Lectures

I am pleased to announce the program for Fall 2009 Research Dinners. Each dinner is an opportunity for a faculty member to present his/her research and discuss it with faculty colleagues from all areas of the university in an informal context. The event begins at 6:00 p.m. with wine and light snacks, followed by dinner and a brief presentation accompanied by questions and discussion. The event usually ends by 8:30 p.m.

Anthropological Insights into Stakeholder Participation in Water Management of the Edwards Aquifer

Water is a hydrological given, but also a cultural construction. Conflicts over the use of the Edwards Aquifer during the past forty years have pitted multiple interests against each other. Agricultural irrigators, municipal water systems, industrial users, river systems and recreational users, to mention a few, all bring different cultural definitions of water to the debate. Research over the past three years has focused on an initiative of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to facilitate a consensus-based forum of stakeholders who would solicit the best science on which to recommend management policy. This presentation will suggest that the success of the effort to date has depended on the gradual creation of a new cultural discourse shared among the stakeholders.

Teaching is at the heart of what we do. When a student experiences that aha moment, we know we have chosen a profession that can be very gratifying. But how do we find time to develop new teaching techniques and approaches due to the demands of research and professional service? One way might be to attend the Associated Colleges of the South Teaching and Learning Workshop. Since its inception in 1992, the workshop has provided 370 new and experienced faculty members from 16 different liberal arts institutions a means to hone teaching skills. This program reminds of what it is like to be a student at a liberal arts college as we experience mini-classes in five different disciplines. Thoughtful feedback during the week gives us insight into our teaching that we may not get from our students. But does the “workshop effect” last for more than one week? Do participants continue to view this program as a valuable professional development experience once they return to their classrooms, rehearsals, and laboratories? Do female faculty report that they are more likely than male faculty to try new teaching techniques? Come join us for dinner and hear about the long-term impact of a professional development workshop.

The imitation of a handful of accepted literary models lies at the core of the Greco-Roman educational process throughout all of its stages. While at the more advanced levels the relationship to models became more nuanced, the underlying principle remained the imitation of those authors who had achieved greatness. The end result was a mimetic compositional ethos created by the centrality of a small group of classical texts that served as models in education, and later, in literary practice. What are the implications of these educational practices for the study of Jewish and Christian texts from the period? We can explore some possible answers to this question by looking at the portrait of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles. A striking feature of Acts is how much of the narrative depicts Paul either on trial or awaiting trial. In this the author of Acts’ portrait of Paul is like his portrait of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, where much of the narrative chronicles Jesus’ slow and methodical journey to Jerusalem and his trials there. The author of Acts has certainly modeled his “Passion” of Paul after his Passion of Jesus. However, the extended portrait of Paul on trial has striking similarities to traditions about the trial and execution of the philosopher Socrates. I argue that such similarities are no accident—Luke has consciously modeled his portrait of Paul on trial after the famous Athenian philosopher’s last days.

We are pleased to announce an excellent line-up of speakers and topics scheduled for Research Dinners in Spring 2007. Each dinner is an opportunity for a faculty member to present his/her research and discuss it with faculty colleagues from all areas of the university in an informal context. The event begins at 6:00 p.m. with wine and light snacks, followed by dinner and a brief presentation accompanied by questions and discussion. The event usually ends by 8:30 p.m. Seating is limited; interested faculty should make a reservation by calling Sarai Santos (x8230).

I am the descendant of Spanish-Mexican colonists who settled the upper Rio Grande watershed of New Mexico at the end of the 16th Century. In 1848, at the end of the U.S. war against Mexico, my great-great-grandparents and their progeny became citizens of the United States. They had no choice in the matter. All became part of the new society, witnessed its raw character as well as its refined aspects, experienced its ravages as well as its benefits. My maternal and paternal great grandparents and their families became willing members of the new society. They joined its (Protestant) churches, became literate in its language, attended its schools, took on its values and ways, participated in its institutions, sought its benefits and opportunities, and yet, despite all their efforts to integrate themselves into the Anglo-American society, were always perceived to be and were treated as the "foreign other." Their historical community saw them as heretics; in their new community they were interlopers. Their experiences constitute a complex and confounding narrative, one I have sought to record. On this occasion I will read stories concerning the experiences of my mother and grandmother.

