Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Dickinson Panelists:

Alex Bates, associate professor of Japanese language and literature
Shawn Bender, associate professor of East Asian studies
Claire Seiler, assistant professor of English
W. Evan Young, assistant professor of history
Shogo Nishikawa, exchange student from Japan

In this panel of four faculty members and a student will each draw from their own research and experience to respond to the questions of how we remember the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  How do these memories shape our contemporary understanding of the past and of current struggles regarding nuclear energy and war?

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

Biographies (provided by the speakers)

Alex Bates is associate professor of Japanese language and literature at Dickinson College. He is a specialist in modern Japanese literature and film. In addition to survey courses in these areas, he has taught courses in Japanese youth culture, ecocriticism, East Asian film, and World War II in Japanese literature and film. Professor Bates’ book on representations of the 1923 earthquake that destroyed Tokyo will be out later this year from the University of Michigan, Center for Read more

A Program that is Part of the Tibetan Monk Residency,
Enlightened Activity: The Green Tara Initiative

Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Dan Cozort, Dickinson College
Tibetan Monks, Drepung Monastery’s Gomang College

Mandala making is part of a distinctive religious practice called tantra or vajrayana. The practitioner of the Tara tantra chants a liturgy that describes Tara and the cosmos, symbolized by the mandala, but in three dimensions. As he chants, he visualizes the three dimensional mandala and visualizes Tara within it; then he suddenly becomes Tara and visualizes doing feats of vast generosity and healing. The chanting is done in an unusual and distinctive manner; the monks employ a tone so low that it generates overtones, so that each monk is singing a chord. They also use bells, drums, and sometimes a kind of oboe. Before the puja begins, Prof. Cozort will give a short illustrated talk about Tara, the mandala, and the puja, making the connection between what the monks are doing and Buddhist insights into greed, delusion, and ill-will as the roots of environmental degradation and consumerism.

This residency is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by Read more

Vanderbilt University

Obama Is Brazilian: (Re)Signifying Race Relations in Contemporary Brazil

Thursday, November 12, 2015
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Barack Obama’s election to the American presidency in 2009 sparked a renewed interest in the theme of race in the Americas, and worldwide. The sight of an African American as President of the United States led analysts to declare that North America was living in a post-racial era. But Obama’s election also had a tremendous impact on the imaginary of the African Diaspora.  This lecture will examine his characterizations in the Brazilian media, especially in examples of political humor, such as cartoons and memes.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies, Portuguese and Brazilian studies and the department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Professor Oliveira-Monte’s research interests include Afro-Brazilian literature, race relations, race in comparative perspective, the Afro-Diasporic experience, the relationship between politics and literature, literature of human rights, as well as Brazilian Cinema and Popular Culture. Her manuscript Writing Identity: The Politics of Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literature (Purdue UP, 2007) examines the intricate connections between literary production and political action by focusing Read more

Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:30 p.m.

Dickinson  Panelists:

Andrea Lieber, associate professor of religion and Judaic studies
Jeffrey McCausland, visiting professor of international security studies
Edward Webb, associate professor of political science and international studies
Anthony Williams (moderator), visiting professor of political science and security studies

On July 11^th, 2015, Iran and a group of six nations led by the United States reached a historic agreement limiting Tehran’s nuclear ability in exchange for lifting international oil and financial sanctions. The overall goal of the accord is to increase Iran’s “breakout time” – the time it would take Iran to make enough material for a single nuclear weapon. Critics of the negotiation question the verifiability of the constraints and the long-term impact on  regional and world stability.  The panel, comprised of Dickinson College faculty members, will explore the historic negotiation and its international policy, security and cultural implications.

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues. It is was also initiated by the Student Project Managers of the Clarke Forum.

Biographies (provided by the panelists)

Andrea Lieber is associate professor of religion and Sophia Ava Asbell Read more

University of Texas at San Antonio

Mary Lincoln’s Assassination

Monday, April 13, 2015
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Live Stream Link

Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865 proved a momentous evening for the people of Washington, for the people of the American nation – and its impact would be felt across the world. But perhaps the person most affected by this epic tragedy was Abraham Lincoln’s widow, Mary Lincoln– whose fate would be forever transformed by the death of her husband that Easter Saturday.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, the House Divided Project and the Digital Humanities Advisory Committee.

Biography Forthcoming (provided by the speaker)

Catherine Clinton earned her undergraduate degree in African American studies from Harvard, her master’s in American studies from the University of Sussex and received her doctorate in history from Princeton in 1980. She now  holds the Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas San Antonio and is an international research professor at Queen’s University Belfast. She has written and edited over two dozen books to date, including three biographies, Fanny Kemble Civil Wars (2000), Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (2004)–which was named as one Read more

University of Maine

The Limits of Climate Change

Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

To understand and predict climate change requires more perspective than is available from a short instrumental climate record.  To expand the climate record in time and space, Mayewski and his teams have recovered ice cores from some of the remotest high and cold places on Earth.  These records tell us a great deal about where we are today in the climate system and enable us to chart the pathways for future mitigation, adaptation and sustainability in the decades ahead.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Churchill Fund. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Dr. Paul Andrew Mayewski is director and professor of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine and has academic affiliations with the university’s School of Earth and Climate Sciences, School of Policy and International Affairs, and School of Marine Sciences. He is an internationally acclaimed scientist and explorer, leader of more than 55 expeditions to some of the remotest reaches of the planet Read more

University of Washington

Prisons, State Violence, and

the Organizing Tradition

Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

This lecture explores the central role that people in prison played during the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that today’s mass incarceration began as a response to the mass mobilization of prisoners and neighborhoods.

A book sale and signing will follow the presentation.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Popel Shaw Center for Race and Ethnicity.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Dan Berger is an assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and an adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Washington Seattle. He studies race, prisons, and social movements in U.S. history. A widely published author, Berger’s most recent book is Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida in 2003 and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. He was the George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow Read more

Middlebury College

Churches and Colleges: Schools of Civility

Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

The absence of civility in American politics has become a national crisis, one we revisit every election cycle. This talk will explore the concept of civility, its importance to our public well-being, and the essential role religion and the liberal arts might play in satisfying this national need.

This event is sponsored by St. John’s Episcopal Church on the Square and the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Churchill Fund. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s Leadership in an Age of Uncertainty Series.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

James Calvin Davis is a professor of religion at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he has taught ethics and American religious history for nearly fifteen years. An expert on the role of religion in American political and public life, he is the author of In Defense of Civility: How Religion Can Unite America on Seven Moral Issues that Divide Us (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010). In this book, Davis considers religion’s impact on various moral debates in America’s past and present, arguing that the participation of theological perspectives Read more

Class of 2006

Curiosity on Mars

Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

The geologic and geochemical analyses of sediments from Gale Crater by the Curiosity rover has given us unprecedented insight into the history of Mars and suggests a formerly habitable environment.

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

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Dr. Kristen Miller recently concluded a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on mineral/organic interactions in Mars analogue soils in collaboration with NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission. Kristen earned a B.S. in geology from Dickinson College in 2006 and was the recipient of the William W. Vernon Prize for Excellence in Geology. While at Dickinson she completed a senior honors thesis with Professor Marcus Key on the use of oxygen and carbon stable isotopes from bryozoans as a proxy for sea temperature change. After Dickinson, Kristen went on to earn her PhD in Geochemistry from the University of Maryland College Park in 2012. Her dissertation focused on biological, chemical, and environmental responses to repeated glacial events as recorded by molecular fossils (biomarkers) and stable isotopes in an ~1 billion year old sedimentary formation from Read more