Ours is a global civilization, and USC is a global university with a global student body. This spring, the USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study will sponsor a polymathic pizza oriented to global issues. Participants in these discussions are encouraged to address these pressing global problems -- which will remain crucial challenges for decades to come -- in a spirit of integrated interdisciplinary analysis.
Historian Lewis Mumford, among others, has argued that warfare as an ongoing and necessary expression of the state originated with the rise of urbanism in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley thousands of years before the Common Era. The twentieth century witnessed global, regional, and local war...
You are what you eat. So runs a time-tested folkloric observation. The past four decades have witnessed a mounting concern with good nutrition as the basis of health. The nation, meanwhile, seems caught in an epidemic of obesity. Hunger, famine, and starvation seem permanently established in...
Following the Greek notion that “in health alone is victory,” Aristotle lists this requirement as fundamental to the conduct of life. Under the guidance of Assistant Professor Carlin Daley, students – fortified with a healthy serving of healthy pizza – will examine the health requirement...
For the first time in human history the urban population outnumbers the rural. While cities represent prominent centers of trade, finance, innovation, and education, there are wide-ranging social and ecological tradeoffs associated with these concentrations of people and power. Local air,...
Using theatre and aesthetics to advance diplomacy with China may be the most polymathic approach to international relations to date. In this Polymathic Pizza session, discover with University Professor Geoffrey Cowan how his life and work as academician, as playwright, and his position as a...
Historians, political scientists, and economists such as Samuel Huntington and Niall Ferguson see clashes between civilizations emerging as the central issue of the 21st century. Americans, meanwhile, are increasingly seeing in diversity an energizing good. As our planet becomes more unified...