Sandstones in California and Oregon provide a remarkably detailed picture of what that part of the world looked like 150-75 million years ago, when the sediment comprising those rocks was first deposited. These rocks formed when California east of the Sierra Nevada mountains was under an ocean and the Sierras were active volcanoes. My research focuses on individual sand grains within these sandstones, whose crystallization ages link them to the mountains from which they were eroded. This source-to-basin link permits evaluation of the extent of more recent fault motion and reconstruction of the drainage systems that brought sediment west from the Sierras and related mountains into sedimentary basins during the Cretaceous Period. These results add to our understanding of how the geology of the western US has evolved through time and also provide an analog for studying similar sedimentary basins, some of which may contain greater reserves of petroleum and/or groundwater than those in California and Oregon.

The economics literature on Fair Trade tends to focus on the price floor that it provides. It is well understood that a price floor should lead to an excess supply of coffee. The standard analysis of price floors assumes that competitive markets exist - both in inputs and in final output. Dr. DeCourcy and her colleague, Dr. Gwendolyn Tedeschi, have found that the assumption of competitive markets likely does not hold for coffee production. In particular, the credit market in which farmers operate typically is not competitive. The coyote in the Latin American coffee trade acts as an intermediary between coffee farmers and millers of coffee. The coyote generally extends credit to the same farmers from which he purchases coffee. The coyote acts as the sole provider of credit and the sole buyer for the farmer's coffee. In a theoretical economic model we show that the coyote subsidizes credit to farmers and pays low prices for their coffee relative to competitive input markets. The presence of Fair Trade leads coyotes to offer farmers higher prices for their coffee.

"Developing Teacher Candidates' Assessment Skills and Dispositions via Protocols"

As teacher educators working in Trinity's five-year, field-based Master of Arts in Teaching program, we are keenly aware of the need to help preservice teachers both examine who students are and develop their capacity to listen to, understand, and assess children and their learning. Based on their own experiences as students, preservice teachers often believe that their role as assessors "is to flag errors and assign a grade, not to wonder, to raise questions, to describe and respond" (Featherstone, 1998, p. 207). To prize observation and description above judgment goes against the grain of American educational practice (Carini, 2001). To help our preservice teachers develop both their willingness and ability to describe and analyze student work, we use protocols in their undergraduate and graduate courses. We have studied whether and how protocols support preservice teachers in the assessment of student work. Our research questions focused on what teacher candidates understand about assessment and what their participation in protocols reveals about their capacity to describe, analyze and assess student work.

Public usage of the term narcissism has spiked in recent years, and authors and commentators often lament that America has become a culture of narcissism. An epidemic of narcissism might spell trouble for society, assuming that one finds fault with chronic self-absorption, inflated self-appraisals, unrealistic entitlement, exhibitionism, exploitative behavior, and empathy deficits. Indeed, dysfunctions associated with pathological narcissism have been well-documented by clinicians, but narcissistic tendencies are also evident in high-functioning “normal” people. Could narcissism in moderation yield benefits? My lab examines how narcissistic traits in college students predict behavior across different situations that we systematically control. Discussion will focus on the methods and results of our investigations into how narcissists behave toward others (hint: no bright side of narcissism here) and the relationship between narcissism and performance.

We all enjoy music of one sort or another, but what exactly is a 'piece' of music? One way to get a sense of the peculiar nature of this question is to ask yourself how you would go about destroying such a thing. Some works of art seem to be physical things: to destroy the Mona Lisa it is enough to destroy a particular paint-covered canvas. But how would you destroy Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or the Beatles' Abbey Road? Thinking about these issues raises questions about the nature of musical works, performances, and recordings, and the various relations that hold between them. It is not obvious that we should answer these questions in the same way for different musical traditions, such as classical, rock, and jazz.

I spent six summers of my graduate career on the Mediterranean seabed, excavating a ship that sank off the southwestern coast of Turkey ca. 1300 BCE, the era of the pharaoh Tutankhamun and Homer's heroes. The team that excavated that shipwreck has spent a second decade studying the ship's cargo and hull, now raised and stored in the halls of Turkey's national museum of underwater archaeology. This lecture describes generally what we are learning from the treasures collected from the sea floor and focuses specifically on one component of the cargo carried on that ship, and what that cargo tells us about the organization of overseas trade.

