Alumni Weekend

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Alumni Weekend is September 15-17, 2017.  There are a number of planned activities for our beloved alumni, visitors, and current students that are listed online (view schedule), including reunions, panel discussions, social mixers, campus tours, excursions around Salem, celebratory meals, exciting entertainment and awards ceremonies.  Alumni Weekend truly has something for everyone.

More than 800 total guests and 500 Bearcats returned to campus this past September, making it one of the most successful and highest attended Alumni Weekend gatherings in school history.  Get a glimpse of the fun that was had by checking out the Alumni Weekend 2016 Recap and Photo Galley.  Also, a number of items owned by Willamette alumni will be on display this weekend on the 5th floor of Waller Hall for alumni weekend.  They will be on display into October for the Waller Hall birthday celebration.  These items include unique items from the Archives that usually are not loaned.

Below are a photos from last year’s Alumni Weekend (2016), including a leather bag with an early Willamette University bearcat emblem owned by Marian Pope (class of 1936), and a yellow stadium seat cushion with Barney the Beartcat that was used between 1952 through the 1970s.

(Info and photos courtesy of the Archives & Special Collections and the Alumni Weekend web page.)

Eclipse-2017

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“The Great American Eclipse,” the first solar eclipse to touch the continental United States since 1979, occurred right here in Salem on the morning of August 21st (10:18 a.m.).  We have compiled events that happened on campus, as well as observation tips, safety, and other fun activities.

Additional info at: http://libguides.willamette.edu/solar-eclipse

Faculty Colloquium, Seth Cotlar

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Dear Colleagues,

Please join us this Friday, April 28th at 3 pm. in the Hatfield Room for our tenth and final Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided.

Seth Cotlar, Professor of History
 

Title:  What the Nostalgic Subject Knows: Nostalgia, the Nineteenth Century Archive, and the Melancholy History of Modernization in Antebellum America

This talk will be drawn from my ongoing book project entitled “When The Olden Days Were New: A Cultural History of Nostalgia in Modernizing America, 1776-1860.”   In the 1820s and 1830s there emerged a new category of people–self-described “antiquaries” and lovers of “the olden times.”  By the 1840s, just about every town or county had a small community of quirky amateur historians.  These librarians, bank clerks, widows, and lawyers collected old books and manuscripts, hoarded old tools and objects, donned “old fashioned” clothing, filled their houses with anachronistic furniture, drew sketches of old houses before they were about to be torn down, and regaled anyone who would listen with stories from “the olden days” that they had gleaned from their conversations with local octogenarians.  In an era when most of their contemporaries could have cared less about history (Independence Hall, for example, was almost torn down and replaced with a more modern building in the 1820s), this community of eccentrics produced hundreds of local histories (such as this gripping, 400+ page history of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury) and founded dozens of historical societies.  This work matters, because the material they collected formed the foundation of the modern historical archive that we now use to reconstruct the history of early North America. In this talk, I will critically interrogate the nostalgic impulses that animated this work of recovery and preservation.  For the most part, these builders of the archive have been looked down upon, if not entirely ignored, by professional historians because of their unseemly, melancholy attachment to objects and documents from the “obsolete” past.  Their emotional investment in their work disqualified them as “serious” scholars for a profession eager to define itself as rigorously modern and empirical.  But I argue that the melancholy, nostalgic sensibility of these early nineteenth century historians is precisely what enabled them to see certain features of the American past that many of their more forward-looking contemporaries wished to forget.  Indeed, we are now able to tell more capacious and creative histories of early America today, in part, because of the radically inclusive work of preservation carried out by this first generation of nostalgic hoarders, and eccentric lovers of “the olden times.”

Students are welcome.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Daniel Rouslin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators

Lecture by Gordon-Reed and Onuf

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The History Department invites you to attend a lecture by historians Annette Gordon-Reed, Professor at Harvard Law School and Pulitzer-Prize Winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, and Peter Onuf, UVA emeritus, founder of the Backstory! Podcast, and author of numerous books on Thomas Jefferson.  The talk will take place on Monday April 24 at 7pm in the Hatfield Room.

Gordon-Reed and Onuf will give a talk based on their recently published and widely-acclaimed book “The Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.”  We hope to see you there!

For questions about this lecture, please contact Seth Cotlar (scotlar@willamette.edu) from the History Department.

2017 Faculty Works Exhibit

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The Mark O. Hatfield Library has on display a number of select faculty works now through May 15th, 2017.  These displays are are located on the first floor, and consist of a number of faculty publications (books and articles), and works of art (photos and studio art).  For the first time, there is also a display which highlight video clips of a theater production. Below are a photos from this exhibit.

Foundational Scientific Reasoning

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Dear Colleagues,

Please join us this Friday, April 21st at 3 pm. in the Hatfield Room for our ninth Faculty Colloquium of this semester. Treats will be provided.

