Past Events

In addition to panels, we have organized a Beinecke visit (2-4pm 4/19) and a seminar workshop (10:30am-12pm 4/20), culminating in our keynote musical performance event at 4:30pm on 4/20, where we will offer the world premiere of a multimedia artwork entitled Shakespeare’s Garden, by composer Sherry Woods and visual artist and engineer Nancy Griffin.

We have some open spots remaining for our visit to the Beinecke and our seminar workshop on “Environmental Thinking and the Grounds of Comparison.” If there are any faculty or students who would like to join for these events, they can use this Google Form to indicate their interest: https://forms.gle/3Z8Q5zdzidoK8Bvm9. There will be pre-circulated readings for the seminar provided to registered attendees.

Please direct any questions or concerns to John Hoffmeyer (john.hoffmeyer@yale.edu) or Taylor Yoonji Kang (taylor.kang@yale.edu).  The program for the symposium follows.

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven,  the City of New Haven Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism, Connecticut Audubon Society and the Yale School of the Environment and the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities present Observing the Observer—Christian Cooper in conversation with Robert Lamothe at Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall on April 4 at 6:30pm. This event is free and open to the public with registration on Eventbrite. Christian Cooper is an American science writer, editor and author of Better Living Through Birding—Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. Cooper is host and producer of Extraordinary Birder on National Geographic. As a writer for Marvel Comics, Cooper created the first gay human character in Star Trek history, Yoshi Mishima, for the series “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” and Marvel Comics’ first openly lesbian character, the dark magic expert Victoria Montesi. He serves on the Board of Directors of NYC Audubon.

A recent interview with Mr. Cooper is available here.

Built by the US government to house the Hanford nuclear site workers who manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Richland, Washington is proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town and proud of the atomic bomb it helped create. RICHLAND offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past. Moving between archival past and observational present, and across encounters with nuclear workers, community members, archeologists, local tribes, and a Japanese granddaughter of atomic bomb survivors, the film blooms into an expansive and lyrical meditation on home, safety, whiteness, land, and deep time.

Director Irene Lusztig will be on hand to discuss the film afterwards.

Climate change and its shifting modes of representation—in news media, contemporary literature, or heavy-handed Hollywood blockbusters—involve problems of perspective and scale, the reliability and verifiability of science, and, at times, a certain funereal nostalgia for a mythologized golden age of harmony between humans and nature. But these problems are nothing new. Robert Watson’s Back to Nature (2006) locates the origin of such contemporary issues in late Renaissance epistemological anxieties of representation, truth, and the constitution of “the world” in close connection with artistic imagings of the environment across media.

In more recent years, early modernists have grown increasingly focused on the ways in which global approaches to material, intellectual, literary, scientific, art, and music histories can illuminate the shortcomings of conventional understandings of the period and its modes of cultural production that are grounded primarily in Western theoretical and methodological frameworks. In a period deeply concerned with problems of perspectival representation—when “subjectivity” and “objectivity” carried meanings opposite their current ones—the early modern “world” and its “environment” are fraught, highly contingent figures enmeshed in logics of imperial expansion and the marginalization of alterity. It is thus incumbent upon current students of the period to engage with the complex points of interaction between Western and non-Western contexts of economic, cultural, and intellectual productivity as means of world-making and understanding the position of “the human” in the broader context of its environment.

We invite papers for a symposium to be held at Yale University on April 19-20, 2024. Papers can deal with the thematics outlined in this introduction from a variety of disciplinary approaches, and we especially welcome presentations that illuminate historically marginalized and understudied objects, texts, and contexts. Possible paper topics might touch upon one or more of the following:

-material histories, comparative paleography as indexes of environmental thinking

-historical scientific modes of understanding and relating to environment

-comparative global philosophies of experience, ethics, epistemology, ontology

-global lyric, the comparative grammar of subjectivity as a form of world-making

-art and architectural histories, histories of craft, visual cultures

-histories of performance, religious and ritual practices connected to environment

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to john.hoffmeyer@yale.edu and taylor.kang@yale.edu. The deadline for abstracts is February 27, 2024.

https://youtu.be/WH2Ns3CYvx0

Building upon two decades of edge-finding archaeological research, the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program continues to refine a transdisciplinary approach that seamlessly blends ethnography, materiality, and technology. Nucleating at the Yale Peabody Museum has allowed YAPP to work across its divisions and vast collections to push our knowledge of ancient organic materials through the fusion of ethnohistory, phytochemistry, and data science. Buttressed by Yale’s commitment to the liberal arts, YAPP is just beginning to explore the possibilities of working across the university at burgeoning intersections between the humanities and sciences.

Bio:  Andrew Koh is an archaeological scientist and ancient historian with a strong interest in pharmacology & medicine, ancient innovation & technology, and modern applications of antiquity. He is Museum Scientist for the Yale Peabody Museum and a faculty member in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and the Council on Archaeological Studies. He is an active field archaeologist who is PI of the Southern Phokis Regional Project in Greece and the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program at the Peabody Museum.

More about Dr. Koh’s work may be learned here:  https://news.yale.edu/2023/03/21/studying-ancient-residues-scholar-finds…

Presented in partnership with RJ Julia Booksellers.

Peabody curator, Yale ornithologist, and inaugural director of The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities Richard Prum sits down with professor Joanna Radin to discuss his new book Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference. This much anticipated follow-up to 2017’s Evolution of Beauty, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, applies queer feminist theory to developmental genetics, arguing that individuals are not essentially male or female.

The idea that gender is a performance has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. This transformative concept has sparked reappraisals of social expectations as well as debate over not just gender, but sex: what it is, what it means, and how we know it. In this new work, Prum brings feminist thought into conversation with biology, arguing that the sexual binary is not essential to human genes, chromosomes, or embryos. 

Their conversation will be followed by a brief Q&A and light refreshments. Books will be available for purchase from event partner RJ Julia Booksellers and Dr. Prum will sign copies immediately following the program.

Reception to follow.

The year 2024 marks the centennial of the Linguistic Society of America.  This presentation scrutinizes four texts written between 1923 and 1946—two letters, two short essays—in which Leonard Bloomfield promoted the creation of the LSA as a means of building solidarity among American linguists, and establishing linguistics as a science of language.
 
But what did it mean to be a ‘science’ in the United States in 1924?  The social-intellectual climate of the day was saturated with attitudes and practices we would now identify as racist, but which at the time were taken to be based on incontestable scientific evidence.  These included immigration restriction initiatives, eugenicist social engineering, laws constraining the rights of African Americans, and disregard for the autonomy of Native peoples.  Linguists may have sought professional and personal solidarity in the LSA as they weathered this uninviting climate.  But they may also have been agents, not merely patients, of racism.  My remarks close by addressing why it is worthwhile for modern linguists to reflect on these issues, and how recognition of the historical context contributes to our work.

_______________________________________________
Ling-dept mailing list
Ling-dept@mailman.yale.edu
https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/ling-dept
–
Ling-teachingfac mailing list
Ling-teachingfac@mailman.yale.edu
https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/ling-teachingfac

The Franke Program was delighted to host a variety of interdisciplinary talks and film screenings over the past academic year, events that cultivated valuable conversation and reflection at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities.

Most of our talks were recorded, and the videos are available in our Archive, which may be viewed here.

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale

Franke Interdisciplinary Research Awards for Graduate Students

Academic specialization increasingly leads to isolation among scholars and the disciplines they study, resulting in misunderstanding and the erosion of common intellectual goals.  We hold that this isolation is also a barrier to research progress on interdisciplinary questions situated between traditional areas of study.  The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is founded on the twin convictions that the fundamental questions that engage humanists must be informed by basic insights of science and that meaningful scientific inquiry in turn deepens with humanistic knowledge.

Thus, our program is pleased to announce the Franke Interdisciplinary Research Awards for graduate students.  This summer, the Program plans to select up to five interdisciplinary research projects to receive funding of $2,000 each to be held during the academic year 2023 – 2024.  We welcome proposals that advance our mission of fostering communication, mutual understanding, collaborative research, and teaching among diverse scientific and humanistic disciplines.

Research proposals are required to have two faculty members from different departments/disciplines as intellectual mentors.  Letters of recommendation will be requested from these faculty mentors for short-listed candidates.  Awardees are required to attend up to two dinners in the fall of 2023 and the spring of 2024 and present their projects.  Last year’s awardees and projects may be viewed on our Fellows page.

Please complete and submit via e-mail the following information along with your project proposal to the Program’s Assistant Director, Ty Kamp (ty.kamp@yale.edu) by Friday, August 18, 2023.

Name of Applicant and Yale Affiliation:

Title of Proposed Project:

Faculty Mentors & their fields:

Budget with brief narrative justification:

Dates for Project:

Description of Project (no more than 1,500 words):

Note that all funded projects must cite the support of The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities if outcomes from the work are published or presented.  At the completion of the work, a detailed summary of the work completed and outcomes is to be submitted to the Program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnFEIDvTvtc&feature=youtu.be

For nearly a half-century, J. Edgar Hoover was director of the FBI or its precursor. A rabid anti-Communist now known for his own law-breaking — specifically, for his secret surveillance of American citizens — he is often caricatured as a bulldog.

But in her new biography “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century” (Viking), Yale historian Beverly Gage reveals new information about the legendary government man (“G-man’) and portrays him as a complicated person, one full of contradictions. Her talk will examine the controversial life and times of Hoover and place him back where he once stood in American political history—not at the fringes, but at the center—using his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.

The book was listed among the top 10 books of 2022 by the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and Publishers Weekly, and was on The New York Times’ list of the 100 best books of 2022.  The New Yorker chose it as one of its 24 “Essential Reads” of 2022.

The history of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in movies is often presented as a hero’s journey. Starting in the 1980s, a scrappy group of computer scientists went up against the large, powerful, but inert, Hollywood studio empire, and forever changed how movies are made. Our guest, Professor Theodore Kim, will present that history, and a counter-history that reads like this:  Starting in the 1980s, a scrappy group of computer scientists ensured that historical biases towards young, white skin and straight, blond hair embedded in film and photography technology would be carried over from the analog era into the digital.

