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The University of Chicago
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Free Seminars (9)
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Ancient Egyptian Society and Family Life
From:
The University of Chicago and Cambridge University Press
What was daily life like for the ancient Egyptians? In many ways, people today share similar values and life ways--a strong emphasis on the nuclear family, the love for social activities, and an attachment to appearance and fashion. In this seminar Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and Douglas J. Brewer, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana, investigate the particular values and societal expectations of the ancient Egyptians.
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Capital Punishment in the U.S.: A Forum on Death-Penalty Issues
From:
Cambridge University Press, Columbia University and University of Chicago
In this seminar, presented in the form of a lively debate, four leading experts discuss reasons why the US still retains the death penalty at a time when many other countries in the world have abandoned capital punishment. This forum introduces many of the socio-economic, racial and legal issues surrounding the use of capital punishment, and questions whether the death penalty actually protects the interests of American society at large or is biased against the poor and against minorities.
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Creoles, Pidgins and the Evolution of Languages
From:
The University of Chicago and Cambridge University Press
In this seminar, Salikoko S. Mufwene, professor and former chair of the department of linguistics at the University of Chicago, looks at some of the issues surrounding the evolution of English. Drawing on material in his recent book, The Ecology of Language Evolution, Mufwene questions attitudes about the evolution of languages, especially English, in today's world. He argues that we must consider a language's ecology--the sum total of internal and external forces acting upon it--if we are to understand how it evolves.
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End-of-Life Decisions
From:
Columbia University and University of Chicago
In this seminar, based on a four-part forum held at Columbia University, experts on end-of-life issues discuss the ethics of deciding when to prolong the lives of patients. They debate the relative merits of living wills and whether a person can ever predict the scenario of death in sufficient detail to provide doctors with helpful guidelines. They weigh the appropriateness of administering medical procedures that provide comfort in patients' final hours but may hasten death, and discuss the economics of prolonging life and the increasing tendency to weigh one patient's potential to live against another's, as resources become more scarce. Presented as a lively debate, this seminar addresses many of the fundamental bioethical and legal questions that all doctors, patients and families will face when making informed end-of-life decisions.
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Ordinary Evil
From:
University of Chicago
On some days it can seem that we find ourselves in a world marked by malignity with no motive--we learn that some of our fellow citizens conspire with others to murder ordinary people in their places of work, or creep around under cover of darkness preying on defenseless people, or use their offices to conceal losses in a way that ultimately deprives lesser employees of any hope for security in their retirement. Reading newspapers, watching television, or listening to reports on the radio, it can be very hard to understand why. You survey the damage and think, "How could someone do that?" In this seminar, Candace Vogler addresses this sense of mute incomprehension in the face of wrongdoing as one root of an old philosophical question about whether it is irrational to be immoral.
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The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio's Heirs in Contemporary Fiction and Film
From:
University of Chicago
Carlo Lorenzini (pen name Collodi) created the puppet who longed to be a boy more than a century ago, yet Pinocchio has lived on, both in popular culture and in literary and filmic versions of the tale. One of the most read books in the world, "The Adventures of Pinocchio" was originally written in serial form for an Italian children's magazine. Collodi killed off the puppet in what he thought was the last episode; until, that is, he was urged by his editor to continue the already very popular story.
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The Scientific Article: From Galileo's New Science to the Human Genome
From:
University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
From its modest beginnings in seventeenth century Paris and London to its central role in today's online world, the scientific article has been essential to the development of modern science. This seminar traces the rise of scientific journals, the development of the article, and the ways that scientists used text, images and graphs to communicate their latest findings.
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The Theatrical Baroque: European Plays, Painting and Poetry, 1575-1725
From:
University of Chicago
The Baroque period was the Age of Theater, a time when Shakespeare, Jonson, Calderon, Lope de Vega, Moliere, Racine and Dryden were at the height of their powers. Playwrights were joined by painters and poets in seeking new responses to a world that was undergoing radical change, as the Protestant Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the New World shattered the old assumptions of European society. In this seminar, we'll see how this upsurge of new ideas shaped the art of the Baroque period, meeting along the way the great scientists of the age, the "Sun King" Louis XIV, and a galaxy of French, Italian, English and Dutch dramatists, artists, and thinkers.
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