Polymathic Pizza

The Harman Academy sometimes defines a polymath as “a person of much or varied learning; a great scholar.”  Is this all there is to being a polymath?  Someone who knows a lot of stuff?   As we have learned over the past six years, and especially this fall, there is much more to the pursuit of the polymathic life: the utility of failure; the imperative of curiosity; and the importance of community, humor, emotion and so on to expand our horizons and enrich both thinking and being.  To conclude this semester we will look at the practice of belief as a...

"Don't stress over anything you can't change." – Mickey Mouse

That’s easy for a mouse to say.  What if the emotion you are feeling is actually determined by a gene and not something that you can easily change or control?  University Professor Jean C. Shih will discuss her current research that focuses on the neurobiology of emotional behaviors and the gene identified as related to aggression and anxiety.  In her field of pharmacology, Professor Shih has branched out into psychotropic research as a crucial element not only of medical practice but...

So what do 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Michael Richards debacle, and the election of Barak Obama all have in common?  They are all momentous events in our country that can be understood by the metric of race? They each constitute seismic shifts in the telling of what it means to be black in the US??  They each possess contested narratives negotiated by various racial groups??? Yes, but what they also all have in common is that they all provide great material for comedic routines! (Say what?) For this session, linguistic anthropologist Lanita Jacobs will show us how humor functions...

“I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”     --Eleanor Roosevelt

It is apropos that the Mars Rover, bouncing and trekking across the red planet is named CURIOSITY.  Polymaths, too, are a curious lot.  Professor Josh Kun is one such exemplar polymath, an intellectual rover of sorts, gifted with a heavy dose of curiosity.  He will discuss with us the utility of inquisitiveness in his research on such topics as the cultural, racial, and...

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” - Thomas A. Edison

“When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.” - Ellen DeGeneres

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein

Failure possesses definitive value. Unfortunately, our culture regularly denigrates the mistake, the blemish, and the imperfect.  But failure often accompanies our most major breakthroughs,...

“To be capable of seeing things from multiple points of view, to be capable of being sympathetic, not just with our friends but with our enemies, is perhaps not enough to prevent wars or to change the world, but it is certainly necessary if we want those things to happen.” Viet Thanh Nguyen

How might the idea of community be understood within an integrative framework, or even as a viable feature of the polymathic life?  Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen helps us explore community as polymathic through a discussion of his recent Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer....

As small children, play is often the first way we express ourselves imaginatively. We create fantastic imagined stories for ourselves, our family, our friends, even our stuffed animals. The recent rise in video games suggests a passionate desire to continue to play and express ourselves imaginatively in new worlds and through expanded narratives. Video games routinely outsell films, and Grand Theft Auto 5 was the fastest selling property across all forms of entertainment upon its release. Gaming gives participants a narrative agency more akin to childhood play than any other form of...

Songwriters from George Harrison to the Zombies have written odes to how a person moves. From our gait to the lightest flickering of our fingers, our movements convey truths about our lives—our state of being, our cultural contexts, our likes and dislikes. Taken to a presentational level, dance can serve as a tool to explore invisible histories, community building, and cultural vernaculars. Since the way we move provides us with a powerful tool to create, question, and disrupt, how can dance provide a structural framework to address topics such as the construction of gender or race in America...

How do we really hear others—listen to, absorb, and consider the thoughts of the person in front of us? Our ideologies and moral values shape our identity and behavior, and they also possess the power to unite or drive us apart. In this fractured world, we could all benefit from listening with a sense of openness and empathy to the beliefs and narratives of those with opposing views, without compromising our own core values. Jesse Graham will help us explore the art of listening in these ideologically diverse and divisive times.

A staggering amount of plastic trash circles the world’s oceans, propelled by gyres, or currents. The USC Fisher Museum puts this environmentally-damaging waste to thoughtprovoking use in their exhibit Gyre: The Plastic Ocean, in which twenty-five artists created works of art from refuse collected from beaches around the world. As the museum describes it, “a flip-flop discarded in Thailand finds its way to Hawaii, and a bottle cast off from a tsunami in Japan becomes Alaska’s beach litter. In a culture dependent upon the modern convenience of plastic, throwaway products of...