The Academic Minute for 2018.04.30-05.04

Academic Minute from 4.30 – 5.04

Monday, April 30th
David Kastan – Yale University
The Politics of Red and Blue
David Scott Kastan is currently the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University, having previously taught at Columbia and at Dartmouth College. Among his books are Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, Shakespeare after Theory, Shakespeare and the Book, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion, and the recently published On Color. He currently serves as one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare, co-editor of the Bantam Shakespeare, and as the series editor of the Barnes and Noble Shakespeare. He won Columbia University’s Presidential Teaching Award in 2000 and was the winner of Columbia’s inaugural Faculty Mentoring Award in 2004.

Tuesday, May 1st
Arie Kapteyn – University of Southern California
Americans Activity Levels
Arie Kapteyn is a Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters Arts and Sciences and Executive Director of the Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) based there. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, fellow of the Econometric Society, past president of the European Society for Population Economics, and corresponding member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. Much of his recent applied work is in the field of aging, economic decision-making, and subjective well-being, with papers on topics related to retirement, consumption and savings, pensions and Social Security, disability, and economic well-being. Before founding CESR at USC, Professor Kapteyn was a senior economist and director of the Labor & Population division of the RAND Corporation. Prior to RAND, he held a chair in Econometrics at Tilburg University, where he served the university in numerous capacities including dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, and founder and director of CentER (a research institute and graduate school). He has held visiting positions at several universities, including Princeton, Caltech, Australian National University, University of Canterbury (N.Z.), and University of Bristol (U.K.). In 2006, he received a knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands Lion.

Wednesday, May 2nd
Amelia Reigstad – University of Wisconsin River Falls
Workplace Communications
Amelia Reigstad joined the University of Wisconsin River Falls Marketing Communications program from Vancouver, BC Canada in 2013. She is a public relations practitioner and university faculty with several years’ experience and has worked in the corporate and education sectors. She developed Crosspoint Communications, a full service consultancy agency from a grassroots level in 2007 and taught a variety of public relations and communications courses universities in Canada, the US, Europe and the UK.

Amelia studied public relations, media and communications and completed her master’s degree from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom where her dissertation studied gender in public relations and why the industry is pre-dominantly female. She was fortunate to present her dissertation research as a workshop at the 2013 Canadian Public Relations Society’s (CPRS) National Conference. Her academic interests are in public relations, gender, gender communication, communication styles, feminism and cultural studies. Amelia’s research has been published in a Canadian textbook and she is completing her Ph. D in Media and Communications.

Thursday, May 3rd
Jaime Kucinskas – Hamilton College
Sacred Experiences
Jaime Kucinskas’ research interests span the sociology of religion, inequality, social movements, cultural and organizational change and field development. Kucinskas is researching the mainstreaming of Buddhist meditation and lived religion in secular institutions in the West. A part of her dissertation research earned the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion Section’s Graduate Student Paper Award. Kucinskas has also conducted research on global income inequality and gender inequality in the Middle East. She earned master’s and doctorate degrees in sociology at Indiana University and a bachelor’s degree at Colorado College.

Friday, May 4th
Sabine Huemer – Whittier College
A Different View of Mental Health Disorders
Dr. Sabine Huemer is a cognitive neuroscientist and neuroblogger with a special interest in brains that work outside the neurological norm. She teaches in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Whittier College in Whittier, California, and conducts research on autism, dyslexia, and other learning differences. Her work has been published in international science journals and presented at neuroscience and autism conferences on three continents. Sabine leads autism and neurodiversity workshops for a variety of audiences including professionals, teachers, parents, and support groups. She recently created a Neurodiversity and Neurotechnology Learning Community to explore neurotechnology for individuals who want to live up to their full neurocognitive potential.