Lecture

Israeli Film Festival: “Intimate Grammar” — March 1

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Intimate Grammar, a film adaptation by director Nir Bergman, based upon the renowned author David Grossman’s book, will be the fifth film screened in The Ring Family Wesleyan University Israeli Film Festival on Thursday, March 1 at the Goldsmith Family Cinema at 8 p.m. This film explores the metaphoric and emotional field of grammar through a 12 year old boy, Aharon, who refuses to grow up. Film critic Laura Blum will deliver a talk entitled The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up as well as conduct a question/answer session after the screening.

The film is 110 minutes and has English subtitles. Admission is free and all are welcomed. 

Please note that our last screening will take place on Thursday, March 29 at the Goldsmith Family Cinema at 8 P.M. Film director and Wesleyan University Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Dani Menkin, will comment upon his movie Je T’aime, I Love Terminal as well as take questions from the audience. 

I hope to see you at the movies,

 Dalit Katz, Religion Department, Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate Program,Director of the Ring Family Wesleyan University Israeli Film Festival

“Is the University Universal?” by Prof. Neha Vora ’96 — 2/28

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“Is the University Universal?: South Asian Diasporas and Globalized Education in the Gulf Arab States

Neha Vora
Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University
 
Tuesday February 28, 4:30-6:00pm
Russell House

A graduate of Wesleyan’s Feminism, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, Prof. Vora is currently an assistant professor of anthropology and women’s studies at Texas A&M University.  Her book “Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora” is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Prof. Vora’s talk is sponsored by the South Asia Studies program, the Feminism, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, and the Middle East Studies program.
 
Talk Description
Extreme budget cuts, corporate partnerships, and neoliberalization of education have left many scholars wondering about the future of American universities. In particular, what will happen to liberal arts curricula, academic freedom, diversity, and critical thinking within higher education? The proliferation of branch campuses, particularly in Gulf Arab cities like Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai have added to these questions. This paper explores, through the experiences of South Asian diasporic youth in Dubai, some of the early impacts of this new distributed knowledge economy on forms of identification, belonging, and citizenship in the Gulf Arab States.

Biography
Neha Vora’s research focuses on forms of citizenship, belonging, and exclusion within the contemporary Gulf Arab States. In particular, she explores how economic, political, and social changes in countries like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar shape the on-the-ground experiences of the large Indian diaspora residing in the region. Although many accounts of migrants in these countries emphasize their lack of belonging, since legal citizenship is mostly unattainable, Dr. Vora’s research follows anthropological and interdisciplinary scholarship that multiplies and expands the concept of citizenship to include different forms and scales, including urban, diasporic, transnational, flexible, and substantive.

Hugo Black Lecture–3/8: Justice Antonin Scalia — tkts available 2/23 at 10 a.m.

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Wesleyan Students are invited to the

21st Hugo L. Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression

“The Originalist Approach to the First Amendment”

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Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the U.S.

Antonin Scalia

Thursday, March 8, 2012

8:00 p.m, Memorial Chapel

(The lecture is endowed by Leonard S. Halpert, Esq., ’44,

and named in honor of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice)

Obtain a courtesy ticket in person from the

University Box Office, Usdan University Center, 1st floor

on Thursday, February 23 beginning at 10 a.m.

One ticket per student.  WESid required.

For additional information, contact

Gina Driscoll, gdriscoll@wesleyan.edu, (860) 685-2549

  

 

Lecture on Brazil by Prof. Peter Kingstone– Today, 2/20 at 4:15 p.m.

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THE GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT  invites you to a public lecture on

“Democracy, Development, and the Puzzling Success of Brazil”

 Peter Kingstone

Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut

Monday, February 20, 2012
4:15 p.m.    PAC 002 

 Brazil’s rising prominence is manifested not only in its dynamic export economy and in its resiliency in the face of the 2008 financial crisis; but also in its innovative social programs (which have contributed over the past fifteen years to a sharp decline of income poverty, income inequality, and infant mortality); in its election of a female president, Dilma Rousseff, in 2010; and in the selection of Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Olympics. It was not always so: as late as the 1990s Brazil was dismissed as “feckless,” “ungovernable,” and “paralyzed.” Professor Kingstone will address the causes and dimensions of Brazil’s transformation from laggard to leader among middle-income countries, and will outline some implications of this phenomenon for our understanding of democracy, development, and political and economic institutions.

