Paul Vance

Benjamin Britten, His Three Suites for Cello, and the Conflict Between the Individual and Society

Mr. Vance will discuss and perform excerpts from Britten’s Three Suites and attempt to explain their musical and sociological themes.

Gretchen Michlitsch and Chuck Ripley
Phillis Wheatley, The First African-American Poet

Brought from Gambia, Africa to colonial America in 1761, Phillis Wheatley entered Euro-American Christian culture as an enslaved girl.  A literary prodigy, she became the first published black American poet in 1767.  Her poems provide an important window into the developing but conflicting discourses surrounding freedom, race, and human nature in the era of the American Revolution.  Gretchen Michlitsch and Chuck Ripley will explore Wheatley’s works in terms of her immediate eighteenth-century context and her twenty-first century significance as the founder of the African-American literary tradition.

Nathan Wardinski

From Michael Moore to Batman: A Survey of Post 9-11 Cinema

Mr. Wardinski will present a survey of post-9/11 American cinema. The talk will cover a wide variety of films, from documentaries to historical dramas to comic book adaptations, and consider how filmmakers, primarily those working in Hollywood, have dealt with the attack and its aftermath either explicitly or thematically.

Michael Wenz and William Yu

How Does Your Job Affect Your Grades?

Mr. Wenz and Mr. Yu will present results from their research into the relationship between student employment and student academic performance using data from the WSU Assessment Day surveys. The talk will provide evidence about the impact of work hours and labor force participation on student grade point averages.

Anne Plummer

Art and Students in China: Impressions from Jingdezhen

China has a rich cultural heritage that westerners find compelling in terms of its scale, longevity, aesthetics, and its high level of craftmanship. Contemporary Chinese artists and students find this history to be both a source of inspiration and a burden.  Western art is recognized as cutting edge in the global culture. While Chinese artists and students struggle to incorporate contemporary western practices and earn recognition in the contemporary global art world, many westerners yearn to find the historic Chinese arts and culture intact. How do the Chinese and westerners deal with these conflicting expectations?

Shanthal Perera and Vaheesan Selvaratnam

Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis

Presented by WSU students representing the two ethnic communities involved in Sri Lanka's twenty-five year civil war, this lecture will provide a historical introduction to Sri Lanka's civil conflict, from its beginnings in colonial times to its explosion in 1983. The presenters will offer a history of the various points of view surrounding the conflict, discuss recent developments, possible future scenarios, and solutions for ending the war.

Beckry Abdel-Magid and Margaret Trott

Sabbatical Experience in the Middle East

A lecture and discussion. The lecture will emphasize planning for a sabbatical leave, application to the Fulbright Scholarship Program, and selection of program and country. The discussion will include academic and cultural preparation for a successful sabbatical leave, transition and family relocation to host country, adaptation to new environment of work and leisure. An overview of the society, economy and politics of the United Arab Emirates (our host country) will be presented.

Drake Hokanson and Carol Kratz

Watching for the Ferris Wheel

A lively illustrated presentation on the nature of the American county agricultural fair, the long-haul research for the book, and a bit about the process of getting it published as a large-format, full-color volume.

TBD - Drinking fountain artist to be selected

The Art of Winona's Drinking Water Fountains: Celebrating Our Water Commons

Marilyn Klinkner

Elements and Natural Processes: Designing a Sustainable Path for Large, Complex Systems

”Fixing problems” at the level of detail in complex systems, is an almost certain way of solving one problem by inventing another.” - Karl Henri Robert

Reductionism and Compartmentalization demolish on-going essential processes in art, poetry and nature. This talk will present a powerpoint on sustainable development, where analysis and competence are more essential than values, because the development is success and action-based, back-casted from a vision of the future.

The more rigorously “sustainability” is defined, the easier it is for levels of planning to be built upon. All involved need a shared mental picture of what we want to correct, no matter what their discipline.

“Nobody can look into the future”, Einstein said, “but we can invent it. “ The goal of the talk is to present a model of arriving at a holistic campus initiative dynamically oriented toward planned economical and sustainable action. The audience will see a developed and tested intellectual and institutional structure for inventing and integrating processes to achieve goals in communities.