Distinguished Lecturers to Speak at UMBC
Events Open to the Public

Contact: Thomas Moore
Director of Arts & Culture
410-455-3370
tmoore@umbc.edu

Note: You may view or download this release as a pdf file.

UMBC's Dresher Center for the Humanities offers a rich and stimulating series of lectures and panels for its Fall 2009 Humanities Forum, including a series of five events that commemorate scientist-novelist C.P. Snow's famous 1959 "Two Cultures" lecture at Cambridge University.

The Humanities Forum offers events that illustrate the richness of contemporary work in philosophy, history, culture, language, literature and the arts. The Forum is particularly interested in demonstrating the links that bring together the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences.

C.P. Snow Series

Fifty years ago, on May 7, 1959, the scientist-novelist C.P. Snow (1905–1972) delivered his famous Rede Lecture at Cambridge University. Published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Snow identified a deep and dangerous divide between the sciences and the humanities. As a research chemist and physicist who became deeply involved in the mobilization of scientific personnel first during the Second World War and then throughout the 1950s Cold War, C.P. Snow could speak with some authority about science and its applications. As a novelist with more than a dozen titles and the author of numerous essays and reviews, Snow was equally at home in the humanities. This series of lectures is intended to stimulate further discussion about the relationships between the sciences and the humanities.

Wednesday, September 30th
4 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, 7th Floor
G. Rickey Welch, Professor of Biological Sciences, and Joseph N. Tatarewicz, Associate Professor and Director, Human Context of Science & Technology Program, UMBC
C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures": A Fifty Year Perspective

While the issues C.P. Snow raised and the terms within which he analyzed them have changed since his 1959 lecture on "the two cultures" almost every discussion of the relationship between science, technology, and the humanities has used his characterizations as a starting point. The divide Snow identified has been evoked more recently in the "culture wars" and "science wars." UMBC Professors Welch and Tatarewicz initiate this C.P. Snow series by looking at Snow, his historical context, and his enduring influence.

Monday, October 5th
4 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Harry Collins, Distinguished Research Professor, Centre for the Study of Knowledge, Expertise and Science, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff, United Kingdom
Politics, Expertise and the Two Cultures

Science has been described, like war, as a continuation of politics by other means. Even if science may not always compel by the force of theory or experiment, it still remains a compelling choice. Collins argues we need an elective modernism that resurrects the two cultures (of the sciences and the humanities) in a positive way.

Wednesday, October 28th
4 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Snow, Two Cultures and the Science Wars

The contest for authority to speak about science and technology, called "the science wars," has often been framed in terms of C.P. Snow's analysis. Fuller argues that few recent commentators are familiar with the historical trajectory that transports us from Snow's earlier concerns to concerns of the present. He will focus on the curious alignments that have transpired over the course of the Science Wars.

Monday, November 2nd
4 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, 7th Floor
Noami Oreskes, Provost, Sixth College, University of California, San Diego
Global Climate Change: Science, Polity, and Authority

C.P. Snow worried that science and technology could not cross the divide of the humanities to render their true value. The new Sixth College, under the leadership of Provost Oreskes, "draws its creative inspiration from the interdisciplinary examination of culture, art and technology." Oreskes will report on her new research on the interwoven science, technology, and policy elements of global climate change.

Monday, November 9th
4 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, 7th Floor
Susan Dwyer, Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park
Christoph Irmscher, Department of English, Indiana University
Manil Suri, Department of Mathematics, UMBC
Tim Topoleski, Department of Mechanical Engineering, UMBC
The Two Cultures Today: An Interdisciplinary Panel Discussion on the Connections between the Sciences and the Humanities

These faculty members from across the disciplines will provide insights into how their teaching and scholarship bridge the divide between the often misunderstood methodologies, values and goals of the sciences and the humanities.

Additional Lectures

Wednesday, October 14
4 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Webb Lecture and the Phi Beta Kappa Lecture
Sandra Herbert, Professor Emerita, Department of History, UMBC
Lincoln and Darwin

Sandra Herbert, Professor Emerita, Department of History, UMBC, speaks on Lincoln and Darwin as she delivers the 2009 Webb Lecture and Phi Beta Kappa Lecture.
Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were each born on February 12, 1809. The enormity of their importance in their respective areas of interest politics for Lincoln, science for Darwin became apparent when each man was about fifty years old. They never met. Yet Lincoln was aware of and sympathetic to evolutionary views, and Darwin was keenly supportive of abolition. This lecture will consider their lives and accomplishments in juxtaposition.

