News

Dr. Randy Browne, Assistant Professor of History at Xavier University in Ohio, will lecture on a topic that most historians of slavery have overlooked - the role of slave drivers on plantations. 

"Drivers, who were ubiquitous on New World plantations, had one of the most difficult and most important jobs in Atlantic slave societies", and despite that, and "their importance in running plantations and shaping the daily lives of other enslaved people, little is known about them, especially in the Caribbean."

Dr. Zoe Kwok, Assistant Curator of Asian Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, will deliver a campus and community-wide lecture on Chinese architectural painting. Her talk highlights previously overlooked aspects of this genre which is often praised for its precision yet glossed over as simply mechanical. Dr. Kwok will discuss the creative ways artists from the tenth to fourteenth centuries manipulated images of architecture to best suit the narrative requirements of their compositions.

Sponsored by the Annie Talbot Cole Lectureship Fund and Bowdoin's Art History and Asian Studies Departments.

Mayra Santos-Febres is one of the most versatile authors in the contemporary Caribbean literary scene and the first Latin American Afra-Hispanic literary celebrity. A PhD graduate from Cornell, and a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Santos-Febres is a poet, novelist, blogger and critic, as well an active public voice promoting literature as a means for decolonization. She has published the novels Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000), Cualquier miercoles soy tuya (2002), Nuestra senora de la noche (2006), and Fe en disfraz (2009) (all translated in English), several collections of poetry, volumes of essays and short stories. Her writing and public engagement make her emblematic of her generation of Latin American writers, shuttling between the traditionally intellectual arena and the popular culture scene. Santos-Febres is the recipient of several international awards, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Cornell University.

Santos-Febres' unique poetic universe is populated by marginalized and itinerant characters, such as transvestites and sex-workers, whose fictional voices both embody and challenge the global fantasies around the Caribbean and its people. Both in her fiction and scholarly work the author addresses the colonial legacy on the Caribbean, and the region's ongoing relation to the Global North, main themes of her public presentation at Bowdoin. She will also lead a Creative Writing Workshop with students (Wednesday, March 26, 4 pm at Sills 117). For more information please contact Nadia Celis (ncelis@bowdoin.edu).

The event is hosted by the Department of Romance Languages and co-sponsored by the Programs of Latin American Studies, Africana Studies, the English Department, the McKeen Center for Common Good and Lectures and Concerts.

Asher Cutter, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair, University of Toronto, CA

Follow filmmaker Jenn Hofmann as she explores the strength and courage of the Inupiat people struggling to preserve their subsistence whaling culture in the Arctic regions of Alaska.

Presented by the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center.

Free.

Join Andrew C. Isenberg, historian of the American environment, the American West, and the encounter between natives and settlers, to discuss his recently published book, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (2013). A popular culture icon, Earp remains a legendary hero and a "beacon of rough justice in the tumultuous American West" in cinematic battles against organized crime in the 1930s, communism in the 1950s, and, most recently, al-Qaeda. Yet as Isenberg uncovers in his book, the Hollywood Earp is largely fictionalized-and imagined by Earp himself. As Earp tried to reinvent his reputation and cover up his lawless past, Isenberg writes, "He donned and shucked off roles readily, whipsawing between lawman and lawbreaker, and pursued his changing ambitions recklessly, with little thought to the cost to himself, andto others."
An engrossing account of the man and his enduring legend, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life is a resounding biography of a quintessential American figure that questions the way in which individuals, with the help of Hollywood, can rewrite their own legacy.
Join Professor Isenberg on Thursday, March 27 at 7:00 PM in the Shannon Room (second floor, Hubbard hall) at Bowdoin College. This lecture is sponsored by the Bowdoin College Lectures and Concerts fund and the Department of History, with support from Biology, Environmental Studies, Government and Legal Studies.

Author and journalist Russ Rymer will read selections from his recent work.

Rymer has contributed to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper's, Smithsonian, Vogue, and Los Angeles Magazine, among others.

His recently published (2013) third book, his first novel, is Paris Twilight.

Rymer's first book, Genie, a Scientific Tragedy, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Whiting Writers' Award winner, was published in 1993.  Rymer's second book was American Beach (1998) about Florida's American Beach community.

Rymer is currently a visiting writer in the Bowdoin College English Department.

He has been the Joan Leiman Jacobson Non-Fiction Writer in Residence at Smith College, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a lecturer in Writing and Humanistic Studies and at the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT, a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, an instructor at the California Institute of Technology, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California.

Rymer was appointed as a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002 and awarded the Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting from abroad by the Overseas Press Club in 2013.

Please mark your calendars for the first of what we hope to be many online book talks sponsored by the McKeen Center for members of the Bowdoin community--alums, students, parents, faculty and staff.

Professor Susan Bell (Sociology and Anthropology) and Professor Steve Loebs (Research Associate of McKeen Center and Professor Emeritus, College of Public Health, The Ohio State University) will moderate a conversation on The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman.

This will be a live event with viewer participation streamed on Bowdoin's website on Tuesday, April 1st at 8:00 p.m. (EST).

Professors Bell and Loebs will be joined by the author to discuss the book and answer questions e-mailed in by viewers.

Amazon describes it in the following way:
"The book explores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award, Anne Fadiman's compassionate account of this cultural impasse is literary journalism at its finest."

This event is being co-sponsored by the McKeen Center and by the Dean for Academic Affairs.

