Events

Each academic year the Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty offers a variety of lectures, luncheons and faculty development workshops that feature Smith faculty and visiting professors.

Liberal Arts Luncheons

Liberal Arts Luncheons are sponsored by the Provost and Dean of the Faculty. LALs will be held on Thursdays in the Neilson Browsing Room, unless otherwise noted. Talks begin at approximately 12:10 p.m., and a complimentary lunch is offered for the first 40 attendees (first come, first served).

Date	Talk	Presenter
September 19	How to Swim through Goo	Becca Thomases, professor of mathematical sciences
September 26	Self and Imagination	Qianyi Qin, lecturer of philosophy
October 3	Diversity in Scholarship for (Climate) Justice at Small Colleges	Alex Barron, associate professor of environmental science and policy; Sian Bareket ’25
October 10	What’s in a Dog’s Breed?	Halie Rando, assistant professor of computer science
October 17	Writing the Unknowns of Science Through the Essay	Jamie Green, lecturer of English language and literature
October 24	What Is in the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection and How Can I Use it?	Kiki Smith, professor of theatre
October 31	Focus on Balance: Why Attentional Focus on Balance During Movement May Be Detrimental to People with Multiple Sclerosis	Stephanie Jones, assistant professor of exercise and sport studies
November 7	Designing for Transformed Futures	Alix Gerber, postgraduate fellow in interdisciplinary design practices
November 14	Fieldwork as [a] Subject: Emotions and Care in Ethnographic Research	Ana Del Conde, McPherson/Eveillard Postdoctoral Fellow in study of women and gender and community engagement and social change
November 21	A Presentation of the Arts Afield 2024 Faculty Fellows	Michele Wick, lecturer of psychology
December 5	Reaped and Sown: Famine and Ethnic Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire	Matthew Hagop Ghazarian, lecturer of environmental science and policy

Sigma Xi Luncheons

Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, meets regularly for talks and a complimentary lunch throughout the year. Talks are open to all faculty, staff and students.

Talks begin at approximately 12:10 p.m. in McConnell Auditorium. A complimentary lunch is offered in McConnell Foyer. Please visit the Sigma Xi website for the schedule.

Faculty Development Events

The Office of the Provost offers a variety of faculty development workshops and events throughout the year. Please visit the office’s Faculty Development webpage for the schedule.

Lectures

Eszter Hargittai ’96

Neilson Professorship

The Neilson Professorship was established in honor of the college’s third president to enable the college to have a distinguished scholar visit the community and share their current research with faculty and students.

Eszter Hargittai ’96 is a Professor and holds the Chair in Internet Use & Society in the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich. She is Fellow of the International Communication Association and an External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Before moving to Zurich, she was the Delaney Family Professor at Northwestern University.

Hargittai’s research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media with a particular interest in how differences in people's Internet skills influence what they do online, and how these may translate into changes in life chances. Hargittai is author of Connected in Isolation: Digital Privilege in Unsettled Times (The MIT Press, 2022), Wired Wisdom: How to Age Better Online co-authored with John Palfrey (forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in 2025), and three books on the behind-the-scenes realities of doing empirical social science research.

Her work has been featured in many popular media outlets in the United States and internationally. Her research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Microsoft Research, Nokia, Google, Facebook, and Merck, among others.

The Role of Social Media in Learning About Science & Religion

Monday, September 16 at 5 p.m.

Klingenstein Browsing Room, Neilson Library
Reception afterward in the Skyline Reading Room hosted by the provost, 6:15-7:45 p.m.
Social media have become an important information source for people on a myriad of topics including the sometimes-contentious domains of science and religion. Which social media platforms are popular for seeing and discussing these topics? Do people tend to have negative or positive experiences with them? Why might people avoid related conversations? This talk draws on interviews with 45 American adults and a survey administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,505 US adults to explore what contexts encourage learning about science and religion versus turn people away from it.

Workshop: Optimizing Your Digital Presence

What will someone see when they google your name? How do you ensure that the first impression people get of you online is optimal for your career and personal goals? How do you avoid your name being associated with harmful material? And why should you care? This workshop will offer tips on how to think about and what to do to achieve a digital presence aligned with your objectives.

For Students

Wednesday, October 23 from 6–8 p.m., Campus Center 205
Co-sponsored by the Lazarus Center for Career Development
Please register in advance. Free pizza offered to workshop participants.

For Faculty & Staff

Tuesday & Wednesday, October 29 & 30 from 5–8 p.m., Kahn Liberal Arts Institute (21 Henshaw Ave). Dinner included.
Express interest by Tuesday, October 1.

Reading Group on Methods to Study Digital Society

The internet, digital media, and new computational tools offer novel opportunities while also raising unique challenges when it comes to methods for studying our social world. Readings offer unusual first-hand accounts—with warts and all—of doing empirical social science research using both traditional and cutting-edge methods when studying digital society.

The group will gather for three lunch discussions: Tuesday, October 22; Wednesday, November 13; and Tuesday, December 10.

Express your interest by October 1.

