Professor Sara Blair, the Patricia S. Yaeger Collegiate Professorship in English Language and Literature, Inaugural Lecture

Portrait v. Landscape: Visual genres, anti-racism, and the photograph

Tuesday, April 11, 2023
4:00 p.m. Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

In an era of digital life and nonstop photo-sharing, the modes of “portrait” and “landscape” are increasingly naturalized as orientations to the worlds we encounter. Yet both have long, complex histories as visual genres that continue, mostly unremarked, to shape our habits of seeing. Reconsidering those histories has been an important project for U.S. photographers who seek to use the camera as a resource for anti-racist imaging, potentially transforming the role of photography itself in representing and reproducing power, difference, and the right to look. This talk, drawn from a project on prehistories of digital imaging, focuses on mid-20th-century photographer Gordon Parks and a recently rediscovered body of his work made in the Jim Crow South. Shooting in the square format, at the intersection of portrait and landscape orientations and genres, Parks draws on their effects both to center lived Black life and to disrupt assumptions about what it means to see and to know race in America.

Professor Helmut Puff, the Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Collegiate Professorship in History and Germanic Languages and Literatures, Inaugural Lecture

Toward a History of Waiting: Time, Space, and the Social Hierarchy

Wednesday, April 19, 2023
4:00 p.m. Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

Waiting is one temporal modality among others that makes time experiential. Waiting portions out the flow of time as waiters anticipate what is to come. Yet is there a history of waiting? This talk proposes to anchor such a history in the spaces where people waited, especially the early modern antechamber. By doing so, it draws attention to the significance of waiting and letting others wait when studying society and culture.

Professor Nuria Calvet, the Helen Dodson Prince Collegiate Professorship in Astronomy, Inaugural Lecture

Watching Stars Grow

Wednesday, May 3, 2023
4:00 p.m. Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

Many things have changed since I got my degree - eons ago. Advances in instrumentation and techniques have revolutionized the field of star and planet formation and evolution. I have been fortunate enough to participate in some of these developments as I will describe in my talk. I will also mention some of my experiences in being a female astronomer and how things have changed over these many years. And I will be happy to talk about my time at the University of Michigan, especially for having had the opportunity to see so many students under my watch grow and become stars.

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Professor Nils Walter, the Francis S. Collins Collegiate Professorship in Chemistry, Biophysics, and Biological Chemistry, Inaugural Lecture

Can RNA Do It All? From Spawning Life on Earth to Fueling Modern Personalized Medicine

Monday, May 8th, 2023
4:00 p.m. LSA Multipurpose Room

Billions of safely given mRNA vaccine doses have saved millions of lives worldwide and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that a transformative era of RNA Therapeutics is upon us, with great promise for overcoming virtually all diseases within this century through personalized medicines. Yet RNA can do so much more! Since the human genome project was completed, we know that at least 75% of our 3 billion DNA base pairs are transcribed into RNA, with the vast majority not coding for proteins but rather for “non-coding” RNAs (ncRNAs). Many of these ncRNAs remain uncharacterized in terms of their structure and function, spawning discussions of whether they are functional or not (and what “biological function” even is!). These applications and discoveries suggest that so far we have underestimated the far-reaching “RNA World” in our body, which may well also have spawned life on earth.
After an introduction to the power and benefits of these “new” and “old” RNA Worlds, this seminar will highlight some of the foundational work by the Walter lab, in which we use modern single molecule fluorescence microscopy to dissect and control the nanometer-sized RNA-protein assemblies that govern life, and particularly gene expression. Specifically, single molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (smFRET) allows us to measure distances at the 2-8 nm scale, whereas complementary super-resolution localization techniques measure distances in the 10 nm and longer range where biology occurs. Embracing the power of these technical advances, we have combined single-molecule, biochemical and computational simulation approaches to show that a bacterial riboswitch – controlled by a metabolite ligand – manipulates the speed of the much larger bacterial RNA polymerase. We posit that many more examples of such intimate coupling between RNA folding and gene expression remain to be discovered, leading to opportunities to identify new Achilles’ heels of the many pathogens that threaten human health. In addition, we are developing tools to observe single RNA nanomachines in action within their natural habitats inside living cells, leading to discoveries that may guide the development of novel cancer-fighting approaches.

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Professor Rebecca Lange, the Alexander N. Halliday Collegiate Professorship in Earth and Environmental Sciences, Inaugural Lecture

Setting the Stage for a Catastrophic Supervolcano Eruption

Wednesday, November 16, 2022
4:00 p.m. LSA Multipurpose Room

The magma type ejected in some of the largest supervolcano eruptions in the U.S. (e.g., Yellowstone, WY and Long Valley, CA) is the most differentiated and evolved on Earth, which gives it unique characteristics. One is that it transitions between 100% liquid and 100% solid within a few tens of degrees of cooling. In this talk, insights extracted from the magma ejected during the Long Valley, CA, supereruption are used to unravel its origin. The evidence points to rapid segregation and ascent of voluminous (>400 km3) melt, which had previously been held in cold storage (i.e., largely crystallized) only months, if not weeks and days, before the eruption. However, the processes that set the stage for such rapid mobilization, leading to a supereruption, took >1-2 Myr to unfold.

