Scholars Lecture Series 2020-21

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, October 6

Lecturer: Jacob Faber, Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Service, CAS Department of Sociology and Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service

Lecture: We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America's Racial Geography

The contemporary American practice of homeownership was born out of government programs adopted during the New Deal, though these programs were designed in segregationist fashion. The long-term impact of these policies (i.e., a more segregated country) is a reminder of the intentionality that shaped America’s racial geography.

Date: Thursday, October 22

Lecturer: Lenora Hanson, Assistant Professor of English

Lecture: The Language of Witchcraft in British Literature

In this lecture and discussion, Prof. Hanson considers the relationship between certain forms of language and representations of witchcraft in Romantic-era literature set in England and Jamaica. Considering the language of these representations gives us access to histories and knowledge that were erased from memory through the criminalization of witchcraft and, later, the stigma of superstition. Working to uncover some of that knowledge, we will turn to the various rhetorical and poetic techniques used by Romantic-era writers to depict the supernatural power of women in the past and in their own time.

Arthur Spirling, Associate Professor of Politics and Data Science

Date: Wednesday, October 28

Lecturer: Arthur Spirling, Professor of Politics and Data Science

Lecture: “Dumbing Down,” Trends in Political Discourse and Why They (Don’t) Matter

There is much consternation that political discourse has become “dumbed down” recently. Prof. Spirling shows these concerns are not new, correct, or well founded. He employs text-as-data methods to examine hundreds of years of speeches and writings to estimate its “sophistication”. Ultimately, he demonstrates popular claims about decreased intellectualism of communication mostly don't stand up to scrutiny, and when they do, it is not necessarily a bad thing.

Date: Monday, November 2

Lecturer: Deborah Archer, Associate Professor of Clinical Law and Co-Faculty Director, Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law

Lecture: Jim Crow in the 21st Century: Crime Free Housing Ordinances, Racial Segregation, and Mass Criminalization

America is profoundly segregated along racial lines. Many people view this as a relic of long-overturned legal systems, but in fact, modern laws continue to sustain racial segregation. Crime-free housing ordinances are one of the most salient examples. These local laws—growing in number—either encourage or require landlords to evict or exclude tenants who have had contact with the criminal legal system. Though formally race neutral, this web of restrictions is rapidly expanding against a backdrop of mass criminalization. Prof. Archer will discuss the central role that mass criminalization plays in locking people out of housing, and how these laws facilitate racial segregation and import the racial biases of the criminal legal system into private housing markets.

Date: Tuesday, November 10

Lecturer: Meredith Broussard, Associate Professor of Journalism

Lecture: Artificial Intelligence and Social Justice

What are the practical implications of an AI-enabled world? As we think about future possibilities for digital campuses, corporations, and communities, it’s important to remember the limits of technology in solving social problems. Despite the optimistic promises of digital evangelists, it’s become clear most large-scale software systems exacerbate existing social inequality—especially racial injustice. Prof. Broussard looks at the inner workings and outer limits of tech, and explains why we should never assume computers always get things right. Making a case against “technochauvinism”—the belief that tech is always the solution—Prof. Broussard looks at why self-driving cars don’t really work, why facial recognition amplifies racism, and why social problems persist in every digital Utopia. If we understand the limits of what we *can* do with technology, we can make better choices about what we *should* do with it to make the world better for everyone.

Date: Wednesday, December 2

Lecturer: David Dent, Associate Professor of Journalism and Social and Cultural Analysis

Lecture: Remaking America from the Ashes of Trumpism: Conversations with My Country on a Search for a Depolarized Nation

It’s easy to see an America with a powerful Civil Divide that promises to rupture our democracy. In a cross-country journey, Prof. Dent discovers, in sometimes unlikely places, the promise and complexity of hope in the lives of everyday Americans who cross over the lines of bubbles that so often insulate and divide us.

Date: Tuesday, February 2

Lecturer: Liina Pylkkanen, Professor of Linguistics and Psychology

Lecture: Making Meanings: The Brain’s Ability To Create and Comprehend Complex Messages

The essence of human intelligence is our ability to make sense of the world and express our own complex thoughts. In other words, our brains are meaning makers constantly combining smaller elements into larger, hopefully coherent, representations. Prof. Pylkkanea’s lab studies processes by which our brains create complex meanings through language. In this talk, Prof. Pylkkanea summarizes what we have learned about this fascinating process so far. To study it, tiny magnetic fields emerging from people’s heads while they use language are measured; these magnetic fields are created by neural activity and with a technique called magnetoencephalography, we can capture them noninvasively.

