Events

The Graphic Novel, also known as (but lately distinguished from) a comic book, has boomed and evolved as a storytelling format over the past decade. A truly polymathic form of storytelling, it combines images and the flash-point nature of the comic strip with the long-forms of literature and the novel. Recently, we have seen the graphic novel seep into popular culture and the public consciousness as inspiration for film adaptations and television series. However, graphic storytelling is nothing new – from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Satrapi’s Persepolis, the graphic format...

“I’m not a robot, I have feelings” – how many times have you heard that phrase uttered? We tend to define our humanity by our ability to feel complicated and intense emotions. However, what if we were able to program robots to experience and empathize with a range of human emotions? Robots are often the stuff of dystopic nightmare, but what if they were able to comprehend human emotion on a level that could help other human beings and aid individuals through social interaction? What if they were even able to provide new insights into human behavior? Does the potential...

Sound and the sonic are vibrant parts of the richly textured worlds we inhabit – how often does a song remind you of a particular time or place in your life? Or perhaps you associate a certain type of sound or music with an emotion or culture? Many of our experiences and feelings are defined by what we hear. But what will the future sound like? As globalization rapidly expands, redefining and blurring cultural lines, what will be the cultural remix of the future? Furthermore, looking backwards and forwards, how has the sonic shaped our histories and how will it impact our future...

The 19th century author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), created works that melded fiction, poetry, mathematics, games, logic and cryptography. This talk explores Dodgson’s use of puzzles and games, word play, and the creation of a cipher language to create iconic children’s tales, such as Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. In August and December 2014, Abby taught a Freshman Micro-Seminar titled “Decoding Wonderland: Puzzles, Logic and Cryptography in the Works of Lewis Carroll.” Through hands-on...

The promise of time travel, be it forwards or backwards, has long been a compelling fantasy. What could we learn, predict, better understand, prevent, or resolve if we had the ability to move forwards or backwards in time? Historians are perhaps the closest we’ll ever get to the possibility of time travel – their painstaking work in archives, attempts to place themselves in the mindset of their subjects, and probing of the past for understanding (and how that understanding can prevent repeating our same mistakes) enacts the work of a time traveler. But can historians use their work to time...

Apocalypse has been handed down to us as total devastation, obliteration of all living things, the end of the world. Along this definitional line of thinking, Isaac Newton predicted the apocalypse would occur in 2060. We have trusted his theories on classical mechanics, laws of motion and universal gravitation—so should we worry? Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism each tell eschatological stories of doom, where good will ultimately reign supreme, but not before the earth is utterly destroyed. The Mayan calendar was advertised as predicting our end on...

George Orwell’s 1984 described a dystopic future where privacy and individual thought had been stifled by the ever-watchful eye of Big Brother – but what might 2084 look like? Fears of dystopia – the loss of privacy, agency, and subjugation to a totalitarian regime—proliferate in popular culture still. From the recent success of The Hunger Games and Divergent to films like Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, our fears of a dystopic world are still very present. Where do these fears come from and what explains their recent boom in popularity? How might we...

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”


These are the profound words from Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel, who found meaning and purpose in his captivity and suffering at Auschwitz. Moving into our individual and collective futures, we will certainly face some suffering, as well as joys and successes. According to Frankel, finding meaning in all life’s experiences is a reflective exercise, and finding purpose is forward looking and intentional. Frankel counsels us to develop these approaches as we embark on this thing called “life.”...

Traditionalism might be described as the notion of holding on to the past to pass on to the future; folklore is the transmission of traditions -- art, literature, knowledge, and practice -- through oral communication and behavioral example. In our fast paced, ever-changing, futuristic, digital age, what new sorts of modes are emerging that millennials (Generation Y) employ to receive, hold, and transmit the traditions entrusted to them? Scholars of folklore and tradition recognize that the Internet has been transformative on these ancient cultural practices, but exactly how transformative...

How and why do we feel emotion? Anger, love, hurt, compassion, empathy, regret, and happiness are just some of the feelings that a song, a scent, or an old photograph of someone can conjure inside of us. Emotion and emotional memory are fundamental to our lived experience as human beings. What is the evolutionary purpose of emotion? Of emotional memory? We turn to Jonathan Gratch to get in touch with the process and purpose behind our feelings.