Kim will conclude with efforts to confront and counter these racially charged biases after the murder of George Floyd. This is a multi-year, multi-institution effort spanning the sciences, arts and humanities, and includes his group at Yale.

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is pleased to award the Franke Fellowship in Science and the Humanities, which is made possible by the generous support of Mr. and Mrs. Richard (‘53) and Barbara Franke. Three to five fellowships of $2,000 will be awarded to rising seniors to support senior essay, research, or art project proposals that explore new and productive intellectual connections between science and the humanities. Interdisciplinary research or art projects should explicitly engage both scientific and humanistic issues or content. Awards are intended to support research during the summer between junior and senior year, or during the following academic year.

Awardees will be asked to participate in dinners with Franke Program faculty and Mrs. Franke to discuss the proposed projects (in the fall) and to present the final results of their work (during the spring semester).

Fellowship monies are intended to offset costs related to the proposed research or project. These include travel costs, accommodation, and supplies and materials.

https://youtu.be/LX5v6piDKIY

Professor Jing Tsu, the John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale, will deliver a talk about her new book Kingdom of Characters:  The Language Evolution that Made China Modern.

Jing Tsu, a 2016 Guggenheim fellow, specializes in modern Chinese literature & culture and Sinophone studies, from the 19th century to the present. Her research spans literature, linguistics, science and technology, typewriting and digitalization, diaspora studies, migration, nationalism, and theories of globalization. At Yale she offers graduate seminars on sympathy, world Sinophone literature, and approaches to East Asian intellectual and literary history. From mainland China to Southeast Asia, her area of expertise covers the Sinophone world at large. She offers a regular interdisciplinary course, “China in the World,” which features six contemporary topics in historical time. Tsu has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eE-CTX96v8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5SnvhRyxkc

Our December 2022 Understanding the Nature of Inference colloquium talk will be given by Brian Cantwell Smith, the Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human at the University of Toronto.  The title of this talk and subsequent discussion is “Inference in a Non-Conceptual World.”

Classical models of inference, such as those based on logic, take inference to be *conceptual* – i.e., to involve representations formed of terms, predicates, relation symbols, and the like.  Conceptual representation of this sort is assumed to reflect the structure of the world: objects of various types, exemplifying properties, standing in relations, grouped together in sets, etc.  These paired roughly algebraic assumptions (one epistemic, the other ontological) form the basis of classical logic and traditional AI (GOFAI).

In this talk, Professor Brian Cantwell Smith will argue that the world itself is not conceptual, in the sense of not consisting (at least au fond) of objects, properties, relations, etc.  That is, he will argue against the ontological assumption.  Rather, he believes that taking the world to consist of the familiar ontological furniture of objects, properties, etc. results from epistemic processes of abstraction and idealization.  Denser representations with so-called “nonconceptual content” can be closer to what is known as “ground truth”.  Deep learning models and other developments in contemporary AI can therefore be understood as initial steps to understand inference over surpassingly rich fields of undiscretized features.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eE-CTX96v8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5SnvhRyxkc

Our December 2022 Understanding the Nature of Inference colloquium talk will be given by Brian Cantwell Smith, the Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human at the University of Toronto.  The title of this talk and subsequent discussion is “Inference in a Non-Conceptual World.”

Classical models of inference, such as those based on logic, take inference to be *conceptual* – i.e., to involve representations formed of terms, predicates, relation symbols, and the like.  Conceptual representation of this sort is assumed to reflect the structure of the world: objects of various types, exemplifying properties, standing in relations, grouped together in sets, etc.  These paired roughly algebraic assumptions (one epistemic, the other ontological) form the basis of classical logic and traditional AI (GOFAI).

In this talk, Professor Brian Cantwell Smith will argue that the world itself is not conceptual, in the sense of not consisting (at least au fond) of objects, properties, relations, etc.  That is, he will argue against the ontological assumption.  Rather, he believes that taking the world to consist of the familiar ontological furniture of objects, properties, etc. results from epistemic processes of abstraction and idealization.  Denser representations with so-called “nonconceptual content” can be closer to what is known as “ground truth”.  Deep learning models and other developments in contemporary AI can therefore be understood as initial steps to understand inference over surpassingly rich fields of undiscretized features.

Following curiosity about the world down a rabbit hole without hesitation can lead to innovation and inspiration. From archeology to space exploration to origami, solutions to design problems can often spring from the most unexpected places.

This in-person talk will be given by James Ramsey ‘99, the principal of raad and the creator of the Lowline. James’ experience in design began at Yale University, where he won a Bates Fellowship to study cathedral design in Europe. He then went to work as a satellite engineer for NASA, where he was a part of the team that created the Pluto Fast Flyby and the Cassini satellites. After his time at NASA, James gained large firm experience at DMSAS in Washington, DC and small firm knowledge, upon relocating to New York, at the boutique outfit, Penny Yates Architects. While teaching design at the Parsons School of Design, James worked to put the pieces in place to start his own design practice in 2004. Raad has since built over a hundred projects, both in NYC and across the country. James Ramsey is the inventor of the Remote Skylight and founder of raadStuff.

We look forward to continuing our Nature of Inference colloquium series with a virtual talk by Alexander Paseau, Professor of Mathematical Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

The title of Professor Paseau’s talk is Inference: A Logical-Philosophical Perspective.

In this talk, Professor Paseau will describe some of his work on inference within mathematics and more generally. Inferences can be usefully divided into deductive or non-deductive. Formal logic studies deductive inference, the obvious question here being: which formal logic correctly captures it? His view, defended in his recent monograph One True Logic (Oxford UP, co-authored with Owen Griffiths), is that any such logic must be highly infinite. In this Inference Project event, he shall explain what this means and sketch some arguments for it.

The other side of the coin is non-deductive inference. This is much harder to capture precisely, but many interesting and important things can still be said about it. Professor Paseau will present some of his ideas about non-deductive reasoning in mathematics and explain why, contrary to current and traditional thinking, it can be a source not just of justified belief but also knowledge. 

What links the two halves of the talk? The idea that inference, both deductive and non-deductive, is more permissive than often imagined.

Professor Gila Sher of the University of California, San Diego will be the conversant for this event.  As a philosophy professor, her research interests center on foundational issues in epistemology, the philosophy of logic, and the theory of truth. Her books include: The Bounds of Logic: A Generalized Viewpoint (MIT, 1991), Epistemic Friction: An Essay on Knowledge, Truth, and Logic (Oxford, 2016), and Logical Consequence (Cambridge, 2022). She is currently working on a book tentatively titled Truth as a Human Value, which offers a reconception of the philosophy of truth in light of the post-truth crisis. 

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale is excited to announce the launch of the Franke Graduate Student Research Award.  In summer 2022, the Program will select a few interdisciplinary research projects to receive funding of $2K each and $3K each for postdoctoral fellows.  Preference will be given to scholars whose areas of research and methods advance our mission of fostering communication, mutual understanding, collaborative research, and teaching among diverse scientific and humanistic disciplines.  Funding should be used to develop an interdisciplinary aspect of a fellow’s current research program.

Please complete and submit the application below electronically to the Program’s Assistant Director, Ty Kamp (ty.kamp@yale.edu), along with your project proposal, by Friday, July 15, 2022.  Successful applicants will be informed by Friday, August 19, 2022.

Academic specialization increasingly leads to isolation among scholars and the disciplines they study, resulting in misunderstanding and the erosion of common intellectual goals.  We hold that this isolation is also a barrier to research progress on interdisciplinary questions situated between traditional areas of study.  The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is founded on the twin convictions that the fundamental questions that engage humanists must be informed by basic insights of science and that meaningful scientific inquiry depends on humanistic knowledge.  Our goal is to build an intellectual community of scholars who think in a pan-disciplinary manner as we believe that this mind-set generates original, creative and innovative breakthroughs.  The Franke Program sponsors lectures, colloquia, conferences, undergraduate courses, faculty seminars, and performances, as well as independent research projects devised by undergraduate and graduate students.  Once selected, awardees are expected to participate in our public events and attend a dinner conversation and presentation once a semester with the entire cohort of Franke undergraduate and graduate research fellows.  Upon completion of the work, a detailed summary of the project and outcomes is to be submitted to the Program.  Note that all funded projects must cite the support of The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities in all advertising materials and products.

FRANKE GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH AWARD APPLICATION 2022 – 2023

Your application should include the following components:

Name of Applicant and Yale Affiliation:

Title of Proposed Project:

Budget with Description:

Timeline for Project:

Letter of Recommendation in support of project work:

(This letter should be from current faculty mentor, and the letter should indicate that the proposed research does not conflict with the postdoc’s primary research goals

Description of Project (in no more than 1,000 words):

NB:  We anticipate receiving a large number of submissions, so please format the file name of your submitted application in either of the following ways: 

FrankeProgram.GraduateStudentAward.[FirstNameLastName].Date

FrankeProgram.PostDocAward.[FirstNameLastName].Date

Join us for the 13th talk of Yale Quantum Institute series of nontechnical talks aiming to bring a new regard to quantum physics and STEM by having experts cast new light on often-overlooked aspects of scientific work.

Years ago, physicist Stephon Alexander received life-changing advice: to discover real physics, he needed to stop memorizing and start taking risks. For this public talk based on his book Fear of a Black Universe, Professor Alexander shows that great physics requires us to think outside the mainstream – to improvise and rely on intuition. His approach led him to three principles that shape all theories of the universe: the principle of invariance, the quantum principle, and the principle of emergence. Professor Alexander uses them to explore some of physics’ greatest mysteries, from what happened before the big bang to how the universe makes consciousness possible. Drawing on his experience as a Black physicist, he makes a powerful case for diversifying our scientific communities. Compelling and empowering, Fear of a Black Universe offers remarkable insight into the art of physics.

Due to the Yale Covid policies, only members of the Yale Community can attend this event in person. The event will be livestreamed here for all to enjoy. 

REGISTER TO RECEIVE THE LINK FOR THE LIVESTREAM HERE

This event is co-sponsored by The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities.

https://youtu.be/nYN5RS6r2ZE

We are delighted to present a talk by Diego Ellis-Soto, a current Franke Fellow now in his second year with our program.

