To ensure the health and safety of lecturers and attendees, the Scholars Lecture Series will be held in accordance with NYU's Covid-19 guidelines for Events and Gatherings.
Scholars Lecture Series 2022-23
The Scholars Lecture Series is designed to encourage and promote the exchange of ideas among our faculty and students in the College of Arts and Science. The lecture series enhances the intellectual experience and social consciousness of the NYU community.
Date: Tuesday, September 20
Lecturer: Andrew Caplin, Julius Silver Professor of Economics
Lecture: The Science of Mistakes
That mistakes are made is clear. What is meant by that is not. How to measure whatever might be meant less so. How to scientifically study even less so. Professor Caplin outlines an interdisciplinary science of mistakes to cut the Gordian knot. The key building blocks are model constructs drawn from the economic tradition, methods of measurement drawn from the psychometric tradition, and analytic methods drawn from economic theory.
Date: Thursday, October 6
Lecturer: Eugenio Refini, Associate Professor of Italian Studies
Lecture: Echo’s echo: Metamorphosis of a Classical Myth
Imagine to be able to speak only by repeating what others say: as indicated by the afterlife of the classical myth of Echo, this dystopian prospect may be read—and rightly so—as a reflection on the limits of communication. In this lecture, Professor Refini will suggest another entry point into the myth of Echo (and a possible way out from her dead-end situation) has to do with the very sound of Echo’s voice. Is there something in it that may evade the condemnation of repetition? How does the sound of Echo’s voice relate to the identities of the utterances that Echo herself revoices? To address these questions, this talk will look at the ways the myth of Echo has nourished opera—an artform deeply concerned with both vocal expression and repetition—from its inception in Italy around 1600 to today.
Date: Wednesday, October 12
Lecturer: Adam Penenberg, Associate Professor of Journalism
Lecture: Fake...Everything
We are collectively submerged into a crisis of epic proportions, drowning in a sea of lies, half-lies and half-truths, distortions, disinformation and misinformation. These days, most Internet traffic isn't even human. It originates from automated bots, and a full half of these is malicious, firing off more lies, half-lies and half-truths, distortions, disinformation, and misinformation at unprecedented scale and speed. Into this sketchy and troll-y public sphere we venture. Living most of our lives through screens of various sorts, we must fend off all manner of fakery: fake people, fake information, fake email, phone calls and texts, fake reviews, fake photos, deep-fake video, fake websites, fake data, fake email, fake businesses, fake products, fake ads, fake ad metrics, fake science, and, ultimately, the fake history we think we share while living in a what many view as a fake democracy. Professor Penenberg will explore the many faces of this explosion in fakery we have witnessed over the past ten years, who is doing it and how, what they hope to gain, and how we can quickly recognize these lies and prevent their spread.
Date: Thursday, October 27
Lecturer: Marvin Parasram, Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Lecture: Synthetic Applications Involving Anaerobic Heteroatom Transfer Reactions Using Dipolar Reagents
Small molecule therapeutics containing heteroatoms, such as oxygen- and nitrogen units, are prevalent in pharmaceutical compounds. Due to the importance of these atoms in medicinally relevant molecules, many synthetic procedures to install and/or transfer heteroatom units have been developed. However, established methods often involve harsh reaction conditions and suffer from limited substrate scope. Professor Parasram will discuss his lab’s efforts in developing a mild, general, and practical strategy for the anaerobic transfer of heteroatom units to organic molecules that can serve as a versatile tool in synthetic chemistry.
Date: Tuesday, November 15
Lecturer: Marshall Ball, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Lecture: Cryptography and Computational Complexity
The field of computational complexity studies the limits of what can be computed efficiently. While for many these barriers are disheartening, demonstrating barriers to what can be computed efficiently, for a cryptographer such algorithmic barriers represent a potential goldmine for constructing secure protocols. The theoretical tools developed at the intersection of cryptography and complexity, enabling us to reason abstractly about security, have had a transformative impact not just on the theory of computation but our modern information infrastructure. Professor Ball will introduce the big questions and recent progress in computational complexity from a cryptographer's perspective.
