Past Programs

Margaret Edson

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright

The Insubstantial Pageant: Writing for Performance

Thursday, October 18, 2012
Mathers Theatre, 7:30 p.m.

We are born ready to talk and listen, but it takes years to learn to read and write. What is gained and lost when the redolent swirl of human experience is consigned to the abstract, linear, preterite alphabetic code? And what ironies await when the freeze-dried code is reconstituted as live performance?

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Norman M. Eberly Writing Center and the Departments of English, American Studies and Theatre & Dance.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Margaret Edson was born in Washington, DC in 1961. Between earning degrees in history and literature, she worked on the cancer and AIDS inpatient unit of a major research hospital. Wit was written in 1991, widely rejected, first produced in 1995, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999. The HBO production won the Emmy Award for Best Film in 2001. Wit has received hundreds of productions in dozens of languages and was presented on Broadway in 2012. The script is used in classes ranging from AP English to medical ethics.

Ms. Edson has Read more

Richard Matthew

Founding Director of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs & Professor of International and Environmental Politics, UC at Irvine

Natural Resources, Conflict and Peacebuilding

Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

Based on fieldwork in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, this presentation examines the complex and evolving relationships among natural resources, violent conflict and peacebuilding.

This event is jointly sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Penn State Dickinson School of Law and School of International Affairs and is part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Richard A. Matthew (BA McGill; PhD Princeton) is a professor in the Schools of Social Ecology and Social Science at the University of California at Irvine, and founding director of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs (www.cusa.uci.edu). He is also a senior fellow at the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Geneva; a senior fellow at the Munk School for International Affairs at the University of Toronto; a senior member of the UNEP Expert Group on Environment, Conflict and Peacebuilding; and a member of the World Conservation Union’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy. He has carried Read more

Kathleen Vogel

Associate Professor of Science and Technology, Cornell University

Birds, Biology, & Bioterrorism

Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

This lecture will discuss the public and policy controversies surrounding the 2012 publication of scientific data on artificially created, mutated H5N1 avian influenza viruses by two prominent virologists. Read more

This event is jointly sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Penn State Dickinson School of Law and School of International Affairs and co-sponsored by the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Political Science and International Studies.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Kathleen Vogel is an associate professor at Cornell University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Science and Technology Studies and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Vogel holds a Ph.D. in biological chemistry from Princeton University. Her research focuses on studying the social and technical dimensions of biological weapons threats, and how knowledge is produced in intelligence assessments on threats involving weapons of mass destruction. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty, Vogel was appointed as a William C. Foster Fellow in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction in the Bureau of Nonproliferation. Vogel has also spent time as Read more

David B. Rivkin Jr. – Constitution Day Address Lecturer

Attorney and Constitutional Commentator

A Potemkin Village: The Supreme Court’s Health Care Decision & Faux Federalism

2012 Winfield C. Cook Constitution Address
Monday, October 8, 2012
Great Room, Stern Center, 7:00 p.m.

Mr. Rivkin will analyze the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, in particular Chief Justice John Robert’s pivotal opinion, and explore the decision’s long-term political and policy implications, especially the Court’s apparent willingness to enforce structural federalism-based limitations on congressional powers only if the policy stakes are relatively low, thereby encouraging a system of faux-federalism.

This event is jointly sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Penn State Dickinson School of Law and School of International Affairs.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
David B. Rivkin, Jr., is a partner in the Washington office of Baker Hostetler LLP, and co-chairs the firm’s appellate and major motions practice. He is also a visiting fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a contributing editor of the National Review. He specializes in regulatory and litigation work, with a particular emphasis on constitutional, international law and public policy issues.