The movement of large groups of animals – such as flocks of birds or schooling of fish – often appears harmonic and soothing to the eye, almost as if animal collectives were dancing to some musical rules not visible to the human eye.  Yet at the same time, the sound of the natural world is increasingly shaped by the timber of the drums of human activities and habitat destruction across the world.  In this talk, Ellis-Soto combines new cutting edge technology, with biological principles and musical theory to take a dive into representing the lives of animal collectives through art and music.  From music on a farm, art exhibitions, up to involving of local youth, we invite you to take the plunge into the sounds of animals collectives and ecosystems.

https://youtu.be/VyKsp5U9FFw

We look forward to hosting a virtual talk by Carl Zimmer, renowened science writer and author of the “Matter” column at The New York Times.  His latest book, Life’s Edge:  The Search for What it Means to be Alive, will be the subject of this talk.

In 1708, the chemist Georg Ernst Stahl posed a question. “Above all else, consequently, it comes down to this–to know, what is life?”  

In 2018, the biologists Francis Westall and André Brack took stock of what science had learned over the intervening three centuries: “It is commonly said that there as many definitions of life as there are people trying to define it.” 

In Life’s Edge, Carl Zimmer explores the nature of life and investigates why scientists have struggled to draw its boundaries. He handles pythons, goes spelunking to visit hibernating bats, and even tries his hand at evolution. Zimmer visits scientists making miniature human brains to ask when life begins, and follows a voyage that delivered microscopic animals to the moon, where they now exist in a state between life and death. From the coronavirus to consciousness, Zimmer demonstrates that biology, for all its advances, has yet to achieve its greatest triumph: a full theory of life.

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is pleased to award the Franke Fellowship in Science and the Humanities, which is made possible by the generous support of Mr. and Mrs. Richard (‘53) and Barbara Franke. Three to five fellowships of $2,000 will be awarded to rising seniors to support senior essay, research, or art project proposals that explore new and productive intellectual connections between science and the humanities. Interdisciplinary research or art projects should explicitly engage both scientific and humanistic issues or content. Awards are intended to support research during the summer between junior and senior year, or during the following academic year.

Awardees will be asked to participate in dinners with Franke Program faculty and our benefactors to discuss the proposed projects (in the fall) and to present the final results of their work (during the spring semester).

Fellowship monies are intended to offset costs related to the proposed research or project. These include travel costs, accommodation, and supplies and materials.

Apply here:  http://bit.ly/3jfV9sS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymitlMUE6WE

We are delighted to host a virtual talk on Wednesday, March 2nd at 4.30 p.m. with acclaimed author Kirk Wallace Johnson, who will speak on the subject of his celebrated book The Feather Thief.

In June 2009, a young American scaled the walls of the British Museum of Natural History, broke out a window, climbed inside, and stole a million dollars’ worth of dead birds - scientific specimens preserved over the centuries by a chain of curators who recognized that these birds held answers to questions that scientists hadn’t even considered.  He stripped them of their tags (bearing information crucial to research), and then hacked them to bits with a scalpel, filling Ziploc bags with thousands of iridescent, glimmering feathers, which he sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cultish community of Victorian salmon fly-tiers.  In The Feather Thief, Johnson descends into this ‘feather underground,’ tracking down the missing birds across the world in a madcap quest for some kind of justice.

This American Life produced a special on the book with our guest;  you may want to listen to it here.

We are indebted to Dr. Mark Adams, Senior Curator of the Bird Group at the Tring Museum, for providing this paper on the subject of the Tring heist and other notable thefts.

Register in advance for this webinar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eyq9oO4EBgY

Mariano Sigman is one of the most outstanding neuroscientists in the world, with over 150 publications in the most prestigious scientific journals. He is also passionate about experimentation and has worked with magicians, chess masters, musicians, athletes and visual artists to bring his knowledge of neuroscience to different aspects of human culture and apply it in different contexts. He has participated twice (2016 and 2017) in the TED global events in Vancouver, the second with Dan Ariely. In his conferences, he teaches how the mind works and what lessons we can learn about decision making, leadership, team management, personal development or creative skills, his presentations always with a high level of participation from the audience through experiments and games.

He obtained his degree in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires, PhD in Neuroscience (PhD) in New York and did a post-Doctorate in Cognitive Sciences at the College de France (Paris). In 2016, he was awarded the Pio XI Medal, from the Pontifical Academy of Science, one of the most outstanding prizes of science (shared among others with Stephen Hawking, and several Nobel prize winners).

Beyond academy, Mariano Sigman’s research has had practical implications in Medicine (for example in the diagnosis of vegetative or autistic patients), in Education (with effective interventions to improve decision-making and learning in schools throughout Latin America) and in Art (in a project “The morphology of the look” that has been exhibited in New York, Austria, Moscow, Mexico, Japan… and was presented in 2017 at the Venice Biennale). He has also developed an extensive career in the proliferation of science that includes TV programmes and hundreds of articles published in different editorial media. He is also the author of the bestseller The Secret Life of the Mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3V2ddYvEMI

Drawn from Imperial Intimacies, A Tale of Two Islands, the lecture will discuss how Professor Hazel Carby employed the insights of Stuart Hall into the nature of identities “as stories we tell ourselves,” and systems of recognition that we adopt, to trace the role of visual culture in creation of British imperial subjects and subjectivity.

Hazel V. Carby HonFLSW, FRSA, is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies Yale University and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.  She is currently a Visiting Research Professor & Humanities Institute Faculty at Dartmouth College.

She is the author of Imperial Intimacies, A Tale of Two Islands (Verso, 2019) selected as one of the “Books of the Year for 2019,” by the Times Literary Supplement.  Winner of the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, 2020.

Finalist John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, ASA, 2020.

Highly Commended PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, 2020.

Author of Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (1999); Race Men (1998); Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987); Hazel Carby is also a co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982).

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6ANm6sK2Ac

We are delighted that famed author and mathematician Jordan Ellenberg will be joining us for a virtual talk this semester.  In his words, our speaker wrote a book about geometry and found himself, surprisingly, constantly talking about poetry.  In this talk, he will cover various subjects, including Wordsworth’s friendship with the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton;  Andrei Markov’s random walk through Eugene Onegin and the idea of mechanical language production;  what geometry and poetry seem to look for in each other;  and the vision of geometry expressed in the poem by Rita Dove, whence his talk title originates.

Since March 2020, The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities has continued our robust programming schedule with virtual talks.  We have been delighted to note the large number of attendees for each and the interest many have expressed in seeing the videos of the talks.  Please note that most of our sessions are recorded, and the videorecordings are available on our website in the Calendar Archive section.

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale

Franke Interdisciplinary Research Awards for Graduate Students

Academic specialization increasingly leads to isolation among scholars and the disciplines they study, resulting in misunderstanding and the erosion of common intellectual goals.  We hold that this isolation is also a barrier to research progress on interdisciplinary questions situated between traditional areas of study.  The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is founded on the twin convictions that the fundamental questions that engage humanists must be informed by basic insights of science and that meaningful scientific inquiry in turn deepens with humanistic knowledge. The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale is excited to announce the Franke Interdisciplinary Research Awards for graduate students.  This summer, the Program plans to select up to five interdisciplinary research projects to receive funding of $2,000 each to be held during the academic year 2021 – 2022.  We welcome proposals that advance our mission of fostering communication, mutual understanding, collaborative research, and teaching among diverse scientific and humanistic disciplines.  Research proposals are required to have two faculty members from different departments/disciplines as intellectual mentors.  Letters of recommendation will be requested from these faculty mentors for short-listed candidates.  Awardees are required to attend two dinners, which at this point we expect will be virtual, in fall 2021 and spring 2022 and present their projects.  Previous awardees and projects including the following:

Cera Smith – Getting Blackness in the Body: What Sculpture and Literature Teach Each Other about Confronting Anti-Black Racism

Clio Doyle – Shakespeare’s Virtual Environments

Cody Musselman – CrossFit’s Messianic Medicine: Evaluating Moral Imperatives and Scientific Authority in the Wellness Industry

Diego Soto – Flocking Pigeons Orchestrate Music for a Machine:  Translating Animal Collective Behavior into Music Theory through Artificial Intelligence

Rosie Aboody – How do I Know What You Know?  Building a Theoretical Framework of Epistemic Inference

William Kwok – Mass Killings as a Coordination Problem in the Shadow of War

Please complete and submit this document electronically to the Program’s Assistant Director, Ty Kamp (ty.kamp@yale.edu), along with your project proposal by August 27, 2021.

https://inferenceproject.yale.edu/no-cause-concern-indefinite-causal-ord…

Join us on Monday, July 19 for an Inference Project talk by Professor Elise Crull of The Department of Philosophy at City University of New York.

Understanding the sorts of explanations and inferences that causal processes countenance is of course of great interest to philosophers and physicists (among others).  But what can be said about physical processes that fail to exhibit classical causal structure? Indefinite causal ordering among events made possible by quantum correlations has become a fruitful arena of study recently, yielding new insights for quantum computing and communication, approaches to quantum gravity, and even for foundational issues in quantum mechanics.

In this talk, Professor Elise Crull will focus on how indefinite causal ordering may provide deeper understanding regarding the central property of quantum mechanics: entanglement.  She will then consider what this case study might imply regarding traditional philosophical views of cause as a relation between independent events.     

Register in advance for this meeting and for the following day’s moderated conversation with Professor Yemima Ben-Menahem of the Department of Philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Non-linear phenomena like climate systems and epidemics display rich patterns of behavior across various temporal and spatial scales.   These rich patterns often produce, in students of these phenomena, the temptation to attribute to them underlying causes.   Professor Winsberg will review examples of this from the fields of climate change and epidemiology, by experts and lay people alike.   But causal inference in these contexts is especially epistemically perilous.   He will discuss, in particular, a method of causal attribution that has been especially popular during the COVID-19 epidemic:  the method of synthetic controls, and he will explain why, despite appearances to the contrary, it is not a magic bullet for overcoming these problems.

