore, and folk [revival] community in which he was a folksinger in a participatory democracy of a singing along pluralistic audience who became his community and he their folksinger and in which boundaries between performance and audience melted. He compared his role in the folk revival of the 1950s and early 1960s to Johnny Appleseed, only his seeds where what he called "people's songs." He built his own "log" house in Beacon, New York, and most stories about him mentioned how he chopped his own firewood--according to the obituaries up to a few days before he died. The internet commentary on Seeger reveals how both he and his "folk" community wove personal experience stories about themselves and each other into the creation of the Pete Seeger legend.
2016
Game theory can be used to model competition and cooperation in economics, biology, military conflict, and even in games such as poker. In applications of game theory, it is generally assumed that the players will gravitate towards playing some Nash equilibrium, a choice of strategies for all players with the property that no single player can improve their payoff by changing their strategy. Which Nash equilibrium is played becomes problematic when there is more than one; more so when different players have different preferences over the set of equilibria. A more recent concept of an equilibrium in a game is that of a correlated equilibrium in which a "choreographer" coordinates the actions of the players towards a single solution. The advantage of this is that each player may do better following the directions of the choreographer than they would be able to do acting independently.
Lessac Kinesensic Training is a holistic and creative approach to developing the voice and the body for greater flexibility, power, and expressiveness. Originally known only to theatre professionals, Kinesensics has now become recognized as applicable to many endeavors in life, from vocal training and speech therapy to ESL, sports and fitness, and learning how to sing.
The proposed presentation will introduce the audience to simple and natural behaviors of the body (or body climates), which may be used to improve physical and vocal functioning. These body NRGs (“energies,” or Neural Regenerative Growth) possess cognate Vocal NRGs that employ a musical metaphor for the treatment of voice training. Kinesensic work involves a bio-neural, feeling process; students are asked to resist the habit of listening to their voices, and instead to feel the sound as a bone-conducted tonal current that can bypass the ears. By learning to sense or feel sound and motion in the body, students gather crucial information to use as organic instructions for optimal body and voice functioning.
During the proposed workshop, I will demonstrate each of the NRGs at work on a piece of text, which I will perform in each kinesensic modality. Then participants will be introduced to each of the NRGs in a series of physical and vocal explorations that illustrate the core concepts of Kinesensic training. I will perform a series of “trinities,” or the use of all seven NRGs in a single piece of text, and will close with a discussion of real-world applications of kinesensic training for non-actors.
SHAMANISTIC HEALING: SPIRITS, CULTURE, AND BODIES IN BRAZIL
Shamanic ritual performances may be both the earliest form of religion and the earliest form of medicine in human cultures. Cross-culturally, shamans are known enter into altered states of consciousness, where they interact with spirits, animals, anscestors, and other forms of supernatural power. In this state they lead communities in ceremonies that encourage the trance state in the group as a whole, increasing social bonding and creating a shared, symbolic identity. These transformations are not only spiritual, psychological, and social, but bodily as well. Even though the traditional cultures in which shamanism originated have all but disappeared today, shamanistic healing continues to exist in variety of ways around the world. One of the places where modern shamanic forms are most prominent is Brazil, where I spent five weeks in study of these practicies. In this talk I will present my understanding of how healing and culture work together in shamanic ritual, based both on the interdisciplinary body of literature that addressses this subject and on my own experiences and observations in Brazil.
2015
Like most other things, chess was invented in Asia and perfected and spread by the Islamic world via North African and Byzantine middlemen to Europe. Europeans then applied provincial and idiosyncratic categories to change the rules of the game and proclaimed them universal. They then judged the rest of the world inferior for not being as good at a game it either didn’t know or had largely forgotten. Today, however, players from the rest of the world, especially Asia, are starting to school Western masters at their own game. In his world history of this ancient game, Torbjörn Wandel does not just tell an engaging tale that takes us from ancient India and Persia through the Islamic world into al-Andaluz, medieval Europe, Renaissance Sicily, Spain, and beyond. Through his history of the game, he also reveals surprising paths and patterns of globalization that offer a fresh perspective on world history itself.
