Home » Commencement Week » Faculty Seminars – May 10, 2012
Faculty Seminars – May 10, 2012
2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
103 Wilson Hall
Why College? – Education and Citizenship in Modern America
CHRISTOPHER P. LOSS
College produces good citizens, right? Yes, but not for the reasons most people think. This talk will explore the role of higher education in defining changing meanings of democratic citizenship in the twentieth century, and explain why coordinated efforts to use education to produce good citizens and to remake society during that century rarely worked as intended. As we shall see, the real genius of American higher education has been—and remains—its utter unpredictability.
Christopher P. Loss is an assistant professor of education in Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. An historian of the twentieth century United States, Loss specializes in the intellectual, political, and social history of U.S. higher education. His articles and essays have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Policy History, the History of Education Quarterly, and History of Psychology, among others.
His book, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the Twentieth Century, was published by Princeton University Press in 2012. He is working on a new book on academic expertise and its challengers in the post-1945 United States. In 2010, Loss won Peabody College’s Excellence for Classroom Teaching Award.
126 Wilson Hall
“Creating Chaos in Haydn’s The Creation”
MELANIE LOWE
In 1797 Joseph Haydn completed what was immediately hailed as his greatest work, The Creation. This enormous piece scored for solo singers, chorus, and orchestra opens with nothing short of a musical impossibility—the sound of infinite nothingness. What follows would seem another nonstarter, especially given the elegance, balance, and symmetry of late eighteenth-century musical style—the Representation of Chaos. This talk explores the aesthetics of the impossible in Haydn’s most sublime work.
Melanie Lowe is Associate Professor of Musicology and Chair of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. A scholar of 18th-century music, Professor Lowe is also widely published on music in American media, classical recording, and “tween” pop culture.
She is the author of Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony (Indiana University Press, 2007) along with numerous articles on other 18th-century topics. Professor Lowe is the recipient of many teaching awards, among them the Reverend James Lawson Lectureship (Vanderbilt University, 2008), the Madison Sarratt Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (Vanderbilt University, 2001), and the Princeton Graduate Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award (Princeton University, 1993).
3:15 – 4:15 p.m.
103 Wilson Hall
Re-engineering Surgery – The Rise of Robots in the Operating Room
ROBERT J. WEBSTER III
Robots are becoming increasingly valuable surgical devices, enabling physicians to reach into the body less invasively and treat diseases more accurately than has ever before been possible. Vanderbilt is at the forefront of this area of research, establishing the Vanderbilt Initiative for Surgery and Engineering this year, a unique partnership between the schools of Engineering and Medicine. This talk will cover several examples of novel surgical robots, ranging from “tentacle-like” robots that are the diameter of needles for endonasal surgery, to swallowable endoscopic capsule robots that can accomplish surgery in the intestines and are thus making the Fantastic Voyage foreseen by Asimov a reality.
Robert J. Webster III, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers in the areas of surgical robotics and medical device design, and is a recipient of the IEEE Volz award for Ph.D. thesis impact, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Clemson University in 2002, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and 2007, respectively.
126 Wilson Hall
Privacy in America – Glimpses of a Modern History
SARAH E. IGO
Privacy has become a flashpoint of contemporary American life. But it would be a mistake to treat “privacy” as an abstraction, unmoored by time, circumstance, and place. This talk investigates one of the key terms of U.S. political culture, charting the diverse ways privacy has emerged as a public concern across the twentieth century. Precisely because privacy has been billed as a personal possession, outside the domain of the state or politics, its history offers an illuminating window onto the social strains of modern citizenship.
Sarah E. Igo is a graduate of Harvard and Princeton, who teaches and writes about modern American cultural and intellectual history. Her first book, The Averaged American, explores the relationship between survey data—opinion polls, sex surveys, consumer research—and modern understandings of self and nation.
The winner of multiple prizes, it was also an Editor’s Choice selection of the New York Times and one of Slate’s Best Books of 2007. Igo has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She also founded and co-directs the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education, a national-level initiative to promote the liberal arts.