Eric Winsberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida.   He works in the philosophy of science, especially in philosophy of climate science and philosophy of physics.  He is especially interested in the role of models and simulations in the sciences.   He is the author of Science in the Age of Computer Simulation from the University of Chicago Press and Philosophy and Climate Science from Cambridge University Press, as well the forthcoming Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Science on Models in Science.  Over the last several months, he has focused on the use of models and methods of causal inference in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Register in advance for this meeting and for the post-talk discussion that will take place on June 18th.

Mozart’s Starling: A Story of Art, Language, and the Human Relationship with the Natural World

The story sounds apocryphal, but it’s actually true.  In the spring of 1784, Mozart found a starling in a Viennese shop mimicking the motif from one of his own concertos, and he took the bird home as a pet.  How did it come to pass that the sublime classical composer found inspiration in one of the world’s most ecologically despised species?  The answer leads to a beautiful tangle of music theory, linguistics, the nature of creative inspiration, and the human relationship with the wild earth.

Register in advance for this meeting here (https://yale.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwqcuitrDwoGtFUhZiy7y_RfmIVHPwXlzy4).

In the current epistemological debate, scientific models are not only considered as useful devices for explaining facts or discovering new entities, laws, and theories, but also rubricated under various new labels: from the classical ones, as abstract entities and idealizations, to the more recent, as fictions, surrogates, credible worlds, missing systems, make-believe, parables, functional, epistemic actions, revealing capacities. Professor Magnani of the University of Pavia in Italy will discuss these approaches showing some of their epistemological inadequacies, also taking advantage of recent results in cognitive science. The main aim is to revise and criticize fictionalism, also reframing the received idea of abstractness and ideality of models with the help of recent results coming from the area of distributed cognition (common coding) and abductive cognition (manipulative).  Professor Magnani will illustrate how scientific modeling activity can be better described taking advantage of the concept of “epistemic warfare,” which sees scientific enterprise as a complicated struggle for rational knowledge in which it is crucial to distinguish epistemic (for example scientific models) from non-epistemic (for example fictions, falsities, propaganda) weapons. Finally, he will contend that it is misleading to analyze models in science by adopting a confounding mixture of static and dynamic aspects of the scientific enterprise. Scientific models in a static perspective (for example when inserted in a textbook) certainly appear fictional to the epistemologist, but their fictional character disappears in case a dynamic perspective is adopted. A reference to the originative role of thought experiment in Galileo’s discoveries and to the usefulness of Feyerabend’s counterinduction in criticizing the role of resemblance in model-based cognition is also provided, to further enrich the answer to the question indicated by the title of this talk.

Professor Jim Weatherall of UC Irvine will lead a conversation with Professor Magnani the next day at 3 p.m.

When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that many facial recognition technologies misclassify women and darker-skinned faces, she delves into an investigation of widespread bias in algorithms.

Immediately following the screening, Professor Elisa Celis will moderate a discussion with the filmmaker, Shalini Kantayya.

This event is co-sponsored by the Computation and Society Initiative at Yale and the Office of the FAS Dean of Science.

Professor Elisa Celis:

Professor Elisa Celis is an assistant professor in the Statistics & Data Science department at Yale University.  She studies the manifestation of social and economic biases in our online lives via the algorithms that encode and perpetuate them.  Her work spans multiple disciplines including data science, machine learning, and theoretical computer science with an emphasis on fairness and diversity in artificial intelligence and machine learning.  Professor Celis’ research focuses on problems that arise at the interface of computation and machine learning and its societal and economic ramifications. She approaches these problems by using both experimental and theoretical techniques.  Her work spans multiple areas including social computing and crowdsourcing, data science, and algorithm design with an emphasis on fairness and diversity in artificial intelligence and machine learning.  Her recent works include methodologies for debiasing data, approaches to produce diverse ranking and recommendation systems, mechanisms to avoid discrimination in access to opportunity in online advertisements, and the design of voting techniques that allow for the election of diverse committees.

Presenters Nikos Salingaros and Richard Taylor will discuss the latest scientific findings on our brain and human perceptual system architecture and how they might help explain the existence of certain ornamental tropes, such as fractals, in cultures around the world.  Ornament will be examined from the perspective of mathematical properties, biophilia, and neuroscience.  How can ornament help us create architecture more in tune with our neurological needs?

This event is sponsored by the Yale School of Architecture, The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, and the MacMillan Center at Yale.

Learn more about the Colloquium and find the Zoom link here.

In the first part of his presentation, Professor Ay will provide an introduction to the field of causal networks. He will focus on instructive simple examples in order to highlight the core conceptual and philosophical ideas that underlie the theory. This approach provides a clear semantics that allows us to distinguish between causation and correlation. It also allows us to study how cause-effect relations give rise to particular kinds of correlations, which can then be exploited for inferring causal relations from correlations. However, this kind of inference, which is based on observations only, turns out to be rather limited. In addition to observing a system, one can also apply experimental interventions and thereby reveal causal structures that would not follow from correlational information.  This is one instance of system identification through experimental perturbations. Professor Ay will conclude his presentation with an extension of the interventional calculus by a “knockout calculus,” which is based on a kind of structural intervention. This allows us to reveal a more fine-grained causal description of the underlying system.

Join us for a post-talk follow-up discussion with Professors Carlo Rovelli and Eric Winsberg.

Marc Brackett, Ph.D., is the Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a Professor in the Child Study Center of Yale University. He is the lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning that has been adopted by nearly 2,000 pre-K through high schools across the United States and in other countries. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).

As a researcher for over 20 years, Brackett has focused on the role of emotions and emotional intelligence in learning, decision making, creativity, relationships, health, and performance. He has published 125 scholarly articles and received numerous awards and accolades for his work in this area. He also consults regularly with corporations, such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google on integrating the principles of emotional intelligence into employee training and product design. Most recently, he co-founded Oji Life Lab, a corporate learning firm that develops innovative digital learning systems on emotional intelligence.

Brackett’s mission is to educate the world about the value of emotions and the skills associated with using them wisely. “I want everyone to become an emotion scientist”, he says. “We need to be curious explorers of our own and others’ emotions so they can help us achieve our goals and improve our lives.”

In this virtual conversation, Tonika Johnson will discuss how she came to use her creativity to explore urban segregation in Chicago with her Folded Map project and how it can serve as a resource for understanding, an empathy generator, and a conduit for action.

This talk will consider the importance of mapping for the understanding of epidemic diseases since John Snow’s work on cholera in London. The focus will be on ways in which traditional maps have greatly helped to understand the way in which race, pre-existing conditions, and air pollution have served as drivers of the coronavirus pandemic.

Professor Snowden received his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1975. His books include Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy: Apulia, 1900-1922 (1984); The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, 1919-1922 (1989); Naples in the Times of Cholera (1995) and The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962 (2006).  Conquest was awarded the Gustav Ranis Prize from the MacMillan Center at Yale in 2007 as “the best book on an international topic by a member of the Yale Faculty,” the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize by the American Historical Association as the best work on Italy in any period, and the 2008 Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine.

He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Italian history, European social and political history, and the history of medicine.

Sustainability has emerged as a global priority over the past several years with important commitments made through the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. But political divides, regional disputes, and deep disagreements over core principles have made it nearly impossible to chart a course toward a sustainable future. This talk will highlight fresh thinking on sustainability from a new book that emerged from a multi-year initiative from the Yale School of the Environment that engaged a diverse set of environmental thought leaders from diverse disciplines and across the political spectrum. The book’s 40 essays cover such subjects as innovation, communications, environmental justice, Big Data, public health, and climate change — all with an emphasis on identifying pathways to a sustainability future.

Dan Esty is the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale’s School of the Environment and Yale Law School. He served as head of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection from 2011 to 2014 and in several leadership roles at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 1989 to 1993.

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is delighted to welcome our 2020/2021 Class of Franke Undergraduate Fellows.

From a highly competitive field, five undergraduates from across the disciplines were chosen.  You can learn more about each here.

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale

Franke Postdoctoral Research Award

In summer 2020, the Program will select a few interdisciplinary research projects to receive funding of $2K each.  Preference will be given to scholars whose areas of research and methods advance our mission of fostering communication, mutual understanding, collaborative research, and teaching among diverse scientific and humanistic disciplines.  Funding should be used to develop an interdisciplinary aspect of a fellow’s current research program.  Awards are made upon evaluation of the submitted proposals by a selection committee that includes the Director of the Program and members of the Franke Program Advisory Board (https://frankeprogram.yale.edu/people).  Please complete and submit this page electronically to the Program’s Assistant Director, Ty Kamp (ty.kamp@yale.edu), along with your project proposal by August 1, 2020.  Successful applicants will be informed by August 20, 2020.  Fellows should be prepared to present their projects in a virtual gathering this fall.

Academic specialization increasingly leads to isolation among scholars and the disciplines they study, resulting in misunderstanding and the erosion of common intellectual goals.  We hold that this isolation is also a barrier to research progress on interdisciplinary questions situated between traditional areas of study.  The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is founded on the twin convictions that the fundamental questions that engage humanists must be informed by basic insights of science and that meaningful scientific inquiry depends on humanistic knowledge.  Our goal is to build an intellectual community of scholars who think in a pan-disciplinary manner as we believe that this mind-set generates original, creative and innovative breakthroughs.  The Franke Program sponsors lectures, colloquia, conferences, undergraduate courses, faculty seminars, and performances, as well as independent research projects devised by undergraduate and graduate students.  Once selected, awardees are expected to attend a dinner conversation and presentation once a semester with the entire cohort of Franke undergraduate and graduate research fellows.  Upon completion of the work, a detailed summary of the project and outcomes is to be submitted to the Program.  Note that all funded projects must cite the support of The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities in all advertising materials and products. 

FRANKE POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH AWARD APPLICATION 2020 – 2021

Your application should include the following components:

Name of Applicant and Yale Affiliation:

Title of Proposed Project:

Budget with Description:

Timeline for Project:

Letter of Recommendation in support of project work:

(This letter should be from current faculty mentor, and the letter should indicate that the proposed research does not conflict with the postdoc’s primary research goals

Description of Project (in no more than 1,000 words):

NB:  We anticipate receiving a large number of submissions, so please format the file name of your submitted application in this way: 

FrankeProgram.PostDocAward.[FirstNameLastName].Date.