Wednesday, October 21
4 pm, Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Ancient Studies Week Lecture
Jenifer Neils, Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History with a secondary appointment in Classics, Case Western Reserve University
The Parthenon Sculptures and Periklean Policies

Jenifer Neils, Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History & Classics at Case Western Reserve University, will speak on The Parthenon Sculptures and Periklean Policies. In addition to teaching classical art and archaeology since 1980, Neils has guest-curated two major international loan exhibitions: Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens (1992), and Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past (2003), and edited and co-authored their catalogues. Her most recent book is The Parthenon Frieze (Cambridge University Press 2001) and she is currently editing a book on the Parthenon, also for Cambridge. Neils has been a visiting professor at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, a resident of the American Academy in Rome, and Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. For six years she was on the curatorial staff of the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she organized numerous exhibitions and wrote the second volume of its catalogue of Greek vases. She is also a field archaeologist and has excavated at Torone in northern Greece, as well as two sites (Murlo and Morgantina) in Italy. Her current research is an examination of war monuments and the construction of memory in classical Athens.

Tuesday, November 10
7 pm, University Center Ballroom
David Oliver Relin, author, journalist and editor
Bookreading and Booksigning: Three Cups of Tea

Prize-winning journalist and editor David Oliver Relin profiled Greg Mortenson to write Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time, the book selected for the 2009–2010 UMBC New Student Book Discussion. David Relin will discuss the book's remarkable story of a man who to this day continues to dedicate himself to educating children in some of the poorest communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For over two decades Relin has reported on social issues and their effects on children.

In Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time, Relin recounts the journey that led Mortenson from a failed 1993 attempt to climb Pakistan's K2, the world's second highest mountain, to successfully establish schools in some of the most remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. By replacing guns with pencils, rhetoric with reading, Mortenson combines his unique background with his intimate knowledge of the third-world to promote peace with books, not bombs, and successfully bring education and hope to remote communities in central Asia. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world--one school at a time.

Wednesday, November 11
7 pm, University Center Ballroom
The 31st Annual W.E.B. DuBois Lecture
Nkiru Nzegwu, Chair of the Department of Africana Studies and Professor of Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture, Binghamton University, New York
Immigration and African Diaspora Women

Professor Nkiru Nzegwu is an artist and the author of close to a dozen scholarly books, edited books and exhibition catalogues on topics ranging from Gender and African Art History, African Diasporan Art, Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy and Culture, and Issues of African Identity. She is also the founder of africaresource.com, a content-based educational website and the managing editor of five academic, peer-reviewed online journals devoted to aspects of the study of global Africa.

Admission
Admission to all events is free.

Telephone
410-455-6798

Web
http://www.umbc.edu/humanities

Sponsors
9/30: Sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Human Context of Science and Technology Program and the Social Sciences Forum.
10/5: Sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Human Context of Science and Technology Program and the Social Sciences Forum.
10/14: Sponsored by the Department of History and the Phi Beta Kappa Chapter with support from the Dresher Center for the Humanities.
10/21: Sponsored by the Department of Ancient Studies, the Department of Visual Arts, and the Office of Summer, Winter and Special Programs with support from the Dresher Center for the Humanities.
10/28: Sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Human Context of Science and Technology Program and the Social Sciences Forum.
11/2: Sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Human Context of Science and Technology Program and the Social Sciences Forum.
11/9: Sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Human Context of Science and Technology Program and the Social Sciences Forum.
11/10: Sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Honors College, the Office of Undergraduate Education, the Division of Student Affairs and the Shriver Center.
11/11: Sponsored by the Department of Africana Studies with support from the Dresher Center for the Humanities.

Directions
- From Baltimore and points north, proceed south on I-95 to exit 47B. Take Route 166 toward Catonsville and then follow signs to parking.
- From I-695, take Exit 12C (Wilkens Avenue) and continue one-half mile to the entrance of UMBC at the roundabout intersection of Wilkens Avenue and Hilltop Road. Turn left and follow signs to parking.
- From Washington and points south, proceed north on I-95 to Exit 47B. Take Route 166 toward Catonsville and then follow signs to parking.
- Daytime metered visitor parking is available in the Walker Avenue Garage for events in the Library, and in the Administration Drive Garage for other events.
- Online campus map: http://www.umbc.edu/aboutumbc/campusmap