Mr. Rivkin has been involved in numerous high-profile cases. He has represented the 26 states that have Read more

John Priscu

Professor of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, Montana State University

Earth’s Icy Biosphere

Thursday, October 4, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

Priscu will demonstrate that the Earth’s icy systems, particularly the Antarctic ice sheet and related subglacial environments, hold a large and potentially active carbon pool, comprised of phylogenetically and metabolically diverse prokaryotic organisms. He will then relate these results to our search for life on other icy bodies in our solar system.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of Biology, Earth Sciences, Environmental Studies and Science and The Natural History Sustainability Mosaic.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Professor Priscu received his M.S. degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1978 where he studied how the ecosystems on the lower Colorado River were influenced by large dams. He then went on to obtain his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 1982 for his work on high altitude lakes. Following his Ph.D. he joined a government laboratory in New Zealand where he was involved with research on the marine and freshwaters of New Zealand. It was during this period that he became interested in Antarctic Read more

Cheng Li

Director of Research and Senior Fellow, Thornton China Center, Brookings

China’s Leadership Transition & the Bo Xilai Case

Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

Just as the Chinese Community Party elite is trying to smooth the way for the transfer of power to a new generation of Chinese leaders, one of its rising stars, Bo Xilai, has been ousted as party chief of Chongqing and his wife is charged with the murder of a British businessman. What are the implications of this unfolding crisis for China’s decision-making process, economic policies, social stability, and foreign relations? More information

The event is jointly sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Penn State Dickinson School of Law and School of International Affairs and co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Studies. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Cheng LI is the director of research and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. Dr. Li currently also serves as a director of the National Committee on US-China Relations, a member of the Academic Advisory Team of the Congressional U.S.-China Working Group, Read more

Stephen Prothero – “Mary Ellen Borges Memorial Lecturer”

Professor of Religion, Boston University

God is Not One

Thursday, September 27, 2012
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.
Book Sale / Signing to Follow

Are the world’s religions different paths up the same mountain? Prothero, author of God is Not One, explains why, especially after 9/11, real and enduring interreligious understanding is achieved, not with a “pretend pluralism,” but with a clear-eyed recognition of religious difference.

This event is sponsored by St. John’s Episcopal Church on the Square and the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Though America is one of the most religious places on Earth, in reality, its citizens know little about religion. In his provocative book Religious Literacy, Stephen Prothero addresses this national crisis, and offers solutions. One of them is mandatory academic study of world religions in public schools. The more that Americans know about religion — whether or not they themselves are religious — the less likely they will be to defer, through sheer ignorance, to politicians who often frame their actions in a religious context. In his latest book, God is Not One, Prothero looks at the differences between religions and how they have shaped the world. Read more

Pat Genovese

Head Lacrosse Coach, William Smith College

Title IX: Conception, Progression, Direction

Monday, September 24, 2012
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.

In 1972, Congress enacted Title IX, which prohibited sexual discrimination in any education program or activity that received federal financial assistance. Coach Genovese will explore the origin of Title IX; the advances and setbacks that have occurred in athletics since its enactment; and where it will take us in the future.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Department of Athletics, Office of Institutional and Diversity Initiatives, and the Women’s Center. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Pat Genovese’s Biography Read more

Heather Love

Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Gay Marriage and Its Others

Thursday, September 13, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

This lecture considers the fate of the spinster in the era of gay marriage. Through a reading of the 2006 film Notes on a Scandal, Love argues that, while monogamous gay and lesbian couples have achieved unprecedented levels of social acceptability, those who are alone or whose intimacies are unconventional are more stigmatized than ever. Read more

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by Women’s and Gender Studies.

Biography
Heather Love is the R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches interests include gender studies and queer theory, the literature and culture of modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity, sociology and literature, disability studies, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007), the editor of a special issue of GLQ on the scholarship and legacy of Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”), and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History (“Is There Life after Identity Politics?”). She has recent Read more

Susan Abraham

Professor of Law, New York Law School

The Ravi/Clementi Case

Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

In September 2010, Dharun Ravi used a webcam to spy on his roommate Tyler Clementi having sex with another man in a Rutgers University dorm. Clementi committed suicide a few days later. Abraham will discuss aspects of this case including hate crime, high-tech bullying on college campuses, and privacy.

