Table, Map, and Text: Writing in France circa 1600
Tom Conley, Harvard University Table, Map, and Text: Writing in France circa 1600
Committee on Social Theory Spring Lecture Series Friday, March 8, 2013 - University of Kentucky
Tom Conley, Harvard University Table, Map, and Text: Writing in France circa 1600
Committee on Social Theory Spring Lecture Series Friday, March 8, 2013 - University of Kentucky
Most of us associate mapping with cartography, but that's not always the case.
New media and technology present us with an overwhelming bounty of tools for connection, creativity, collaboration, and knowledge creation - a true "Age of Whatever" where anything seems possible. But any enthusiasm about these remarkable possibilities is immediately tempered by that other "Age of Whatever" - an age in which people feel increasingly disconnected, disempowered, tuned out, and alienated. Such problems are especially prevalent in education, where the Internet often enters our classrooms as a distraction device rather than a tool for learning.
What is needed more than ever is to inspire our students to wonder, to nurture their appetite for curiosity, exploration, and contemplation. It is our responsibility to help them attain an insatiable appetite and pursue big, authentic, and relevant questions so that they can harness and leverage the bounty of possibility, rediscover the "end" or purpose of wonder, and stave off the historical end of wonder.
Tom Conley is Lowell Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media. In 2003, Dr. Conley won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in topography and literature in Renaissance France.
Dr. Derek Gregory University of British Columbia
January 25, 2013 - Social Theory Lecture "Gabriel’s Map: Cartography and Corpography in Modern War"
Most of us heard that the world was going to possibly end on December 21st, 2012, and that it was predicted by the traditional Mayan calendar. In this podcast, Rusty Barrett, a linguist and scholar of Mayan culture and history, explains the superstitions and misunderstandings surrounding December 21st, and a little bit about how the Mayan calendar works.
At the end of March 2012, the American Studies Center at Shanghai University hosted a symposium on Urbanization in the American South.
A lecture by Jane I. Guyer given on April 20th, 2012 at the University of Kentucky Singletary Center.
With the help of a generous grant from the U.S. State Department, UK has been able to forge a partnership across the Pacific. On March 29th, 2012, three UK scholars will go to deliver lectures for the Inaugural Symposium for the American Studies Center at Shanghai.