Brown Bag Lunch Series for Research, Scholarship, and Creative
Work
The Brown Bag Series provides an opportunity for Butler faculty
to present their original research, scholarship, and creative work,
aimed to speak to both departmental colleagues and those in
completely different disciplines.
All presentations begin at noon and take place in
AU111.
Spring 2012
Jon Sorenson, Computer Science: "The Life and Work
of Alan M. Turing"
Wednesday, February 8
In the 1930s, the British mathematician Alan Turing developed a
mathematical model of computation, now called the Turing Machine,
which has encouraged many to give him credit for the invention of
the computer as we know it today. In this talk, Jon Sorenson
will look at Turing's work, and discuss some of the controversies
surrounding his life. Click here
to view a poster for this presentation.
Brian Murphy, Physics and Astronomy: "Twinkle,
Twinkle Giant Star"
Wednesday, February 22
Stars come in various colors, radii, masses, and
compositions. These properties determine how a star will live
and eventually die. Star clusters are particularly useful for
understanding the lives of stars since we can do a stellar census
of a cluster with just a few digital images. In this talk,
Brian Murphy will discuss our current understanding of the lives
and deaths of stars. He will focus on research he and his
students have been pursuing on pulsating giant stars that can
varying in brightness by 300% in just one hour. Click here to view a poster
for this presentation.
Shannon Lieb, Chemistry: "The
Observation Problem in Quantum Mechanics"
Thursday, March 1
Quantum Mechanics is so fundamental to our understanding of all
areas of Chemistry due to its ability to relate molecular structure
at the atomic scale to function at the human scale. Despite
this fundamental role in Chemistry, Philosophers and Physicists who
insist on pre-1900 Classical Physics explanations of physical
phenomena malign Quantum Mechanics. One of the crucial
experiments that evokes this schism in science is the double slit
experiment. Shannon Lieb will explore developing an
appreciation for how the "Observation Problem" of the double slit
experiment is related to a classical, everyday "Monte Hall"
problem. Click here to view a
poster for this presentation. Click here to
view the PowerPoint from this presentation.
Kristen Hoerl & Casey Kelly, Communication:
"Staging Disingenuous Controversy at the Creation Museum"
Tuesday, March 20
This presentation analyzes the argumentative
structures that guide visitors' experiences at the "Answers in
Genesis" ministry's Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
Kristen Hoerl and Casey Kelly will explain that the Creation Museum
stages a "disingenuous controversy" with evolutionary science to
legitimate an interpretation of the Genesis myth as an
equally-valid and more desirable explanation for the origins of
life. Further, they suggest that the
museum's technologically-advanced displays and
pseudoscientific layout articulates the Creation Museum's status as
a museum while it advances its ideological mission. They conclude
that this museum is a representative anecdote for the ways in
which contemporary fundamentalists adapt their texts to the
formal and aesthetic conventions of secular society and manufacture
controversy to delegitimize their opponents. Click here to view
a poster for this session.
Margaret Brabant, Political Science, March
29
In this presentation, Margaret Brabant will discuss
her field-based research that analyzes how the educational system
in Turkey reinforces a particular notion of Turkish citizenship and
perpetuates a gendered concept of the ideal Turkish citizen. It
appears as though the Turkish concept of citizenship produces
paradoxical outcomes - at once stimulating the advancement and the
erosion of women's rights. This presentation sets the historical
and political context of citizenship in the Republic of Turkey and
then focuses upon the efforts of a particular women's organization
which seeks to address the needs of women who are marginalized from
the realm of politics and precariously hold their rights as
citizens. Click here to view the
poster from this session.
Chris Bungard, Classical Studies, April 10
Scholars of the Roman playwright Plautus have
focused on the role of the clever slave in scripting the plots of
plays they are in. Some scholars have elevated these clever slaves
to an equal status with Plautus as a playwright of their plays, but
there is an inherent danger in doing so. Looking at Milphio in the
play Poenulus, Chris Bungard will show the limits of this equation
and the dangers Plautus warns us of believing we really are the
roles we are called to play. Please click here to view the
poster for this session.
Brooke Beloso, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies,
April 25
Brooke Beloso will examine the way in which an
ensemble of new ICT practices and possibilities that the American
legal system has recently begun to label "cyber prostitution"
disturbs the status quo of the law as privileged conservator of
sexual morality. She will map out the "early, clumsy form" of cyber
prostitution today-the practices and possibilities that threaten to
serve as "an incubus on later understanding" of these new
technologies, explore the way in which such technical laymen as
judges (and lawyers) have begun to apply familiar analogies from
the past (principally, pimping and pandering, pornography, and
prostitution) in their attempts to assimilate "cyber prostitution"
into some semblance of a structure of rights and obligations, and
will suggest that the interface produced by this analogization to
the new ICT practices and possibilities that are, in the eyes of
the law, collectively constitutive of "cyber prostitution" provides
an important and likely short-lived window of opportunity for an
honest moment of reckoning with a naked emperor previously and
pervasively dressed up and trotted out as "prostitution" by our
courts. Click here to view the
poster for this session.
Liliana Torres-Goens, Modern Languages, Literatures
& Cultures, Date TBD in fall 2012!
Interested in leading a Brown Bag Lunch presentation? Please
contact facultyaffairs@butler.edu.
Brown Bag Series Archives 2010-11
Brown Bag Series Archives 2009-10