This event is jointly sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Penn State Dickinson School of Law and School of International Affairs and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of American Studies.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Susan J. Abraham is a professor of law at New York Law School, where she teaches evidence,
advanced appellate advocacy, trial skills, and legal method, and is the faculty advisor to the
Moot Court Association. She is also affiliated with the Justice Action Center, through which she
has collaborated with students and faculty on various public interest projects, most recently co-
authoring an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the University of Texas in Fisher v. The University of Texas, a Read more

The Wisconsin Shooting: An Opportunity for America

Rajbir Singh Datta

Former National Director, Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund

Manar Waheed

Policy Director, South Asian Americans Leading Together

Erik Love – Moderator

Assistant Professor, Sociology

Thursday, September 6, 2012
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.

The Sikh community has dealt with hate and persecution for over 500 years — long before the 9/11 attacks. Representations of hate – like the Wisconsin shooting at a Sikh Gurdwara – will continue until we see each other as an extension of one family, see each other with respect, stand up to hate everywhere and actually live up to the ideals of our Founding Fathers.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Biographies (provided by the speakers)
Rajbir Singh Datta served, from 2005 until 2009, as the national director of the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF), the nation’s oldest Sikh American civil rights organization in the United States. In that role, he was responsible for coordinating policy, legislative, education, and legal assistance programs on behalf of over 700,000 Americans. During his tenure at SALDEF, he conducted multiple briefings on civil rights issues and has addressed audiences about Sikhism, the Sikh American community, Read more

Harry Brod

Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Northern Iowa

Asking for It: The Ethics & Erotics of Sexual Consent

Thursday, August 30, 2012
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7:30 p.m.

In a nonthreatening, non-hectoring discussion that ranges from the meanings of “yes” and “no,” to the indeterminacy of silence. to the way alcohol affects our ethical responsibilities, Brod challenges young people to envision a model of sexual interaction that is most erotic precisely when it is most thoughtful and empathetic.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Milton B. Asbell Center for Jewish Life and Women’s and Gender Studies.

Harry Brod’s Web site

Co-Chair of the Kitchen Table Patriots

The Tea Party

Thursday, April 19, 2012 (originally scheduled for March 1)
Althouse Hall, Room 106, 5:00 p.m.
Reception to Follow

Puig will address the nature of the Tea Party and the impact that it has had in the early Republican primaries and the role she anticipates it will play in the 2012 presidential election.

This event was initiated by The Clarke Forum Student Project Managers and is sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Ana Puig’s Biography

Video of Program

Professor of Music, New York University

Acoustemology & the “War on Terror”

Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

Based on interviews with released detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere, this lecture analyzes the ways that regimes of sound and silence were used to attack the subjectivities of prisoners detained in U.S.-run prison facilities during the so-called “global war on terror.” More information.

The event is co-sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and the Department of Music.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Suzanne G. Cusick is a professor of music at New York University. Her writing on music in relation to gender, sexuality and cultural history has appeared in such journals as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Early Music, Musical Quarterly, Repercussions, Perspectives of New Music, Early Modern Women, TRANS, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Her monograph “Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court” will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2009. She is currently working on a book about the uses of sound and silence in U.S.-run detention camps in the so-called “global war on terror.”

Video of the

Professor of History and International Affairs, Princeton University

Global Order After the Financial Crisis

Thursday, April 5, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

Today there exists a real possibility of deglobalization, not so much because of trade protectionism (that was a principal driving force of the last big episode of deglobalization in the 1920s and 1930s) but from the response to the character of the current crisis, which is primarily a financial one, and which will prompt a new financial nationalism that brings very different policy approaches to those of the past quarter century. In the 1990s, the most dynamic and richest states were generally small open economies: Singapore, Taiwan, Chile, New Zealand, and in Europe the former communist states of Central Europe, Ireland, Austria, and Switzerland. In the world after the financial crisis, the center of economic gravity will shift to really large agglomerations of power. Does this mean that the new world order will inevitably be a China-centered world?

This event is jointly sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Penn State Dickinson School Law, the School of International Affairs and Betty R. ’58 and Dan Churchill.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Harold James is a Read more

Jennifer Egan – “The Morgan Lecturer”

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 6:00 p.m. ** Note Time Change **
A book sale and signing will follow

Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, will read from her work A Visit from the Goon Squad and discuss the novel, the characters and her writing process.

