Swarthmore College Faculty Lectures
http://www.swarthmore.edu/alumni/faculty_lectures/index.html

This program allows you to experience Swarthmore College Faculty Lectures. The lectures that we feature are complete, self-contained lectures that were open to the campus and local community.

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Cinema Has Not Yet Been Invented: Avatar and the Future of Film
Posted: August 2010

Special effects have long defined the cutting-edge possibilities of cinema, pushing the limits of both realistic representation and fantastic spectacle. With the global success of James Cameron's Avatar (2009), cinema seems on verge of reinventing itself as a fully immersive virtual experience, delivering on a promise called "total cinema" by theorist André Bazin and "the complete film" by Rudolf Arnheim. At the 2010 Family and Friends Weekend, Assistant Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies Bob Rehak spoke about the tale and technology of Avatar as a way of framing what cinema has always dreamed of being and what it might yet become. In his lecture, Rehak examines how film theory has addressed the issues of realism, representation, and special effects; the production of Avatar; and how film theory "might need to adapt to asses future films built along the same lines and enact a similar logic of sensory immersion and digital spectacle." Through Cameron's use of 3-D camera technology and computer-generated imagery, "Avatar's audiences are undergoing the same kind of travel and employing new bodies and environments" that Avatar the narrative wants us to believe is happening to its protagonists." Rehak ultimately concludes that not only the film industry but the medium itself now stands at a crossroads, ushered in by the success and buzz surrounding Avatar and the possibility of future successes through emerging technologies. More thoughts on Avatar, special effects, videogames, film, and television can be found on Bob Rehak's blog Graphic Engine.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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Baccalaureate Address: Mark Wallace
Posted: June 2010

Professor of Religion Mark Wallace delivered the Baccalaureate Address at the 2010 Commencement. Baccalaureate is intended to touch upon the moral and spiritual roots of the educational process and encourage commitment to a more just world.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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Last Collection: Diane Anderson
Posted: June 2010

Acting Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Educational Studies Diane Anderson delivered the Last Collection at the 2010 Commencement. The senior class chooses a faculty or staff member for this event each April.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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Learning and Becoming: The Construction of Identity in Urban Classrooms
Posted: May 2010

Assistant Professor of Educational Studies Cheryl Jones-Walker explores the current context of public education and how improvements in student learning revolve around high-stakes testing, rigorous and rigid standards, and increased accountability measures. These practices joined together present one model for reforming high-poverty urban districts. Through her research, Jones-Walker traces the development of identities of students and teachers through interactions in order to understand how identities are formed and reformed in classroom spaces. She argues that educators need to have a deeper understanding of how one actor (or set of actors) informs the other and, more importantly, that they must begin to uncover how the construction of self informs the act of teaching and the process of learning.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War
Posted: April 2010

Assistant Professor of Political Science Dominic Tierney's talk, based on a forthcoming book, explores the American experience of war since the Revolution. The project explains why people back some conflicts, but not others, how the United States fights, why Washington wins and loses, and how Americans remember and learn from war. His talk contrasts the American experience of war in two types of military conflict: interstate war (where we fight against other countries) versus nation-building (where we fight against insurgents). Inspired by idealism and vengeance, we view interstate wars like World War II as a glorious crusade to overthrow tyrants. These same cultural forces, however, mean that we see nation-building in places like Somalia or Afghanistan as a wearying quagmire. In other words, Americans are addicted to regime change and allergic to nation-building.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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Ways of Seeing, Ways of Seeming: Black Autobiography and the Problem of Image
Posted: April 2010

In this talk Assistant Professor of English Literature Anthony Foy considers the productive interplay between narrative and visual modes of self-presentation at the turn of the twentieth century, reflecting on black authors’ direct engagement with the visual regimes of race within which their autobiographies were produced. He notes that by the end of the nineteenth century, class-based discourses of uplift, which conflated the race’s progress with the race’s public image, came to dominate black autobiography. Faced with the anti-black representations of the Jim Crow era, members of a rising middle class responded with life stories that narrated them as emblematic Negroes; meanwhile, they increasingly deployed sketches, engravings, and photographs in their books to address the historical problem of black visibility.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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Pig Iron Theatre Company and the Re-Imagination of American Theater: 1995-2010
Posted: March 2010

