The Academy in Context
The Academy in Context dinner-seminar series is intended to help foster a better sense of community among Brown's graduate students by providing them with a venue for meaningful interactions and discussion on topics that are of interest across disciplines, both inside and outside the laboratory and classroom. Graduate students are often isolated within circumscribed fields of study and research during their time at the University; we want to give them a chance to explore ideas and issues that are compelling, if not directly related to their course of study.
Prior events, which are listed below, allowed us to invite speakers on a very wide range of topics – from the relationship between theoretical perspectives and questions of truth and evidence; computers and human values; humans and animals; science and superstitions; and the intersections between government policy making and the scientific community.
Attendance at Academy in Context dinner-seminars is limited, which facilitates conversation among students and the speakers. The evening starts with a seminar, dinner follows the presentation. Registration for these events is handled through an electronic enrollment system; see descriptions below for details.
The Graduate School launched this series in 2005, in partnership with the Office of Campus Life and the Graduate Student Council. In its inaugural year, the series focused on the role of ethics in research and scholarship and featured four limited-enrollment dinner and discussion sessions with leading figures from a variety of fields. In 2006, the Graduate School received a grant from the National Science Foundation and the Council of Graduate Schools to promote ethics training of graduate students. The grant helps to support departmental training, interdisciplinary workshops, a cross-sciences breakfast roundtable and this series.
If you have questions about the series or would like to make suggestions for future topics or speakers, please contact the Graduate School.
Schedule information: 2009-2010
The Dirty, Rotten Secrets of Health Care Reform
Thursday, November 12, 6 p.m., Faculty Club
The Graduate School is delighted to present James A. Morone, Chair and Professor of Political Science
at Brown University, on a timely topic: why does health care reform create such a political frenzy? Jim, who has told parts of this story on NPR's Morning Edition, Science Friday, Market Place as well as on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer and CBS Sunday Morning, will look at why health care reform is so difficult in the U.S. and what the frenzy tells us about American politics and culture. This dinner-seminar gives graduate students the opportunity to engage with him on the ethics of health care reform and the past, the present and the future of American health care.
Please visit http://training.brown.edu/index.php?eventID=4077 to register for this event. Attendance is restricted to current Brown graduate students. If you are not a graduate student and would like to attend the event, please contact the Graduate School.
Schedule information: 2008-2009
The Position: Everything You Need to Know About Theory and Practice
Monday, November 3, 6 p.m., Faculty Club
The Graduate School welcomed Stanley Fish, a public intellectual known for his New York Times blog, “Think Again.” He is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a Professor of Law at Florida International University. He is dean emeritus at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois, Chicago, and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University. Author of 10 books, his most recent one, “Save the World on Your Own Time,” is hot off the press, published by Oxford University Press.
In his Academy in Context talk, Mr. Fish explored the relationship between theoretical perspectives, especially postmodern ones, and questions of truth, fact and evidence.
Earlier in the day, he gave a public lecture on what teachers should and shouldn’t do on campuses, drawing from his new book, "Save the World on Your Own Time." This Kathryn O. Greenberg Lecture took place at 4 p.m. in Salomon Center for Teaching, De Ciccio Family Auditorium. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Graduate School and the Office of the Provost, and was open to the public.
The Ethics of Biotech in a Globalized Society: Splitting Hairs vs. Splitting Genes
Tuesday, September 23, 6:00 p.m., Faculty Club
Dr. Moira Gunn is the host of “Tech Nation” and “BioTech Nation” on NPR Talk, as well as the program director for Information Systems Programs at the University of San Francisco. A former NASA scientist and engineer, she was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. Gunn is the author of “Welcome to BioTech Nation: My Unexpected Odyssey into the Land of Small Molecules, Lean Genes, and Big Ideas.”
Dr. Moira Gunn discussed a variety of ethical dilemmas presented by emerging biotech. These issues present themselves when society must choose between difficult choices: between hunger and genetically-modified food, between food on the table and bio-fuel in the tank, between traditional agriculture and environmentally less-demanding GM crops, between genetically-based medical treatments for the living and the rights of embryos, between large DNA databases and the rights of the individual. Gunn presented these dilemmas in terms of the actual biotechnology and the political, economic and social aspects which must be considered, while taking into consideration the nature of innovation and the present-day speed of technological change.
