Lecture program - Fall 2020
All lectures are online this quarter.
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Sunday, September 27
2:00 pm |
Strange Views of Space and Time: From Einstein to String Theory
youtu.be/9T_q40KqjJU Professor Gary Horowitz, Physics Department, UCSB A hundred years ago, Einstein's discovery of his special and general theories of relativity revolutionized our understanding of space and time. We have recently undergone another dramatic change in our understanding of these fundamental concepts due to advances in string theory. Professor Horowitz will describe these major developments in a nontechnical manner, and explain the strange view of space and time that we are presented with today. |
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Sunday, October 25
2:00 pm |
Digging Up the Bible: What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Bible
youtu.be/4LpNinvUQc8 Sandra Richter, Professor of Old Testament, Biblical Studies, Westmont College Every year at Christmas, Passover and Easter we are flooded with documentaries that claim to have “unearthed never before seen evidence that the Bible is true!” Or equally so, “new scientific data demonstrates that the Jews were never in Egypt and Jesus never existed!” This of course leaves the lay person wondering about the reliability of the data … and their Bibles. So what exactly can archaeology tell us about the Bible? And what would be a reasonable posture regarding all this “never before seen evidence”? Sandra Richter, professor of Religious Studies at Westmont College is an expert in the intersection between Bible and archaeology. Her own degree comes from the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department of Harvard University, her specialty is the pre-exilic history of the Hebrew Bible. Moreover, she’s spent more than one summer in dirt directing students in the unearthing of Israelite material culture. Come hear her discuss what ancient historiography looks like, what sort of evidence we can expect, and what we should expect of that evidence. There will be pictures! |
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Sunday, December 6
2:00 pm |
A diversity of Difference: painter Jean-Leon Gerome and Istanbul
Professor Nuha Khoury, Department of History of Art and Architecture, UCSB The work of French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), The Snake Charmer establishes comforting distance between its depicted subjects and its viewers, reinforcing ideas of difference while easing European viewing publics into colonialism at a time of intense interest in Ottoman lands. More recent scholarship retains most of these interpretations but complicates them by including the Ottomans as viewers and buyers of Gérôme’s work. From within this richer view, this talk revisits The Snake Charmer alongside other works of the late nineteenth century to consider the diversity of ways in which Europeans and Ottomans represented difference visually. What emerges on the Ottoman side is a fluid situation in which the government sought first to obscure and later to emphasize diversity in its domains. Note: the lecture on Chocolate is rescheduled for the Winter quarter. |