Events

“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,...

HEALING ARTS: The Polymathic Collection of Dr. Eugene Rogolsky

From Chicano street art to gay inspired photographs, prints, paintings and sculptures, the polymathic collection of Dr. Eugene Rogolsky, on exhibit at the USC Fisher Museum of Art, is "complex and introspective, and range from sacred to profane." Please join us in a Trojan Family Weekend special event co-sponsored by the Harman Academy for Polymathic Study and Fisher Museum of Art featuring a discussion with noted physician, art collector, Keck Medical professor and practitioner Dr. ...

“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...

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...

"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...

The Academy for Polymathic Study guides its enquiries through four flexible pathways or Quadrants:  (1) critical and integrative thinking; (2) study of the polymaths; (3) the tapestry of knowledge; and (4) communication.  In order to explicate these Quadrants more fully, Edwin McCann, professor of philosophy and English, will conduct four conversational workshops over the fall and spring terms from a philosophical, historical, and practical point of view.  Attendance at these two sessions covering all four quadrants is required for Academy certification. 

Quadrants (3)...

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...

“A polymath is one who not only mastered one or several disciplines, but one who synthesizes them, integrates them.”  Sidney Harman

Integrate:  Combine (one thing) with another so that they become a whole. Oxford Dictionary

Dr. Bonnie Ruberg integrates. Her research explores gender and sexuality in contemporary digital cultures, with a focus on LGBTQ issues in video games.  A genuine polymathic practitioner, Ruberg utilizes integration to create, educate, reimagine, and challenge our gendered world.   For our opening session of the spring 2017...

Translating is an essential skill for the polymath.  To traverse disciplinary languages, to find the common parlances that can speak across scholarly divides—this is an essential art that polymaths of the past have mastered.  Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Sherry Velasco is just this sort of linguistic polymath, and she practices translating through multiple modalities.  In her research, Velasco translates and interprets languages in the traditional sense, but she also translates and interprets across the esoteric languages of various disciplines such as gender...

PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE TO THURSDAY

“Tinkering is fooling around with phenomena, tools, and materials. It’s whimsical, enjoyable, fraught with dead ends, and ultimately about inquiry.” The Art of Tinkering

Fiddling, playfulness, and tinkering.  These approaches, attitudes, and instruments of inquiry are fundamental to polymathic praxis. As professor of electrical engineering, professor of computer science, professor of linguistics, professor of pediatrics, and professor of psychology, Shri Narayanan is a paragon polymath who tinkers across his multiple fields of...