Schedule information: 2007-2008
Academic Responsibility: To Whom Are You Accountable?
Monday, April 14, 6:00 p.m., Faculty Club
Bernard Reginster is a professor of Philosophy at Brown. His research focuses on issues in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of mind in nineteenth-century German and twentieth-century French thought, as well as in contemporary psychoanalytical theory. He is particularly interested in the ethical implications of a secularized world view and in the relations between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. He has published many articles on these themes and his most recent book, The Affirmation of Life. Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, was published by Harvard University Press in 2006.
Reginster will discuss the notion of academic responsibility: What sorts of responsibilities do academics have? To whom? Is the choice of a research topic, and the manner in which research is conducted, answerable only to one’s own discipline, to other disciplines, to one’s society, or even to humankind? In what ways are such choices answerable to these constituencies? In other words, what are appropriate justifications for the various forms of academic inquiry?
Tea with Randy Cohen: A Conversation with The Ethicist from the NY Times Magazine
Monday, December 3, 3:30 p.m., Faculty Club
Students are encouraged to submit questions of an ethical nature (preferably though not necessarily academic in focus) when registering for the event using our online system. Questions may also be submitted at any time to Graduate_School@brown.edu. Mr. Cohen will deliver a more formal address to the campus at 7 p.m. As with all Academy in Context events, this will be a smaller gathering at which students, faculty, and our guest can share ideas.
- Randy Cohen’s first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker, Harpers, the Atlantic, Young Love Comics). His first television work was writing for "Late Night With David Letterman" for which he won three Emmy awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on "TV Nation." (Cohen received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error and kept it.) Currently he writes "The Ethicist" a weekly column for the New York Times Magazine syndicated throughout the U.S. and Canada. He is a regular contributor to Weekend All Things Considered on National Public Radio.
Stem Cell Research: The Diversity of Ethical Issues
Tuesday, September 25, 6 p.m., Hope Club (6 Benevolent St., Providence)
Rebecca Dresser is the Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor of Law and Professor of Ethics in Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 1983, she has taught medical and law students about legal and ethical issues in end-of-life care, biomedical research, genetics, assisted reproduction, and related topics. Dresser served on the ethics committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the advisory council of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, a division of the National Institutes of Health. She is a fellow of the Hastings Center and one of the "At Law" columnists for the Hastings Center Report, the oldest and most widely read U.S. bioethics journal. In 2001 Dresser published When Science Offers Salvation: Patient Advocacy and Research Ethics. She is also co-author of The Human Use of Animals: Case Studies in Ethical Choice and "Bioethics and Law: Cases, Materials and Problems. Since 2002, she has been a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Schedule information: 2006-2007
Philosophical Approaches to Animal Rights
Thursday, April 26, 5 p.m., Faculty Club
- Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. A former Brown faculty member, Nussbaum received her B.A. from New York University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. She has also taught at Harvard and Oxford universities. A philosopher whose work focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, contemporary moral and political philosophy, feminism, and the connections between philosophy and literature Nussbaum's 1985 book The Fragility of Goodness was particularly influential and made her a well-known figure throughout the humanities. Her other books include Love's Knowledge (1990), The Quality of Life (1993, with Amartya Sen), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Sex and Social Justice (1998), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000), Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004), Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2005), and The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future (2006).
The Ethics of Science in an Age of Superstition
Tuesday, February 6, 6 p.m., Chancellor's Dining Room (Sharpe Refectory)
Robert L. Park is Professor of Physics and former chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. Prof. Park received his Ph.D. in physics from Brown, where he was the Edgar Lewis Marston fellow, in 1964. Prior to coming to Brown, his study of law at the University of Texas was interrupted by the Korean War, during which he served as an electronics officer in the U.S. Air Force. Following the war, he switched to physics and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with high honors. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Society for the Advancement of Science and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Park is author of more than a hundred papers on the structure of crystal surfaces. For more than twenty years he has posted a provocative weekly column from Washington, D.C., on science issues at http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu. Park is a prolific op-ed contributor for the New York Times and Washington Post and is a frequent commentator on television news. He is the author of Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud.
