The Academic Minute for 2017.11.27-12.01

Academic Minute from 11.27 – 12.01

Monday, November 27th
Dustin Wright – Connecticut College
Sunagawa Struggle
Dustin Wright is a historian of Japan, The Pacific, Okinawa and East Asia. At Connecticut College, he teaches a range of courses, including Protest and US Imperialism in Asia, Quakes & Nukes: (Un)Natural Japanese History, Food Empires of Asia and the Pacific, The Making of Modern East Asia, and Art and Invention in Ancient Japan.

Dustin Wright’s current manuscript, “Bloody Sunagawa: Anti-Base Protest and the Struggle for Peace in Modern Japan,” explores one of the most important (and least known) social movements in modern Japanese history. The Sunagawa Struggle was a pioneering anti-US military base and runway expansion movement that began in 1955 in the Sunagawa district of Tachikawa, a Tokyo suburb. Sunagawa became a proving ground for radical activists who later participated in social movements throughout Japan throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and into today. As a cultural historian, Dustin interrogates the colorful and relatively forgotten histories of local Japanese citizens who had a profound influence on the course of the Japanese state and the U.S.-Japan military alliance. The project recognizes the everyday activists who are at the center of the fight for democracy and peace in Japan today.

Dustin has written widely on issues related U.S.-Japan historical relations, appeared on “Rising Up With Sonali,” and has written for The Japan Times. He is also working on two new projects. The first, a colonial history of Spam (the canned meat product) across the Pacific, is drawn from his interest in Pacific food histories, which is also one of his favorite teaching subjects. The other investigates the basetown milieu of 1960s Okinawa through the lens of single criminal act; the killing of a local baseworker.

Tuesday, November 28th
Barry Lam – Vassar College
The Wishes of the Dead
Barry Lam received his B.A. in Philosophy and English at the University of California, Irvine (2001), and his PhD in Philosophy at Princeton University (January 2007). His current research focuses on the nature of epistemic rationality and justification. He also has extensive interests in the philosophy of language and linguistic semantics, the philosophy of science, and analytic metaphysics.

Wednesday, November 29th
Damon Coletta – Air Force Academy
Educational Practice and Liberal Education
Damon Coletta is summer visiting scientist at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Professor of Political Science at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs. At the Academy, Damon edits the peer-reviewed electronic journal Space & Defense and teaches core courses in American Government and Geopolitics. He also represents the Department of Political Science for USAFA’s Nuclear Minor, a course sequence offered jointly with the Department of Physics in accordance with the Air Force Chief of Staff’s Flight Plan for the Air Force Nuclear Enterprise (June 2013).

Thursday, November 30th
Reza Akhavian – California State University, East Bay
Technology and Construction Accidents
Dr. Reza Akhavian is an Assistant Professor of Construction Management at the School of Engineering, California State University East Bay (CSUEB). He received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering (with Construction Engineering and Management concentration) from the University of Central Florida (UCF). He also holds an M.S. (UCF, 2012) and a B.S. (University of Tehran, 2010) in Civil Engineering. He has more than 20 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings and serves as a member of the editorial board of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Journal of Construction Engineering and Management (JCEM).

Friday, December 1st
Jonathan Wilson – Haverford College
Re-Animating Extinct Plants
I received my B.A. in Computer Science and Earth and Planetary Sciences from Johns Hopkins University in 2003 and a Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University in 2009.  After two years as an O K Earl Postdoctoral Scholar in Geology and Postdoctoral Scholar in Geobiology at Caltech, I joined the Biology Department at Haverford in 2011 as an environmental biologist.  I enjoy field-based work, whether geological or botanical in nature, and try to spend my summers near some combination of plants, rocks, and trout.