Professor of Theater Allen Kuharski offers a critical overview of Pig Iron Theatre Company's history and relationship to contemporary theater in the U.S. and beyond. First launched by a group of Swarthmore College theater alumni in 1995, Pig Iron Theatre Company is now in its 15th season as a critically-acclaimed and growing part of Philadelphia's professional theater community. Though strongly rooted in Philadelphia, Pig Iron's cosmopolitan, unpredictable, and highly mobile work (consisting of almost two dozen original works to date) has earned it a national and international profile. The company's unique character and success reveal a continuation and dialog with certain aspects of the American avant-garde as well as a significant departure from much contemporary theater practice in the United States.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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Dissent From Within: How Site-Based Educators Use Protest to Create Policy Ch...
Posted: February 2010

Professor of Educational Studies Frank Grossman focuses on how an organization comprised of teachers and administrators in New York State used protest to create policy change. Grossman's work provides a framework to understand how marginalized actors within systems of schooling organize to create change. Such a framework is becoming increasingly relevant as educators attempt to create space for local practice in the current top-down policy environment.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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Between the keys: Jazz explorations
Posted: December 2009

Isn't a German Jazz pianist somehow like a Japanese Yodeler? Cornell Visiting Professor Hans Lüdemann discusses the role of a creative musician in society and examines questions of identity. The lecture includes adventurous improvisations and some brand new pieces of music created at Swarthmore College.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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Transfronterizo Talk: Conflicting Constructions of Bilingualism on the US-Mex...
Posted: October 2009

Ana Celia Zentella, Lang Visiting Professor of Social Change, is a recognized leader in building appreciation for language diversity and respect for language rights. Her research shows that fluency in Spanish and English, the most visible cultural marker of the identity of students who have spent years living and studying on both sides of the US-Mexico border (transfronterizos), is both a product and facilitator of their frequent trips between San Diego and Tijuana. Interviews in Spanish and English with eighty transfronterizo college students indicate that, despite their proficient bilingualism, their linguistic capital may not translate into expected rewards as they struggle with language and identity conflicts. In particular, intra-sentential code switching, or Spanglish, is frowned upon, because that way of speaking is identified with el hablar mocho de los pochos [‘chopped up Mexican American speech’]. Nevertheless, the obstacles transfronterizos encounter in ESL programs, criticisms of their Spanish by Mexican citizens, feelings of shame about their Spanish-accented English, and heightened English-only fervor in the state and nation may undermine their avowed commitment to Spanish. Her research has led her to argue that interrupting the reproduction of linguistic and educational inequality requires educational and governmental language policies in the USA and Mexico that build on the principles of an anthro-political linguistics.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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Microbiology: An Icebreaker for Conversations about Science Literacy
Posted: July 2009

Professor of Biology Amy Cheng Vollmer is devoted to increasing science literacy. She finds that the impact of microbes and microbiology on society is manifold: medical, environmental, as well as on the geochemical history of the earth itself. Using microbiology, Vollmer communicates the process of research and discovery - the content and application of science - to many audiences beyond her Swarthmore classroom, including those who attended her talk during this year's Alumni Weekend.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.

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Camp Mementos from Krystyna Zywulska: The Making of a Satirist and Songwriter...
Posted: July 2009

Krystyna Zywulska is perhaps best known as the author of Przezylam Oswiecim (I Survived Auschwitz), her candid and moving account of life and death in the extermination camp Birkenau published immediately after the war. Less known, but no less important, are Zywulska's songs and poetry created during her imprisonment. These works not only offer valuable insight into the daily experiences and cultural activities of prisoners in the Nazi camps, but also reveal the unlikely birth of a literary and satirical talent. Assistant Professor of Music Barbara Milewski examines a selection of Zywulska's camp songs and the contexts in which they were created. She also considers the stylistic qualities that lent Zywulska's post-war writings their force and the extent to which they were developed in the works she created in Birkenau.

An audio podcast in MP3 format.