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is pleased to award the Franke Fellowship in Science and the Humanities, which is made possible by the generous support of Mr. and Mrs. Richard (‘53) and Barbara Franke. Three to five fellowships of $2,000 will be awarded to rising seniors to support senior essay, research, or art project proposals that explore new and productive intellectual connections between science and the humanities. Interdisciplinary research or art projects should explicitly engage both scientific and humanistic issues or content. Awards are intended to support research during the summer between junior and senior year, or during the following academic year.

Awardees will be asked to participate in dinners with Franke Program faculty and our benefactors to discuss the proposed projects (in the fall) and to present the final results of their work (during the spring semester).

Fellowship monies are intended to offset costs related to the proposed research or project. These include travel costs, accommodation, and supplies and materials.

The deadline is March 6, 2020.

Application Information:

Applicants should submit the following materials:
-  a project abstract (125 words or less)
-  a three-page proposal detailing the objectives of the project, the means by which it will be carried out, the applicant’s preparation and motivation for the proposed work, and how this interdisciplinary project relates to the applicant’s career plans and aspirations
- a budget outlining project costs

Applicants should arrange for the submission of a letter of recommendation from a faculty project mentor.  This individual should identify himself or herself as the mentor for the proposed project in the submitted letter. Please request this letter of recommendation well in advance of the deadline.

If a language other than English is needed in order to conduct the proposed project, applicants should also arrange for the submission of a language evaluation form by a faculty member. If the applicant is a native speaker of the language, the proposal should mention as much.
 

In this talk, Ross Andersen will discuss what he has learned about bringing the humanities to bear on the sciences, drawing from his own essays and other pieces in The Atlantic.

Taking a Random Walk: a scientific approach to art

Join us for the 10th talk of Yale Quantum Institute series of nontechnical talks aiming to bring a new regard to quantum physics and STEM by having experts cast new light on often-overlooked aspects of scientific work. For this event, we will investigate science and art with visual artist Werner Sun.

As two ways of knowing the world, art and science have been labeled either as diametric opposites or as strange bedfellows. Can both descriptions be correct? Ithaca-based visual artist with exhibitions in north America, Werner Sun discusses how his background in physics informs his work with sculpted images, in order to spark a conversation about the intersection of art and science.

Talk open to all and will be accessible to students, researchers, the wider university public and the New Haven Community. This event is co-sponsored by The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities

Get your free ticket here

SUPERIOR: How bias and prejudice are perpetuated by science

As ethnic nationalism rises around the world, race science is experiencing a revival, fuelled by the abuse of data and facts by politically-motivated groups. The story of who humans are and how we evolved is being rewritten to suit these agendas.

But even well-intentioned scientists, through their unconscious use of old-fashioned categories, betray their suspicion that race has some basis in biology. In truth, it is no more real than it was hundreds of years ago, when both racial and gender categories were defined and hardened by those in power.

In Superior: The Return of Race Science, award-winning science journalist Angela Saini explores the concept of race in science, from its origins to the present day. Following her acclaimed 2017 book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, in this talk Angela explores the damaging legacy of prejudice in science, and why researchers still fall victim to bias.

“In 2010 it began to be possible to sequence whole genomes from ancient human remains, making it possible to ask and answer questions about how present-day people relate to ancient people, and how ancient people related to each other, that simply had not been possible to address before. The findings have sometimes conflicted with prevailing understandings—rejecting some mainstream theories in archaeology, supporting other theories, and in multiple cases revealing previously unanticipated processes. I will focus my presentation on a case example: the evidence that between 5000-3500 years ago, people with ancestry from the Steppe north of the Black and Caspian Sea made a profound major genetic impact on both Europe and South Asia, probably spreading the Indo-European languages that are predominant in both regions, a series of findings that have unfolded over about a dozen ancient DNA papers and that go a long way to resolving the more-than-200-year-old mystery about the origin and spread of Indo-European languages. The overall context for my presentation is that technological developments have brought science into an area that until the last few years has been the province of the humanities, opening up dialogues between disciplines that have very different intellectual traditions but are addressing abutting issues. While the very different cultures in the sciences and the humanities in some cases lead to misunderstanding, these interactions in fact represent a welcome opportunity for intellectual progress and dialogue.

Learn more about Dr. David Emil Reich and his genetics research here.

Please note the start time of 5 p.m. for the talk.

People divide the world into objects (like rocks and toasters) and agents (like people and dogs).  How do we decide where robots should fall along this divide?  We’ll discuss some of the ways in which we view robots as different from objects, agents, and even other technologies (like virtual avatars).

How did human culture take on the complexity manifest in all societies today?  Gary Tomlinson adopts a long perspective to answer this question, looking back across the last 500,000 years. Joining capacities of early human perception to mechanisms of cultural and biological evolution, he offers a new model of the emergence of modern humanity. 

At this private dinner, we celebrate this year’s cohort of Franke Undergraduate and Graduate Fellows.  Over dinner at the Whitney, our Fellows will delivery their research findings in short presentations.

Our 2018/2019 Fellows are:

Undergraduate Fellows

Marie Freudenburg - Worship, Medicine, and the Ancient World: Investigating Healing Narratives at the Temple of Asclepius

Raeven Grant - Zika and the Media: A Comparative Analysis of Zika’s Portrayal in Brazilian and American News Over Time

Hannah Hauptman - Archival Research on the South Cuba Sponge Fishery (1890-1930) for History Senior Essay

Zachary Smithline - Phenomenologies: Visual and Moral Imagining at Thirteenth-Century Bamberg Cathedral

Franklin Eccher - “Not in My Backyard”: The Human Dimensions to Native Cutthroat Trout Reintroduction in the Mountain West

Oriana Tang - Body, Time, and Techno-Orientalism in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro and Nam June Paik

Graduate Fellows

Mary Petrone - Motivating Behavior Change among Community Health Workers using Performance Dashboards in Kampala, Uganda

Tyler Lutz - Science in Fiction: Modern Physics Mirror and Muse

Davis Butner - Sounding Sacred: An Interfaith Comparison of the Evolution of Religious Architectural Acoustics and Sacred Musical Practices

Ambre Dromgoole - “I’ll Keep On Living After I Die”: Black Women Songwriters, Gospel Music, and the Historical Record

Zeyu Wang/Benjamin Olsen - The In-situ Occupiable Drawing:  Augmented Reality and Architectural Representation of Heritage Sites

Official bio for our guest:

Jack D. Hidary works on AI and Quantum Computing at Alphabet (Google X).  Jack’s work on AI includes investigation into the dynamics of generalization of deep learning  neural networks.  Here is a link to Jack’s recent  AI papers.  Jack’s work in quantum computing includes a forthcoming book on  applied quantum computing.

Jack’s first company he founded is EarthWeb,  a company dedicated to the needs of tech professionals.  Jack led the company from its inception through three rounds of investment and then its IPO.  Under Jack’s leadership, EarthWeb acquired Dice.com, a website that connects users with IT positions, and other sites dedicated to the needs of IT professionals.  As Chairman and CEO of the public company, Jack continued to grow the company and engage with shareholders, customers and analysts.  (NYSE: DHX) www.dice.com

After Dice, Jack co-founded and led Vista Research, a research web platform for investment firms.  Jack and team sold Vista to S&P after 3 years of growth and gaining a multinational client base.  Jack serves as Chairman of Primary Insight www.primaryinsight.com, a web-based financial firm led by alumni of Vista.

Committed to community and philanthropic causes, he has received several industry and community awards as well as being recognized as a Global Leader of Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum, Davos.  He serves on several boards including the X Prize Foundation. www.xprize.org

Jack’s foundation is dedicated to medical oncology research and has supported work at Sloan Kettering and UCSF.  In this area, the foundation is particularly focused on treatments which move the field beyond chemo and external beam radiation.  The focus is on: immunotherapies, genomics, AI applied to oncology and nanomedicine.

Jack studied at Columbia University and was then awarded a Stanley Fellowship in Clinical Neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Under the fellowship at the NIH, he conducted research on the use of AI tools such as neural networks to model and analyze the data in functional neuroimaging.  

“City Unseen: New Visions of an Urban Planet”

Humanity and the planet are rapidly urbanizing. Is this good or bad? Sustainable or not?  This talk will examine cities around the world in their larger geographic contexts, and discuss how the world shapes urban landscapes and how urbanizing landscapes are reshaping the world.

Maps in the 21st century have moved far beyond their hand-drawn, paper-bound antecedents.  They are now interconnected ecosystems of computers, datasets, models, websites, primary documents, images, movies, and sound.  In this presentation,  Eric Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society will discuss how these new and rapidly changing fusions of technology, geography, and history help us see and conceive of the world and the role of human agency within it, through discussion of three kinds of “maps” describing  arguably the most altered landscape on Earth, Manhattan island.  The first map, developed through the ground-breaking Mannahatta Project, describes Manhattan in the hours immediately prior to Henry Hudson’s arrival in 1609 via over 1600 data layers and associated renderings.  The second “map” is a modern composite of the current ecosystems of the city, where buildings, streets, parks, and a surprising amount of remaining forest and wetlands, are fueling critical discussions of what the city should be and what urban life means through a first-ever set of New York City nature goals.  Finally, Sanderson will discuss Visionmaker (visionmaker.nyc), a free, online, “map” designed for ecological democracy.  Visionmaker.nyc gives all New Yorkers an opportunity to create, test, and share visions of their own neighborhoods, with detailed and comparative evaluations of socio-ecological performance.  Such new kinds of maps are critical avenues for people to see, understand, and shape New York, and other cities and locales, in the centuries to come.

Get your free ticket via Eventbrite here

Einstein and the Quantum - How to write a fun book about a really scary subject

Join us for the 7th talk of Yale Quantum Institute series of nontechnical talks aiming to bring a new regard to quantum physics and STEM by having experts cast new light on often-overlooked aspects of scientific work. For this event, we will investigate quantum physics and literature with our very own YQI member Douglas Stone.

