Susana Martinez-Conde is the Director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Susana visited on April 11, 2014, and was hosted by the department of Physics. Her lecture was titled "Art as Vision Research: Illusory Perception in Op Art".
Merlinda Bobis, Writer and Performance Artist, Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, visited on April 8 - 10, 2014, and was hosted by the department of Modern Languages & Literatures. She conducted three events. "In Search of 'Corazon de Lorca': What is Lost/What is Found". This lecture unpacked the cross-cultural negotiations in Merlinda Bobis's creation of her ficto-documentary play “Corazon de Lorca” (Australian Broadcasting Radio, 2007), which she researched and recorded in Granada, Spain. She argues that the losses from war, colonization, and migration may be 'found again' in Lorca's poetry, and the poetry of everyday sounds and voices in the streets of Granada. The second lecture contextualized the play "River, River": "Passion to Pasyon: Playing Militarism". This lecture mapped out the creative-critical journey of Merlinda Bobis as Filipino-Australian writer and performer from the lived 'passion' around a Philippine Total War to her writing about it in her novel "Fish-Hair Woman" to her adapting and performing the novel into a one-woman play "River, River" using the music of the Pasyon, the indigenized chanting of the "Passion of Christ" derived from colonial Spain. Her third lecture was titled, Performance of "River, River". Estrella Capili, the Fish-Hair Woman, uses her twelve-metre hair to trawl corpses from the river in Iraya, a militarized village in the Philippines. It is 1987 and Total War is declared by the government to purge insurgency in the countryside. In Iraya, the river becomes the dumping ground of victims of summary executions. Each time a body is thrown into the river, the water changes flavour: from river sweetness to brine, then to lemon grass. Is this myth, a trick of memory? Estrella remembers a moonless night lit by fireflies. She is taken by the soldiers to the river to retrieve a body from the water. Her story unfolds in this cross-genre play which is storytelling, drama, poetry, ritual, and music: the traditional chanting style of the Bitabara family and the composition of Sarah de Jong. This music is based on the Pasyon, the chanting ritual of the "The Passion of Christ."
Levi T. Thompson of the University of Michigan visited March 20, 2014, and was hosted by the department of Chemical Engineering. He conducted a lecture titled, "Using Cascading Catalysis Concepts to Design Highly Active & Selective Heterogeneous Catalysts."
Seloua Luste Boulbina is a political philosopher of Algerian descent with a Ph.D. in Political Science and Philosophy and leads a seminar at the College International de Philosophie in Paris and edits special issues of the journal Rue Descartes on topics related to postcolonial thought and migration. Professor Boulbina visited February 26, 2014, and was hosted by the department of Philosophy. She conducted a lecture on her research into the state of postcolonial philosophy in France titled, "Cold Case", and led a workshop titled, "Neither Here Nor There" discussing philosophical issues in the translation of texts by Caribbean authors of minority ethnicity from French to English and vice versa.
Lynn E. Maquat is the J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Rochester. She also serves as the Director of the Center for RNA Biology at the University of Rochester and Chair of the University of Rochester Graduate Women in Science. She visited on February 25 and 26, 2014, and was hosted by the Center for RNA Molecular Biology at the School of Medicine. Her lectures were titled, "Alu'strious Effects on Human mRNA Metabolism via 3' UTR Sequences" and "Tales from the Cellular Underworld: mRNA Decay and Disease".