Professor Ann Chih Lin, Endowed Professorship in Chinese Studies, Inaugural Lecture

Scapegoating Chinese American Scientists in the Name of National Security

Thursday, September 22, 2022
4:30 p.m. 10th Floor, Weiser Hall

Over the past decade, Chinese American scientists and the American universities they work at have come under increasing government suspicion. Some academics have been arrested in high-profile raids on their homes and laboratories. Many who support multi-million dollar research teams on federal grants have had their grants terminated, their laboratories closed, and their personal savings bankrupted. And large majorities, particularly at research universities, are rethinking their hiring of postdocs, their international collaborations, their research strategies, and even their lives in the United States. Yet few of their university colleagues understand the scope and scale of what is happening. My talk will explore how fears about China’s economic development strategy, zero-sum assumptions about international conflict, and the lack of a coordinated national R&D strategy have led to a cynical focus on Chinese American university scientists as the reason for China's rise and America's decline. I also explore how these suspicions have parallels in the treatment of German American academics in World War I, using the University of Michigan’s treatment of German American academics as a cautionary tale.

Professor Sarah Moss, the William Wilhartz Professorship in Philosophy, Inaugural Lecture

Knowing What's at Stake: Epistemology and Criminal Justice Reform

January 25, 2022

In many criminal trials, judges are not allowed to inform juries of the sentences that a defendant may face if convicted. This prohibition is commonly justified on the grounds that informing juries about sentencing would “inject irrelevant considerations into the jury’s deliberations as to guilt.” Unfortunately, this justification is missing something big. In this talk, I argue that there is an important reason for jurors to know the potential consequences of a conviction—namely, without this knowledge, jurors may be unable to grasp the legal standard of proof that they are being asked to apply.

Professor Susan Juster, the Rhys Isaac Collegiate Professorship in History, Inaugural Lecture

"Mumbling Masses and Jumbling Beads": Finding Catholics in Early America

November 10, 2021

How do we find people in the past who don't want to be found? Catholicism in post-Reformation England was a fugitive faith. In the century before the first colonial settlements were established in North America in the early 1600s, English Catholics had lived a twilight existence scarcely visible in the archives. Their faith driven underground, their priests hunted down and executed, their children taken away from them and their dead denied Christian burial, men and women who adhered to the old faith learned to live in the shadows. Overseas migration changed this equation, offering an environment that was freer in some respects ((law and coercive institutions were underdeveloped in the first century of settlement) and more repressive in others (persistent imperial war and emerging racial codes ensnared Catholics whose loyalty and ethnic identity were always suspect). This talk explores some of the evidence available to historians who seek to understand the world colonial Catholics made for themselves, drawing examples from both textual and material sources. My aim is to show how historians use the fragments left to them by the vagaries of time and preservation to reconstruct the lives of men and women who inhabited the threshold between the medieval and the modern world.

Professor Jianming Qian, the David M. Dennison Collegiate Professorship in Physics, Inaugural Lecture

Quests and Discoveries at the Energy Frontier

November 4, 2021

The Standard Model of particle physics has been remarkably successful in describing phenomena at the smallest distances that are explorable with current technologies. Discoveries over the last half-century at the energy frontier, enabled by powerful accelerators, are imperative in the development of the Standard Model. In this presentation, I will discuss research and major discoveries which I have been fortunate to be part of

Professor Vonnie McLoyd, the Ewart A.C. Collegiate Professorship in Psychology, Inaugural Lecture

The Ecology of Childhood Poverty

October 5, 2021

Poverty exposes children to multiple environmental inequities that increase the risk of impaired physical health, lower educational attainment, mental health problems, delinquency, and worse outcomes as adults. Adverse outcomes are stronger when poverty occurs in early childhood or persists throughout a large portion of childhood. Experiments that test the effects of policies and programs that increase cash income and “near cash” benefits (e.g.,nutrition assistance) suggest that income poverty itself causes negative child outcomes, and that differences between the outcomes of poor and nonpoor children do not stem exclusively from the cluster of other disadvantages associated with poverty that may be harmful to children (e.g., low levels of parental education). There are numerous pathways through which poverty can influence children's development. In this lecture, I will emphasize research that adopts a “family stress” perspective, which posits that poverty can adversely affect children’s socioemotional development partly by increasing psychological distress and depressive symptoms in parents and in turn, undermining the quality of parenting. Neighborhood characteristics and interpersonal factors can contribute to, amplify, and mitigate links in this pathway. Extensive research suggests that alleviation of poverty can foster children’s development by increasing the goods and services that parents can buy for their children and by promoting a more responsive, less stressful environment in which more positive parent-child interactions can occur.