After a long career in theoretical physics Douglas Stone wanted to write a book that would communicate the drama and creativity of being a physics researcher. As someone drawn to the field late in his studies, he recalled the intimidating barrier of complex equations, confusing diagrams and cool, but impenetrable technical terminology. In 2005, the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s miracle year, in which Einstein created relativity theory and a critical foundation stone for quantum theory, a solution occurred to him.  Tell the true story of the atomic revolution, from the point of view of Einstein, a major but ambivalent participant in this turning point for human civilization. Einstein began as the earliest and most ardent quantist, and ended up as the theory’s greatest skeptic. Due to Einstein’s ultimate rejection of quantum mechanics on philosophical grounds, his full story had not previously been presented in a unified manner, accessible to general audiences.  In this talk Stone will recount how he attempted to craft a gripping and entertaining narrative from momentous but complex history of science.

Get your free ticket via Eventbrite here

**Please note a room change for this event.  It will now be held in WHC 208 instead of the Auditorium.**

Matthew Edney, Professor of Geography; Osher Professor in the History of Cartography

University of Southern Maine

“The Limits to Mapping”

What is “mapping”? Literally, it is the act of making maps, of turning the world to paper (or digital screen). Figuratively, it is bringing something to paper (or digital screen) as if it were the world being mapped; if the methodology is sufficiently structured and systematic then, pace Alfred Korzybski or Stephen Toulmin, the map is a theory and mapping is science. The metaphor works because we all know what maps are and therefore what mapping is. Or do we? Our understanding of “the map” is determined by a network of preconceptions and convictions that are deeply rooted in modern culture, a network that has cohered only since 1800. The network constitutes “cartography.” It is a simulacrum that imagines a thing that never existed such that it does not conceal a truth so much as conceal that there is none. No singular and universal endeavor of cartography exists; what humans actually do is follow a myriad of mapping processes to produce, circulate, and consume maps. This lecture therefore reconsiders the nature and limits of mapping as the creation of spatial meaning, or of meaning construed spatially. It uses a variety of case examples, including Mark Twain’s burlesque map of Paris (1870) and a mural from Neolithic Çatalhöyük (ca. 8000 BP), first to explain why “mapping” as a necessarily social and semiotic process and then to delineate markedly different mapping strategies that are always creative and never algorithmic.

Matthew H. Edney is Osher Professor in the History of Cartography, University of Southern Maine; he also directs the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. With Mary Pedley he has edited Cartography in the European Enlightenment (Chicago, 2019), Volume Four of The History of Cartography. He is the author of Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, 1997), numerous articles and book chapters, and the forthcoming Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (Chicago, 2019). He explores ideas relating to the history and nature of maps and mapping practices at mappingasprocess.net.

Following on the success of our Franke Ideas Salons last year, we are delighted to invite any Yale faculty members to the first convening of this unique series this semester. The Franke Ideas Salon is an informal meeting and idea-space intended to facilitate inter-disciplinary interaction and intellectual exchange.  The event, as per usual, will consist of two faculty members from two distinct disciplines addressing a  theme from the vantage point of their respective fields with a brief presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A.  Dinner and drinks will be served, and our gathering hopes to have ~20-30 guests. 

Our Salon speakers for September 12th are:  Tracey Meares (Law School) and Laura Wexler (American Studies, WGSS), and the theme of their conversation is Identification & Identity: technologies of witnessing.

Here is a bit of reading if you’d like to do some beforehand:  https://www.cnn.com/2011/09/20/opinion/wexler-witness-memory-davis/

and

https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4648-our-image-of-lincoln

Please respond by September 10, 2018 to frankeprogram@yale.edu, so we may gather a count for catering purposes.

Dava Sobel, a former New York Times science reporter, is the author of Longitude (Walker 1995 and 2005, Penguin 1996), Galileo’s Daughter (Walker 1999 and 2011, Penguin 2000), The Planets (Viking 2005, Penguin 2006), and A More Perfect Heaven (Walker / Bloomsbury, 2011 and 2012). She has also co-authored six books, including Is Anyone Out There? with astronomer Frank Drake.

A long-time science contributor to Harvard Magazine,Audubon, Discover, Life,Omni, and The New Yorker, she continues to write for several on-lineand print publications.

Ms. Sobel received the 2001 Individual Public Service Award from the National Science Board “for fostering awareness of science and technology among broad segments of the general public.” Also in 2001, the Boston Museum of Science gave her its prestigious Bradford Washburn Award for her “outstanding contribution toward public understanding of science, appreciation of its fascination, and the vital role it plays in all our lives.” In October 2004, in London, Ms. Sobel accepted the Harrison Medal from the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, in recognition of her contribution to increasing awareness of the science of horology by the general public, through her writing and lecturing. In 2008 the Astronomical Society of the Pacific presented her with its Klumpke-Roberts Award for “increasing the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy.” Her 2014 Cultural Award from the Eduard Rhein Foundation in Germany commends her “for using her profound scientific knowledge and literary talent to combine facts with fiction by merging scientific adventures and human stories in order to give the history of science a human face.”

From January through March 2006, Ms. Sobel served as the Robert Vare Non-fiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago, where she taught a seminar in science writing while pursuing research for her stage play about sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, called “And the Sun Stood Still.” Her play was commissioned by Manhattan Theatre Club through the Alfred P. Sloan Initiative, and was also supported by a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

In May 2011, as the Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Doenges Visiting Artist/Scholar, Ms. Sobel taught a course called “Writing Creatively about Science” at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia. In fall 2013 she began a two-year appointment as the Joan Leiman Jacobson Visiting Nonfiction Writer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Invited to stay on for a third academic year, Ms. Sobel is happy to continue her association with the Smithies through May 2016.

Longitude went through twenty-nine hardcover printings before being re-issued in October 2005 in a special tenth-anniversary edition with a foreword by astronaut Neil Armstrong. Soon after its original publication in 1995, the book was translated into two dozen foreign languages and became a national and international bestseller, much to Ms. Sobel’s surprise. It won several literary prizes, including the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and “Book of the Year” in England. Together with William J. H. Andrewes, who introduced her to the subject of longitude, Ms. Sobel co-authored The Illustrated Longitude (Walker 1998 and 2003).

She based her book Galileo’s Daughter on 124 surviving letters to Galileo from his eldest child. Ms. Sobel translated the letters from the original Italian and used them to elucidate Galileo’s life work. Galileo’s Daughter won the 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science and technology, a 2000 Christopher Award, and was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. The paperback edition enjoyed five consecutive weeks as the #1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller.

A sequel, Letters to Father, containing the full text of Galileo’s daughter’s correspondence in both English and Italian, was published by Walker in 2001. An English-only edition, a Penguin “Classic,” followed in 2003.

The PBS science program “NOVA” produced a television documentary called “Lost At Sea — The Search for Longitude,” which was based on Ms. Sobel’s book. Granada Films of England created a dramatic version of the story, “Longitude,” starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon, which aired on A&E as a four-hour made-for-TV movie. A two-hour “NOVA” documentary based on Galileo’s Daughter, called “Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens,” first aired on public television in October 2002, and won an Emmy in the category of historical programming.

Lecture engagements have taken Ms. Sobel to speak at The Smithsonian Institution, The Explorers’ Club, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, The Folger Shakespeare Library, The New York Public Library, The Hayden Planetarium, the U. S. Naval Observatory, The Royal Geographical Society (London), and the American Academy in Rome. She has been a frequent guest on National Public Radio programs, including “All Things Considered,” “Fresh Air,” “Science Friday,” and “The Diane Rheem Show.” Her television appearances include C-SPAN’s “Booknotes” and “TODAY” on NBC.

A 1964 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Ms. Sobel attended Antioch College and the City College of New York before receiving her bachelor of arts degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from the University of Bath, in England, and Middlebury College, Vermont, both awarded in 2002. In December 2015, she is to receive an honorary doctor of science degree from the University of Bern, Switzerland.

A play based on Galileo’s Daughter, written by Timberlake Wertenbaker and directed by Sir Peter Hall, premiered in Bath, England, in July 2004. In October 2005, a play by Sir Arnold Wesker, based on Longitude, directed by Fiona Laird, enjoyed a successful limited engagement at the Greenwich Theatre near London.

Ms. Sobel’s own play, “And the Sun Stood Still,” was performed by the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company, Colorado, in March and April 2014, with grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts. A radio play version has been recorded and distributed by L.A. Theatre Works.

The editor of the collection Best American Science Writing 2004, published by Ecco Press, Ms. Sobel has served as a judge for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and the Lewis Thomas Prize awarded by Rockefeller University to scientists who distinguish themselves as authors.

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is excited to announce the launch of the Franke Ideas Salon, an initiative for Yale University faculty that we hope will greatly enhance intellectual engagement across disciplines. ​ The Franke Ideas Salon is a new monthly informal meeting intended to facilitate inter-disciplinary interaction and intellectual exchange.  The event will consist of two faculty members from two distinct disciplines addressing a single theme from their unique vantage points with a brief presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A.  Dinner will be served and our gathering hopes to have 20 – 30 guests at each event.

The speakers for the second meeting of the Salon will be announced soon.

EVENT DETAILS

TIME:  6 – 8 p.m., March 28, 2018

PLACE:  MORSE HOC HOUSE

RSVP:  frankeprogram@yale.edu

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is excited to announce the launch of the Franke Ideas Salon, an initiative for Yale University faculty that we hope will greatly enhance intellectual engagement across disciplines. ​ The Franke Ideas Salon is a new monthly informal meeting intended to facilitate inter-disciplinary interaction and intellectual exchange.  The event will consist of two faculty members from two distinct disciplines addressing a single theme from their unique vantage points with a brief presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A.  Dinner will be served and our gathering hopes to have 20 – 30 guests at each event.

The Inaugural Salon speakers are:  Richard Prum (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) and Jonathan Kramnick (English) and the theme of their conversation is Beauty & Aesthetics.

EVENT DETAILS

TIME:  6 – 8 p.m., Feb. 15, 2018

PLACE:  MORSE HOC HOUSE

RSVP:  frankeprogram@yale.edu

Please respond by Tuesday, February 6 so that we may have a full count in hand for our caterer.

A sphere has a constant positive curvature, a banana has positive and negative curvature. A surface with constant negative curvature, called a hyperbolic plane, has been traditionally difficult to visualize. While attending a geometry workshop in 1997 at Cornell, Daina Taimina saw the fragile paper models of hyperbolic planes used by mathematicians to visual theses complex shapes. She decided to try to make more durable models, and did so by crocheting them. Daina’s curvy creations, made of yarn, are a great example of art influencing mathematics and vice-versa.

