The arrival of the pandemic in March 2020 put onpause the longstanding tradition of the Inaugural Lecture Series, a celebration of faculty in the Arts& Humanities recently promoted to the rank of Professor.
One of the missions of the Humanities Collaboratory is to support the Dean of Arts &Humanities in fostering cross-disciplinary conversations and making our research more visible to each other and to the broader communities in which we reside.
With that goal in mind, the Collaboratory teamed up with Dean Dana Renga this fall to host the revived Inaugural Lectures. For the first time, lecturers were encouraged to consider paired conversations in place of the traditional lecture ,and four of our six events for the year will be in this format. In addition to providing hybrid access to the in-person lectures, the Humanities Collaboratory also worked to help promote the events and edit the videos to preserve this important record of our intellectual history.
Autumn 2021 Inaugurals
October
Elizabeth Hewitt (English), "Managing Time in a Plurality of Worlds" & Greg Anderson (History), "Life in a Pluriverse of Many Different Worlds"
November
Susan Lang (English), ""Aviate, Navigate, Communicate: The Essential Interdisciplinarity of Research in Writing Studies"
December
Kay Halasek (English), "Metaphors We Teach By: Reflections on Pedagogy in the Age of Big Data" & Scott Jones, "Trading Efficiency for Outcomes: Large Ensemble Music Making without a Conductor"
Spring 2021 Inaugurals
In Spring, we will co-host three more Inaugural Lectures, featuring Sara Crosby (English) and Sam White (History) in February; Ryan Friedman (English) and Dana Renga (French and Italian) in March; and Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm (Germanic Languages and Literatures)in April.