Thursday, March 23 - Forrest Smith Conference Room (Mabee Dining Hall 2nd Floor)

The Cassini mission to Saturn is returning some of the most remarkable pictures ever taken of another planet in our Solar System. Not only do these images show the beauty of the ringed planet, they help us to see the complexity of the dynamics of the rings and the inner moons. To fully understand what is happening we have to go beyond the data taken by the craft and attempt to recreate the systems present at Saturn in the virtual space of a computer simulation. For this talk we will look at some of the more striking images that have been returned by Cassini and I will describe my work to simulate different aspects of the rings to understand their behaviors in greater detail.

"The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Their Plan to Expand First Amendment Freedoms"

The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society’s plan to bring issues before the Supreme Court is unique in the history of First Amendment law in the United States. The Society, better known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, was the first to apply a far-reaching plan of what has been termed “vigilant” or “disciplined” litigation to First Amendment issues. In a period of 15 years, Watchtower lawyers, lead by Texan Hayden Cooper Covington, won Witnesses the right to distribute literature door-to-door, on public streets and on streets owned by private corporations and the federal government; the right to carry out these activities without first securing a permit or paying a tax; the right to use sound-amplifying equipment to spread their beliefs; and the right to be protected from continued arrests under unconstitutional ordinances. By implementing an extensive, detailed legal plan to overturn ordinances that interfered with their evangelical mission, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society broadened protection under the First Amendment for their members and for all Americans. The overwhelming success of the plan shaped mass media law, the application of the First Amendment, and group litigation in the United States.

Why is America wealthy and Latin America poor? Complexity may have a new take on this question.

What has come to be known as Complexity Science is a paradigm that reflects a view of the world that rejects the previously pervasive linear framework of analysis. In a linear conception of the world, the agents relevant in our study are essentially independent of each other, thus making observed aggregate behavior a mere reflection of individual actions.

On the other hand, the move away from linear modeling recognizes the inherent interdependency between agents. As a result, the aggregate is more than the sum of its parts; we can know everything there is to know about an individual neuron, but that will tell us nothing about the mind that emerges when we put a few trillion of them together in the brain.

My research intends to apply this novel way of thinking to economics. Standard Neoclassical economic theory is based on an individualistic view of the world, where the agents’ utility functions (reflecting the happiness of the individual) are generally independent of each other, and altogether exogenous to the model. I would like to consider a model architecture in which these utility functions are to some degree created by society. In this view we recognize that a person is composed of many different intertemporal individuals, and that groups may behave as a unit.

The proposed hierarchical composition involves many levels of agency. This abstraction shall point out connections between the approach for describing human behavior and social phenomena by economics, social theory, and evolutionary biology. I believe that it is only through this holistic approach that we will be able to provide a scientific understanding of the processes of economic growth.

The last quarter century of archaeological discoveries have significantly enriched and nuanced our understanding of interactions between the Greek world and the Levant during the Greek Archaic Period (conventionally defined as 776-479 B.C.E.). They have also allowed us to construct an increasingly detailed model explaining the diffusion of knowledge from Mesopotamia to Greece at this time. In addition, advances in our understanding of oral cultures, and the role of oral narrative traditions within them, have cast valuable new light on the ways in which the Homeric epics appropriate, adapt, and preserve cultural knowledge. The palace of Alkinoos, described in Book 7 of the Odyssey, poses an interesting problem for archaeologists and Homerists alike, in that it departs significantly from the generalized, or "formulaic," image of a Homeric palace and, moreover, departs equally from Bronze and Iron Age Greek architecture. In order to account for anomalous features such as these, one must always take into account the narrative function and context of the description, which in this case suggests a possible Near Eastern origin. Archaeological evidence not only confirms the possibility, but allows us to take the comparison further: although some of its features doubtless belonged to a stereotypical Greek image of Near Eastern palaces, the description is sufficiently detailed and coherent that we can identify Assyrian palatial architecture as a chief source of inspiration for the palace of Alkinoos.