Monday, November 6

The Shulman Lectures in Science and the Humanities

Reports from Nonhuman Worlds

Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University

“Fragility, Globalism, and the End of the World”

5 pm, Room 208

Alyson Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  She will be included in the exhibition Art & Space at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and was recently included in the exhibitions The More Things Change, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Contemplating the Void and The Shapes of Space, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Light and Landscape, Storm King Art Center, and Living Color, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.  She has had solo exhibitions at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, the, and Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, among others.  Shotz was an Arts Institute Research Fellow at Stanford University in 2014- 2015, she received a Pollock Krasner Award in 2010, the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, and was the 2005-2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery.  Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, among others.

Alyson’s extraordinary oeuvre may be viewed at https://www.alysonshotz.com/.

Adele Myers and Emily Coates are both dancers and choreographers who recently produced artistic projects closely related to physics. While Adele used her imagination, instincts and knowledge about people and objects in relation to time, space, and gravity, which led her to Einstein’s Happiest Thought, Emily had an opposite creation process. Inspired by her ongoing collaboration with particle physicist Sarah Demers, in her latest piece Incarnations she uses physics as both a source of movement and a “found object,” which she intertwines with dance history. During this evening, we will consider how the creative process influenced the final result, thanks to video excerpts of both performances and discussions with Adele and Emily.

Registration link here:  http://quantuminstitute.yale.edu/einsteins-happiest-dance.

The Cultural Heritage in Science and the Humanities Reading Group will meet tonight at 7 p.m. in WHC 208.

As always, food and refreshments will be served.

Tonight’s meeting will feature a presentation and discussion from Dr. Chitra Ramalingam, Lecturer in the Department of History and Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art.  Dr. Ramalingam will deliver a talk titled “The Laboratory as Camera:  Experiment and the Photographic Archive of Victorian Physics.”

https://www.editingnature.org/watch-here

DNA is the basic building block of life. It is shared by all living things, providing commonality between us and nature. With the advent of CRISPR technology, we now have the capability to alter that very sequence of life, efficiently and
inexpensively, through a process called gene editing. Using gene editing we could create new solutions for environmental sustainability and public health, but without careful consideration and foresight, gene editing could also irreversibly destroy ecosystems and drastically transform the natural world as we know it.

Pioneering a new model based on inclusivity and transparency, the Editing Nature Summit will foster dialogue that spans disciplines and viewpoints to honor the complexity of this important issue. Join us for a series of public talks given by thought leaders from ecology, genetics, public policy, ethics, journalism, engineering and architecture that aim to broaden our perspectives and spur conversation.

The next meeting of the reading group Cultural Heritage in Science and the Humanities will take place Tuesday, April 11, at 7pm, Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall Street), Room 208.  As always, food and refreshments will be served.

The meeting will feature a presentation and discussion from Dr. Claire Bowern, Associate Professor in Yale Linguistics Department.  Dr. Bowern will speak about her paper, “Phylogenetic approach to the evolution of color term systems.” This paper is already uploaded to the Google Drive.  If there are any questions or concerns before our next meeting, please contact ethan.perets@yale.edu.

The Slavic Graduate Colloquium and The Yale Sustainable Food Program present Darra Goldstein, Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams College and Founding Editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture

This talk explores Russian national identity and cuisine from the 18^th century into the present.  Ever since Peter the Great opened his country to the West, the Russians have struggled with ambivalence toward outside influences.  This unease has extended beyond political wariness into cuisine, with Western foodways alternately embraced and rejected over the years.  Today, following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Western food is again politically fraught.  The economic sanctions imposed by Europe, Australia, and the U.S. have led Russia to ban imports of meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, and dairy products, causing widespread food shortages.  Russians are famously accustomed to deprivation, but these latest shortages have led not to resignation but to a gradual revival of artisanal production that is transforming Russia’s gastronomic landscape.  We can see a new form of nationalism being played out in the culinary sphere.

Sponsored by The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities;  The Yale Sustainable Food Program;  The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund;  The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures;  The Dean’s Fund;  and The Slavic Graduate Colloquium.
 

How do we visualize the complex and intangible forces which surround us? It turns out to be surprisingly difficult without employing a range of similes, resemblances, and metaphors.  Unlike science, art offers ways of looking at problems that are wobbly and uncertain, neatly sidestepping the need for rigorous quantification or stabilization. Ordinary things can stand in for the rare, the speculative or the impossible to glimpse, events can be collapsed and condensed into layered images. Our guest offers a brief overview of my practice to date, outlining the ways in which the history of science, human knowledge and our changing understanding of the universe unfold in my work through the mediums of paper, ink, and the odd bit of yarn.

Professor Samuel K. Roberts, Jr. of Columbia University will deliver this talk as the keynote address of the conference “Critical Histories and Activist Futures:  Science, Medicine and Racial Violence.”

The first meeting of the spring semester will take place Tuesday, February 14, at 7 p.m. at the Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall Street), Room 208.  Refreshments and pizza will be served.

At this meeting, the group will discuss a chapter from Timon Screech’s 2002 publication The Lens Within the Heart: the Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan, focusing in particular on the author’s discussion of the scientific microscope in eighteenth-century Japan (pages 194-211). The text is now accessible through the Google Drive (if you do not have access, please let Ethan Perets know).

Upcoming meetings:

March 14, 7 p.m., talk from Dr. Caroline Fowler, Postdoctoral Associate in the History of Art

April 11, 7 p.m., discussion TBA

May 2, 7 p.m., talk from Dr. Chitra Ramalingam, Lecturer in History of Science

*Note that this event will be held as anticipated, regardless of Thursday’s impending snowstorm.*

Connections between physics and technological invention and aspects of human life that seem far from science are both unexpected and unexpectedly common.  And rather than flowing one way - from physics to gadgets - the connections form an intricate web, linking all aspects of human culture, in a way that frustrates our convenient compartmentalizations and coarse interventions aimed at promoting technology transfer.  Our distinguished guest will discuss this theme not abstractly but with examples, ranging from music to the color of gold, and explain how quantum physics helps him do quantum physics (sic).

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is now accepting applications for our Franke Fellowship in Science and the Humanities.

These competitive grants, made possible through the generous support of Mr. and Mrs. Richard (‘53) and Barbara Franke, are awarded to rising Yale College seniors to support senior essay, research, or art project proposals that explore new and productive intellectual connections between science and the humanities.  Fellowships are intended to fund research during the summer between junior and senior year, or during the following academic year.

Successful applicants will receive up to $2,000 and will be expected to produce a presentation of their work.  Fellows will also participate in two dinners with their advisors and the donors of the Program.  Refer to the attached documents for help in preparing requested materials.

Please search the student grants database for “Franke” to learn more.  We shall be hosting an information session for the fellowship sometime in February;  details to follow.

The history of the restoration of native species is inextricable from the history of nativism, but in ways that are not immediately apparent. To see how nativism shaped ecological restoration in the United States, it is necessary to consider not only why people came to care about native species, but how they proposed to protect them. During the interwar years wildflower preservation societies attempted to exert control over “new immigrants,” while wildlife preservation societies established the nation’s first wildlife reservations on Indian reservations that the federal government was systematically dismantling in order to erode tribal sovereignty. Today, these societies’ successors, The Nature Conservancy and National Wildlife Refuge System, manage 119 million acres and 150 million acres respectively, and we should consider to what extent contemporary ecological intervention remains implicated by this history of disempowerment and dispossession.

Bio:  Laura J. Martin is a Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and the Department of the History of Science. In 2015 she received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, specializing in evolutionary ecology and environmental history. She has been awarded national fellowships in history and in ecology. Her research explores how humans intentionally and unintentionally shape the distribution and diversity of other species. Her current project, “Saving Species: Ecological Restoration from the Dust Bowl to De-extinction,” examines the history of ecological restoration as an idea, practice, and scientific discipline.

http://environment.harvard.edu/about/fellows/laura-j-martin

If labs and museums have a common origin in the rationality of European Enlightement, I argue that they have been redefined after the Second World War with a contradictory injunction : their collections have to circulate globally, because they concern the public at large, but they have to be secured, because their value increases on the market. The classical need to store collections has been transformed into an injunction to stockpile goods for a coming catastrophe, with different relations to the future. I will illustrate this claim through cases from my research with Influenza experts in Hong Kong and with curators at the musée du quai Branly in Paris. Borrowing the notion of preparedness from the debates in global health, I will show that it sheds light in contemporary debates on the virtual museum and restitution.

Frédéric Keck is a researcher at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology and Director of the Research Department of the Quai Branly Museum . After studying philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley , he has been researching the history of anthropology and contemporary biopolitical questions. He published Claude Lévi-Strauss, une introduction (Pocket-La découverte, 2005), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, entre philosophie et anthropologie (CNRS Editions, 2008) Un monde grippé ( Flammarion, 2010). He has co-edited (with N . Vialles ) Des hommes malades des animaux, L’ Herne, 2012 and (with A. Lakoff) Sentinel devices„ Limn, 2013.

Cultural Heritage in Science and the Humanities:  An Interdisciplinary Reading Group for Graduate Students is having its first meeting of the 2016-2017 academic year.

The inaugural meeting of the graduate student reading group in Cultural Heritage in Science and the Humanities will take place Wednesday, October 5, from 7 p.m. – 8 p.m. in the Whitney Humanities Center.  Sponsored by The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, the reading group will be dedicated to discussion of interdisciplinary research topics at the interface of art and the natural sciences.  Whether you want to explore a career between the arts and sciences, have an interest in pursuing collaborative research projects, or just want to find out more about the latest arts research using scientific approaches, all interested graduate students are encouraged to attend.  The meetings will also be an opportunity to meet and interact with fellow graduate students in departments outside your own, and with overlapping interests in interdisciplinary research.

For more details, please visit our description of the program here.  Pizza and refreshments will be served.

If you are interested in receiving emails from the Cultural Heritage in Science and the Humanities graduate student reading group, please sign up for our mailing list at http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/scihumreadinggroup.
 