“Commonness and rarity: An ecologist’s view of banality and eccentricity”.
Ecologists study the determinants of species’ distributions and abundances, so understanding why some species are common while others are rare is a fundamental, though enigmatic, undertaking. In this lecture, I will present glimpses of over 20 years of my own research, investigating both ends of the abundance spectrum – from what makes some species successful weeds (i.e., “too” common!) to what makes a species rare enough to be listed as federally endangered. Are there discoverable biological/ecological factors that explain why these species are as prolific, or as scant, as they are? Further, to what extent are species’ current abundance states being driven by human activities that modify factors determining their abundances from what they would otherwise be, if unaffected by anthropogenic influences? I will address these questions via examples of field work on several different plant species I’ve studied.
For over 150 years, from Darwin’s Origin of Species to current community ecological theory, naturalists have noticed patterns of abundance, striven to describe them quantitatively, and ascribed to these patterns not only determining mechanisms, but also implications about how Nature itself might be organized. Recognizing such patterns of abundance does beg for explanation, but so does human fascination with the atypical. I will end my presentation with an inquiry that includes what cognitive science offers regarding how Homo sapiens sees the world, from the banal to the eccentric.
Increasing the number of students who pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses and careers must involve more than just increasing the number who enter the pipeline, as the pipeline has been found to be rather leaky. To minimize the leaks, it is imperative to understand the social and psychological factors that impact STEM achievement related choices. Robot competitions not only increase students’ interest in pursuing STEM, they also provide a unique research environment to examine these factors.
The concept of common sense, which emerges from the rhetorical and philosophical theories of Aristotle, Cicero, Giambattista Vico, and the Scottish School of Common Sense, contains specific coordinates that American colonists adapted to the cause of independence in the American Revolution. This lecture argues that the architects of American Revolutionary rhetoric appropriated and applied principles of common sense philosophy to the invention of their discourses. A rhetorical analysis of their efforts is a means of exploring some ways in which rhetoric is essential to democracy.
2014
In the 1940s, the FBI ran a little-known political surveillance operation in Latin America called the Special Intelligence Service (SIS). In January, Marc Becker tripped across documents in the United States National Archives that reveal the extent of its penetration into Latin America. The original justification for sending hundreds of FBI agents, many of them undercover, was to combat German Nazi influence in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. But the mission did not stop there. The agency placed 45 agents in Ecuador, a small country that never was the target of German espionage networks. With the decline of the Nazi threat by 1943, the FBI shifted its entire intelligence apparatus to focus on FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s primary obsession with communism. As a result, historians are left with a rich source of documentation of the history of the Latin American left during the 1940s.
In this presentation Professor Antonio Scuderi will share the findings from his research on the European carnival. Various aspects of European culture may have their origins in this primordial Indo-European rite of passage. "Carnival," a fertility rite with many faces —including the Roman Saturnalia— was so prevalent in ancient Europe that it made itself felt in the traditional Christian calendar, and generated a host of cultural traditions and iconic symbols.
Dr. Hirsch will explore the renewed interest in the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project since the economic implosion that began at the end of 2008. This renewed interest reflects seemingly permanent questions about American culture and nationality, about a perpetual need to rediscover a diverse pluralistic America. The most recent manifestation of this interest comes from professors of composition and rhetoric trying to develop a Federal Writers’ Project for the 21st century. Their goal is to link university composition and rhetoric professors, their students, professors in other disciplines, and the community beyond university walls in new FWP-like endeavors that will explore American history and culture. Dr. Hirsch will also explore how talk of an FWP2.0 is helping him rethink the FWP legacy, the role of his ongoing scholarly endeavors to the world of liberal arts education, and his place in this particular dialogue between present and past. The FWP sought to speak to general readers and to contribute to scholarly studies in American history, literature, and folklore. Whether new-FWP like guides to American culture can achieve this is a question that ought to interest all of us who care about liberal arts education.
Join us for a night of education. We will examine trends (e.g., technology, accountability, and economy) and reflections from13 MAE graduates--navigating through 10 years of educational practice.
