Professor Frieda Ekotto, Ursula Jakob, and Scott Spector, Collegiate Professorship Inaugural Lecture

Monday, April 15, 2024
4:00 p.m. Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

Professor Frieda Ekotto, the Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature, and Francophone Studies

Lecture Title: Poetics of Peace and Quiet : One Breath at a Time

Abstract: I seek peace by passing through a long period of silence. Memories resurface then. How to speak of the pain of exile, if not from the self. To speak of myself, or of my condition as an exile, allows me to invent a new configuration, to open up other possibilities in the production and circulation of knowledge. I am another à la Rimbaud, and this becomes for me the question: Who am I? Right there, a deep malaise settles. This constant search for my identity renders me immediately vulnerable. To think as an exile is to return always to the self; it is a permanent questioning of the I that becomes possible, even when suffering the pain of being neither here nor there. This narrative will offer an autoethnography of a subject always wandering for a lost country. In other words, it’s a mise-en-scène of modernity par excellence, an example of 21st century contemporary questions.

Professor Ursula Jakob, the Patricia S. Yaeger Collegiate Professor in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Lecture Title: Why Do We Age And What Can We Do About It?

Lecture Abstract: Why do we age and why do some of us stay healthy longer than others? Many years of aging research have shown us that human lifespan is determined by a combination of our genetic make-up, the environment we live in and some, yet to be identified and seemingly stochastic events. Thanks to the development of shorter-lived aging model organisms, much has been learnt about the processes which contribute to our inevitable demise, and the tight connection between these processes and the development of age-associated diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. New drugs and interventions are being found that extend lifespan in model organisms and can help delay the onset of these devastating neurodegenerative diseases. My lab recently discovered that events that happen naturally in early life can have profoundly beneficial effects on the lifespan of organisms and their ability to stay healthy. Studying the underlying mechanisms by which this ticking clock is set during early life and manifests itself during adulthood gives us hope we can identify novel effective interventions to enable people to live long and healthy lives.

Professor Scott Spector, the Rudolf Mrázek Collegiate Professor of History and German Studies

Lecture Title: Atlas of an Invisible Empire

Lecture Abstract: The cities of Vienna and Prague, but also Lviv in Ukraine, Sibiu in Romania, Trieste and Bolzano in Italy, Opatija in Croatia, share a history as ethnically diverse centers during their history within the Habsburg Empire. Nationalists and the historians that unwittingly supported them thought of this polity as a “prison-house of nations,” a phrase deliberately blind to the ways in which subjects living in this pluralistic region experienced their place in it. That experience informed innovative expressions of culture and modes of knowledge that have been investigated without fully exploring the context of this imperial existence. This project—a voyage as literary as it is historical—aims to expose the palimpsest of life and sensation in these places, where traces of a very different past are hidden in plain sight, even as they have been superseded by newer sensibilities of city and nation.

Please note that captions for this recording are auto-generated and are in the process of being edited.

Professor Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Richard L. Lewis, and Alford A. Young Jr., Collegiate Professorship Inaugural Lecture

Thursday, March 21, 2024
4:00 p.m. Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

Professor Elizabeth A. Armstrong, the Sherry B. Ortner  Collegiate Professor of Sociology

Lecture Title: Gender, Class, and Higher Education: Insights from a Longitudinal Study of College Life

Abstract: Armstrong, with her collaborator Laura Hamilton, followed a cohort of white women from their first year of college at a large Midwestern university until age 30. Armstrong will overview the study's findings -- ranging from college hookups to marriage patterns to how class background shaped their college experiences and social class trajectories through age 30. She will also discuss plans for interviews with the women as they approach age 40.

Professor Richard L. Lewis, the John R. Anderson Collegiate Professor of Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Lecture Title: The Advent of Artificial Intelligence: What Does it Mean for Psychology, Linguistics, and Cognitive Science?

Lecture Abstract: Reaction to ChatGPT and related models across the cognitive sciences has ranged from dismissal as irrelevant to claims that entire research paradigms have been undermined. This talk will offer a critique of these reactions, and advance the view that AI is a source of stunning new scientific hypotheses about the nature of mind. Along the way, we'll get a glimpse of recent and historical Michigan work that is relevant to understanding both current developments and a coming new scientific era—an era in which the frontiers of cognitive science and AI are shared.

Professor Alford A. Young, Jr., the Edgar G. Epps Collegiate Professor of Sociology

Lecture Title: The Politics of Black Scholarship: Purpose and Conviction for African American Scholars

Lecture Abstract: How do African American scholars who study the Black experience articulate their scholarly purpose and intention? How might they do so while contending with their perceptions of how the social utility and legitimacy of their scholarship is considered within the academy and among African Americans? This presentation introduces a research agenda addressing how these scholars articulate that vision amidst this often turbulent terrain, and how that effort is rooted in the intellectual, social, political, and personal politics associated with their scholarly functioning.

