lecture
Distinguished Professor Lecture - Richard Jefferies
The College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Lecture recognizes the 2012-2013 recipient, Professor Richard Jefferies for his work in the Department of Anthropology.
The End of Wonder in the Age of Whatever
New media and technology present us with an overwhelming bounty of tools for connection, creativity, collaboration, and knowledge creation - a true "Age of Whatever" where anything seems possible. But any enthusiasm about these remarkable possibilities is immediately tempered by that other "Age of Whatever" - an age in which people feel increasingly disconnected, disempowered, tuned out, and alienated. Such problems are especially prevalent in education, where the Internet often enters our classrooms as a distraction device rather than a tool for learning.
What is needed more than ever is to inspire our students to wonder, to nurture their appetite for curiosity, exploration, and contemplation. It is our responsibility to help them attain an insatiable appetite and pursue big, authentic, and relevant questions so that they can harness and leverage the bounty of possibility, rediscover the "end" or purpose of wonder, and stave off the historical end of wonder.
Table, Map and Text: Writing in France circa 1600
Tom Conley is Lowell Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media. In 2003, Dr. Conley won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in topography and literature in Renaissance France.
Refashioning the Self Through New Therapeutics in Urban China
Refashioning the Self through New Therapeutics in Urban China
Zhang's lecture will address how, through a new mass psychological counseling movement, middle-class Chinese seek to refashion "the self" by turning it into an object of intense inquiry, while pursuing personal development and fulfillment through therapeutic projects centered on the notion of self-management. Zhang is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Davis. This event is free and is sponsored by the Confucius Institute at the University of Kentucky.