Center for the Humanities | What Is Human?

What Is Human? Events

Past Events

What is Human? Fall 2009 Conference

October 1, 2009 @ 7:00 pm to October 3, 2009
Microbial Sciences, Pyle Center, Chazen (Elvehjem Building)
This event is one of the What is Human? events.
A three day event exploring the transformations and genealogies of the human from a multidisciplinary perspective. The conference will trace two overlapping lines of inquiry: one devoted to biotechnology, bioethics, and biopolitics (tissues, stem cells, genomics, IVF, the making of the human body) and the other to neuroscience, neurotechnology, and neuroethics (creativity, sovereignty, identity, emotion, plasticity, the making of the human mind and brain).

Guests to Include:

Jay Clayton
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor and Chair, Department of English
Vanderbilt University

Ian Hacking
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
University of Toronto and College de France

Jennifer Michael Hecht
Poet, Historian, Philosopher, and Author
The New School

Marco Iacoboni
Associate Professor, Neuropsychiatric Institute
Director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab
Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Deborah Jenson
Professor of French
Duke University

Evelyn Fox Keller
Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, Emerita
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones
Founders of LabStudio
Institute for Medicine & Engineering, School of Design, Nonlinear Systems
The University of Pennsylvania

Stuart J. Youngner
Susan E. Watson Professor and Chair of Bioethics and Professor of Psychiatry
Case Western Reserve University

And University of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty to include:

David J. Beebe
Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Richard J. Davidson
Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry
Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience
Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging & Behavior

John M. Denu
Professor of Biomolecular Chemistry

Katrina T. Forest
Professor of Bateriology

Sara Guyer
Associate Professor of English
Director of the Center for the Humanities

Linda F. Hogle
Associate Professor of Medical History & Bioethics

Richard Keller
Associate Professor of Medical History & Bioethics

Daniel Kleinman
Professor and Chair of Rural Sociology
Director of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies

Lewis Leavitt
Professor of Pediatrics
Waisman Center

Tejumola Olaniyan
Louise Durham Mead Professor of English

Seth David Pollak
Professor of Psychology, Anthropology, Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Public Affairs
Child Emotion Research Laboratory

Dietram A. Scheufele
Professor of Life Sciences Communication
Center for Nanotechnology in Society

Michael Witmore
Professor of English

Please click HERE for detailed conference information.

Please click Here to Register. Registration is FREE and open to the public, but required.

Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones
Founders of LabStudio

Sabin+Jones LabStudio: Code, Context and Perception

October 1, 2009 @ 7:00 pm
Microbial Sciences: Ebling Symposium Center
This event is one of the What is Human? events.
In 2005, Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones initiated LabStudio, a hybrid research and design unit based within the Schools of Medicine and Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Within LabStudio, architects, cell biologists, musicians, and materials scientists are actively collaborating to develop, analyze and abstract dynamic, biological systems through the generation and design of new tools. These new approaches for modeling complexity and visualizing large datasets are subsequently applied to both architectural and biomedical research and design. The real and virtual world that LabStudio occupies has already offered radical new insights into generative and ecological design within architecture, and it is providing new ways of seeing and measuring how dynamic living systems are formed and operate during development and in disease. Overall, the mission of LabStudio is to produce new modes of thinking, working and creating in design and biomedicine through the modeling of dynamic, multi-dimensional systems with experiments in biology, applied mathematics, fabrication, and material construction. This lecture will describe the new hybrid field being generated between architecture and biology through the illustration of work resulting from our ongoing trans-disciplinary research and design.

Peter Lloyd Jones is an Associate Professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, and Director of the Penn-CMREF Center for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Research at The Institute for Medicine & Engineering (IME). He is a Fellow of the American Heart Association and teaches at the graduate level at the University of Pennsylvania in the Schools of Engineering, Medicine & Design.

Jenny E. Sabin currently teaches design studios and elective seminars within the graduate Department of Architecture at PennDesign. She is Director of CabinStudio+, a research and architectural design studio based in Philadelphia.

Lorraine Daston
Executive director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin

The Passions of the Unnatural

April 24, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
Pyle Center
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
The unnatural comes in several forms: monsters that violate the order of natural species; catastrophes that capsize the order of ecological balance; marvels or miracles that break with the order of what happens always or most of the time. It is a striking fact that these versions of the unnatural also provoke distinctive emotional responses: horror, terror, and wonder, respectively. These are the emotions (or better, passions, in the original sense of the term as an extreme state that we suffer rather than merely feel) that register a breach of order -- and blur the boundary between the natural and the moral.

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book, co-authored with Peter Galison, is Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2008). Lorraine Daston will also participate in a History of Science brown bag discussion April 24th, 2009 at 12PM in the Memorial Union. Co-Sponsored by the UW-Madison History of Science Department and the Center for the Humanities 'What is Human?' Initiative

Beyond Human

What is Human? Symposium

March 27, 2009 @ 8:30 am
1800 Engineering Hall
This event is one of the What is Human? events.
A one-day symposium devoted to exploring the limits and excesses of the human across the division of the humanities and the sciences.

Please click HERE to register. Registration is FREE and open to the public, but required.

Coffee served at 8:30 am; first session begins at 8:45 am

Schedule

Featuring Keynote Addresses by:

Cary Wolfe
Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor
Rice University, Department of English

Introducing Posthumanism. Again

Lewis Gordon
Laura H. Carnell University Professor of Philosophy, Temple University Director, Institute for the Study of Race and Social ThoughtDirector, Center for Afro-Jewish Studies

Theorizing the Human: A Pedagogical Imperative of a Philosophical Anthropology

Richard Davidson
Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Director, Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience
Director, Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior

Change your brain by transforming your mind

With additional guests to include: Linda Hogle, Alastair Hunt, Jay Martin, Jon McKenzie, Gregg Mitman, Walt Schalick, Karen Strier, Stephanie Youngblood, Cary Wolfe

Made possible through support from the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Fund of the University of Wisconsin Foundation