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Please forward all corrections, feedback and/or questions about Monday Memo content to asadvance@louisville.edu.
Message from the Dean
I know that departments, programs, and friends across the College are discussing the questions posed earlier about our strengths and goals for the next 5, 10, 15 years. I am eager to hear your ideas.
Here is a suggestion from a thoughtful colleague for Cultural Studies:
As the College responds to the “University of the Twenty-First Century” initiative by identifying inter-disciplinary areas of strength, Cultural Studies is an area in which a number of disciplines in Humanities and Social Sciences could participate. Such a concentration is one through which liberal arts disciplines could make a significant contribution to an understanding of contemporary challenges, local and global.
“Cultural Studies” is the general term for work in a wide range of disciplines that attempts to explain how cultures are created, how they are maintained, and how they change. Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu are commonly cited as originators of this kind of inquiry, which rejects the idea that culture is created by the powerful and imposed on the rest and equally rejects the idea that culture is a product of conscious choices and unrelated to power. For example, how are group identities created? How are they changed? “What is the role of architecture in nation-building?” or “How is a national identity created by the writing of a history?”
The term “Cultural Studies” means different things to different disciplines. Anthropologists, for example, defines “culture” differently than do those in English. The very fact that we disagree about such things suggests that talking about it in a fairly sustained way might be very productive. A lot of disciplines, from established departments to programs like Social Change and Medieval/Renaissance (which is interested in epochal change from Medieval to Early Modern) seem at this point to be trying to say what it means to be “a child of one’s culture.”
The method has been around for a few decades. It has evolved to lots of refinements that go by different names. I don’t know how many of my faculty colleagues would say they are doing “Cultural Studies,” but I think that its assumptions and its questions are central to a lot of disciplines. I don’t know whether any of my colleagues share my sense that broadening the conversation across disciplinary lines would enrich their work. We as a college haven’t had a general conversation about the role of liberal arts in the 21C University; it we do, Cultural Studies would be my suggestion.
Keep those suggestions coming!
Sincerely,
Kimberly Kempf-Leonard
Dean
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Announcements
- If your department or program and/or individuals associated with your department or program, i.e. faculty, staff, students or alumni, have a recent successes, stories or events that are newsworthy, please forward them to the A&S Dean’s Office either before or concurrently with submitting to other offices on campus. In other words, if you are sending something to Judy Hughes in Communications and Marketing, be sure to copy asadvance@louisville.edu. It is important that the Dean’s Office act as a clearinghouse for college news!
- Please be sure to submit any department or program event to the University calendar. Once the event is submitted and cleared, it will by default show up on the A&S calendar. You can submit at events.louisville.edu. Log in using your UofL userid and password. Here is a quick instructional video on how to add an event to the calendar.
Don't forget to get your ticket to see the first play of Theatre Arts’ 2014-2015 Mainstage season! Eda written by Obotunde Ijimere, translated by Ulli Beier, and directed by Nefertiti Burton is the Yoruba version of the medieval morality play Everyman. Tickets can be purchased at the Box Office M-F 10am-4pm. Call 502-852-6814 or 502-852-7682 for more information. Read more and see Youtube clip.
Teaching/Instruction/Research
- As of September 17, the listed courses did not have syllabi posted in Blackboard. Please check the list and see if your course is listed; even if you posted a syllabus, any slight error in naming it may cause it to be invisible to the program that does the searching. If you are having trouble posting your syllabus, please ask for help from your department chair.
- Reminder: Please be sure to nominate your graduate students for various Graduate School Awards to be given at December Commencement. SIGS has received NO nominations at this time. The deadline is October 3, 2014 Students may be nominated by any graduate faculty member. Nominate using the online form. Download call for nominations PDF. Also, the deadline to nominate a student for the Doctoral Dissertation Completion award is October 1, 2014. Download PDF reminder.
- Poster presentations are being sought from undergraduates in all disciplinary areas for the Posters-at-the-Capitol event. Please have them submit their abstract by October 15, 2014. For more details and a link to the flyer, see the Announcements section of the A&S Research Office’s blog.
News
- The UofL Theatre Arts Repertory Company will present the short play “Ms. Peabody’s Apples,” an adaptation of Madonna’s book of the same name at this year’s Corn Island Story Telling Festival. A&S is a sponsor of this year’s festival, which will take place from 6-10 p.m., Friday, Oct. 10, on the Natural Sciences Lawn. For more info, go to uofl.me/cornisland2014.
- The "Black Freedom, White Allies, and Red Scare" exhibit that looks at 1954 Louisville was covered in an article in The Courier-Journal. The exhibit is through November 9 at the main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. The opening reception is October 1 at 7 p.m.
Congratulations and Kudos!
- Congrats to Nate Surrey, Chair of Military Science, for his recent promotion to Lieutenant Colonel of the U.S. Army. Photos
- Congratulations to Prof. Raymond Chastain, Physics and Astronomy, for being chosen as one of the Top 4 Faculty Favorites of 2013-2014. A whopping 174 A&S faculty members were nominated as faculty favorites by students! See all of the nominations.
- The Department of Justice Administration had a group of faculty, students, staff, “and families” who participated in the American Association Heart Walk on 9/20/14. Way to go! Photo1, Photo2, Photo3
- The Department of Mathematics has been busy!
- Prof. Alica Miller, Mathematics, was recently awarded a 3-year $117,638 NSF research grant entitled "Semiflows with arbitrary acting topological semigroups."
- Prof. Prasanna (Ron) Sahoo, Mathematics, has been awarded the prestigious "Hind Rattan Award 2015" for outstanding services, achievements and contributions for keeping the Flag of India High. The Hind Rattan Award (translated as Jewel of India) is one of the highest Indian diasporic awards granted annually to non-resident Indians (NRIs) by the Indian Government.
- Prof. Thomas Riedel, department chair, briefly appeared in an interview with American RadioWorks on the Common Core State Standards.
Opportunities/Items of Interest
- “Motivation Demystified: Steps We All Can Take to Improve Student Motivation” by Dr. Kenn Barron. Dr. Barron is Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Motivation Research Institute at James Madison University. He will offer a one-hour open presentation for the UofL community about his research on motivation and learning. Oct. 10; 9:30 to 10:30 a.m., Chao Auditorium, Ekstrom Library; no registration required. Sponsored by the Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning
- Mark your calendar for the upcoming NETWORK luncheon on October 16th. Presenters are Dr. Kevin Cosby and Mr. David Jones, Jr.; Moderator: Dawne Gee
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In this Issue
Message from the Dean
Announcements
Teaching/Instruction/Research
News
Congratulations and Kudos
Opportunities/Items of Interest
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Upcoming A&S Events
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