Date: Wednesday, February 10

Lecturer: Andreas Hochwagen, Associate Professor of Biology

Lecture: Counting Genes

Although most genes are present in two parental copies, some are repeated dozens or even hundreds of times. This lecture explores the reasons for this copy-number increase, both in healthy individuals and in disease. It also presents research indicating cells can sometimes determine gene copy number and regenerate copies if numbers get too low.

Date: Monday, February 22

Lecturer: Alejandro Velasco, Associate Professor of History

Lecture: Venezuela’s Once (and Future?) Crisis

Even against the backdrop of nearly twenty years of seemingly unending crisis, recent news from Venezuela are astounding: barren grocery stores; unobtainable medicine; resurgent diseases; exploding malnutrition; collapsing infrastructure; millions fleeing—all underlain by an intractable political impasse fueling growing calls for armed intervention. However, another dangerous crisis is taking shape, less tangible and compelling but possibly more consequential. It is a crisis of memory and amnesia, one that threads together Venezuela’s past, present, and future turmoil. This crisis informs dangerously simplistic explanations of why Venezuela is where it is—for some, because of an historic dependence on oil; for others, because of the nefarious impact of socialist rule—each one eliding important contrary evidence and motivated more by short-term aims than by long-term solutions. But behind the fog of urgency and its attendant distortions lies nuance critical for a full and considered evaluation of Venezuela’s deeper-seated problems, problems that will continue to exist long after the present crisis abates. These problems extend well beyond any particular policy or program, and instead reach deep into the way that a country does and does not wrestle with its past in order to craft different futures, in the process inviting larger reflections about the role and the purpose of history in urgent times.

Date: Thursday, March 11

Lecturer: Tania Lupoli, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Lecture: Identification of Allosteric Pockets in Antibacterial Drug Targets

During host infection, pathogenic bacteria encounter several types of stress that impair protein integrity, including reactive oxygen and nitrogen species and chemotherapy. The resulting protein aggregates can be resolved or degraded by molecular machinery conserved from bacteria to eukaryotes. Eukaryotic Hsp104/Hsp70 and their bacterial homologs ClpB/DnaK are ATP-powered chaperones that restore toxic protein aggregates to a native folded state. In this talk, Prof. Lupoli discusses how these proteins can be inhibited at allosteric sites by small molecules that may act as antibiotics.

Date: Wednesday, March 24

Lecturer: Elena Manresa, Assistant Professor of Economics

Lecture: Learning about the Unobservables Driving the Economy: The Role of Machine Learning

The world is heterogeneous in unobservable ways: workers receive different salaries despite similar education and experience, countries differ in political regimes when populations have similar income distributions, and firms differ in productivity when they have similar size and produce similar goods. The design of successful economic policies depends on understanding decision-making, but decision-making cannot be rationalized without understanding the role of unobserved heterogeneity. Prof. Manresa combines economic data with machine learning tools to account for unobserved heterogeneity to learn about firms responsible for R&D spillovers in the US or sources of wage inequality.

Date: Monday, March 29

Lecturer: Dennis Geronimus, Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Art History

Lecture: Hidden in Plain Sight: Black Africans in Renaissance Visual Culture

Slaves, servants, nurses, and kitchen maids; pages and grooms; shipmates and gondoliers; marginal bystanders in crowded banquet halls and town squares…In images sacred and profane, from Venice and Florence to Antwerp and Lisbon, this is how sub-Saharan Africans were typically depicted in Renaissance imagery. At times, their presence in religious contexts was charged with special primacy. Conversely, numerous unsympathetic and downright hostile portrayals likewise persisted. The exceptions are as revealing as the rule, however, and such examples begin to flash out from history in increasing number the closer we study the visual landscape. Portraiture, in particular, reveals the relationships between Black Africans and European artists (and their patrons) to have been marked by growing complexity—and a sense of shared humanity. One especially remarkable portrait takes us from 1530s Medici Florence to 1930s Baltimore, raising a host of questions ranging from ancestry and gender to the politics of race.

Spring 2021 Lectures

Will be held remotely through Zoom

All lectures are scheduled from 5:00–6:00 PM (Eastern)

Non-members of the Scholars progam can fill out this form to receive the Zoom link to the lecture

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Scholars Lecture 2019-2020 Edition
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