Inaugural Lecture - Professor Susan Collins

From In Conversation (1997) which provided a live link between the street and the internet and Transporting Skies (2002) which relayed sky live, in real-time, between Penzance and Sheffield, to more recent pixel-by-pixel transmissions from remote locations including Fenlandia (2004), Seascape (2009) and London 2013; the lecture will present a number of works which each in different ways rely on an ‘open system’ or structure for their realisation. The lecture will also explore issues raised by the works including the role of belief in their construction and interpretation; the relationship between time, landscape and technology, and reflect on what it means materially to record a digital image and transport it across space and time.

Susan Collins is Professor of Fine Art and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where she founded the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in 1995. She works across public, gallery and online spaces often employing networking and time as primary materials. The work is exhibited widely nationally and internationally with key works including the BAFTA nominated Tate in Space for Tate Online, Fenlandia, and Seascape. Public commissions include Underglow, a network of illuminated drains for the Corporation of London.

Transporting Skies - Professor Susan Collins (Slade School of Fine Art)

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Dorian Fuller

Full title - Growing Societies: the Archaeobotany of Food Production and Globalization of Agriculture

The origins of agriculture irrevocably changed the relationship of humans and the earth, literally transforming earth at local scales of cultivation, and over the long-term, promoting population growth and economic specialization globally.While archaeologists have long investigated this “Neolithic revolution”, the ways in which humans changed plants through domestication and reordered their use of the vegetative world has come to be appreciated more recently through advances in the archaeobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains. This lecture considers recent insights on the transition from wild plant gathering to farming, drawing on examples from India, Southwest Asia, China, and Africa.

Dorian Q Fuller grew up in San Francisco, California, received a BA from Yale University in Anthropology and Biology, and a PhD from Cambridge. After his PhD on the origins of agriculture in South India, he began teaching archaeobotany at UCL in 2000. His archaeological fieldwork has included India, Sri Lanka, China, Thailand, Sudan, Ethiopia, Morocco, Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. He has authored more than 170 papers and is a founding editor of the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Growing Societies - Professor Dorian Fuller (UCL Institute of Archaeology)

Last week, biographer and journalist Walter Isaacson delivered the 43rd annual Jefferson Lecture—the government’s highest honor for people working in the humanities. But Isaacson’s message wasn’t just for humanists. He argued that the future belongs to those who can appreciate both the arts and the sciences. Isaacson joins Ira to explain how thinkers from Einstein to Steve Jobs drew on both spheres to make their breakthroughs, and why mixing the two is more important than ever in the digital age.

Find out more at http://scifri.me/S0d88c.

Why Science and the Humanities Are Better Together

TALK: Nature Spends the Past Few Million Years Experimenting with a Prosocial Brain
Kenneth S. Kosik (The Neuroscience Research Institute, UCSB)
Thursday, November 12, 2015 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Human interactions are finely calibrated and many of these interactions are prosocial, that is a social behavior that benefits other individuals or a larger group. The repertoire of prosocial behaviors is vast: How much eye contact we make, how much affection we show, how much concern we feel for the plights of others, what we reveal to others and what we don’t.  In a sense, the motivation for language itself is a prosocial activity. Among humans the degree to which we utilize these social tools is highly variable. At the extremes of the social behavior spectrum are clusters of neurological conditions caused by highly specific mutations. At one end of the spectrum are the autistics and savants; at the other end is a condition called Williams syndrome in which affected individuals are hyper-social and despite cognitive impairment have remarkably preserved language ability. Some neurodegenerative disorders such as fronto-temporal dementia selectively affect prosocial behavior. Knowledge of a genetic mutation in some of these cases tells us the root cause. Because genes have changed very little among primates, this genetic hook allows us to track genes related to social behavior through evolution and perhaps gather insights regarding the emergence of our particularly prosocial lifestyle relative to other primates.

Kenneth S. Kosik completed a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Case Western Reserve University in 1972 and an M.D. from the Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1976. He served as a resident in neurology at Tufts New England Medical Center and was Chief Resident there in 1980. Beginning in 1980 he held a series of academic appointments at the Harvard Medical School and achieved the rank of full professor there in 1996. He also held appointments at McLean Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In 2004, Kosik became the Harriman Professor of Neuroscience Research and Co-Director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He founded and serves as Medical Director of the non-profit center, Cottage Center for Brain Fitness (CCBF).

