Guest Lecture Series
Spring 2013
FEBRUARY
An Afternoon with composer Joan Tower
*POSTPONED*
Bates Hall Room 117
Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of the most important American composers living today. Her work has been commissioned by major ensembles, soloists, and orchestras. Tower studied piano and composition at Bennington College and Columbia University. This afternoon with Joan Tower is open to music majors from all area colleges and universities, and includes a lecture, coaching and a master class.
MARCH
Covering Lost History: Writing and Publishing American Indian Narratives
Trace A. DeMeyer
March 28, 7PM
Horace Mann Center Garden Level Conference Room
Author and award-winning journalist Trace A. DeMeyer will be giving a talk "Telling Our Stories", about her career as a Native American journalist and how she became a writer, book publisher and professional blogger.
Ms. DeMeyer will read excerpts from her memoir One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects and her new book Two Worlds, she will also discuss her research into adoption practices, genocidal government policies aimed to destroy American Indian culture, and the origins of the slogan, “The Only Good Indian is a Dead Indian.”
She will also share her most memorable experiences conducting interviews with famous Native Americans including the American Indian Movement’s political prisoner Leonard Peltier and the movie "Incident at Oglala," the actor-poet-activist John Trudell's career and Hollywood’s favorite Lakota actor Floyd Red Crow Westerman of Dances with Wolves.
APRIL
The Shape of Space
Jeffrey Renwick Weeks
April 10, 7PM
Location TBD
When we look out on a clear night, the universe seems infinite. Yet this infinity might be an illusion. During the first half of the presentation, computer games will introduce the concept of a multi-connected universe”. Interactive 3D graphics will then take the viewer on a tour of several possible shapes for space. Finally, we'll see how recent satellite data provide tantalizing clues to the true shape of our universe.
The only prerequisites for this talk are curiosity and imagination. For middle school and high school students, people interested in astronomy, and all members of the Westfield community.
Jeff Weeks fell in love with geometry in the 12th grade when he read Flatland. While an undergraduate at Dartmouth College he bounced back and forth between math and physics, eventually settling on math. He went on to study 3-manifolds under Bill Thurston at Princeton but maintained his interest in physics on the sly. After a few years teaching at Stockton State College and Ithaca College, Weeks resigned to be a full-time dad for a few years. From there he fell into the life of a freelance mathematician, at first part-time, then full-time. He has enjoyed extensive work with the Geometry Center and the National Science Foundation as well as smaller gigs for science museums and teaching at Middlebury College. In 1999 a telephone call from the MacArthur Foundation brought five years of work with zero administrative overhead. The timing could not have been better: 1999–2004 was an intense period for cosmic topology, as well as the time to finish the unit Exploring the Shape of Space for middle schools and high schools. With NSF support, Jeff is currently writing new and more extensive geometry and topology software.