* Dr. Miner asks that audience members bring their own wireless internet enabled devises so that they can ask questions via a back channel while the presentation is underway.
2013
This lecture will analyze the popular concerns over "Asian Ascendance vs. US Decline." The rise of China is real but not as threatening as described by the media and extremists. China's rapid economic growth presents a new and complex model-its gross GDP is the second largest in the world, yet its per capita GDP is at the middle income level. The decline of the US is true but it is not as appalling as fanned by the demagogues; the fall of any great power is a historical, biological, and natural process. The talk will also look at the positive and negative sides of globalization and the need for global economic and political stability and various prescriptions and make suggestions as to how we re-position ourselves under globalization.
-- The impact of student opinions of campus built heritage on their perceptions of institutional loyalty: Implications for marketing strategies
P. Joan Poor and Jeanette Snowball
A presentation by Dr. Joan Poor
Tuesday, February 26, 2012 at 7:00pm
In Baldwin Hall, Little Theatre
Research has shown that the racial diversity of college/university student populations improves social tolerance and academic performance. It is also however, found that students of colour are more likely to drop out than their white counterparts, and to feel isolated and excluded from campus life. One possible reason for such feelings is the built heritage on campuses, particularly those with colonial-era style, which is often used in college marketing and recruiting. This research uses student survey data from St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM) in the U.S. and Rhodes University (RU) in South Africa to investigate student attitudes towards, and knowledge about, campus built heritage and their perceptions of its impact on student loyalty.
2012
In 2006 outgoing patrician Met Director Philippe de Monetebello announced that America’s premier art museum would return to Italy the most celebrated example of functional art from the Etruscan period. The agreement to repatriate the “hot pot” essentially acknowledged what the artistic and museum community has known since the purchase of the vase in 1974—then Director Thomas Hoving and the Board of Governors, representing the elite of New York City’s cultural circle, had falsified the provenance required to legitimate the $1.4 million purchase.
This lecture focuses on the reasons why the Met risked such subterfuge. Theft of rare objects had become widespread within the art community during and after WWII. Still, events in the 1970s led Met officials to take risks unusual for the post war art market. Led by the venerable chairman Douglas Dillon (past Undersecretary of State and Treasury Secretary), they set out to protect the Met’s place in the city’s cultural hierarchy as sixties era grassroots movements challenged the liberal consensus corporate elites had crafted to reinforce their social influence. Dillon and Hoving hoped purchase of celebrated objects and hosting blockbuster art shows would out maneuver “small is beautiful” critics who called for decentralization of elite cultural institutions. They also had to justify doubling the Met’s footprint on city-owned Central Park property at a time when the city faced bankruptcy and activists condemned encroachment on limited green space.
In effect, New York city elites engaged in a form of cultural covert operation to preserve its stature.
Factual disagreements with people whose opinion we value are regular occurrences in the course of daily life-- think, for instance, of the divergences of opinion that occur in weather and stock market forecasts, pronouncements about upcoming elections or athletic contests, or other prognostications about the future. Should we change our beliefs when they come into conflict with others whose general skill at judgment we respect? On the one hand, we might worry that moving away from our own beliefs makes us wishy-washy: deferring partially to our peers, we end up having no firm opinions about any matter of disagreement. On the other hand, it looks like our respect for others’ ability to judge some matter requires some sort of deference to their respective points of view.
My proposed Truman Faculty Forum presentation will be an interactive lecture that considers the question of what to believe in the face of disagreement with those whose judgment we respect. I will use Keynote slides to present arguments that support different answers to the question, and I will ask members of the audience to think along with me about which of the arguments, if any, are successful. The aim of my talk is to clarify the consequences of taking various positions on this important question in epistemology.
