Faculty Colloquium: Geologic Carbon Storage

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Dear Colleagues,

Please join us this Friday, February 5th at 3 pm. in the Hatfield Room for our second Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided.

Burt Thomas, Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental and Earth ScienceBurt Thomas

Title: Geologic Carbon Storage: A Climate Salve with Some Nasty Side Effects

Abstract:

Geological Carbon Storage (GCS) is the world’s best hope of mitigating carbon dioxide emissions over the next few decades as global economies transition away from fossil energy sources. GCS refers to a variety of strategies that involve capturing carbon dioxide before it is released into the atmosphere and permanently storing it in geological reservoirs. Over the next 100 years, the lion’s share of carbon mitigation is expected to involve industrial scale GCS. Industrial methods are based primarily on the lessons-learned and expertise of the US oil industry that has routinely used carbon dioxide injection to enhance oil recovery in depleted oilfields. I will discuss the risks and consequences of our Nation’s oil-dependent GCS trajectory and argue for the need for municipal-based low-risk storage options.

Please feel free to invite students to attend this talk.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Bobby Brewer-Wallin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators

Hallie Ford Literary Series: Walidah Imarisha

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Please join us for the first event in the Spring 2016 Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette, a talk and reading by Walidah Imarisha, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. The talk will take place on Thursday, February 4, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s library. The event is free and open to the public, and books will be for sale courtesy of the Willamette Store.

Octavia’s Brood is the first anthology of its kind to gather science fiction that explores the genre as a means of political expression, of imagining a world free of war, racism, and oppression. The anthology was named one of the top ten feminist books of 2015 by Ms. Magazine, and CBC Radio called it the best new science fiction/fantasy book of the season.

Walidah is a poet, journalist, and fiction writer, who has taught in Portland State University’s Black Studies Department, Oregon State University’s Women Gender Sexuality Studies Department, and Southern New Hampshire University’s English Department. For the past six years, she has presented all over Oregon as a public scholar with Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project on topics such as Oregon Black history, alternatives to incarceration, and the history of hip hop. One half of the poetry duo Good Sista/Bad Sista, she has published poetry in a wide variety of journals and performed at venues across the country. Walidah also spent six years on the board of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, and helped to found the Human Rights Coalition, a group of prisoners’ families and former prisoners with three chapters in Pennsylvania.

Read an interview with Walidah and her co-editor Adrienne Brown at The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/why-science-fiction-fabulous-tool-fight-social-justice/

Scott Nadelson

Faculty Colloquium: Star Numbers

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Dear Colleagues,

Please join us this Friday, January 29th at a special time, 4:10-5:10 in the Hatfield Room for our first Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided. josh-laison

Josh Laison, Associate Professor of Mathematics

Title: Star Numbers: From 17th-Century Oranges to Delivery Robots and Beyond

Abstract:

We will discuss a new variation of a 400-year-old problem from Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton about how densely geometric shapes can be packed together. Along the way we’ll encounter Amazon delivery robots, geometric networks, an iphone game, computers that prove theorems, 24-dimensional spheres, Tetris, cannonballs, and some exciting new theorems. No previous math or Tetris experience required. This research was done in collaboration with Andrew Bishop WU’14, Ben Gardiner WU’13, and David Livingston WU’15.

Please feel free to invite students to attend this talk.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Bobby Brewer-Wallin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators

Politics and Religion: Constantine in Rome, 312-326

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Dear Colleagues,

Please join us this Friday, December 4th at 3:00 in the Hatfield Room for our tenth and final Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided.
chenault-sm
Robert Chenault, Associate Professor of History and Classics

Title: Politics and Religion: Constantine in Rome, 312-326

Abstract:

The nature of Constantine’s personal conversion to Christianity has been endlessly discussed, doubted, and defended, and probably always will. Instead of inquiring into the unknowable, scholars would do better to focus on the ways in which Constantine presented his religious affiliations publicly and how they were represented by others. In this talk, I apply this method to a single, especially significant case: Constantine’s relationship with the city of Rome and its various constituencies. By exploiting both the textual evidence and the symbolic meanings of certain buildings and monuments linked to Constantine’s three visits to Rome between 312 and 326, it is possible to arrive at fresh insights into Constantine’s skillful balancing of political messages and religious expressions, the ways in which Constantine and the Senate were able to find common ground, and the flavor of public discourse at Rome in the early fourth century.

