The Academic Minute from 1.30 – 2.3
Monday
Darby Saxbe – University of Southern California
Dad Brain? How Fatherhood Changes the Brain
Darby Saxbe is a professor in the psychology department at the University of Southern California, where she co-directs the USC Center for the Changing Family and studies families, stress, health, and neuroplasticity in her NEST (Neuroendocrinology of Social Ties) Lab.
Tuesday
Joel Christensen – Brandeis University
Women, Witchcraft, and Greek Myth
Joel Christensen (he/his) is Professor of Classical Studies at Brandeis University where he also serves as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the School of Arts and Sciences. He has recently published The Many-Minded Man: the Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic with Cornell University Press.
Wednesday
Kathleen Lubey – St. John’s University
The Ethics of Brain Computer Interfacing
Kathleen Lubey is a literary scholar and writer at work on piecing together the complex history of pornography. A professor at St. John’s University and specialist in eighteenth-century literature, her teaching and research spans British literature, the history of sexuality, and gender studies. What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century, traces currents of feminism and social justice in British pornography from the 1740s to the present.
Thursday
Morgan Shipley – Michigan State University
The Varieties of Spirituality
Morgan Shipley (Ph.D.) is the Inaugural Foglio Endowed Chair of Spirituality and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. Author of Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America (Lexington Books, 2015) and co-editor of The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), Dr. Shipley’s research explores secular spirituality, new religious movements, and individuals who increasingly identify as spiritual but not religious.
Friday
Jeff Liebert – McGill University
Get Big or Get Out: How Farm Size Affects the Use of Sustainable Management Practices
Jeff Liebert is a Postdoctoral Researcher jointly appointed in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Jeff recently completed his PhD at Cornell University where his work on agroecology drew on methodologies and theories from both the biophysical and social sciences. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach, Jeff’s graduate research explored the motivations and barriers to using agroecological farming practices among US farmers. Through this research, Jeff collaborated with farmers, extension educators, crop consultants, NGOs, government agencies, and other scientists from around the world. As a postdoctoral researcher, Jeff is focused on untangling the complex, spatially explicit ways that ecological, social, economic, and political dimensions of farm management interact to enable or hinder climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes across Canada.