Although we do not typically think of her as a “devotional” poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s use and defense of devotional verse appear early in her career, in the 1830s. They also figure into one of her later poems, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1848), which reveals the effects of brutal disempowerment on the identity and psychological integrity of a slave mother. In this text as well as in her 1838 volume The Seraphim and Other Poems, Barrett Browning seeks to create a kind of “new utterance” in devotional verse that speaks in concert with the poems of Christina Rossetti, a writer well-known for her devotional texts in the nineteenth century. In Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866), Rossetti brings together ideas of secrecy and devotional poetics in order to reveal ways in which fallen women might regain their spiritual and social equilibrium in Victorian culture. Through lively and passionate means, both writers invest tropes of the human soul in devotional poetics with powerful analyses of religious, gender, literary, and social conventions. In my presentation I will discuss how Barrett Browning and Rossetti give us a new perspective through which to view Victorian women’s religious verse. Moreover, through both lecture and discussion, and using a PowerPoint presentation to display relevant images and key texts, I will provide a brief overview of Victorian devotional poetry and explore some of the specific qualities of Barrett Browning’s and Rossetti’s poems.
2011
In his Crudites (1611), written in connection with his pedestrian travels through areas such as France, Italy, and Germany, the Englishman Thomas Coryat described Venice as “the most glorious and heavenly show upon the water that ever any mortal eye beheld…”. Part of Venice’s glories, to Coryat and countless others, were (and still are) the opulent luxury goods that could be bought in her markets, especially the Rialto. Observers noted—among many other things—the rich textiles, glass, clothing, and paintings that could be obtained there; indeed, the sixteenth century marks a highpoint in Venetian visual culture. Luxury goods in the lagoon city have received a great deal of scholarly attention; however, neither the coloring materials (pigments and dyes) that contributed to their beauty nor the vendecolori (color sellers) who manufactured, sold, and traded in these goods have received the same level of attention—until recently. Vendecolori stood to gain considerable wealth from their work with these beautiful, expensive, and often exotic materials, and that wealth afforded them some interesting positions in terms of social status in the Venetian social hierarchy.
With this richly-illustrated talk I hope to accomplish a variety of goals: first, to introduce the central role of color and coloring materials in sixteenth-century Venetian visual culture; second, explore the key part vendecolori played in that culture and the implications for their social position; and third, to outline the kinds of archival documents and research methods that have allowed me to study this relatively recently rediscovered specialty in Venice’s rich (in a variety of ways) mercantile world.
My research involves studying cell shape and movement in the embryo of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. By understanding these events in worms, we can gain a better understanding of human biology. The cell migrations I study are directly relevant to wound healing, cancer cell migration and metastasis, closure of the spinal cord (which results in spina bifida if it fails), and the process that changes the embryo from a sphere of cells into an elongated body. The forum will include an introduction to developmental biology and the standard use of various “model” species to understand developmental processes. We will then explore several specific processes in development and how worm embryos are being used to better understand those events. The talk will feature movies of developing embryos from a number of different species.
The primary focus of this project is to create a body of digitally manipulated photographs that visually express the notion of transience and split cultural identity caused by the act of migration. I have been viewing this issue through the lens of my own personal history and cultural journey from India to the United States. This journey left me feeling disconnected - unable to anchor myself in any particular cultural framework. I have therefore formed a hybrid identity, a patching together of two cultures within one person. In my work I explore absence, loss and genealogy through the use of my own family snapshots. These personal artifacts are re-contextualized alongside fragmented images and staged imagery to reveal the correlations between generations, cultures and memory.
The significance of this project stems from the increasing relevance of the migrant experience and the importance of hearing minority voices. By providing a migrant perspective this project also introduces the topic of interaction and assimilation of cultures. For the individual the process of integrating different cultural perspectives can blur their identity. The discussion of how we can recreate distinct identities is led by artists of diverse backgrounds dealing with personal histories of diaspora - a relatively new voice in the art world.
This presentation results from a sabbatical project on the English poet, painter, and engraver William Blake (1757-1827) entitled “There’s a Methodism to his Madness: William Blake as a Voice of Religious Moderation.” In that project, I propose a new understanding of the theological dimensions of Blake’s works that arises from recognizing interpretive problems caused, in part, by insufficient cross-disciplinary expertise. Specifically, I show how Blake’s theology has been misinterpreted by literary critics who are not sufficiently trained theologically. My sabbatical work in this area opened up fundamental questions for me about the nature of the bounding lines that distinguish one discipline from another and that also make visible the connections between them.