Please feel free to invite students to attend this talk.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Bobby Brewer-Wallin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators

Faculty Colloquium: Water Conflict in the Klamath Basin

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Dear Colleagues,

Please join us Friday, November 20th at 3:00 in the Hatfield Room for our ninth Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided.Don Negri

Don Negri, Professor of Economics

Title: Water Conflict in the Klamath Basin

Abstract:

The Klamath Basin in Southern Oregon has been the site of conflict over water resources for more than a decade. The Basin is a microcosm of the conflict over water scarcity that plagues the western US. The conflict is as much about clashing cultures as it is about insufficient water. The Basin is home to four Native American Tribes, four wildlife refuges and a federal irrigation project that provides water to approximately 210,000 acres of farmland. In the 1990’s the Endangered Species Act listed two fish species in the basin that made agricultural water supplies susceptible to cutbacks especially in drought years. Also during the 90’s the Confederated Klamath Tribes began to assert their historical water rights magnifying the threat to agricultural production in the region. Then in 2001, the conflict erupted into violence as the federal government mandated the water supply head gates be closed to protect endangered fish. Since that time the battle over water allocation in the basin has be waged in Congress and the courts with no end in sight.

Please feel free to invite students to attend this talk.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Bobby Brewer-Wallin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators

Faculty Colloquium: “A Hindu is white although he is black”

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Dear Colleagues,

Please join us this Friday, November 6th at 3:00 in the Hatfield Room for our seventh Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided.

Alexander Rocklin, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Alexander Rocklin
Title: “A Hindu is white although he is black”: Hindu Alterity and the Performativity of Religion and Race between the US and the Caribbean

Abstract:

This talk uses the controversies surrounding the racially and religiously enigmatic Ismet Ali, a yogi working in Chicago and New York in the 1920s, as a way to get at the complexities of the interrelatedness of the performativity of religion and race. In examining several moments in which Ali’s “authenticity” as Indian is brought into doubt, it opens up larger questions regarding the global flows of colonial knowledge, racial tropes, and groups of people between India, the US, and the Caribbean. The practices of the yogi persona and its sartorial stylings, particularly the donning of a turban and beard, meant to signify “East Indianness” in the US, were one mode through which “Hindoo” stereotypes were repurposed as models for self-formation by both South Asian and African Americans in the early twentieth century. In passing as “Hindoo,” peoples of color could circumvent the US’s black/white racial binary and the violence of Jim Crow. This act of racial passing, though, was an act of religious passing as well. This talk explores the ways in which, in the early twentieth century US, East Indian “authenticity” only became legible via identificatory practices that engaged with and took on Orientalized stereotypes. However, the ways in which identities had to and could be performed changed with context, as individuals moved across national and colonial lines.

Please feel free to invite students to attend this talk.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Bobby Brewer-Wallin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators

New Voices Showcase: Rabins & Bernard

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Please join us for the third event in the Fall 2015 Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette, a New Voices Showcase, featuring poet Alicia Jo Rabins and fiction writer Sean Bernard. The reading and Q&A will take place on Monday, November 9, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s library. It is free and open to the public, and books will be for sale courtesy of the Willamette Store.

A writer, composer, performer and Torah scholar, Alicia Jo Rabins won the 2015 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Her first volume of poetry, Divinity School, was published this October. She tours internationally with her band, performing Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women. A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, her one-woman chamber-rock opera, was named one of Portland’s best theatre performances of 2014 by the Willamette Week.

Sean Bernard is the author of two books released in the last year: a novel, Studies in the Hereafter, and a story collection, Desert Sonorous, which won the 2014 Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press. He lives and teaches creative writing in Southern California, where he serves as Fiction Editor for The Los Angeles Review and also edits the journal Prism Review. He holds degrees from Oregon State University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in Epoch, CutBank, LIT, Glimmer Train, and Sequestrum. In 2012, he received a literary fellowship from the NEA.

Read one of Alicia’s poems here: https://aprweb.org/poems/florida; or listen to her songs here: http://www.girlsintroublemusic.com/listen/.

Read an interview with Sean here: http://therumpus.net/2015/10/the-rumpus-interview-with-sean-bernard/.

Scott Nadelson
Associate Professor of English;
Department Chair of English