麻豆原创

Arthur Shapiro completed his undergraduate work in Mathematics (Computer Science) and Psychology (Cognitive Science) at U.C. San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University and did post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences. He has been interested in illusions ever since his parents first took him to a science museum. He started producing research related to illusions in 2002, following a sabbatical year at the University of Cambridge. In addition to his research, Shapiro is currently co-editing听The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions. In addition to being an academic, Shapiro is also a vision scientist and an internationally acclaimed creator of visual illusions.听听in the 鈥淏est Visual Illusion of the Year鈥� contest, sponsored by the Neural Correlate Society. The contest started in 2005, and since then Shapiro鈥檚 lab has produced twelve illusions in the top ten, and six illusions in the top three鈥攎ore than any other researcher or research team. The National Geographic show听Brain Games听has featured several of Shapiro鈥檚 illusions

Michael Sappol lives in Stockholm, Sweden and is a visiting researcher at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in University of Uppsala. For many years he was a historian, exhibition curator and scholar-in-residence in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (USA).听听Sappol鈥檚 work focuses on the history of anatomy, death, and the visual culture of medicine and science in film, illustration and exhibition. He is the author of听A Traffic of Dead Bodies听(2002) and听Dream Anatomy听(2006), editor of听A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire听(2010) and听Hidden Treasure听(2012), and formerly curator of Medical Movies on the Web. His most recent book is听Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration and the Homuncular Subject听(University of Minnesota Press, 2017).听Sappol is currently working on two new books, 鈥淎natomy鈥檚 photography: Objectivity, showmanship and the reinvention of the anatomical image, 1860-1950鈥� and 鈥淨ueer anatomies: Perverse desire, medical illustration and the epistemology of the anatomical closet.鈥�

Eric Lohr is Chair of the History Department at 麻豆原创 and is widely recognized as one of the leading scholars of Russia鈥檚 World War I experience, authoring many articles and document publications on the subject.听听He previously taught at Harvard as an assistant professor of History (2000-2003). 听He is the author of听Russian听Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union听(Harvard University Press, 2012) and听Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens during World War I听(Harvard University Press, 2003). He is also the co-author of a book with Lafayette College history professor Joshua Sanborn titled听Russia鈥檚 Great War, 1914-1918,听and is the听editor of the forthcoming book听The Empire and Nationalism at War.听He is currently writing听Russia鈥檚 War, 1914-1918: From Total Mobilization to Total听Demobilization.

Dr. Catherine Knight Steele is a scholar of race, gender and media with specific focus on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media. She is a native Chicagoan and received her PhD听in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research has appeared in the听Howard Journal of Communications听and the book听Intersectional Internet听(S.U. Noble and B. Tynes Eds.) Her doctoral dissertation,听Digital Barbershops, focused heavily on the black blogosphere and the politics of online counterpublics. She examines representations of marginalized communities in the media and how traditionally marginalized populations resist oppression and utilize online technology to create spaces of community. She is currently working on a monograph about digital black feminism and new media technologies. Dr. Steele also serves as the first Project Director for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded College of Arts and Humanities grant, Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture.

鈥淚 consider myself a digital black feminist, often exploring the 鈥渟hades of grey鈥� between media听consumption听and media critique as black female activist scholar.鈥�

Richard C. Sha is Professor of Literature at 麻豆原创, as well as a member of its Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. His new book, Imagination and Science in Romanticism, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in August 2018, and considers how science then shaped ideas of scientific discovery and artistic achievement. Chapters focus on chemistry and physics, neurology, physiology, and obstetrics and embryology. The book shows what is lost when the imagination is not understood properly as it was, an engine for epistemology. The research for this book was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The book he is now working on, Modelling Emotion in Romanticism and Beyond, examines how writers from Goethe through Voltaire to Leopardi experimented with different models of how to connect emotions to subjectivity. What kinds of things were the emotions, and how to stitch them together to achieve personhood? How do scientific models both simplify and idealize, and how do models capture how artists think about what it means to be human? He argues that Romantic thought challenges our current fascination with the unconsciousness of affect, and that these writers had productive models of structuring the relations between emotions and the feeling subject. Together with Joel Faflak, he edited Romanticism and the Emotions, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. Recent articles treat Byron鈥檚 sexuality, Distributed Cognition in Blake, what鈥檚 wrong with affect theory, and what 鈥渆rotic鈥� means for Romantic poets. He is the recipient of three teaching awards at 麻豆原创, including being named the 2012 鈥淪cholar Teacher of the Year.

