Dean's Seminar Series 2009-10
Sessions will be held in the UCET Classroom (NS245) at noon (before or after the Academic Senate meeting) unless otherwise noted.
Drinks will be available; please feel free to bring your lunch.
2009-10 Series
October 16, 2009 Lee Kahan, Assistant Professor of English
The Talk of the Town: Publicity and Female Propriety in the Fictions of Frances Burney
November 20, 2009 J.R. Shrader, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Emerging Options in the Mind-Body Problem
January 22, 2010 Jeremy Linton, Assistant Professor of Counseling and Human Services
Problem Gambling : The New-Old Hidden Epidemic in the United State
February 26, 2010 Theo Randall, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ethnic Group Identity Dynamism in West Africa
March 26, 2010 Anne Brown, Associates Professor of Mathematics
Developing Notions of Mathematical Infinity
April 23, 2010 Gabriel Popescu, Assistant Professor of Geography
The Globalization of Borders and Social Life: Biopolitics, Networks and Remote Control
Contact Us
Office of Academic Affairs
Alfred J. Guillaume Jr., Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Administration Building Room 247
Phone: (574) 520-4183
Fax: (574) 520-5549
October 16, 2009 Lee Kahan, Assistant Professor of English
The Talk of the Town: Publicity and Female Propriety in the Fictions of Frances Burney
This talk will examine late eighteenth-century concerns about the increasing attention that newspapers were devoting to society gossip and how female novelists of the period responded to those concerns. Critics of the “tete-a-tete” sections of newspapers—the forerunners of the modern society pages—accused male writers of exposing the private lives of women, whose social capital rested on their reputation for modesty. However, the brunt of social criticism was levied at women themselves for either willfully appearing in the papers, submitting stories to them, or providing them with an audience. Female novelists were especially susceptible to such criticism, not just because of their celebrity status, but also because their novels fed readers’ desire to invade the private sphere in a manner similar to newspapers. My talk will focus on the most successful novelist of the period, Frances Burney, who both avidly consumed newspapers and lived in perpetual fear of being exploited by them. I will suggest that her second novel, Cecilia, implicates the ideology of separate spheres in the success of the scandal industry and offers the novel itself as a solution to the problem of newspaper gossip.
November 20, 2009 J.R. Shrader, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Emerging Options in the Mind-Body Problem
The two dominant responses to the mind-body problem throughout the history of Western thought have been reductive materialism, the theory that every substance (including minds) is physical and that all mental properties and facts are reducible to physical properties and facts, and substance dualism, the theory that the mind is a separate substance (often called a soul) from the physical body, and that mental properties and facts are distinct and independent from physical properties and facts. But an important third option has often been overlooked and has seen a rise in prominence in the last several years. This is the idea that mental substances and properties are distinct and irreducible to physical substances and/or properties, but still emerge from, and are thus dependent upon, physical substances and/or properties. Here I distinguish the metaphysical underpinnings of two different theories of emergence, the Classical Ontological Emergence (COE) advocated by early twentieth century British philosophers like C.D. Broad and Lloyd Morgan, and the Minimal Ontological Emergence (MOE) which is increasingly being advocated by a cadre of contemporary philosophers. I then show how theories of MOE can be sorted into several categories and elaborate on how different theories of MOE might be employed to address the mind-body problem.
February 26, 2009 Theo Randall, Assistant Professor of Sociology/Anthropology
Ethnic Group Identity Dynamism in West Africa
I will be discussing the dynamism of ethnic group identity in West Africa. Based on over twenty months of ethnographic research conducted by the author in the Gambia since 1997 and Nigeria since 2007 and a review of the literature of the historian Donald Wright on group identity in pre-colonial West Africa, it is argued that the contemporary ethnic group identity in West Africa is the product of specific historical and cultural processes. The most significant of these processes include Mandinkization, Hausification, and European colonialism. Phenomena such as language, kinship, village of origin, caste and class, and political affiliation also appear as pertinent as ethnicity in the establishment of group identity. These processesand phenomenademonstrate that ethnic group identity in West Africa in both the present and the past is highly complex and should not be regarded as a static phenomenon. An emphasis is placed on the Mandinka and Jola of The Gambia and the Hausa and Lelna of northwestern Nigeria.