The Franke Program is pleased to announce the formation of a new reading group dedicated to exploring the subject of cultural heritage in science and humanities.  Dates for group meetings will be posted here, but in the meantime, you may learn more about this group here.

Maria Batlle is a social entrepreneur, film maker, sculptor, and painter from the Dominican Republic.  In 2013, she created The Muse Seek Project to make a significant impact in the education system for the deaf through music.  Every year, Ms. Batlle explores the benefits of music in education together with Yo Yo Ma, The Silk Road Ensemble, teaching artists, and educators from all over the world at Harvard University.

She directed an original documentary film about her latest initiative,“Whale Muse Seek,” which opened up the world of live whale music to deaf children, an endeavor without precedent.  It was described as a “brilliant initiative for deaf children” by Forbes magazine, as a “revolution in education” by the Dominican Minister of Culture, and presented as a “successful case of accessible tourism in the Dominican Republic” by the Dominican Ministry of Tourism.

In October 2015, the newspapers El Diario de NY and La Opinión de Los Angeles, acclaimed her work in this way:  “A hurricane called Maria is revolutionizing education for the deaf in the D.R. and soon the world.”

Can we contain some of the deadliest, most long-lasting substances ever produced?  Left over from the Cold War are a hundred million gallons of radioactive sludge, covering vast radioactive lands.  Governments around the world, desperate to protect future generations, have begun imagining society 10,000 years from now in order to create monuments that will speak across the time.  Part observational essay filmed in weapons plants, Fukushima and deep underground—and part graphic novel—Containment weaves between an uneasy present and an imaginative, troubled far future, exploring the idea that over millennia, nothing stays put.

Film screening will be followed by a discussion with the directors of this documentary.  For more information about this remarkable film, please visit the official site.

Monday, April 11th (Rescheduled Time):  Liz Lerman, Choreographer, Performer, Writer, and Educator:  “Creative Research:  Crossing Borders, Disciplines, and Domains”

We are pleased to announce that the competition for The Franke Fellowship in Science and the Humanities is now open!  Made possible through the generous support of Mr. and Mrs. Richard (‘53) and Barbara Franke, these fellowships of up to $2,000 are awarded to rising seniors to support senior essay research or art project proposals that explore new and productive intellectual connections between science and the humanities.  Please search the student grants database for “Franke” to learn more.

KINGS PARK: Stories from an American Mental Institution captures the rapidly vanishing history of our public mental health care system and the legacy of deinstitutionalization, asking “how do our past decisions concerning the treatment of people with mental health conditions influence and shape policy and practice today and into the future?”

On June 21, 1967, at the age of 17, award-winning filmmaker Lucy Winer was committed to the female violent ward of Kings Park State Hospital following a series of failed suicide attempts. Over 30 years later, Lucy returns to Kings Park for the first time since her discharge. Her journey back sparks a decade-long effort to face her past and learn the story of the now abandoned institution that once held her captive. Her meetings with other former “patients,” their families, and the hospital staff, reveal the painful legacy of our state hospital system and the crisis left by its demise.

David Albert, Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University (left) and Tim Maudlin, Professor of Philosophy at NYU (right) will present recent work and engage in a conversation regarding the possibility of mechanical explanations of the direction of time. 

On Wednesday, 25 February, Randolph Distinguished Professor of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College Lisa Paravisini-Gebert will visit Yale to present from her new project “Extinctions: Vanishing Fauna and the Caribbean’s Environmental Imagination.” 

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies, the Program in Environmental Studies and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies’ Student Interest Group in Latin America.

Episodic Memory, Time, and Agency: Some Constraints from Neuropsychology

A lecture by Carl Craver, Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Abstract: People with episodic amnesia are frequently said to be stuck in time, trapped in a permanent present tense, and altogether lacking a subjective sense of temporality. These claims are grounded in the well-characterized inability of persons with episodic amnesia to perform much above floor on standard questionnaire tests assaying their ability to remember past personal episodes and to imagine vividly what one might do in the future. I review recent empirical work demonstrating several distinct varieties of temporal knowledge and sensitivity in people with acquired or developmental cases of episodic amnesia. These studies raise doubts about whether the sense of time, mental time travel, and (indeed) episodic memory constitute well-formed psychological kinds. At very least, they caution against a pernicious kind of semantic creep common in (psychological) science. 

Richard Preston has written nine books, including The Hot Zone, The Demon in the Freezer, and The Wild Trees.  His books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and most of them have first appeared as articles in The New Yorker.  Preston has won numerous awards, including the American Institute of Physics Award and the National Magazine Award. He’s also the only person not a medical doctor ever to receive the Centers for Disease Control’s Champion of Prevention Award for public health. An asteroid is named “Preston” after him. (Asteroid Preston is a ball of rock three miles in diameter, traveling on a wild orbit near Mars.)

http://richardpreston.net/about-richard-preston

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11^TH

Extinction: Biology, Culture, and Our Futures
a daylong symposium
10:30 AM, Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium

and
The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons
by Anthony Philip Heinrich, North American Premiere, performed by the Yale Symphony Orchestra
7:30 PM, Woolsey Hall

Symposium Speakers Include:

Resit Akçakaya, Professor of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University
Neely Bruce, Professor of Music and American Studies, Wesleyan University
David Harrison, Professor of Linguistics, Swarthmore College
Ursula Heise, Professor of English, UCLA
Ben Novak, Lead Researcher of “The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback,” The Long Now Foundation
Lukas Rieppel, Assistant Professor of History, Brown
David Sepkoski, Research Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the extinction of American Passenger Pigeons, the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities is pleased to announce two events on Saturday, October 11.  Extinction: Biology, Culture, and Our Futures is a symposium on the scientific, cultural, and humanistic implications of human mediated extinction. The event brings together biologists, historians of science, linguists, and literary scholars for lectures and discussions on extinction. The symposium will report on the contemporary extinction crisis, and reflect on the broader implications of extinction for the planet’s biota, human cultures, and our understanding of ourselves.

Following the symposium, we are pleased to sponsor the North American premiere of The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons performed by the Yale Symphony Orchestra. This symphony was composed by Anthony Philip Heinrich in 1857 and was inspired by the spectacular migration of the wild Passenger Pigeons in the United States before their demise. Heinrich immigrated  to the United in the early 19th century and ultimately settled in Kentucky where he became acquainted  with John James Audubon and the American wilderness. Heinrich was a classically trained musician, and became the first symphonic composer in America. He composed a number of grand programmatic works for symphony about the American landscape. The Columbiad was composed in 1857, and was performed only once in Prague to great acclaim in the same year. The YSO performance will be both the New World Premiere and the first performance in over 150 years.
 

Jenny Reardon is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate in the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Talk abstract: While assembling the 3 billion nucleotide sequence of the human genome into machine-readable form might have been a tremendous technical feat, it left unanswered the fundamental question: what does the sequence mean?  In the decade after the Human Genome Project, this turn to the question of meaning—the question of the uses, significance and values of the human genome sequence—marks what I call the postgenomic condition.  This talk explores how in the wake of few biomedical breakthroughs, human genomics continued to generate hope through promises to generate a more just world.  It focuses on the emergence of this strategy in efforts to recruit African Americans into human genomic research at the turn of the millennium. Based in fieldwork at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and historically black universities and colleges, this talk explores the opportunities, but also the problems for ethics, justice, and knowledge these efforts posed.  It ends with reflections on what this turn to justice in human genomics reveals about the contemporary conditions of knowledge and politics.

Like other foundational concept in biology, as for instance genes and species etc., homology has a long history of frustrating the efforts of biologists and philosophers to define it. On its most general level, homology means correspondence of body parts across species, i.e. the continuity of character identity over evolutionary time. The difficulties arise, in part, from the fact that characters that are manifest the same in various animals can develop from different genes and along different developmental pathways. This fact is leading to the question whether it is at all meaningful to speak of the same character in different animals/species. In this talk I will defend my recent proposal, that character identity can be linked to our mechanistic understanding of development. The basis for my thesis is the realization that character identity and character states are caused by different developmental genetic mechanisms. My hypothesis states that character identity is tied to developmental mechanisms that enable differential expression of “realizer” genes. These character identity gene networks do not dictate whether a body part is in fact different from other parts or in what way it is different from the rest of the body. Homology is not only conceptually abstract, but also mechanistically abstract, in the sense that it stands for the potential to be different rather than for a particular way to be different. This conception of character identity, if validated, has consequences for the metaphysics of evolutionary biology that will be discussed in this talk as well. 

In the 1984 preface to Cells into Organs: The Forces that Shape the Embryo, Yale embryologist John Trinkaus (‘Trink’) argued that, “‘molecular’ does not necessarily mean ‘analytical’ nor, by contrast, does ‘cellular’ or ‘histological’ necessarily imply ‘descriptive.’” Trink was reacting to the rising dominance of molecular genetic methods in the study of development, aptly encapsulated by his former PhD student, Albert Harris: “To the molecular types, a cause is a molecule or a gene. To explain a phenomenon is to identify genes and characterize proteins… A molecule is an explanation: a force is a description; to argue otherwise brings pity, at best.” Although a genetic explanatory paradigm is predominant in biology for good empirical reasons, increasing attention has been paid to how physical processes can explain development. This involves an appeal to generic features that are not unique to biological entities (e.g., shear forces due to fluid flow). Finding ways to integrate or combine generic and genetic explanatory strategies is difficult because apportioning causal responsibility among different types of causes requires a common currency. John Stuart Mill recognized this long ago in his discussion of the composition of causes and “the intermixture of effects,” but his solution relied on ascertaining the effect of each cause in isolation. After reviewing extant philosophical models for integration, I use two ideas—temporal sequence juxtaposition and actual difference making—to formulate a new approach that exploits an idealization in Mill’s methods: the mediating process between cause and effect is treated as irrelevant. My analysis helps to illuminate the resurgence of generic approaches and accounts for why this kind of integration may not always be palatable to developmental biologists because it can narrow the scope of generalizations secured for each mode of causation separately. Additionally, my analysis illustrates the value of philosophy for collaboratively achieving explanatory goals in ongoing empirical inquiry.

Co-sponsored with the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism.

Link to their program