Fred Albertson, associate professor of art history, The University of Memphis, Tennessee, will discuss various aspects of portraiture in the Ancient world in this lecture. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Imago to Persona: Portraits from Antiquity at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Illustration: Roman, Portrait Headof Emperor Antoninus Pius, ca. 138-150, marble. Gift of Edward Perry Warren,Esq., Honorary Degree, 1926

Robert S. Levine, Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park will deliver the annual John Brown Russwurm Lecture at 7:00 pm Thursday, April 3 2014, in the Lancaster Lounge of Moulton Union. A reception in the Main Lounge will precede the lecture, and both are free and open to the public.

Professor Levine's topic, "Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War" reflects his interest in Douglass, who is the subject of his current book project, The Lives of Frederick Douglass, which "aspires to offer a cultural history of how Douglass's life has been conceived over the past 170 years".

He serves on various editorial boards, including American Literary History; Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies; ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance; J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. His recent awards include a 2012-2013 National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship, and a 2013-2014 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Named after the first African-American graduate of Bowdoin College (class of 1826), the lecture series explores the "legacy and status of Black Americans." Notable speakers include Carl Stokes, Vernon Jordan, Shirley Chisholm, Bayard Rustin, Benjamin Hooks, and Julian Bond, among others.

Dan Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School. In addition to risk perception, his areas of research include science communication and the application of decision science to law and policymaking. He is a member of the Cultural Cognition Project, an interdisciplinary team of scholars who use empirical methods to examine the impact of group values on perceptions of risk and related facts. In studies funded by the National Science Foundation, his research has investigated public disagreement over climate change, public reactions to emerging technologies, and conflicting public impressions of scientific consensus.

For more information and to view the full Spring 2014 Common Hour schedule, please visit: Events and Summer Programs: Common Hour

The Classics Department Presents:

Leda N. Kobziar University of Florida Associate Professor of Fire Science & Forest Conservation

Please join us for a relaxing afternoon of wonderful music performed by students in the Bowdoin Department of Music.

For more information and to view the full Spring 2014 Common Hour schedule, please visit: Events and Summer Programs: Common Hour

Protracted droughts and scarce water resources combined with internal and cross-border migration have contributed to the securitization of discourses around migration and water in much of the Middle East. This presentation will examine how Israel, Jordan, and Syria frame issues of water, climate change, and migration as national security concerns in different ways. Dr. Weinthal and her colleagues identify two different framings of the water-climate-migration nexus, depending on whether migration is largely external or internal. In Israel and Jordan, concern with influxes of external migrants elevated migration as a security issue in part through impacts on already-scarce water resources. In Syria, where severe drought in the early 2000s prompted large-scale internal migration, officials downplayed connections between scarce water resources, drought, and internal migration, part of a broader pattern of rural neglect.

Dr. Weinthal specializes in global environmental politics and natural resource policies with a particular emphasis on water and energy. The main focus of her research is on the origins and effects of environmental institutions. Her research on water politics in conflict regions (e.g. the Gaza Strip in the Middle East) focuses on how the environment might be harnessed for peace building.

Dr. Weinthal is Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Associate Dean for International Programs at Duke University, Nicholas School of the Environment. She earned a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University.

Co-sponsored by the Government Department and Environmental Studies Program with support from the John C. Donovan Lecture Fund.

Susan Wegner,associate professor of art history, and Nathaniel Wheelwright, professor ofnatural sciences, lead an interdisciplinary discussion of select works in TheObject Show: Discoveries in Bowdoin Collections. Third in a series of threegallery talks during the Spring 2014 semester.

Susan A. Kaplan, Director of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center, will give an illustrated talk titled, "What is in Your Cabinet of Curiosities?" on April 17, 2014 at 4 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center.

The talk is in conjunction with the opening of a new exhibit at the Arctic Museum titled, Cape Dorset and Beyond: Inuit Art from the Marcia and Robert Ellis Collection.

A reception and chance to view the new exhibit will take place in Hubbard Hall following the talk.

For information call 725-3062. Free.

Paul M. Forlano, Brooklyn College, Department of Biology

Using fish as model systems, Forlano's lab employs a combination of evolutionary/systems neuroscience with a molecular and cellular approach in order to identify the mechanisms underlying steroid-induced neural plasticity and sex differences in brain and behavior. These studies focus on vocal, auditory and neuroendocrine circuits that are conserved across vertebrates.

Elizabeth Strout is the author of numerous short stories and three novels, including Amy and Isabelle, which was shortlisted for the 2000 Orange Prize and nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and Olive Kitteridge, a collection of connected short stories about a woman and her family and friends on the coast of Maine, for which Strout won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. Her most recent novel, The Burgess Boys, was published in March of 2013.

Strout has been a professor at Colgate University and on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. She was born in Portland, Maine, and makes her home in New York City.

Sponsored by the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund and the English Department.

The Spear and Shield of Knowledge: Scientific Transference and Cultural Obstruction Between China and the West

Keynote speaker Don J. Wyatt is John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor at Middlebury College. His most recent book is The Blacks of Premodern China (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Among his forthcoming publications is the "China" chapter essay in the volume The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art in the renowned series The Image of the Black in Western Art, edited by David Bindman, Suzanne Blier, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., which is scheduled to appear in 2015.

Open to the public free of charge. For more information and the completeschedule of events, go to: 2014 Kemp Symposium or call the Department of History at 207-725-3291.

Sponsored by the Robert J. Kemp Lectureship Fund, Departments of History,Asian Studies, Religion, Chemistry, and Earth and Oceanographic Science.

What can computers reveal about images that even the best-trained connoisseurs, art historians and artist cannot? How much more powerful and revealing will these methods become? In short, how is the "hard humanities" field of computer image and analysis of art changing our understanding of paintings and drawings?