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Professor Anne Curzan, Robin Queen, and Heather Thompson's Collegiate Professorship Inaugural Lecture

Monday, March 11, 2024
4:00 p.m. Palmer Commons, Forum Hall

Professor Anne Curzan, the Geneva Smitherman Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, Linguistics, and Education

Lecture Title: On Listening and Language Peeves

Abstract: Many of us grew up with a strong sense of “right” and “wrong” in language, perhaps drilled into us at school or at home. And these rules of correctness, often naturalized to feel like common sense, make language one of our most powerful gate-keeping tools, from schools to workplaces. What happens when we pull back the curtain and ask where these rules come from? Who resists and why? This talk considers the implications for inclusion and justice when we recognize linguistic diversity as part of cultural diversity and language change as part of every living language.

Professor Robin Queen, the Sarah G. Thomason Collegiate Professor of Linguistics

Lecture Title: On the Performative Power of Taboo Words in Fictional Television and Film

Lecture Abstract: Tabooed words present a fascinating source of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic puzzles. For instance, taboo words in fictional television and film have become much more common since the turn of the century even as they remain formally regulated through ratings systems, guidelines from the FCC, and other similar sources. This talk explores the cultural and linguistic factors that have facilitated an increased use of taboo words in fictional television and film along with the ways in which that increase has coincided with reframing regulation away from preventing offense (or breaking the taboo) and toward the ideological protection of children.

Professor Heather Ann Thompson, the Frank W. Thompson Collegiate Professor of History and African American Studies

Lecture Title: On The Ugly 80s: Rethinking Contemporary Police Violence, White Vigilantism, and their Contested Reckonings

Lecture Abstract: In the popular imagination the decade of the 1980s was all about Big Hair, garish neon, consumerism, and corporate greed. It was also, in fact, the crucible of an unprecedented urban crisis. This lecture will revisit the 1980s and its underappreciated legacies in order to shine new light on today’s civic battles over policing as well as its alarming public support for acts of white vigilantism. It draws from new work Thompson is doing on two important moments in that decade—Bernie Goetz’s notorious shooting of Black youth on NYC subway in 1984, and the Philadelphia police’s bombing of MOVE in 1985.

A copy of the recording will be available after the event.

Professor Gordon Belot, James M. Joyce, and Laura Ruetsche's Collegiate Professorship in Philosophy, Inaugural Lecture

Tuesday, December 5, 2023
4:30 p.m. Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

Professor Gordon Belot, the Lawrence Sklar Collegiate Professor of Philosophy

Lecture Title: On the Road to Truth

Abstract: This talk will explore some questions raised by Larry Sklar in Theory and Truth. What does it mean to be a realist about our scientific theories in our present predicament, in which we are virtually certain that the best theories of physics cannot be true, strictly speaking, because they break down or make false predictions in certain regimes? Sklar suggests that to be a realist in this setting is to be confident that our best current theories are in some sense stations on the road to truth—but what precisely does that mean?

Professor James M. Joyce, the Cooper Harold Langford Collegiate Professor of Philosophy

Lecture Title: Decision Making and the Accuracy of Beliefs

Lecture Abstract: Epistemologists have long focused on belief as the basic epistemic attitude, with the understanding that a belief is fully successful only if true. In the 20th Century, however, some philosophers began to see degrees of confidence, or credences, as more fundamental, largely because of their ties to rational action. The philosopher Frank Ramsey and statistician Bruno de Finetti famously argued that (i) a rational person's credences will be revealed in her betting behavior, and (ii) that a person whose credences do not obey the laws of probability will accept "books" of bets that, in the aggregate, lose money no matter what the world is like. These "pragmatic" (action centered) arguments were used to justify probabilism, the idea that rational credences must be subjective probabilities. But, many epistemologists were dissatisfied with this pragmatic approach since it did not ultimately relate the quality of credences to their accuracy or "closeness to the truth". As a response to these complaints, I sought to define a meaningful sense of accuracy for credences, and to show that probabilism could be seen as a means to pursuing credal accuracy. I knew de Finetti had offered an argument that could be adapted for this purpose, but it had limited applicability and was still pragmatic in spirit. While searching for something more general, and more clearly epistemic, I was attending the UM Decision Consortium, run by Frank Yates of the Psychology Department. One day Frank pointed me to his wonderful book Judgment and Decision Making, which introduced me to the use of strictly proper scoring rules to measure the accuracy of probabilistic forecasts. This turned out to be exactly what I needed! In two related papers, I argued that any reasonable score of credal accuracy should be a strictly proper scoring rule, and that for a wide range of such rules probabilism follows in this sense: for any system of credences that violates the laws of probability there is a system of credences that satisfies those laws and is more accurate in every possible state of the world.

Professor Laura Ruetsche, the Louis E. Loeb Collegiate Professor of Philosophy

Lecture Title: "The Physics of Ignorance: Believe It or Not?"

Lecture Abstract: Should we believe our very best theories of physics? Scientific realists urge that we should: the best way to make sense of a theory's remarkable success, they argue, is to suppose that the world is (more or less) the way that theory says it is. Most physicists regard our very best theories of physics, including those making up the Standard Model of contemporary particle physics, to be effective theories. Not itself fundamentally or universally valid, an effective theory is rather, within an avowedly limited domain, an able mimic of more fundamental theories. But what do we believe, when we believe an able mimic? And is that something we should believe? I'll critically consider a resourceful realist answer to these questions. I'll also defend an alternative that becomes available once we liberate ourselves from a constrictive presupposition: that to understand a theory, we must articulate the way that theory says the world is.

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.