Date: Thursday, December 8
Lecturer: Tatiana Linkhoeva, Assistant Professor of History
Lecture: Japan’s Empire and Its Minorities
Modern Japan emerged and developed as an empire, and as in any empire, the Japanese as the titular group came to dominate over different ethnic groups on the Asian continent and in the Pacific. In order to win over these groups, gain their support, and mobilize them, the Japanese state had to come up with ethnic policies, often formulated in terms of a civilizing and defense mission. In this lecture, Professor Linkhoeva discusses how modern Japan devised its imperial ideology and how it was experienced by non-Japanese subjects of the empire.
Date: Thursday, February 2
Lecturer: Robert J.C. Young, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Lecture: Who Was Frantz Fanon?
The work of Frantz Fanon appears in the reading lists of many courses at NYU across a wide range of different disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. But who was Frantz Fanon and what is it about his work that enabled him to write so meaningfully to diverse audiences? In this lecture, Professor Young will focus on different phases in the short life of Frantz Fanon (1935–1961) to consider his work as dramatist, as analyst of means to survive and overcome racial trauma, as psychiatrist of the dispossessed, and as prophet of anti-colonial revolution. Finally, he will consider why and how it is that his work has remained so relevant to our experiences today.
Date: Wednesday, February 15
Lecturer: Alec Marantz, Silver Professor of Linguistics and Psychology
Lecture: The Slithy Toves Slay Language in the Brain
Speakers of a language produce and understand sentences they have never heard before. The usual explanation of this ability supposes that we memorize the words of a language and generate sentences from them. Evidence from brains and behavior—and Jabberwocky—suggests instead that we generate the words and memorize the sentences. A more compelling explanation dissolves the distinction between memory and generation and identifies a (generative) grammar as the way in which brains store a potentially infinite set of words and sentences.
Date: Tuesday, February 28
Lecturer: Hye Young You, Associate Professor of Politics
Lecture: Foreign Lobbying in the United States
Who influences American foreign policy? While most scholarly and public attention has historically been focused on American policymakers and the ways they are lobbied by US-based corporations and interest groups, explosive news stories detailing Russia's involvement in the 2016 presidential election have brought foreign lobbying entities to the center of public attention. Foreign firms and governments, and their representatives, have been actively involved in US lobbying for decades. Despite a long history of concern about foreign powers trying to influence American public opinion and policy, little is known about the scope, magnitude, and influence of foreign lobbying. In 1938, Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in response to Nazi organizations' efforts to influence American political debate. The FARA provides a legal channel for foreign governments and businesses to lobby the US government and to influence US public opinion. Professor You will share her ongoing research on foreign influence in American democracy and policymaking process through lobbying under the FARA.
Date: Wednesday, March 22
Lecturer: Sarah Cowan, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Lecture: A Primer on Abortion in the United States
Professor Cowan will discuss the facts about who gets an abortion and what is involved in getting an abortion in the United States and how we know what we know about abortion provision. I will also discuss the long arc of abortion public opinion and how Americans' thoughts, feelings and opinions on abortion are far more nuanced and complex than abortion politics would lead one to believe. This lecture will not address the ethics of abortion.
Date: Thursday, March 30
Lecturer: Rahul Satija, Associate Professor of Biology
Lecture: Exploring Human Biology by Sequencing Individual Cells
The human body consists of trillions of single cells which exhibit breathtaking diversity in their composition, anatomy, and function. Professor Satija will introduce new genomics technologies that enable the molecular profiling of individual cells, and statistical and machine-learning based approaches to interpret these datasets. Together, these advances are enabling the discovery of a “periodic table” of cell types in the human body and a deeper understanding of how our cells function in health and disease.
Date: Tuesday, April 4
Lecturer: Cristina Savin, Assistant Professor of Neural Science and Data Science
Lecture: Neural Mechanisms for an Adaptive Brain
When it comes to neural circuits in the brain the only constant is change. Brains constantly adapt their information processing based on past experiences and current goals, through a variety of mechanisms. Professor Savin will cover some of our theoretical results about how such changes come about and their role in making the brain respond quickly and appropriately to an ever-changing world.
Irving H. Jurow Lecture Hall
Silver Center for Arts and Science
31 Washington Place
All lectures are scheduled from 5:00–6:00 PM (Eastern)
Useful Links
- Scholars Lecture 2021-2022 Edition
- Scholars Lecture 2020-2021 Edition
- Honors Programs