In this Faculty Forum, I will discuss my sabbatical project briefly in order to illustrate wider concerns about multi-disciplinary scholarship, teaching, and learning in liberal arts education. These concerns will constitute the main substance of this presentation. I will not be delivering a theoretical argument about interdisciplinarity. We have already reached a collective decision at Truman to move in this direction. Rather, I will present what I see as the main promises and pitfalls of this kind of study, and pose practical questions geared toward re-examining the complexities of our goals and how to reach for them responsibly. I will argue that creative interdisciplinary horse-trading liberates us to engage real-world issues in innovative ways, but that it also generates unintended misconceptions about academic disciplines that are not only difficult to correct, but even to detect. Those misconceptions endanger our attempts to deal constructively with the cultural challenges that face us today.
This will be a Power-Point address geared to the university community, with ample time for audience discussion.
2010
Short Description: When CEOs are overconfident, does the overconfidence result in less reliable financial statements? To answer this I examine a group of firms with accounting problems. These firms have financials with material problems and usually the problems have existed over many accounting periods. I also examine firms that are very similar to these firms--same size, same industry, but without accounting problems. I document that in firms with accounting problems, a vast majority of the firms have overconfident CEOs while in firms without the accounting problems, about half of the firms have overconfident CEOs. This suggests that investors should assess the CEO's overconfidence in making investment decisions.
In November of 2005 the Truman State University Press published Encounters with Lincoln: Images and Words by Thomas J. Trimborn. The book by Dr. Trimborn was the result of eight years of research and creativity which involved his great interests—Abraham Lincoln, art, and music. Even as Lincoln's 2009 bicentennial year approaches, he still matters to us today as his story continues to inspire generations of people around the world. He quite simply is part of our national consciousness.
Participants: Randy Bame, David Charles Goyette, Joan Larkins Mather and Ron Rybkowski
Abstract:
Truman students tend to become jaded and view faculty as one-dimensional inhabitants of the teaching profession. In January of 2010, Ron Rybkowski, David Charles Goyette, Randy Bame and Joan Mather presented a minimalist production of the play 'Art', by Yasmina Reza, as a Faculty-Staff Showcase. The showcase was a rare opportunity give our own creative needs an outlet while showing the students that we actually practice what we preach in class.
The play concerns the cataclysmic effect on three friends when one of them purchases an expensive work of abstract art—a large painting consisting of white lines on a white canvas. Their friendship has been based on tacit mutual agreement; but what happens when one of them does something completely different and unexpected? The question is: are you who you think you are, or are you who your friends think you are? As the three men debate the value of the painting, emotions run high and the conflict escalates to the point of potentially destroying their long-standing friendship.
In this session, the actors and director will present a scene from 'Art', and discuss how the creative process of collaborating with peers to bring a play to life, differs from the traditional educational experience of working with students.
Objectives: As a result of attending this presentation, participants will consider the following questions:
• How do the books we read as young children influence our development?
• How are those books chosen by the adults in our lives?
• In what ways do those choices impose parental and societal values
upon children?
• How can we best use literature to engage students in thinking critically about controversial issues?
Content: The focus of this session will be children’s literature which has proven controversial on political, religious, sexual, and social grounds. The facilitator will share information on books that have historically been deemed controversial, as well as recent book challenges identified by the American Library Association. In small groups, participants will then examine examples of children’s books that have recently been identified as controversial. These books will serve as s springboard through which participants can share their feelings about the appropriateness of the books and the issues they represent for use with children. Participants will be asked to explore how various stakeholders in the child’s life might view this literature. These stakeholders include parents, teachers, and school administrators. When possible, the facilitator will also share the result of interviews with the authors of these books, including their motives and inspirations for writing, as well as the challenges they may have faced. Finally, participants will have the opportunity to share other titles that have proven controversial in their own educational settings and how they have dealt with them.
