Distinguished Faculty Lectures

For additional talks, see Guest Lectures

Alternate Thursdays, 12:30-1:50 p.m.
CHAT Lounge, 10th Floor, Gladfelter Hall

Each talk showcases current research by Temple faculty. Presentations are 30-40 minutes, followed by open discussion. Lectures begin at 12:30 p.m. in the CHAT Lounge, on the 10th floor of Gladfelter Hall, and end at 1:50 p.m., to allow participants to move on to other obligations.

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Fall 2009

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September 24
Beth Bailey, History

America’s Army: Making the
All-Volunteer Force

The military played a critical role in the United States during the last decades of the 20th century, and not only as an instrument of national defense or in times of war. In the Army, America directly confronted the legacies of the social change movements of the sixties era: African American claims and the problems of social inequality; women’s expanding roles; gay rights.

The Army also confronted the rising importance of the marketplace and of consumer culture in American society, as it competed with other “employers” in the national labor market, and Army recruiting sold military service alongside soap and soft drinks in the marketplace. Around the issue of Army service, Americans even struggled over some of the most important questions of the age: who “belongs” in America? and on what terms? What is the meaning of citizenship and the rights and obligations it carries? Is equality or liberty the more central American value?

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October 8
Alan Braddock, Art History

Blown Up Flowers: Georgia O'Keeffe, Photography, and the Great War

Georgia O'Keeffe emerged as an important figure in the New York art scene during the Great War and its immediate aftermath, a time of radical transformation in American art.  This presentation explores that historical moment in relation to her signature artistic innovation of the 1920s: her "blown up flowers" (as she later called them), which adapted the aesthetics of modernist photography to the explosive cultural dynamism of the postwar years.

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October 22
Oliver Gaycken, English

The Secret Life of Plants

The understanding of plant life was changing at the end of the nineteenth century, transforming from an Aristotelian conception that separated plants from animals absolutely to a more Darwinian conception where the boundary between the animal and vegetable kingdoms was less definite. Probably no other visual medium supported this transformation more powerfully than time-lapse cinema. Film’s ability to compress time and thereby visualize plant movement created moving images that became touchstones for both avant-garde movements, especially Surrealism, as well as for a variety of other audiences, ranging from the first time-lapse plant film made for a non-scientific audience, Percy Smith’s The Birth of a Flower (1910), to the psychobotanical documentary The Secret Life of Plants (1978). This talk will present an overview of this intriguing cinematic sub-genre that hovers somewhere between science, art, and magic.

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November 5
Carolyn Kitch, Journalism

Mediating Memorial: The Growing Role of Journalism in Local Ritual
and National Tribute

Over the past decade, there has been a rise in public memorial ritual throughout American culture, tributes that tend to be enacted locally but expressed in terms of national ideals. It is at least partly for news media that public grief rituals are performed, and it is because of their coverage in news media that a broader public may “participate” as well. News reports on public-grief events illuminate many of the central tensions of journalism itself, blurring the lines between: hard and soft news; national and local news; the serious and the sentimental; public space and media space; and journalists and audiences. This talk surveys news coverage of recent deaths considered to be both locally and nationally meaningful.

Carolyn Kitch, Ph.D., is a Professor of Journalism and the Director of the Mass Media and Communication Doctoral Program at Temple University. She is the author of The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media and Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines, and the co-author, with Janice Hume, of Journalism in a Culture of Grief. She is a former magazine editor and writer for McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Reader’s Digest.

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November 19
Daniel Berman, Classics

The City in Early Greek Poetry

Professor Berman examines representations of the city in early epic, including the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, the Hesiodic poems, and other Homeric and early Greek poetry. Focussing on Thebes, he will discuss why the city takes a minor role especially in Homer, and how the city's space is represented when it does appear. Using Thebes as a paradigm, he will discuss approaches to understanding the representation of urban space in ancient (and perhaps more modern) mythic literature.

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Spring 2010

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February 4
Jeremy Schipper, Religion

Disabling Issues in the Study of
the Hebrew Bible

Informed by Disability Studies, this talk examines a variety of methodological issues that should influence the study of disability in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature.

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February 18
Lila Berman, History/Religion

Jewish Sacred Spaces:
From City to Suburb

What are the possibilities and limitations of using sacred space as a clue to understanding the past?  This talk explores how American Jews in the postwar era re-envisioned their politics, class status, and spiritual lives through the new synagogues they erected as they migrated from cities to suburbs. These new sacred spaces were often mediated by contemporary architectural trends, particularly modernism and functionalism. Jews embraced these trends, shaping them into forms of Jewish expression and allowing themselves to be shaped by them.

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March 4
Talissa Ford, English

From Here to Timbuktu

In the Black Atlantic of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, three figures engaged in different forms of anti-state activity. A. M. Falconbridge, the wife of a British Sierra Leone agent, was informally working with the state. The two others were "working" the state in different fashions. Robert Adams was a black Barbary captive who hoodwinked rich Britons into believing that he had been to Timbuktu. Olaudah Equiano was an ex-slave-turned-sailor and abolitionist. Taken together, these three narratives uncover patterns of resistance that disrupted the otherwise totalizing economy of the Atlantic.

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March 18
Jane Gordon, Political Science

Degrees of Statelessness: Vulnerability and Political Capital

Post-World War II discussions of statelessness describe a condition of extreme political vulnerability. Between membership in a nation-state and statelessness lies a third condition as membership increasingly offers degrees of statelessness to its citizens, as in the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Rather than sustaining an alternate kind of membership rooted in concerns outside of market calculations, citizenship increasingly does little more than mirror the purchasing power of the person who claims it.  In the larger international context of ideological battles, what enables some to translate experiences of statelessness into political capital while for others it marks their ultimate disposability?

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April 1
Naomi Schiller, Anthropology

Spectrum Wars: Community Television, the State,

In an analysis of poor neighborhoods in west Caracas, Dr. Schiller explores how media producers use the tools of television production to gain entrance into both official state arenas and poor communities, where they participate in everyday forms of state formation.

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April 15
Heather Thompson, African American Studies/ History

Why Mass Incarceration Matters:
Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in Postwar
American History

As the twentieth century came to a close and the twenty-first began something happened in this country that was internationally unparalleled as well as historically unprecedented. Between 1970 and 2008 the United States incarcerated more people than at any other time, and more people than were incarcerated by any other country on the globe. Few historians have tried to sort out what impact mass incarceration might have had on this nation’s economic, social and political evolution in the postwar period. This lecture seeks to do just that and, in the process, it hopes to challenge a number of time-honored assumptions that scholars hold about the past as well as the present.

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2008-2009 CHATs