2015-2016

Warrior Chorus

Warrior Chorus is a major new national humanities program by New York’s Aquila Theatre Company, training 100 veterans in four regional centers to present scholar-led public programming based on classical literature.  The programming performed by veterans focuses on critical social issues including war, conflict, comradeship, home, and family and includes veteran-led readings, discussions and the innovative use of New Media. This event will feature a performance by the New York Warrior Chorus, followed by a discussion moderated by Cleveland native and MacArthur Fellow, Professor Thomas Palaima of the University of Texas.  Other participants include Stacey Peebles (Center College), John M. Meyer (University of Texas), James Sheeler (Case Western Reserve University), and James Dawes (Macalester College).

Food Justice, Food Sovereignty: Transforming our Food System

In his lecture, Eric Holt-Giménez, executive director of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, will address the structural inequity and inherent unsustainability of our current food system and the role and challenges for the food movement in systems transformation.

Humanities@Work: Entrepreneurs

In this panel, designed for undergraduate Students, Cleveland area entrepreneurs will discuss how studying the humanities influenced their careers. Panelists include Kathleen Barrie (art history and studio art) and Dennis Barrie (history and art history), principals at Barrie Projects, a museum and cultural planning firm that specializes in developing unusual and often surprising exhibits and visitor destinations; Rebecca Braun (linguistics and Russian), an entrepreneur, venture development consultant, and author, she is president of The Braun Group, producer of executive memoirs and biographies in a variety of formats; Baiju Shah (history), an entrepreneur in the biomedical field, he is currently CEO of BioMotiv, a biotech company focused on accelerating research discoveries into medicines; and Mike Mitchell (philosophy), with his brother Pete, he founded Mitchell’s Ice Cream in 1999.

Surprising Interactions: Unlocking Content through Personal Experience

This is event is co-sponsored with Books@Work, which conducts seminars in community and company settings. Students bring to their reading a wide array of personal experiences that shape the way they engage with content–how can we make the most of it? Drawing on their Books@Work seminars, three local professors share how participants use their own life experience to reflect on narrative texts–with compelling results. In a discussion-based format, they will explore how those insights might bring new insights to leveraging experience in the college classroom.

Symposium – Legacies of Nazi Perpetrators: Looking at Hitler and Himmler Today

The Holocaust and its perpetrators have left a legacy of evil which has permeated our lives and culture like no other. This mini-symposium features two experts in Holocaust and Visual Studies who will explore visual images of perpetrators in art, literature, film and popular culture. Brad Prager, Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia, will look at the use of photographs of Nazi relatives in order to cope with the National Social past within a German family. Michael Richardson, Interim Dean of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of German at Ithaca College, discusses current Hitler representations in popular culture, which find wide distribution on the internet. These images often satirize Hitler and his appearance, such as the phenomena of Hitler cat or the comic “Hipster Hitler.” Richardson will also speak to the moral and ethical questions raised by such representations.

Cleveland in the Political Crosshairs: A Panel Discussion

With the date of the Republican National Convention fast approaching, Cleveland the focus of the nation and the world is turning to us, with possible implications for our city and region. And Cleveland’s politics will be subject to broader scrutiny as well, with increased media attention devoted to our upcoming senatorial and mayoral races, among others. What are the prospects for protests and disruptions during the convention? What impact will that have on Cleveland’s politics? Our city truly is caught in the political crosshairs—join us to discuss what that means.

Cyberinfrastructure for the study of multimodal communication—language, gesture, art

Location: Tinkham Veale University Center Ballroom

This talk will review the big data and machine learning methods and instruments developed in the Red Hen Lab for the study of multimodal communication, including our teams of coders in two successive Google Summers of Code, and our collaboration with the CWRU High-Performance Computing Group to create efficient production pipelines.  For more background information, click HERE.

Big Data in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science

Data abounds that is of interest to scholars in the humanities, arts, and social science.  High performance computing offers the opportunity to analyze large collections of data to aid in answering questions of interest to humankind, as well as for deriving new questions of interest.  In this talk I will address the kinds of questions and problems that scholars in humanities, arts, and social science face with big data from large text collections, image collections, video collections, network databases and more, and discuss examples of projects that are currently underway.