The Academic Minute for 2017.1.2-1.6

Academic Minute from 1.2 – 1.6

Monday, January 2nd
Andrew Wood – San Jose State University
Twilight of the Roadside Motel
Dr. Wood has authored or co-authored books on internet communication, reality television, roadside Americana, and the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. His 2009 book City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Omnitopia received the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award from the Urban Communication Foundation. His latest co-authored book, Die ortlose stadt: Über die virtualisierung des urbanen, further examines the impact of new communications technology on urban life and human relationships. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in scholarly journals dedicated to media, performance, education, and rhetoric, and he has served on editorial boards for several regional and national journals. His teaching interests include architectural rhetoric, urban design, media analysis, and the humanities, and he is committed to helping globalize his department and campus. He has led student groups to Austria, China, Finland, and Taiwan (and he has facilitated side trips to Estonia, Russia, and Sweden), and he is a Fulbright Scholar who taught at Belarusian State University in 2015.

Tuesday, January 3rd
Rafael Narvaez – Winona State University
Souls
Rafael Narváez is a sociologist educated in Lima, Peru, and at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His research involves, broadly, the intersections of sociology, psychology, and biology, and he is particularly interested in questions pertaining to embodied collective memory. Current projects include an “Enduring Questions” grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (# AQ-234985) to prepare a class that traces the development of the body/soul rhetoric in the West. Representative publications include, Embodied Collective Memory: The Making and Unmaking of Human Nature (2013), and others listed in the attached curriculum vitae. He is also an ethnographer, and has conducted most of his fieldwork in New York City, primarily in the areas of drug use and sexuality. He joined the Winona State University faculty in 2012.

Wednesday, January 4th
Reed Scherer – Northern Illinois University
Fossils and Rising Sea Levels
As a youngster in Brooklyn, N.Y., Reed Scherer loved the ocean and the diversity of its creatures. By age 7, he had started collecting fossils, and by fifth grade, classmates had affectionately dubbed him the “ mad scientist.”  From those childhood interests blossomed a research specialty that is helping scientists better understand one of the most pressing problems of our day: climate change. Scherer is an internationally respected geologist whose research has taken him around the globe and beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet. He was a key member of a research team that tackled the ongoing changes in the ice sheets and other studies of climate change, and he has published numerous studies in top-tier journals such as Nature, Science and, most recently, Nature Communications.

Thursday, January 5th
Mark Molesky – Seton Hall University
Gulf of Fire
I study a wide range of subjects in modern and early modern European history, with a particular emphasis on intellectual and cultural history. My interests include the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, the European and American Enlightenments, environmental history, the history of science, narrative history writing, the history of Franco-American relations, World War I and II, the Holocaust, and the history of classical scholarship. My recent book, This Gulf of Fire: The Destruction of Lisbon, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason (Knopf, 2015), was awarded  the 2016 Phi Alpha Theta Book Award for Best Subsequent Book and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Friday, January 6th
Lori Martin – Louisiana State Universty
Alton Sterling and Black Lives Matter
I am a native New Yorker. I was born and raised in Nyack, New York, a small town about 30 miles North of New York City. I completed my undergraduate work at Fordham University in Bronx.  I earned a Master’s Degree from the University at Buffalo, and I completed my Ph.D. at the University at Albany, State University of New York.  My first full-time teaching position was in small city in upstate New York.  In 2006, I joined the faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I never thought I would leave New York, but I could not pass up the opportunity to join a world-class institution like LSU.  The caliber and the commitment of the faculty; the ambition of the students; and the support of the community for the university; made the decision to make Baton Rouge home, an easy one.  I am looking forward to the opportunity to collaborate with my distinguished colleagues. I am also looking forward to the opportunity to capture the sociological imaginations of my students.  I am deeply committed to research, teaching, and learning.  Service-learning is one of the ways that I connect my research and the classroom to the community.  I am excited about the prospect of addressing community-identified needs in my new role. LSU is the ideal place for me to pursue my research interests, especially my research on race and ethnicity, racial wealth inequality, black asset poverty, and the sociology of sports.