Courtney Stevens and Melissa Witkow, Associate Professors of Psychology,
 

Title:  Promoting foundational scientific reasoning skills in Introductory Psychology: Findings from an NSF-IUSE curriculum grant

In this talk, we will describe our collaborative work over the past 5 years to develop and assess new materials to improve the training of scientific reasoning skills in introductory psychology.  This work was initially inspired by changes to the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) to include psychology-focused questions. These questions highlighted the potential for introductory psychology to move beyond traditional content coverage to include stronger training of scientific reasoning skills, including data interpretation and research design. Our talk will cover a series of studies, moving from initial efforts in our own classes at Willamette to broader efforts involving other instructors at WU, as well as Chemeketa Community College and Oregon State University. The talk will highlight the course modules and assessment results, as well our design process. This work was funded by a Keck grant (iScience; PIs: Mark Stewart and Stas Stavrianeas) and an NSF-IUSE grant (PIs: Courtney Stevens, Melissa Witkow, and Kathy Becker-Blease).

Students are welcome.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Doreen Simonsen and Daniel Rouslin
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators

 

Professor Parayil

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Tuesday April 18, 4:15 in the Library’s Hatfield Room,  Prof. Govindan Parayil will give the 2017 Teppola Chair lecture on “The Return of ‘the Machinery Question’ and the Failed Promise of Globalization.”
Abstract: Political economists and social critics of the 19th century theorized “the machinery question”: the rage against machines by unemployed former artisans and alienated workers after the onset of modern capitalism. Two centuries later, resistance to the “march of the machine” has returned.  Whereas the Luddites in the 19th century English mills attacked textile machines as tangible instruments of their oppression, information-age revolts rage against the post-Cold War global political and economic order. There is public anxiety and fear that the twin forces of globalization and technological innovation are forging an economic future in which most work will be done by autonomous technologies.  Looming in scholarly debates and public discourse is the prospect of a dystopia worse than the one Charlie Chaplin portrayed in the film “Modern Times,” that is, an economic marketplace where humans need not apply.  In Bill Joy’s words, we fear a future “that doesn’t need us.”  In this talk, I will investigate whether, as several major technological advances revolutionize the world’s political economy, it is possible to have a fair economic future in the face of gross asymmetries in social relations, political power, and economic opportunities for the marginalized and excluded majority.

Acclaimed Novelist Leah Stewart

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Please join us for the final event of the Spring 2017 Hallie Ford Literary Series, a reading by acclaimed novelist Leah Stewart and a celebration of the first annual Mark and Melody Teppola Creative Writing Prizes at Willamette, with food, drink, and readings by our winners in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The readings and celebration take place on Thursday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room and are free and open to the public.

Leah Stewart is the critically acclaimed author of The History of Us, Husband and Wife, The Myth of You and Me, and Body of a Girl. The recipient of a Sachs Fund Prize and a NEA Literature Fellowship, she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati.

The New York Times Book Review says of her newest novel, The New Neighbor, “In simple, elegant language, Leah Stewart draws us to a little pond hidden away in the mountains of Tennessee… Stewart never relaxes her tight focus on these complex characters.”

Read an interview with Leah here: http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/features/an-interview-with-leah-stewart

The winners of this year’s Mark & Melody Teppola Creative Writing Prizes are:

Poetry: Lara Zetzsche, for “Electronegativity of Atoms,” judged by Michelle Y. Burke

Nonfiction: JoAnna Hernandez, for “Tongue Tied,” judged by Jay Ponteri

Fiction: Jacob Kirn, for “Voodoo,” judged by Leah Stewart

 

Image sources from leahstewart.com

Colonial Latin America Myth-Making

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Professor Adorno is not only a distinguished scholar, but she has also written quite successfully for a general audience, and she is an excellent guest speaker. She will give a public lecture, “Gonzalo Guerrero: Hearsay and History in Myth-Making about Colonial Latin America,” on Friday, April 14th at 3pm in the Hatfield Room.

Talk abstract:

“Gonzalo Guerrero” is the name given by sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers to a shipwreck victim who was thought to have joined Maya society and became a Maya war lord who thwarted the Spanish conquest of Yucatan (Mexico). The retelling of the story has proven irresistible: as recently as fifteen years ago there appeared a newly discovered “autobiography” of Gonzalo—and it was not the first. Tracing this series of arresting accounts through the centuries in both Spanish-language and Anglo-American English-language traditions, we will consider how fiction emerged from history and hearsay in the Latin American literary tradition. Taking this celebrated example from the chronicles of the Spanish conquest period, we will contemplate the issue of  how vaguely known historical events become the object of hearsay, eventually creating myths that are ultimately given the credence and weight of history. This lecture will be illustrated (PowerPoint).

Lecture: Electoral Politics in Southeast Asia

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The Center for Asian Studies is pleased to invite you to a lecture and presentation by Prof. Meredith Weiss, University at Albany SUNY) on “Electoral Politics in Southeast Asia: Policy, Patronage, and Public Interest.”  The lecture will be on Monday, April 10 at 4:15 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of the Hatfield Library.  Refreshments will be served.

“Throughout Southeast Asia, in a range of phenomena sometimes collectively labeled “money politics,” candidates for elected office distribute patronage— benefits that might include cash, food and other goods, public-sector jobs, infrastructure projects, or other rewards—via clientelist networks. Sometimes illegal or illicit, other times above-ground and at least tacitly condoned, such practices span the electoral cycle and deeply inflect the quality and character of governance structures, democracy, and national integration. This seminar will offer an overview of a multi-year, cross-national, collaborative research project to track and compare these practices and their implications for candidates, political parties, citizens, and policies in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand.”

Read more about Professor Weiss at: http://www.albany.edu/rockefeller/faculty_pos_weiss.shtml