At end of discussion, facilitator will present results of research on attitudes of administrators, teachers, parents, and MAE students towards these same books. Data were collected in the fall of 2007 while the facilitator was on sabbatical.
The 1902-04 excavations of John Garstang at Beni Hasan in Egypt provide us with a window into the growth of professional archaeology in the last century. He was one of a group of archaeologists whose interest was primarily in the life and death of the common people rather than royalty, and his excavation of the so-called "Middle Class" cemetery at Beni Hasan was typical of its time in the approach to recording and analysis, while providing us with an example of the rich sites still being discovered at the turn of the last century. My presentation will discuss the process of Garstang’s excavation itself, from the initial contract drawn up in London through which a group of wealthy individuals essentially bought "shares" of the excavation and the objects it revealed, to the post-excavation dispersal of those objects to museums and educational institutions throughout the world. The results of the excavation will also be addressed in some detail; this relatively well-documented site gives us an almost unique opportunity to examine issues of social stratification in antiquity and regional variation in material culture during a period in which the traditional assumption has been that regionalism was a relatively minor factor. Garstang's site report, Burial Customs of Ancient Egypt, is still the standard publication on non-royal burial practices during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, during the first half of the second millennium B.C.E.
A lecture will include a power-point presentation that will include photographs and drawings of the objects, both from Garstang’s original excavations, and from my own examination of the material in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as historical, sociological, and statistical analysis of the material from the site.
2009
In sabbatical-supported research, Dr Harker studied the work of of the 17th-century Scots Gaelic poet Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh (Mary MacLeod, c. 1615 – c. 1705). Notable as a largely self-trained woman in a world dominated by career courtly poets, an exclusively male occupation, Màiri served the aristocratic chiefs of Scotland’s Clan MacLeod. Not widely known to modern scholarship outside Celtic Studies, her poetic output is noteworthy not only for her unusual personal circumstances but also for her remarkable ability to write in the high-literary style of the exclusively male bards. In this presentation for a non-specialist audience, Dr Harker will examine the subjects of both the collapse of late-medieval/early-modern Celtic culture as illustrated by the last moments of the traditional high literary traditions of the Gaelic Scottish Highlands—and also the role of a woman occupying a traditionally-male dominated place in that traditional society. The Truman Faculty Forum presentation will involve brief historic overviews of the status of Gaelic culture at the moment when England was eradicating a politically independent Gaeldom and English was rapidly dominating spheres in which high-culture Gaelic had flourished, as well as a brief introduction to the Gaelic bard tradition. It will also address the place of women in this traditional society in order to consider the degree to which Màiri’s work was so remarkable. Some poems will be read in Gaelic and then translated and explicated in English.
“All men are created equal” is the most cherished phrase in the Declaration of Independence, and one of the most powerful ideas to emerge during the Revolution. Yet most Americans have little idea of what this concept meant at the time, nor how it evolved along with their country’s institutions and culture. In 1600, equality was viewed as anarchy, and rigid socio-economic hierarchies were viewed as necessary for a moral civil order. Over the next century and a half, this order was undermined, first with the idea that political and economic equality had existed among Englishmen before the Norman conquest; then with the Enlightenment notion that all humans were born with the same capabilities and inherent rights to life, liberty, and property; and finally by a radical evangelical movement. Educated Anglo-Americans also embraced the lesson from Classical history that a republic could only survive as long as it avoided extremes of rich and poor. In Revolutionary America, all of these ideas were, to varying degrees, part of the popular yet still controversial concept of equality. But after the war, even as democracy widened and developed deeper roots, the celebration of individual liberty and property ownership caused notions of substantive economic equality to become marginalized. Racial inequalities increased even as slavery ended in North, and women were never considered part of the body politic or economic. My Forum lecture will outline these intellectual developments and show how they created a tension between liberty and equality during the nation’s first half-century that is still with us today.
