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Over the past half-century, no one has written more probingly or more influentially about the relations between culture and agriculture than Wendell Berry. His essays, short stories, novels, and poems have ranged eloquently over such subjects as marriage, community, work, farming, and the encompassing order we call nature. Mr. Berry will read selections from this powerful body of work.
Over the past half-century, no one has written more probingly or more influentially about the relations between culture and agriculture than Wendell Berry. His essays, short stories, novels, and poems have ranged eloquently over such subjects as marriage, community, work, farming, and the encompassing order we call nature. Mr. Berry will read selections from this powerful body of work.
What should history be "about"? The long-term movement of DNA-carrying peoples and their economic development, or the crises of a given president or prime minister. Ancient history and its narratives shaped much of what we think of as history, so this lecture will use Greco-Roman examples to think through these issues and show that the title of the lecture, though seemingly an obvious fact, is actually a daring proposition for a historian to utter.
This lecture will describe the roots of sociogenomics and how it provides a new framework for understanding the relationship between genes and social behavior. The key discoveries underlying this framework will be discussed: 1) Brain gene expression is closely linked with behavior, across time scales, from physiological to evolutionary; 2) Environmentally induced changes in gene expression mediate changes in behavior; and 3) The relationship between genes and behavior is highly conserved, from animals to humans.
Studies of genes and social behavior, aided by new genomic resources, are coming of age. Here, I highlight three of the insights that have emerged from these studies that shed light on the evolution and mechanisms governing social life: 1) Nature builds diverse social brains from common genetic blocks in insects and vertebrates, including those related to metabolism and transcriptional regulation; 2) Changes in the wiring of gene regulatory networks are involved in the evolution of insect societies; and 3) The social brain is addicted to altruism.
From Homer's Iliad to Milton's Paradise Lost to the Russian novel and contemporary global literature, major works, read from the angle of the practice of statecraft, offer insights on leadership, substance, and the structure of world affairs reaching beyond the methodologies of international security and policy studies. The meaning and prospects for "The Arab Spring" and the European Union may be more clearly discerned when viewed through this humanities-focused lens.
In many human and environmental crises, individuals and their governments exhibit a morally troubling response to the risk of mass casualties that can be described by the phrase “the more who die, the less we care,” reflecting a flawed “arithmetic of compassion.” Paul Slovic will present research demonstrating three non-rational psychological mechanisms that underlie this phenomenon: psychic numbing, pseudoinefficacy, and the prominence effect. After documenting these obstacles to rational decision making, he will explore ways to counteract them -- a roadmap for future research and its application to crisis management.
Mass usage of the Internet is in its second decade, and Professor O'Donnell's Avatars of the Word, a study of the place of media in cultural history, is just ten years old. What have we learned, what haven't we learned, and especially: what sense do we make of the scale and speed of change for our most traditional ways of building and preserving culture?
Digitization has completely changed the literary archive. Historians of the novel used to work on a few hundred nineteenth-century novels; today, we work on thousands of them; tomorrow, hundreds of thousands. This new size has had a major effect on literary history, obviously enough, but also on critical methodology; because, when we work on 200,000 novels instead of 200, we are not doing the same thing, 1,000 times bigger; we are doing a different thing. The new scale changes our relationship to the object of study, and in fact it changes the object itself, by making it entirely abstract. And the question arises: what does it mean to study literature as an abstraction and by means of abstractions? We clearly lose some important aspects of the literary experience. Do we gain anything?
In addition to his interest in the lyric poem, which he has now been exploring for fifty years, Paul Muldoon is drawn to the shadowy domain of the song lyric. His reading tonight focuses on new poems and songs, as well as work included in the recently published Selected Poems 1968-2014 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Sadie and the Sadists (Eyewear).