News

David Des Marais, Research Associate, Harvard University

Research Interests

I study the diversity of life at many different scales. Like most of us, I am amazed by the visual diversity of plant life. But I am also fascinated by the diversity of genes, proteins, and other molecules which give rise to the beautiful plants that surround us. My research addresses how molecular processes shape organismal diversity, and how these processes evolve within and between species of plants.

F-you aloha, I love you: Hawaiian Hip Hop, Drag Queens, and the Refusal of Aloha

Lani Teves, PhD in American culture, weaves together indigenous studies, critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, and Pacific studies in her work. She is a postdoc at the University of California-Berkeley.

Join us:

Thursday, April 24th
7:00 p.m.
Adams Hall 208

In Hawaii, the spirit of aloha is pervasive, and it is mobilized to sell everything from hula skirts to fantasies of diversity to plumbing to same-sex marriage. Loosely defined as love, aloha is frequently used as a greeting and moniker of Hawaiianness. Hawaii state law even sanctions aloha, advising lawmakers to consider the aloha spirit in the workplace. Promoted as the so-called seminal Hawaiian concept of love and inclusion, the extraction of aloha from Hawaiian culture, works to obscure troubling material realities that marginalize Native Hawaiians. At the same time, Native Hawaiians deeply believe in aloha and perform it because we believe that aloha connects us to our ancestors. In this talk, she weaves together Marxist, post-colonial, and performance theory to provide a historical and theoretical framing of alohas ideological significance for the state of Hawaii and for Native Hawaiians. She shifts the focus away from disparaging the appropriation of aloha to look instead at the generative tensions that require Native Hawaiians to perform aloha and how Native Hawaiians engage with aloha by performing it. Through a close reading of the work of a Native Hawaiian rapper from a Hawaiian homestead, as well as a Native Hawaiian drag queen, she offers an examination of how aloha is performed and sustained in a manner that evades the optics of the state and tourisms' commodifying gaze.

Sponsored by: the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund

7 PM - April 24, 2014
Smith Auditorium, Sills Hall

Navarana is an Inughuit elder from the northern district of Greenland.  In the 1860s, her ancestor led a legendary Inuit migration to Greenland.  More than 150 years later,  Navarana connects with distant cousins and explores these two isolated groups.

Free.

Matthew Wilson's presentation draws parallels between the rising consumer-electronic sector associated with personal activity monitors and the rapid visioning of smart urbanism. He interrogates developments in interoperability and propriety, competition and habit, fashion and surveillance. He addresses the social-cultural and political implications for this refiguring of spatial thought and action as well as the capacities reinforced and developed through the implementation of these technologies and techniques.

Matthew Wilson is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University and Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky, where he co-directs the New Mapping Collaboratory. Matt holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Washington. His website is http://matthew-w-wilson.com.

Monday, April 28
7:00 - 9:30 p.m.
Sills Hall, Smith Auditorium

Cui Zien is China's first independent queer filmmaker and an outspoken queer activist. Queering Chinese 'Comrades' presents a comprehensive historical account of queer culture in China for the last 30 years. The documentary uses exclusive interviews and original film footage to examine how shifting attitudes in law, media, and education have transformed queer culture from an unspeakable taboo to an accepted social identity.

Sponsored by Lectures and Concerts, Asian Studies Program, Film Studies, and Gay & Lesbian Studies.

Free and open to the public.

A number of distinguished neuroscientists have recently been declaring that their science shows that free will is an illusion. It turns out that what they mean by this is something quite trivial, having almost nothing to do with whether or not we can be morally responsible choosers of our actions--but some of them think otherwise. Exposing the confusions in their thinking is a good job for philosophers.

Please join us for this free lecture
Tuesday, April 29th
4:00 pm
Druckenmiller Hall 016

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy with support from the Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience.

How can we fix our broken political system? The notion of a plural executive was rejected in 1781 but perhaps "two presidents are better than one" - a constitutional reform that could help to solve problems of executive power and decision-making, political polarization, and public disengagement.

Professor David Orentlicher of Indiana University's School of Law will present this provocative argument which forms the basis of his new book, "Two Presidents are Better than One: The Case for a Bipartisan Executive Branch" (NYU Press, 2013).

Sponsored by the Department of Government and Legal Studies.Light refreshments will be served.

Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture, at the Smithsonian Institution will discuss objects in the Smithsonian's collections, such as the Star-Spangled Banner, Lincoln's hat, Bell's telephone, Armstrong's trumpet, Warhol's Marilyn Monroe, and even the National Zoo's pandas to weave an engaging history of our nation.

RSVPs are kindly requested, but not required. Contact Christine Piontek: cpiontek@bowdoin.edu.


Illustration: Dr. Richard Kurin

Timothy O'Leary, Post Doctoral Researcher, Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University

Jonathan Petropoulos is an international authority on Nazi art theft. He is the John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College and is author of several books, including The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany and the forthcoming Artists Under Hitler: The Power of Seduction and the Fate of Modernism in Nazi Germany.

Petropoulos served as research director for art and cultural property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, where he helped draft the report "Restitution and Plunder: The U.S. and Holocaust Victims' Assets" (2001).

He has helped organize art exhibitions, such as Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991, and has served as a consultant for a number of Holocaust victims and heirs trying to recover lost artworks. He has appeared in more than a dozen documentary films, including the award-winning The Rape of Europa (2007).

Dana Renga, Assistant Professor of Italian at The Ohio State University, will discuss the ways in which the conventions of melodrama shape the mafia movie, focusing in particular on the Italian box-office hit Romanzo criminale (Michele Placido, 2005). Melodramatic narratives, argues Prof. Renga, create sympathy for the mafia film's brooding anti-hero - a sympathy that is increased when these characters are played by the likes of Italian film idols Kim Rossi Stuart and Riccardo Scamarcio. In "Mafia, Masculinity, Melodrama" Prof. Renga examines how such films cause their viewers to forgive the transgressions of their criminal protagonists, and even mourn their deaths.

Prof. Renga works on modern and contemporary Italian cinema and culture, including representations of the Mafia, gender, the holocaust, fascism and terrorism. She has published articles and book chapters on Italian cinema, popular culture, poetry, and literature. She is the author of Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millennium (University of Toronto Press, 2013), the editor of Mafia Movies: A Reader (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and co-edits The Italianist: Film Issue. She is currently at work on a book entitled Italian Women's Cinema and the Wounded Filmic Body (1915-2015).

This lecture is sponsored by the Bowdoin College Department of Romance Languages, Film Studies Program, Department of English, and Gender and Women's Studies Program, with additional funding from the Lectures and Concerts Committee and Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund.

"Art is Our Chief Means of Breaking Bread With the Dead" - W. H. Auden

Celebrating the life and work of Seamus Heaney with Professor of English Marilyn Reizbaum, English Department Writer-in-Residence Anthony Walton, and author Jane Brox.

Sponsored by the English Department and Fishouse

Museum Pieces, a Bowdoin tradition for more than twenty years, will conclude the 2013-2014 Common Hour series. The annual event celebrates the arrival of spring through dance and music provided by the Department of Theater and Dance, class projects, and independent student work.

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

Students and non-students alike are invited to take a "Bach break" and join Bowdoin's Artist-in Residence, George Lopez, for Music at the Museum on Thursday, May 15th at 6:30pm. Relax, clear your mind, and be inspired by magnificent works of art while listening to parts of J.S. Bach's Partitas for harpsichord in the Museum's Rotunda.

This event is free, but tickets are required as seating is limited.  Tickets are available at the Museum Shop.  For more information please call (207) 725-3276.