Bruce R. Smith

Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Professor in Renaissance Studies

Fall 2022

Bruce R. Smith’s interests include Shakespeare, sound studies, Queer studies, and media studies, often in combination. His books include Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (Chicago, 1991), The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, 1999), Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford, 2000), The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago, 2009), Phenomenal Shakespeare (Wiley Blackwell, 2010), and Shakespeare | Cut: Rethinking Cutwork in an Age of Distraction (Oxford, 2016). Smith’s full CV is available.

Fall 2022 Lecture Dates and Information

Renaissance Poetry Across Media

In our own media-savvy time, we realize that what gets communicated is very much a function of how it gets communicated. These three lectures investigate manuscript, print, sculpture, architecture and music as media for communicating 16th and 17th century poems in Shakespeare's England.

All lectures will take place in the Neilson Browsing Room and begin at 5 p.m.

This series is hosted by the Department of English and made possible by the Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Endowment for Renaissance Studies.

Lecture Date	Lecture Title
Monday, September 26	Poetry, Media and Across
Monday, October 31	Poetry, Sculpture and Architecture
Tuesday, November 29	Poetry and Music

The Engel Lectureship is granted annually to a Smith faculty member who has made a significant contribution to his or her field. The lecture was established in 1958 by the National Council of Jewish women in honor of Engel, its onetime president and a 1920 Smith graduate. The 2024 Engel Lecturer will be Steve Waksman.

Spring 2024

The 65th Katharine Asher Engel Lecture

The Politics of Scale: Live Music Crowds from Jenny Lind to Taylor Swift

STEVE WAKSMAN

ELISIE IRWIN SWEENEY PROFESSOR OF MUSIC AND PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN STUDIES

Monday, April 1, 2024 at 5 p.m. — Neilson Library, Klingenstein Browsing Room, Smith College

Live music is one of the most significant forms of public congregation that we have and the crowds that attend musical events have frequently been perceived to have a significance at least equal to, if not outweighing, the character of the musical artists themselves. A major impulse in the modern history of live music has been to gather the largest crowd possible, a tendency that has an important connection to the growth of the live music business, within which big crowds equal money and profit. Yet commercial motives alone do not explain the importance of live music crowds, which also serve as an index of the varied “imagined communities” to which music gives rise. In this presentation, I will survey four moments in live music history when the crowd has been invested with significance as an emblem of broader struggles over collective identity and musical value: Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind’s U.S. tour in the early 1850s; the Beatles’ 1965 performance at New York’s Shea Stadium; Beyoncé’s 2018 headline appearance at the Coachella festival; and Taylor Swift’s current Eras tour, which is on track to become the highest-grossing concert tour of all-time.

Steve Waksman is Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music and Professor of American Studies at Smith College. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999), and This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009), which was awarded the Woody Guthrie Prize by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Chapter. With Reebee Garofalo, he is the co-author of the sixth edition of the rock history textbook, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (2014), and with Andy Bennett, he co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (2015). His essays have appeared in such collections as the Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop, Metal Rules the Globe, and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre and Popular Music. On WRSI radio, The River in Western Massachusetts, he can be heard as the “Doctor of Rock,” offering bits of popular music history in support of Black History Month and Women’s History Month. His latest book is Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé (Oxford University Press, 2022), which received the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society and won 3 rd place honors for the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, given by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In 2008, Waksman was the keynote speaker at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s American Music Masters event honoring the legacy of musician and inventor Les Paul. His dissertation on the electric guitar won the 1998 Ralph Henry Gabriel prize awarded by the American Studies Association. Currently he is completing work on The Cambridge Companion the Electric Guitar, co-edited with Jan-Peter Herbst.

A lecture by Ambreen Hai

September 12, 2024

5 p.m. in the Neilson Library Klingenstein Browsing Room
Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities and Professor of English Language and Literature
Intimate Strangers: Domestic Workers and Postcolonial Servitude in Contemporary South Asian English Literature

A lecture by Julianna Tymoczko

December 5, 2024

5 p.m. in the Neilson Library Klingenstein Browsing Room
Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Mathematical Sciences
What Is the Color of Symmetry?

A lecture by Jeffrey Ahlman

January 30, 2025

5 p.m. in the Neilson Library Klingenstein Browsing Room
Gwendolen Carter Chair in African Studies and Professor of History
African Studies and African History: Histories between the Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary

A lecture by Lucie Schmidt

February 13, 2025

5 p.m. in the Neilson Library Klingenstein Browsing Room
Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics
TBA

A lecture by Sara Pruss

March 11, 2025

5 p.m. in the Neilson Library Klingenstein Browsing Room
Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Geosciences
TBA

A lecture by Daniel Kramer

April 1, 2025

5 p.m. in the Neilson Library Klingenstein Browsing Room
Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities and Professor of Theatre
TBA

Spring Showcases

Smithies are always up to something good! Each year, the spring semester offers a variety of chances for students to share their research, business ventures, art, or other projects from the academic year and previous summer.

Celebrating Collaborations, one such event, showcases research conducted by students and professors.

Check out how students are pushing the world forward in countless ways.

Explore Spring Showcases More About Collaborations