The Humanities Project Events for September 2007
David Z. Albert, is the Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy, and the Director of M.A. Program in The Philosophical Foundations of Physics, in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University.
Professor Albert is the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience and Time and Chance and has published many articles on quantum mechanics, mostly in the Physical Review.
About the talk: This talk will introduce one promising interpretation of quantum mechanics suggested by Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber (GRW) and point to a connection between that theory and the foundations of statistical mechanics.
This event is free and open to the public.
Professor Daniel Reichman of the Anthropology Department will introduce the film.
Director: Salvador Aguirre. Synopsis: Filiberto, a Mexican migrant worker returns home to Mexico after working for three years as a migrant laborer in California. Finding his village radically changed, Filiberto gets caught in the middle of a violent attempt by the local hacienda boss to steal property from his friend Luis and other native Indians. When hired mercenaries burn down Luis' house and kill his father, the two friends must embark on a journey to legally confirm Luis' rights to his own family's land.
Spanish with English subtitles
Read more about the film on the Internet Movie Database.
Edward J. Blum is a historian of race and religion in the United States. He is the author of Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (2005) and W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007). Currently, Blum is writing a book on race and depictions of Jesus Christ in American culture, society, and politics, titled Jesus in Red, White, and Black.
In this candid documentary, Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, follows George W. Bush on his 2000 presidential campaign trail. Pelosi exposes the pressures imposed upon political figures and the influence of big budgets while providing an intimate portrait of our current President that moves beyond the sound-bites and caricatures provided by most media coverage.
Read more about the film on the Internet Movie Database.
Hans Davidsson, is Professor of Organ, and the Project Director of the Eastman-Rochester Organ Initiative, at the Eastman School of Music.
Joel Speerstra is Research Director at the Göteborg Organ Art Center (GOArt) and research coordinator of the Rochester organ installation.
As a child in the inner city of Philadelphia, Deidre Crumbley never imagined that she would grow up to become an anthropologist. In fact, as a member of a millenarian sanctified church, she never expected the world to last long enough for her to reach adulthood. When it did, she turned to the study of religious and culture in Africa and the African Diaspora as a window on the human quest for meaning. This pursuit culminated in a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern, after four years of fieldwork in Nigeria. In Nigeria, Dr. Crumbley studied the Aladura, an indigenous church movement among the Yoruba people, the subject of her forthcoming book, Spirit, Structure, and Flesh: Gender and Power in African Initiated Churches. Her current book project, Divine Mother-Holy Saints: Race, Gender, and Migration in the Rise of a Storefront Sanctified Church, is a historically embedded ethnography of her home church.
Dr. Crumbley has taught at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, at Rollins College, where she headed African and African American Studies, and at the U. of Florida where she held a joint appointment between the departments of Anthropology and Religion. She is currently an associate professor on the faculty of Africana Studies, in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at North Carolina State University.
Daniel Schwarz, is the Fredric J. Whiton Professor of English Literature, and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in the Department of English, at Cornell University.
The working title of Professor Schwarz's lecture is "Measuring the Candidates and Weighing the Issues: The Times Influence on the Present and the Past." This presentation is derived from Prof. Schwarz's forthcoming book project, a historical analysis of The New York Times. He will discuss how the Times' representation of presidential candidates depends upon their stance on certain "core values" of the newspaper. He will also examine the increased attention on the personal lives of politicians and its effect on voter attitudes.
This event is free and open to the public.