Sponsored by the IHC series The Humanities and the Brain.

Kenneth Kosik: Nature Spends the Past Few Million Years Experimenting with a Prosocial Brain

Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella are the co-editors of Translation and Creativity (Continuum 2006) and One Poem in Search of a Translator (Peter Lang 2008).  

They met in 1998 at the University of East Anglia, UK, while studying for postgraduate degrees in literary translation, Eugenia specialising in experimental translation, Manuela in theatre translation, and have since collaborated in several translation projects. 

They are both interested in developing the idea of translation as a creative form of text making, and have set up The Creative Literary Studio (http://thecreativeliterarystudio.wordpress.com/) in November 2012, a blog and a virtual space encouraging experimentation, performance and the creation of texts through translation.

For further podcasts in the Between the Lines series visit: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cics/between-the-lines 

Between The Lines: Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella

A conversation reflecting on thirty years of Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center with Peter Brooks, Founding Director, and Founding Fellows Kai Erikson, Geoffrey Hartman, and Robert Shulman is held as part of the Whitney’s 30th Anniversary celebration. In 1981, the Whitney Humanities Center began at Yale University under the new university presidency of A. Bartlett Giamatti. For this celebration of thirty year’s growth and activity at Yale, the WHC’s founding director and three of its founding fellows return to discuss and offer reflections on their experience both in the University at large and their place at the WHC within it, especially with regard to the role of the humanities in relation to the sciences in the undergraduate experience at Yale. Peter Brooks, Founding Director, is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values at Princeton. Kai Erikson is the William R. Kenen Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies at Yale. Geoffrey Hartman is Sterling Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar of English and Comparative Literature at Yale, and Robert Shulman is Professor Emeritus of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Senior Research Scientist in Diagnostic Radiology. Jul 23, 2012

For the Record: A Conversation Reflecting on Thirty Years of the Whitney Humanities Center

Adonis (born Ali Ahmad Said Esber) is a Syrian poet and essayist who led the modernist movement in Arabic poetry in the second half of the 20th century. He has written more than 20 books in his native Arabic, including the pioneering work An Introduction to Arab Poetics. He is visiting the US to celebrate his 80th birthday, and in this netcast, he and Khaled Mattawa read from Adonis: A Selection, published by Yale University Press in 2010 in the Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters Series. Jan 06, 2011

Adonis visits the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University

Between the Lines - Adam Freudenheim

Artist Grayson Perry joined a panel discussion on the Future of the Arts, as part of UCL's Festival of the Arts.
The panel also included: 
• Professor Lisa Jardine (UCL Historian and Broadcaster) 
• Professor Malcolm Grant (UCL President and Provost) 
• The Rt Hon David Willetts MP (Minister for Universities and Science) 

Chaired by the Dean of Arts and Humanities, Professor Jonathan Wolff.

The panel discussion examined the broad definition of what we mean by the 'arts', from fine art and performing arts to its more general use in academia, 
incorporating also the humanities, including literature, philosophy and history. The panel also questioned whether the arts are threatened by recent cuts in funding.

More info on the Festival of the Arts: 
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/festival-of-the-arts

Future of the Arts - panel discussion

Excerpt from her 2013 McGill University commencement address

Transcript, and discussion: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/07/judith-butler-mcgill-2013-commencement-address/

MORE / HIGHLIGHTS

Judith Butler on the value of reading and the humanities

The IHC’s mission is to advance knowledge about human experience in cultural, historical, and social contexts and to do so through programs that foster human agency, social connectivity, and civic empowerment.

IHC events include lectures, seminars and conferences organized by IHC research focus groups and sub-units as well as events co-sponsored with campus departments. In addition, the IHC mounts year-long public programs on themes suggested by UCSB faculty and graduate students.

Kenneth Kosik: Nature Spends the Past Few Million Years Experimenting with a Prosocial Brain

IHC UCSB

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