Events

Each academic year the Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty offers a variety of lectures, luncheons and faculty development workshops that feature Smith faculty and visiting professors.

Liberal Arts Luncheons

Liberal Arts Luncheons are sponsored by the Provost and Dean of the Faculty. LALs will be held on Thursdays in the Neilson Browsing Room, unless otherwise noted. Talks begin at approximately 12:10 p.m., and a complimentary lunch is offered for the first 40 attendees (first come, first served).

Date	Talk	Presenter
February 1	Medieval Art in the Age of Napoleon—Appropriation, Spoliation, Restitution	Brigitte Buettner, Louise I. Doyle 1934 Professor of Art
February 8 (CANCELED)	(CANCELED) Fieldwork as [a] Subject: Emotions and Care in Ethnographic Research	(CANCELED) Ana Del Conde, McPherson/Eveillard Postdoctoral Fellow in Study of Women and Gender and Community Engagement and Social Change
February 15	Quantifying Uncertainty and Containing Chaos: Preparing Students for a Future We Cannot Predict	Denise McKahn, Associate Provost and Associate Professor of Engineering
February 29	One Contemporary Artist, Many Sites: Younes Rahmoun's Upcoming Retrospective at SCMA, Botanic Garden, and MacLeish	Emma Chubb, Curator of Contemporary Art, Smith College Museum of Art
March 7	Solving the Mystery of Bermuda: Using Isotope Geochemistry to Understand Volcanism	Sarah Mazza, Assistant Professor of Geosciences
March 14	Implicit Assessment of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI)	Stephanie Steele, Assistant Professor of Psychology
March 28	Explaining Mansplaining	Eric McCurdy, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
April 4	Queenly Visions: Early/Modern Dialogues on Women, Spirituality, and Social Justice	Theresa Brock, Assistant Professor of French Studies
April 11	Not Judgment but Terror: Contested Notions of Trial by Combat	Joshua Birk, Associate Professor of History
April 18	The Design Clinic Download Podcast: Alum Voices Validate and Inform Pedagogy	Susannah Howe, Senior Lecturer of Engineering
April 25	The James Webb Space Telescope: Expanding Our Vision of the Universe	Gary Felder, Professor of Physics

Sigma Xi Luncheons

Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, meets regularly for talks and a complimentary lunch throughout the year. Talks are open to all faculty, staff and students.

Talks begin at approximately 12:10 p.m. in McConnell Auditorium. A complimentary lunch is offered in McConnell Foyer. Please visit the Sigma Xi website for the schedule.

Faculty Development Events

The Office of the Provost offers a variety of faculty development workshops and events throughout the year. Please visit the office’s Faculty Development webpage for the schedule.

Lectures

Eszter Hargittai ’96 is a Professor and holds the Chair in Internet Use & Society in the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich. She is Fellow of the International Communication Association and an External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Before moving to Zurich, she was the Delaney Family Professor at Northwestern University.

Hargittai’s research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media with a particular interest in how differences in people’s Internet skills influence what they do online, and how these may translate into changes in life chances. Hargittai is author of Connected in Isolation: Digital Privilege in Unsettled Times (The MIT Press, 2022), editor of the Handbook of Digital Inequality (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021), and three books on the behind-the-scenes realities of doing empirical social science research.

Her work has been featured in many popular media outlets in the United States and internationally. Her research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Microsoft Research, Nokia, Google, Facebook, and Merck, among others.

Lecture Dates and Titles

Lecture 1. The Black Box of Information Access in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Wednesday, September 27 at 5 p.m. in the Neilson Browsing Room

While we know that artificial intelligence plays an increasingly important role in what information people encounter in everyday life, we know surprisingly little about people’s awareness and understanding of such technologies. Algorithm skills are an important new dimension of Internet skills, which refers to the efficient, effective, and informed use of digital technologies. This presentation will first review work on more general Internet skills to show how these vary by user background and are an important component of digital inequality. Then, the talk will shed light on people’s algorithm skills drawing on data collected through interviews in several countries and through national surveys of US adults.

Lecture 2. Digital Inequality During Pandemic Lockdowns

Thursday, October 26 at 5 p.m. in the Neilson Browsing Room

Reception Afterward Hosted by the Provost in the Skyline Reading Room

Rarely is access to information as important as during a global health crisis. During the initial COVID-19 lockdowns, at a time when information could mean the difference between life and death, information inequalities were of paramount significance. As people scrambled to shift ever more activities online, having robust home Internet access and the necessary skills to navigate digital technologies efficiently became increasingly important. Drawing on national survey data collected in the early days of the pandemic in three countries (US, Italy, Switzerland), this talk shares how people’s digital privilege related to their knowledge and misconceptions about the virus with consequences for whether they stayed safe during lockdowns.

Lecture 3. Older Adults and Social Media: Opportunities and Challenges

Tuesday, November 14 at 5 p.m. in the Neilson Browsing Room

Although often dismissed as out-of-touch with technology, the majority of older adults (60+) in the United States now use social media. What potential drawbacks and benefits might result from using such platforms? What encourages adoption of new services and what leads to their rejection? This talk shares insights from both interview- and survey-based research conducted in multiple countries about older adults’ experiences with a variety of social media. Contrary to popular belief, older adults represent significantly varied experiences with online technologies and treating them as one homogenous group of uninformed users misses opportunities for peer support and potential advantages for well-being.