The event is co-sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Student Senate, Department of English, Office of Student Development, Department of American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Women’s Center, and the Department of Political Science and the Belles Lettres Literary Society.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Jennifer Egan is the author of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Published by Knopf in 2010, the book soared to the top of many publications’ Best of 2010 lists, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Slate, Salon, and People. In addition to being awarded the Pulitzer, A Visit from the Goon Squad won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction and for the Pen/Faulkner award, and was short listed for Read more

George DeMartino

Professor of Economics at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver

The Economic Crisis and Economics

Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.

Since the outset of the economic crisis in 2008 Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and other economists have indicted the economics profession for its failure to predict the crisis. They argue rightly that the profession became overcommitted to economic models that prevented economists from worrying about the possibility of economic crisis. Indeed, leading economists continued to express confidence in the financial system even after warning signs were indicating that a crisis was imminent. But the critics have failed to appreciate the ethical obligations of the profession, and the way in which the profession’s historic refusal to engage its professional ethical responsibilities led economists to advocate policies that were far too dangerous, and that contributed to the crisis. The crisis in economics that has resulted from the economic crisis poses a new challenge and opportunity: to inaugurate the new field of professional economic ethics.

This event is sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and the Departments of Economics, Philosophy and Policy Studies.

Biography (provided by the speaker) George Read more

John Dower – “The Donald W. Flaherty Lecturer”

Emeritus Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cultures of War

Thursday, March 29, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

Historian John W. Dower draws on Cultures of War, his most recent book, to place 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in a broader historical and comparative context that challenges the familiar canards of clash-of-civilizations thinking, and treats war-making as a congeries of cultures in and of itself. Drawing on his expertise in modern Japanese history and World War II in Asia, Professor Dower’s lecture will
focus on wars of choice, failures of intelligence and imagination, groupthink and wishful thinking, strategic imbecilities, and the deliberate targeting of civilians to destroy enemy morale that became standard operating procedure in the U.S. air war against Japan in 1945, culminating in the first “Ground Zeros” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This event is co-sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and the Department of East Asian Studies, Penn State Dickinson School of Law and the School of International Affairs.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
John W. Dower is an emeritus professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director of MIT’s innovative online “Visualizing Cultures” Read more

Michael B. Oren

Israeli Ambassador to the United States

Foreign Policy: Israel the Ultimate Ally

Thursday, March 29, 2012 – Noon
Rubendall Recital Hall, Weiss Center for the Arts *College or Valid ID Required*

Event will be simulcast to overflow seating in Althouse 106 & Weiss 235 and on Channel 17

No backpacks or large bags will be allowed into Rubendall Recital Hall (RRH) and all small bags will be subject to search. No cameras, video equipment, or signs will be permitted inside RRH.

This event is co-sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues at Dickinson College, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) – Central Pennsylvania Chapter, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg-Pennsylvania.

Ambassador Oren’s Biography
A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Dr. Oren has received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and from the British and Canadian governments. Formerly, he was the Lady Davis Fellow of Hebrew University, a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel-Aviv University, and the Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown.

Ambassador Oren has written extensively for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New Republic, where Read more

Doug Guthrie

Dean of the School of Business, George Washington University

China’s Capitalism: A Model For U.S.?

Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

One of the great ironies of our time is this: today, the largest Communist society in the world is also the world’s most dynamic and business-friendly capitalist economy. To examine this seemingly paradoxical circumstance, this lecture will analyze the economic reforms that have been sweeping across China for over three decades. As we view the changes in China through the prism of media representations, political rhetoric, and the many other distortions that have shaped perceptions of the reform process in China, the picture is murky at best. We will examine the changes that have actually occurred in China and the forces that have brought about this process of change. As it turns out, China’s course of building a market economy can teach the world’s capitalist powers a great deal about healthy market economies.

This event was initiated by The Clarke Forum Student Project Managers and is sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, the Department of Political Science and Department of International Business and Management. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership Read more