Cittàslow (composed of the Italian word for city, plus slow) is a network of cities that began in Italy but has spread to several European countries, Australia, and New Zealand. The Cittàslow charter includes the goals to promote a better, less frenzied quality of life (Lebensqualität in German), “Slow Food,” a local economy grounded in local traditions, and environmental quality. These goals express a critique of our frenzied race for “progress,” and an imagined alternative of a transnational network of cities that work toward a more sustainable and livable world. However, the critique of current patterns of globalization may merely promote various forms of parochialism (campanilismo in Italian). Furthermore, the efforts of translating a vision into reality can involve numerous betrayals, as can the translation of ideas from one language to another within an international movement (as the Italians say, “traduttore traditore,” the translator is a traitor). This presentation presents insights into these issues based on research visits in Cittàslow member cities in Italy, Germany, and England.
2008
Dr. Scott Alberts, Associate Professor of Mathematics
Jane Roads, Professor of Mathematics, Chair, Mathematics and Science Division, and Director, Learning Center, MACC
Steven Voss, Associate Professor of Psychology, MACC and Marriage and Family Therapist, private practice
The chasm between mathematics “haves” and “have-nots” continues to grow. Some students are soaring higher and higher, while most are lagging behind. Internationally, we see that the US continues to lag other industrialized countries. More and more jobs require mathematical competence, and some companies are unable to find good workers. Comparing students at Truman State University and Moberly Area Community College, we find that
students at both schools have significant anxieties, but these anxieties vary widely by group and ability level. Students at both schools understand the importance of learning mathematical ideas, but many face real anxiety in and out of the classroom.
Is math anxiety like other anxieties? Can it be treated? Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) involves recognizing destructive and debilitating beliefs then learning to refute them and replace them with constructive beliefs. CBT is frequently the treatment of choice for anxiety and mood based disorders, but it is fairly intensive, and normally only done by a trained therapist.
Our interdisciplinary research has been examining whether ideas from CBT can be adapted to the mathematics classroom, and whether mathematics teachers can be trained to use these techniques to help their students.
This research has been generously funded by the NSF as part of Truman’s larger STEP Grant (DUE-#0431664)
An appreciation for scholarship and creativity at a liberal arts college begins with an understanding of a liberal arts education. There is no shortage of books and articles about the value of a liberal arts education. Truman State’s own mission statement aims to express that value in a relevant and meaningful way. Those working at places like Truman are often asked to defend the intrinsic value of a liberal education versus the instrumental value of a professional or vocational education. Without presenting a laundry list of things a liberal arts education can offer, I would like to address the topic of scholarship and creativity by describing the essence of what a liberal arts university is: A moral community. What I mean by that is, while not utopia, a liberal arts college is a place where students, faculty, staff and even administrators, are searching for Happiness with a capital ‘H.’ Not the trivial, fleeting kind of happiness one experiences while eating a tasty ice cream cone or watching Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, but the profound, meaningful and even transcendent kind of Happiness we experience if living in a community where we have the opportunity to express our better selves and the chance to see the world from a fresh perspective everyday. It is toward this noble end that the appreciation for scholarship and creativity begins.
Since its construction in 2003, the Truman State University Observatory has become a valuable resource for astronomy education, outreach, and undergraduate research. The Observatory has a suite of state-of-the-art equipment to support a range of undergraduate research projects, including a recently upgraded telescope, CCD cameras, photoelectric photometers, stellar spectrometers, and radio telescopes.
This presentation will provide an overview of ongoing research projects at the Truman Observatory, including the motivation for the research, observational techniques, and examples of data acquired by Truman students. Topics to be covered include:
• Measurements of “neglected” double stars;
• Monitoring solar activity by observation of the state of the Earth’s ionosphere;
• Mapping the distribution of neutral hydrogen in the Galactic plane.
• Detection of extrasolar planets by observing planetary transits;
• Photometric observations of variable stars, including eclipsing
binary stars;
• Determining the rotation period of asteroids;
• Spectroscopy of long-period variable stars.
A special feature of this presentation will be a remote link to the Observatory telescope and the display of real-time images and/or data.
Composers of music are often asked by curious listeners to answer two seemingly innocuous questions:
1) “Where do you get your ideas from?”
2) “When you compose, what comes to you first—the melody, chorus, words (etc., etc., etc.)?”
