Academic Program

Remembering the Vietnam War/Peace Symposium – April 9-10

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Vietnam symposium

A commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and Vietnam’s reunification, reflecting on the meanings of the war, the peace process, and its aftermath from the perspective of the Southeast Asian diaspora.

Tuesday, April 7 4:30-6 P.M. Exhibit: The Vietnam War and Student Activism at Wesleyan Davison Rare Book Room, Olin Library, Wesleyan University

Thursday, April 9 4:15 P.M. Panel: “Aftermaths of the Vietnam War: Diasporic Art, Activism, and Research” Panelists: Lam Lê (director of Công Binh), Nancy Nguyen (Boat People SOS), Quan Tran (Yale University), Ma Vang (UC Merced) Moderator: Tri Phuong, Yale University Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University

7:30 P.M. Film Screening: Công Binh – The Lost Fighters of Vietnam, dir. Lam Lê (France, 2012) Powell Cinema, Wesleyan University

Friday, April 10 4:15 P.M. Keynote Lecture: “The Vietnam War and the Vietnam Peace” Lien-Hang Nguyen, University of Kentucky Respondent: Catherine Fung, Bentley University Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University

Saturday, April 11 2:45 P.M. Film Screening: Last Days in Vietnam, dir. Rory Kennedy (USA, 2014), followed by panelist and audience discussion. Luce Hall Auditorium, Yale University

Sponsored by the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, Baldwin Lecture Fund, College of East Asian Studies, Center for the Americas, Division I, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, WesWorldWednesdays, Olin Library and Special Collections, and the French Mission for Culture and Higher Education at the French Embassy.

Contacts: Amy Tang atang@wesleyan.edu, Stéphanie Ponsavady sponsavady@wesleyan.edu

SCCT Certificate Lecture: “UTOPIA” by Prof. Eirene Visvardi — Today, April 8

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Please join us for the fifth and last of this year’s lectures on Fundamental Concepts in Theory, sponsored by the Certificate in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. Eirene Visvardi (Classical Studies) will bear us to the threshold of UTOPIA at 4:30 on Wednesday, April 8, in Downey 113.

The full schedule of lectures is available here: http://www.wesleyan.edu/theory/html_email/spr15_five_fundamental_concepts.html Videos of the semester’s lectures are available here: http://www.wesleyan.edu/theory/In%20Theory%20Lecture%20Videos.html

Spring Intensive Semester Info Session — April 7 at 7:30 p.m.

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A new opportunity available to Wesleyan students next spring!
Information session:
• Tuesday, 4/7 at 7:30 p.m. in Usdan 110
The Wesleyan “Spring Intensive” will allow students to plunge into a new course every three weeks and to intensively focus on one course at a time rather than balancing several. The goal of the program is to give students an opportunity to build cohesiveness across their courses, collaborate with faculty, engage in project-based learning and sample from some never previously offered courses from prominent visitors. Each three week course will carry a full credit covering the same amount of material as 14 week courses.
Who can participate? Up to 50 students interested in building their spring schedule with intensive courses and other for-credit experiences.
Can I take other courses? Though most admitted students will take their courses exclusively in the intensive format, students may enroll in one or more semester-long credits for a senior thesis, independent or group tutorial, student forum, or internship. Students can also take quarter-credit courses outside the intensive format, schedule permitting.
When will intensive courses meet? Classes will meet Monday through Friday for 2 hours and 50 minutes for three weeks.
How will students be admitted? The Intensive program is POI. Interested students may apply for admission by meeting with Professor Lisa Dierker (ldierker@wes) or any of the faculty teaching through the intensive program, before or during planning period this fall. Admitted students will then seek final course selection approval from their advisors.
A bonus! Students admitted to the Intensive semester will not need to participate in pre-registration for spring 2016.
How do I learn more? Check out the emerging menu of courses that will be offered through the intensive http://wesleyanspringintensive.blogs.wesleyan.edu/, attend the information session on campus (4/7 at 7:30 in Usdan 110) or contact Lisa Dierker (ldierker@wes).

CAAS Distinguished Lecture: “The Geography of Resistance”–Dr. Cheryl LaRoche, March 27, 4:15 p.m.

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Please join us on

Friday, 27 March at 4:15 p.m.

for the

21st Annual CAAS Distinguished Lecture

Reception to follow! 

This year’s speaker is Dr. Cheryl LaRoche of the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park.  An award-winning archaeologist and historian, Dr. LaRoche teaches in the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland and has been influential in the archaeology of African American sites. She uses powerful interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary rubrics in her work to define and to reclaim 19th century African American cultural landscapes and their relationships to the Underground Railroad.  Her scholarship and practice combines law, history, oral history, archaeology, geography and material culture and she has been honored for her exemplary work in the field of African American archaeology.  A project historian for the Smithsonian’s newest museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, she also has worked closely with National Park Service, the National Forest Service, the African Meeting Houses in Boston and Nantucket, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, and a number of other vital historical sites and projects.

