The Academic Minute for 2019.08.19-08.23

The Academic Minute from 08.19 – 08.23

Monday, August 19th
Julie Merten – University of North Florida
Sunscreen
Dr. Julie Merten is an Associate Professor of Public Health at the University of North Florida. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Florida Public Health Review and chairs the Skin Cancer Prevention Task Force for the Northeast Florida Cancer Control Collaborative. Her research involves behavioral skin cancer prevention and she is currently working on a funded study testing the feasibility of a brief intervention and referral for community-based skin cancer screenings.

Tuesday, August 20th
Peter Filkins – Bard College at Simon’s Rock
H.G. Adler
Peter Filkins is an award-winning poet and translator. His authorized biography H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds appeared in 2019 from Oxford University Press, and his most recent book of poems is The View We’re Granted (Johns Hopkins, 2012), winner of the 2013 Best Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. He has translated three novels by H.G. Adler, Panorama, The Journey, and The Wall, as well as the collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the DAAD, and the American Academy in Berlin, he is the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and also teaches translation at the main campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Wednesday, August 21st
Vaughn Scribner – Central Arkansas University
Taverns
My research investigates early American history in a global context, specifically striving to understand how early modern Britons sought to define (and redefine) their positions in the empire.

I recently published one book, and have another forthcoming. Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society (NYU Press, April 2019) analyzes early Americans’ mercurial attempts at realizing a “civil society” through the lens of the urban tavern, while Merpeople: A Human History (under contract with Reaktion Books UK/ University of Chicago Press USA) uses humanity’s long-held obsession with merpeople to gain a deeper understanding of one of the most mysterious, capricious, and dangerous creatures on earth: humans.

Thursday, August 22nd
Scott Melzer – Albion College
Manhood
Scott Melzer(smelzer@albion.edu) is Professor of Sociology and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Albion College. His work focuses on how men respond when they think their status and identities are threatened. He is the author of Manhood Impossible: Men’s Struggles to Control and Transform Their Bodies and Work, and Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War. He is interviewed and quoted regularly in national and international news media, appearing in print and online stories, on radio, and in documentary films and TV shows.

Friday, August 23rd
Lesley Shipley – Randolph College
Contemporary Art Reactions
My research and teaching interests are in modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on identity, feminism, activism, and abstraction in art since 1960. Currently, I am completing an article that examines the intersection of ethics and aesthetics in two installations by the contemporary Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. I’m also finalizing a paper on a series of reliefs by the American artist Lee Bontecou. I have presented my research at the Feminist Art History Conference, the Annual Conference of the College Art Association, the Asians in the Americas Conference, and the Association of Art Historians Annual Conference in Norwich, England.

At Randolph, I teach 19th-century European Art, Modern European Art, American Art and Architecture, and the second half of the survey of Western Art. Special topics that I plan to teach include “Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Art”, “Art and Activism since 1960,” and “African American Art from Colonialism to the Present”.