On October 24, the Literature Department will hold a special colloquium on听Frankenstein. Sha is currently teaching a course on Science and Romanticism, and they recently discussed the novel. He attempts to convey to students Mary Shelley鈥檚 erudition and curiosity. For instance, Shelley once wrote about the death of her child, and in the next sentence mentioned reading Edward Gibbon鈥檚听The History of the Decline and Fall听of听the Roman Empire. And given听Frankenstein鈥檚 depth and profundity, it鈥檚 remarkable that Shelley started drafting the novel at age 17.

Sha has read听Frankenstein听some 30 times, and he finds it endlessly fascinating. 鈥淚鈥檓 sure on the 31st time of reading, I will start thinking about a passage that I鈥檝e never really thought about before.鈥�

Jimena Canales is an award-winning author and scholar focusing on science in the modern world.听She received an MA听and PhD听from Harvard University in the History of Science and a BSc in Engineering Physics from the Tecnol贸gico de Monterrey. Her first book,听 explored the relation between science and history as one of the central intellectual problems of modern times. Her second book,听, is now available. Her scholarly work on the history of science has been published in Isis, Science in Context, History of Science, the British Journal for the History of Science, and the MLN, among others. Her work on visual, film and media studies has appeared in Architectural History, Journal of Visual Culture, Thresholds. She writes for general readers publishing in Aperture, Artforum, WIRED, Nautilus, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.

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Canales is currently a faculty member of the Graduate College at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a Research Affiliate at MIT (2017-2018). She was previously the Thomas M. Siebel Professor for the History of Science at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, an Associate Professor at Harvard University, and senior fellow at the IKKM (Internationales Kolleg f眉r Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie) in Germany. Canales received the 鈥淧rize for Young Scholars鈥� of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, Division of History of Science and Technology. She has been a visitor at various universities and research centers including the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, MIT, the Princeton-Weimar Summer School of Media Studies at Princeton University and has lectured widely nationally and internationally, presenting her work at the BBC, the听Mus茅e Georges Pompidou, and the 11th Shanghai Biennale.

Check out some of Jimena Canales鈥櫶�books below. Also, check out her听听for more information about her publications.听

On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson鈥檚 theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein鈥檚 theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time.听The Physicist and the Philosopher听tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today.

Jimena Canales introduces readers to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and traces how this clash of worldviews reverberated across the twentieth century. She shows how it provoked responses from figures such as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger, and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics. Canales explains how the new technologies of the period鈥晄uch as wristwatches, radio, and film鈥昲elped to shape people鈥檚 conceptions of time and further polarized the public debate. She also discusses how Bergson and Einstein, toward the end of their lives, each reflected on his rival鈥檚 legacy鈥旴ergson during the Nazi occupation of Paris and Einstein in the context of the first hydrogen bomb explosion.

The Physicist and the Philosopher听is a magisterial and revealing account that shows how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new sense of time.

In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn鈥檛 until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the impact on modern science and society was profound. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval,听A Tenth of a Second听sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries.

Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies鈥攖elegraphy, photography, cinematography鈥擩imena Canales locates the reverberations of this 鈥減erceptual moment鈥� throughout culture. Once scientists associated the tenth of a second with the speed of thought, they developed reaction time experiments with lasting implications for experimental psychology, physiology, and optics. Astronomers and physicists struggled to control the profound consequences of results that were a tenth of a second off. And references to the interval were part of a general inquiry into time, consciousness, and sensory experience that involved rethinking the contributions of Descartes and Kant.

Considering its impact on much longer time periods and featuring appearances by Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein, among others,听A Tenth of a Second听is ultimately an important contribution to history and a novel perspective on modernity.

Oliver Gaycken received his BA in English from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He previously has taught at York University (Toronto) and Temple University. His teaching interests include silent-era cinema history, the history of popular science, and the links between scientific and experimental cinema. He has published on the discovery of the ophthalmoscope, the flourishing of the popular science film in France at the turn of the 1910s, the figure of the supercriminal in Louis Feuillade鈥檚 serial films, and the surrealist fascination with popular scientific images.听His book听, appeared with听Oxford University Press in the spring of 2015.