Bruce R. Smith

Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Professor in Renaissance Studies

Fall 2022

Bruce R. Smith’s interests include Shakespeare, sound studies, Queer studies, and media studies, often in combination. His books include Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (Chicago, 1991), The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, 1999), Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford, 2000), The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago, 2009), Phenomenal Shakespeare (Wiley Blackwell, 2010), and Shakespeare | Cut: Rethinking Cutwork in an Age of Distraction (Oxford, 2016). Smith’s full CV is available.

Fall 2022 Lecture Dates and Information

Renaissance Poetry Across Media

In our own media-savvy time, we realize that what gets communicated is very much a function of how it gets communicated. These three lectures investigate manuscript, print, sculpture, architecture and music as media for communicating 16th and 17th century poems in Shakespeare's England.

All lectures will take place in the Neilson Browsing Room and begin at 5 p.m.

This series is hosted by the Department of English and made possible by the Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Endowment for Renaissance Studies.

Lecture Date	Lecture Title
Monday, September 26	Poetry, Media and Across
Monday, October 31	Poetry, Sculpture and Architecture
Tuesday, November 29	Poetry and Music

The Engel Lectureship is granted annually to a Smith faculty member who has made a significant contribution to his or her field. The lecture was established in 1958 by the National Council of Jewish women in honor of Engel, its onetime president and a 1920 Smith graduate. The 2024 Engel Lecturer will be Steve Waksman.

Spring 2024

The 65th Katharine Asher Engel Lecture

The Politics of Scale: Live Music Crowds from Jenny Lind to Taylor Swift

STEVE WAKSMAN

ELISIE IRWIN SWEENEY PROFESSOR OF MUSIC AND PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN STUDIES

Monday, April 1, 2024 at 5 p.m. — Neilson Library, Klingenstein Browsing Room, Smith College

Live music is one of the most significant forms of public congregation that we have and the crowds that attend musical events have frequently been perceived to have a significance at least equal to, if not outweighing, the character of the musical artists themselves. A major impulse in the modern history of live music has been to gather the largest crowd possible, a tendency that has an important connection to the growth of the live music business, within which big crowds equal money and profit. Yet commercial motives alone do not explain the importance of live music crowds, which also serve as an index of the varied “imagined communities” to which music gives rise. In this presentation, I will survey four moments in live music history when the crowd has been invested with significance as an emblem of broader struggles over collective identity and musical value: Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind’s U.S. tour in the early 1850s; the Beatles’ 1965 performance at New York’s Shea Stadium; Beyoncé’s 2018 headline appearance at the Coachella festival; and Taylor Swift’s current Eras tour, which is on track to become the highest-grossing concert tour of all-time.

Steve Waksman is Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music and Professor of American Studies at Smith College. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999), and This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009), which was awarded the Woody Guthrie Prize by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Chapter. With Reebee Garofalo, he is the co-author of the sixth edition of the rock history textbook, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (2014), and with Andy Bennett, he co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (2015). His essays have appeared in such collections as the Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop, Metal Rules the Globe, and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre and Popular Music. On WRSI radio, The River in Western Massachusetts, he can be heard as the “Doctor of Rock,” offering bits of popular music history in support of Black History Month and Women’s History Month. His latest book is Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé (Oxford University Press, 2022), which received the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society and won 3 rd place honors for the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, given by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In 2008, Waksman was the keynote speaker at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s American Music Masters event honoring the legacy of musician and inventor Les Paul. His dissertation on the electric guitar won the 1998 Ralph Henry Gabriel prize awarded by the American Studies Association. Currently he is completing work on The Cambridge Companion the Electric Guitar, co-edited with Jan-Peter Herbst.

A lecture by Suleiman Mourad

November 30, 2023

Myra M. Sampson Professor of Religion
Defining Islam: An Impossible Possibilty (! ?)
Neilson Browsing 5 p.m.

A lecture by Erin Pineda

December 12, 2023

Phyllis Cohen Rappaport '68 New Century Term Professor
Displays of Force: Protest and the Spectacular Violence of Police
Neilson Browsing 5 p.m.

A lecture by Michael Barresi

January 30, 2024

Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of Biological Sciences
The Art of Breaking and Making the Brain
Neilson Browsing 5 p.m.

A lecture by Aaron Kamugisha

February 26, 2024

Ruth J. Simmons Chair of Africana Studies
The Responsibilities of Caribbean Intellectuals in an Age of Disenchantment
Neilson Browsing 5 p.m.

A lecture by Carrie Baker

April 11, 2024

Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Chair of American Studies
Resisting Reproductive Coercion: Abortion Pills Post-Dobbs
Neilson Browsing 5 p.m.

A lecture by Kate Queeney

April 24, 2024

Carol Tecla Christ Professor of Chemistry
When Two Dimensions Are Better Than Three: Adventures in Silicon Surface Chemistry
Alumnae House Conference Room 5 p.m.

Celebrating Collaborations

“Celebrating Collaborations: Students and Faculty Working Together” showcases and celebrates the scholarly work of Smith College students. Students present the results of their senior theses, independent study projects, research seminars and other creative work as part of oral sessions, panels, poster sessions, exhibits and performances.

Learn More About Collaborations