 Peter Kingstone (B.A., Swarthmore; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Crafting Coalitions for Reform: Business Preferences, Political Institutions and Neoliberal Reform in Brazil (Penn State, 1999) and of The Political Economy of Latin America: Reflections on Neoliberalism and Development (Routledge, 2010). He is co-editor (with Tim Power) of Democratic Brazil: Actors, Institutions and Processes (Pittsburgh, 2000) and of Democratic Brazil Revisited (Pittsburgh 2008), as well as co-editor (with Deborah Yashar) of the Handbook of Latin American Politics (Routledge, forthcoming).

 

Prof. Rachel Rubenstein: “Tribal Longings, Enlightenment Selves: Indians, Jews, and the Making of American Identity” — 11/30, 8 p.m.

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You’re cordially invited to Professor Rachel Rubinstein’s lecture this Wednesday evening in PAC 002 at 8pm.  As a part of the Jewish and Israel Studies Program lecture series this semester, Professor Rubinstein will speak about her recently published book, Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination. Her lecture is entitled “Tribal Longings, Enlightenment Selves: Indians, Jews, and the Making of American Identity.” Rubinstein is Associate Professor of American Literature and Jewish Studies at Hampshire College.

In her book, Rubinstein examines interventions by Jewish writers into an ongoing American fascination with the “imaginary Indian.” Rubinstein argues that Jewish writers represented and identified with the figure of the American Indian differently than their white counterparts, as they found in this figure a mirror for their own anxieties about tribal and national belonging. Through a series of literary readings, Rubinstein traces a shifting and unstable dynamic of imagined Indian-Jewish kinship that can easily give way to opposition and, especially in the contemporary moment, competition.

Please join us on Wednesday evening.

CAAS’s First Book Series: Prof. Oneka LaBennet ’94 on “She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn” — Tues., 4:15 p.m.

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Please join us tomorrow in CAAS’s Vanguard Lounge for the final speaker in the First Book Series. 

Anthropologist  Oneka LaBennet ’94 is Assistant Professor of African-American Studies and Women’s Studies at Fordham University. She received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2002. She will discuss her first book,  She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn (New York University Press, 2011), an examination of West Indian adolescent girls’ complex negotiations of raced and and gendered identities within the context of American and Caribbean popular culture in Brooklyn. LaBennet is also Research Director for the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP) where she leads a hip hop history initiative.

 

The talk will be followed by a book signing. 

The event is free and open to the public.  For more information, please contact Joan Chiari in AFAM at ext: 3569.

Lecture: Environmental Monitoring & Good Policy Decisions — Today, 4:15 p.m.

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Chasing Storms and Stalking Mercury:  How We Can Use Environmental Monitoring To Make Good Policy Decisions

Rachel Allen, Environmental Analyst from the San Francisco Estuary Institute will present SFEI’s unique model for a research organization, discuss the history of water quality and water quality monitoring in the Bay and illustrate some of the ongoing challenges and current efforts in the San Francisco Estuary. 

November 17    4:15 p.m.    PAC 001

Snacks will be provided.

Sponsored by The College of the Environment.  For more information, please contact Valerie Marinelli at vmarinelli@wesleyan.edu

 

“The Revolution Will Be Financed”: Brad Burnham ’77 — Today, 6:30 p.m.

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It’s been suggested that Wesleyan’s 1960s & 70s counter-culture has now taken the revolution to Wall Street.  They occupy Wall Street, too, I guess–but not in Zuccotti Park.  Instead, venture capitalists like Brad Burnham ’77 have been financing the social media technologies that facilitate popular mobilization—from Tunisia to lower Manhattan.  And maybe the Tea Party, too.

Brad Burnham will speak of such things tonight at 6:30 in PAC 004. 

Brad Burnham graduated from Wesleyan as a government major in 1977. He began his career in venture capital at AT&T Ventures in 1993.  In 2003 Brad co-founded Union Square Ventures, a New York-based venture capital firm that funded Twitter, Zynga, Tumblr, Etsy, and  other popular networks.

LAST/CAMS Talk on the Border and Migration — Tues. at 5 p.m.

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Please join the Latin American Studies Program and the Center for the Americas for a talk by Mark Overmyer Velazquez (UConn) entitled “This Thin Edge of Barbed Wire: Border Disruptions and Narrative Elisions in Latino American Migration History.”

Tuesday, November 15 at 5 pm at CAMS 

We hope to see you there!