Events

 

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Thursday, November 17, 2022
4:30 p.m.
The Humanitities Center, 224 W. Packer Avenue

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Join us for the first in a series on Ethics in the Disciplines as Professor Whitehouse leads a discussion of case studies, based on his fieldwork in West Africa, illuminating ethical questions in anthropological research.
Reception following discussion.

Thursday, September 8, 2022
4:30 p.m.
The Humanitities Center, 224 W. Packer Avenue

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Moderator: Amardeep Singh
Faculty Panelists: Gordon Bearn, Nandini Deo, Frank Gunter, and Amber Rice
 

Rauch Business Center, Rooms 291/292/293 or Virtual - Registration is Required
 

 

 

A Faculty Forum on Controversial Topics #1

"Did My Professor Just Say That?!"

 

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Meghan Hynson, colloquium: "A Balinese "Call to Prayer": Sounding Religious Nationalism and Local Identity in the Puja Tri Sandhya"

 

In this presentation, Prof. Hynson examines the Puja Tri Sandhya, a Balinese Hindu prayer that has been broadcast into the soundscape of Bali since 2001. By charting the development of the prayer, she explores the religious politics of post-independence Indonesia, which called for the Balinese to adopt the Puja Tri Sandhya as a condition for religious legitimacy in the new nation. The Puja Tri Sandhya is likened to a Balinese “call to prayer” and compared to Muslim and Christian soundings of religion in the archipelago to assert how these broadcasts sonically reify the national motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (“Unity in Diversity”), and participate in a sounding of religious nationalism. The sonic components of the Puja Tri Sandhya (when it is sounded, the vocal style, and the gender wayangand genta bell accompaniment) are also discussed and argued to infuse the invented display of religiosity with authority and facilitate a mediation between technology, space, and local identity.   Meghan Hynson is a visiting assistant professor of music at the University of San Diego. She received a BM in Music Education from Boston University, and her MA and PhD in Ethnomusicology from UCLA. She was most recently an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Monmouth University and has also served as a faculty member at Duquesne University and the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Hynson has spent over a decade living and studying in Southeast Asia, where she has conducted extensive research on religious and gender politics in the performing arts of Bali and West Java, Indonesia. She has offered globally-oriented courses such as World Music, Global Popular Music, Music and Gender, and Music and Religion. From 2016-2019, she was the director of the University of Pittsburgh Gamelan Ensemble and, in 2019, toured internationally as a vocalist for the Indonesian pop band, the Dangdut Cowboys, under the invitation of the US State Department. Throughout her career, she has developed world music curricula and outreach programs for K-12 schools, worked with major museums and international world music festivals, and been the voice for global diversity through music via various campus and community activities.

 

Meghan Hynson, PhD, is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at the University of San Diego.

 

A Music Department, Asian Studies and Humanities Center Collaboration

 

 

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Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

 

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

Humanities Center Lunchtime Salon: Race, Caste and the State
The Humanities Center invites interested parties to participate in a lunchtime discussion of sections of Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). The salon will be held Friday, November 20, from 12:00-1:30PM.

This will be the first of a two-part series of events around the theme of systemic racism and the state. Our second event will be held during the Spring 2021 semester.

Facilitated by Emily Pope-Obeda (History) and John Vilanova (Journalism & Communication/Africana Studies), the sessions will engage with structures such as policy, labor,  and citizenship in the active making and codification of race, specifically discussing the ways racial others have been constructed. Participants will be invited to read selections from the book and come prepared to discuss them. We hope to create a discussion-centric space where faculty from a wide range of disciplines can bring their insights to the conversation.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a major new work of cultural studies produced by Wilkerson, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and published The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) to similar acclaim. Caste, which has garnered wide attention, offers incisive and important new ways of theorizing race (and anti-Black racism specifically) in America.

Please register here for the Nov 20th discussion. Once you register, we will send you the pdf of the readings. This event is open to all university community members who are interested.

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VIRTUAL EVENT: https://lehigh.zoom.us/j/7957428965#success

 

 

 

Sponsored by: Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, Lehigh University’s Humanities Center, and South Side Initiative

 

The community reading group invites you to join us to discuss an award-nominated LGBTQ memoir each month. Our conversations allow us to reflect upon major topics in LGBTQ communities, discuss our own experiences as they connect or diverge from the memoir, and engage with impactful books that are starting national discussions. Books are provided free of cost to the first ten people to sign up with Kathleen Kapila, kathleen@bradburysullivancenter.org!

 

This group will meet from 6:30-8:00 p.m. at the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, 522 West Maple Street, Allentown, PA 18101.

 

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Co-sponsored Events

 

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Fall 2019

Humanities Center Antibiotic Resistance Seminar with the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies
November 4 | 6:00 p.m. | STEPS 280
The Anthropocene in/of the Cell: Antibiotic Resistance and the History of Industrialization
Hannah Landecker, Department of Sociology and Director, Institue for Society and Genetics, UCLA
Lorenzo Servitje, Moderator, Assistant Professor of English, Lehigh University
The Anthropocene, being a concept that comes to us from geology and climate science, is generally seen in relation to material evidence gathered from the rock strata, marine sediments, and glacier ice. It is a concept of macro scales, carbon economies, epochs and world systems. This talk goes small instead, and reads biological and biochemical narratives to examine the idea of an Anthropocene in, or of, the cell. Drawing on specific examples of the industrial production of pharmaceuticals and pesticides, I show how microbial cells have changed to adapt to the biochemical environments generated during and after World War II by a growing chemical industry, shifts in medical protocols, and changing hygiene practices. Rather than the organism in sediment during historical time, I consider the organism as sedimentation of historical time: a repository of metabolic strategies for navigating novel chemical milieu after industrialization. From this perspective, the insides of cells can be seen as microscopic landscapes in their own right, in which the products of industrialization alter the biophysical and architectural character of molecular life, affecting the flow of mobile genetic elements, the dynamics of microbial community life, and the very nature of human-microbe relationships.