Brown and the Slave Trade: The Final Report from the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
(Students are encouraged to visit the Slavery and Justice website where a copy of the report can be downloaded, along with background and supplementary information: http://brown.edu/slaveryjustice.)
Monday, November 13, 6 p.m., Chancellor's Dining Room (Sharpe Refectory)
James Campbell is an associate professor of American Civilization, Africana Studies, and History at Brown. He is the author of two books, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa and the recently published Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005. He is also co-editor of a forthcoming anthology, Race, Nation, and Empire in American History, slated to appear in 2007. Campbell has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Carl Sandburg Literary Prize for Non-fiction and the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Prize. Before coming to Brown, he taught at Northwestern University and at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Schedule information: 2005-2006
The Dirty Ethics of Archaeology
Thursday, April 6, 6 p.m.
Susan E. Alcock is the inaugural Director of the new Artemis A. W. Joukowsky and Martha Sharp Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown. Her current research interests include the Hellenistic and Roman eastern Mediterranean and southern Caucasus, landscape archaeology, and the archaeology of memory and of imperialism. Dr. Alcock has recently begun fieldwork in southern Armenia, as co-director of the Vorotan Project. She is a 2001 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her books, solo authored and edited, include: Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments and Memory (2001), which won the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians; Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece (2001); Empires : Perspectives from History and Archaeology (2001); The Archaeology of Memory (2003); and Side-by-Side Survey: Comparative Regional Analysis in the Mediterranean Region (2004).
- Hima B. Mallampati is a graduate student in the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan. She earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School in 2001 and a B.A. in Art History and Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Before graduate school, Mallampati was an associate at the law firm of Hughes Hubbard and Reed in New York City, where she practiced art law with cases involving NAGPRA, copyright, trademark, and conspiracy claims. Her current research involves the acquisition of antiquities by non-profit museums and private collectors.
The Ethics of Punishment: Mass Incarceration and American Values
Wednesday, March 1, 6 p.m.
- Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown. He has taught previously at Boston, Harvard, and Northwestern universities, and the University of Michigan. He holds a B.A. in mathematics from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A distinguished academic economist, Loury has contributed to a variety of areas in applied microeconomic theory (welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of income distribution). His over 200 essays and reviews on racial inequality and social policy have appeared in dozens of influential journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic. Professor Loury's books include One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (1995), The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (2002), Ethnicity, Social Mobility, and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK (2005). A native of the Southside of Chicago, Loury currently resides in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.
Looking for Truth in History and Science
Thursday, November 17, 6 p.m.
- John M. Barry is a prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author of five books. A frequent commentator on broadcast media, he has written for publications ranging from Sports Illustrated to The New York Times Sunday Magazine , Fortune, Newsweek, Esquire, and The Washington Post. Currently Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Center for Bioenvironmental Research of Tulane and Xavier Universities , he divides his time between New Orleans and Washington. Barry's books have won more than twenty awards. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History won the 2005 Keck Award given by the National Academies of Science for the outstanding book on science or medicine of the year, and Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America won the 1998 Francis Parkman Prize given by the Society of American Historians for the year's outstanding book of American history. Barry graduated from Brown University , and did work beyond the M.A. in history at the University of Rochester before withdrawing from the Ph.D. program. Before writing his first book, he coached major college football, then spent ten years as a journalist covering national politics and economics.
Computers and Human Values
Wednesday, October 5, 6 p.m.
- Michael Chorost graduated Brown in 1987 and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. Born with extremely limited hearing in both ears because of an epidemic of rubella among pregnant women, Chorost went completely deaf in on July 7, 2001, during a business trip to Tahoe. Rebuilt is about going deaf and getting my hearing back with an implanted computer," Chorost says, "but it's also an extended consideration of what computers have done to our bodies and our lives. In it I discuss how our society has misused computers, and how we might reorient ourselves so that technology makes us more human."
- Roger Blumberg teaches a first-year seminar on computers and human values, as well as The Educational Software Seminar at Brown. Before joining Brown's Department of Computer Science, Blumberg was senior hypermedia researcher at the Scholarly Technology Group, the senior fellow in technology and education at the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, and a visiting scholar at Brown's Institute for Brain and Neural Systems.
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