In reality, the answers to these questions are rarely simple, as the creative process is often a complex one involving intricate interaction between both sides of the brain.
In this session, composer Warren Gooch will briefly discuss the creative process as it applies to specific original musical works. The session will include performances of the musical works under discussion.
2007
Citizen science takes place when scientists and public citizens form partnerships to explore a question of mutual interest. The most successful example of citizen science is Project Feederwatch (sponsored by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology), wherein citizens from around the nation record and report bird abundance at their backyard bird feeders. The katydids are a group of insects (related to the grasshoppers and crickets) that hold great promise for citizen science because they are abundant and loud and easy to find in backyards, parks, and natural areas. Moreover, they are docile and easily handled by children and adults. Insects are often regarded as pests in Western societies, but most insects – including katydids – provide important ecosystem services on which humans depend.
In this oral presentation to third-graders at Ray Miller Elementary School, I will cover basic information about the katydids: what characters distinguish them from crickets and grasshoppers, what they look like, and what sound they make. I will also provide the children and their families with keys (developed by my students and I) to identify katydid sounds. Finally, I will provide live katydids that can be handled by the children. The main purpose of the presentation is to foster a sense of ‘biophilia’ by exposing children to this abundant, widespread, and charismatic family of insects that are model organisms for citizen science.
This presentation will be held at Ray Miller Elementary School and families with elementary-aged children are particularly invited to attend.
Novice jazz listeners are often mystified by jazz performance. Where is the melody? Who should the audience listen to? How do the musicians know when to start and stop? Why are there so many solos? Professor Tim AuBuchon will shed light on these and other questions from the perspective of both an audience member and a performer.
The presentation will be made up of lecture, performance, and the study of selected recordings. Listening strategies for the audience will be illustrated through improvisations on standard jazz compositions. Listening exercises will include the playing of several different recordings of the same composition by different artists from different time periods.
2006
Genomics and Bioinformatics at Truman State University: constructionist thinking from a traditionally reductionist sub-discipline
In the last decade advances in DNA sequencing technology has facilitated the sequencing of the genomes of various organisms including humans. More recently, new sequencing technologies have been developed which have radically reduced the time and cost of sequencing DNA. In addition, methodologies such as microarray technology (i.e., gene chips) have been devised to enable geneticists to simultaneously evaluate the expression of most, if not all, the genes of an organism. Genetic technologies have now advanced to the degree that it is often impossible to analyze and interpret the results of genomic experiments without the aid of sophisticated computational methods. Bioinformatics is the cross disciplinary field of study which is meeting the challenge of processing, visualizing, and assisting in interpreting the outcomes of genomic experiments. The data from these genomic analyses have far reaching applications and implications in medicine, agriculture, and nearly all aspects of the life sciences.
Biologists and computer scientists at Truman State University are actively participating in multi-institutional collaborations aimed at elucidating genetic diversity and global gene expression in maize. In this presentation, the fundamental concepts of genomics and bioinformatics technologies will be described while highlighting the maize genomic undergraduate research ongoing at Truman State University.
The talk will cover the place of New Religious Movements (NRMs) in society, especially American society, and the tensions often produced by them. It will also address the stereotypes, self-serving assumptions, and unfair representations that NRMs have faced in the public sphere, even by academics, but also by church and government leaders, and how certain scholars have tried in a variety of ways to alter the discourse about them. The talk will finally consider the appeal of NRMs to a variety of people, looking at how specific groups offer an alternative spirituality at least one or five different spheres of human life: understanding the world; the view of the self; relationship to a family; creating a just or ideal society; and/or desiring an end to the world altogether.
Professor Aaron Fine will focus on the process of creating a body of work, as well as the connections between his creative research and the work of other artists at various points in history.
Specifically, he will focus on the theme of “surfaces” in his paintings to facilitate a discussion of how the artist works and how that relates to a cultural context.
2005
2004
Dr. Becky Becker, Associate Professor of Theatre
Prof. Daryl Fazio, Assistant Professor of Art
Dr. Joan Mather, Professor of Theatre