AFAM lecture--3-27-15

 

 

CAAS Day-long Symposium: “Within Our Sites: Legacies and Imperatives of African American Historic Places” — Sat., March 28

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The CAAS Distinguished Lecture will lead into the Saturday, March 28 CAAS day-long symposium Within Our Sites: Legacies and Imperatives of African American Historic Places.  The symposium is inspired by the Beman Triangle that is part of our Wesleyan campus and that also stands as one of the  nation’s earliest-known African American planned communities.  Beman family members were at the forefront of many nineteenth-century religious, educational, social, and political movements and they had strong ties to the communities of color here in Middletown, Colchester, New Haven, Hartford, as well as Boston.  We look forward to a day of illuminating presentations and inspiring discussions. We hope to see you in CAAS!

AFAM Symposium 3-27-15

Africanizing Technology Conference — March 5 & 6

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This is an exciting conference on campus that will be of special interest to students who are exploring global studies, development, or science, technology, and medicine from a global perspective in their studies.  The keynote lecture is by Dr. Julie Livingston (Rutgers University), who is a recent MacArthur Genius Grant winner and author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke UP, 2012).  Her talk and the conference panels are open to the public.

Africanizing Technology

Wesleyan University 

 Thursday, March 5th

Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, Room 311

 

5:00pm            Keynote Lecture: Julie Livingston (Rutgers University)

“Pharmaceutical Technologies and the Nature of Efficacy in Botswana”

 

Friday, March 6th:  Conference Panels

Usdan University Center, Room 110

9:00am             Panel I: Technologies of Identity and Knowledge Production

Drew Thompson, Bard College–“Disputes over the Past: The biometric passport and studio photography in Mozambique, 1980-Recent Times”

Crystal Biruk, Oberlin College–“Standards and ‘gifts’: Soap as improvisational technology in Malawian survey research worlds”

Summer Wood, New York University–“Technologies of Identity in Tanzania”

Panel Chair: Jennifer Tucker, Wesleyan University

10:45am          Panel II:  Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Development        

Susan P. Wyche, Michigan State–“‘If God Gives Me the Chance I will Design my Own Phone’: Rural Kenyan Repairers and Reimagining Mobile Phone Design”

Sean Jacobs, The New School and “Africa is a Country” Blog–“Shifting African Digital Landscapes”

Gloria Emeagwali, Connecticut State University– “Interconnections between female entrepreneurship and technological innovation in the Nigerian  Context”

Solen Feyissa, University of Minnesota–“Contextualizing Educational Uses of Information Communication Technologies inside and outside of Ethiopian Classrooms”

Panel Chair: Mike Nelson, Wesleyan University

1:45pm            Panel III:  Imagining New Technological Cultures

Laura Ann Twagira, Wesleyan University–Becoming Master’s of Nature: Women’s Transformation of a Colonial Irrigation Project in French  West Africa”

Joshua Grace, University of South Carolina–“Tinkering, Techne, and Cars: The Africanization of a Hindi-named European Technology”

Mahriana Rofheart, Georgia Gwinnett College–“Fictional Technologies of Collaboration”

Jennifer Hart, Wayne State University–“Of Mammy Trucks and Men: African Automobility and the Politics of Development in Colonial Ghana”

Panel Chair: Heidi Gengenbach, University of Massachusetts Boston

3:15pm            Coffee Break

3:30pm            Panel IV: Technological Cultures of Health and Healing

Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech–“Africanizing synthetic chemistry?: Hope in Drug Discovery ‘by and for’ Africa”

Donna Patterson, Wellesley College–“Pharmacy, Biomedicine, and Gender in Senegal”

Tara Dosumu Diener, University of Michigan–“Practice Makes Perfect: Signal, Noise, and Clinical Imagination in the Maternity Ward”

Sarah Hardin, St. Anselm College–“Modern Potions: The Social and Health Repercussions of Pesticides in Senegal and the Francophone World”

Panel Chair: Paul Erickson, Wesleyan University

5:30pm            Closing Discussion

For more information please see the conference website:  africanizingtechnology.conference.wesleyan.edu

Or, contact the conference organizer Prof. Laura Ann Twagira (ltwagira@wesleyan.edu)

 

Lecture: ” Treasure My Love to the Nation of Muhammad: Jews and Muslims in Modern Iraq” — Tues., Nov. 18 at 8 p.m.

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The inaugural Jewish Cultures of the World lecture will take place this evening (Tues., Nov. 18) at 8:00 pm, in Russell House.  This event is being sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies together with the Religion Department, Middle East Studies, the History Department, as well as by two student groups, The Bayit and the Muslim Students’ Association.

The lecture, entitled “‘I Treasure My Love to the Nation of Muhammad’: Jews and Muslims in Modern Iraq, will be delivered by Professor Orit Bashkin.

Orit Bashkin, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Chicago, is a renowned scholar of modern Iraqi history, literature, and culture, and of the unique history of the Iraqi Jewish community. She is the author of The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2009), and New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Standford University Press, 2012), and numerous articles.