Society & Culture

Journalist and professor Pamela Newkirk will deliver two lectures in February, discussing the case of Ota Benga and the media's coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement.

David Bowie, who died Sunday at the age of 69, wasn't the first performer to create an alter ego. But as music professor and director of the Institute for Popular Music John Covach explains, the difference with Bowie was how his personas would change over the years, sometimes shifting drastically.

In her formative years, Joan Bondurant dreamt of a career in music. Instead, she became a spy. Now, in time for what would have been her 97th birthday, the Joan V. Bondurant Papers are fully processed at the River Campus Libraries and are available to scholars across the globe.

Syracuse University professor and author Christopher R. DeCorse will discuss how archaeology has shown that African cultures were both transformed and maintained throughout the Atlantic World.

By extracting information from Instagram images and hashtags, computer science researchers have shown they can expose patterns of underage drinking more cheaply and faster than conventional surveys.

Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters, a new book published by the University’s Open Letter Press, details the rise and fall of the infamous 12 and 15-year-old mediums who convinced the world they could communicate with dead.

Christopher White, associate professor of religion at Vassar College, will give the talk, “Doorways to Invisible Dimensions: Claude Bragdon's Other-Worldly Art, the ‘Fourth Dimension’ and Modern Forms of Enchantment.”

Anthropologist Jessica Cattelino uses ethnographic research in the Everglades to examine the cultural politics of water, and the ways that Everglades residents—including Seminole Indians and non-Seminole farmers and ranchers, water managers, and environmentalists—value water.

“Instead of thinking about the effects of intimate partner violence in an isolated kind of way, we need to look at it across the lifespan and across the developmental stages,” says keynote speaker Dr. Tasneem Ismailji.

The University will celebrate the opening of its Humanities Center this fall with an inaugural talk by Gerald Early, a leading authority on race and American culture.

Psychologists at the University's Mt. Hope Family Center have found that mothers who experienced more types of maltreatment as children are more critical of their ability to parent successfully.

While much is known about the famed suffragist’s stance on social equality and slavery, Susan B. Anthony also had lots to say on a variety of issues that still resonate today.