Summer and Fall 2006
July 7–10
Computational Aspects of Statistical Data Depth Analysis
Exploratory Seminar; Science
Diane L. Souvaine RI ’06 (Computer Science, Tufts University)
The newly suggested statistical concept of data depth has significant potential as a data analysis tool in applied fields like bioinformatics, clinical data mining, and statistical process control. This concept has the potential to extract fresh insights and provide new visualization tools for enhanced understanding. Computational geometry techniques have been successfully applied to develop more efficient tools for data depth analysis and are an important factor in making them an accessible tool for researchers. However, practical implementations of data depth techniques are not yet in widespread use.
This workshop will bring together three international groups of researchers in computer science, from the United States (Boston), Spain, and Canada. These groups will be supported by a statistician knowledgeable in computational aspects of statistics. Each of the four groups has a unique perspective on the topic and, thus far, not much collaborative work has been done. The workshop will provide ample opportunities for exchanging ideas and developing new research directions and collaborations and a stimulating environment for junior researchers to learn from and interact with senior faculty.
September 8–9
Global Articulations: Realignments of Personhood and Language
Exploratory Seminar; Social Science
Smita Lahiri (Anthropology, Harvard University)
Janet McIntosh (Anthropology, Brandeis University)
This seminar is an exploration of the role of language in globalized processes, with a particular focus on the articulations between globalization, language, and personhood. Our discussions will focus on the domains of language-in-use, language ideologies, and modalities of communication as we examine the words, speech events, codes, and media formats that index globalization, embed themselves in its processes, and give form to the experiences of those contending with it in their daily lives. In particular, we will explore the ways that these linguistic considerations mediate the relationship between globalization and “personhood,” in the sense of situated models of what it means to be an agentive, economically viable, morally accountable person in a specific setting. We are designing this seminar in hopes of generating productive cross-talk between those who identify centrally as linguistic anthropologists and those whose scholarship speaks to globalization and personhood but who wish to acquire tools for thinking more deeply about these matters through language.
September 8–9
Remaking Sex in Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Medicine
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities and Science
Katharine Park (History of Science and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University)
In his influential book, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), Thomas Laqueur proposed a two-stage model for the development of Western ideas concerning sex difference, based largely on his reading of medical texts. Before about 1800, according to Laqueur, Europeans understood man and women as physically constituting a single sex, their bodies differing only in degrees of perfection that expressed themselves in genital anatomy; in the ninetenth and twentieth centuries, in contrast, the sexes were seen as radically different from and complementary to one another. Although there has been considerable dissatisfaction with this model among historians of early medicine, there have been relatively few clear critiques of it, and those proposed to date have been limited in time and place. This seminar proposes to bring together a group of specialists in ancient, medieval, and early modern medicine—not limited to Europe—to discuss alternatives to Laqueur’s account of the “one-sex body.” The aim would be to explore the possibility of producing a synthetic and collaborative volume on the historical construction of sex difference that would be accessible to students and nonspecialists.
October 20–21
Quantifying Nonlinear Variation in Multivariate Data
Exploratory Seminar; Science
Rima Izem (Statistics, Harvard University)
Xiao-Li Meng (Statistics, Harvard University)
Scientists in an increasing number of fields, including biology, medicine, and physics, collect samples of curves, images, or shapes. Usual methods of analysis of variation in these data sets, such as principal components analysis, are only effective in analyzing linear variation and do not always produce interpretable results for analyzing nonlinear variation. This workshop will investigate novel methods of quantifying nonlinear variation in multivariate data. The proposed methods will make it possible to quantify statistical properties of the probability distribution useful for dimensionality reduction, variability decomposition, and inference. This area of research is interdisciplinary; it comprises researchers in statistics, probability, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. The workshop will bring together a team of scientists in these research areas; each researcher will bring his expertise as well as a strong experience in interdisciplinary collaboration to the workshop.
October 20–21
Dynamic Networks: Behavior, Optimization, and Design
Exploratory Seminar; Science
David Parkes (Computer Science, Harvard University)
Anna Nagurney RI ’06 (Finance and Operations Management, University of Massachusetts at Amherst)
This exploratory seminar will bring together scientists and social scientists in order to pursue fundamental themes and theories surrounding dynamic networks with applications as varied as congested urban transportation networks, the Internet, and even targeted cancer therapies.
November 17–18
Musical Degeneracy: Sounding Cultural Decline in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities
Alexander Rehding (Music, Harvard University)
The powerful figure of degeneracy (the "dark side of progress") came to the fore in mid-nineteenth century medical discourses, but was soon applied to wider cultural, social, and political issues to diagnose the "sickness"—the perceived state of moral and cultural depravity—of entire communities, finding its tragic climax under the National Socialist regime. In many ways a necessary by-product of modernity, the idea of degeneracy connects a deeply felt sense of cultural decline with the full authority of scientific accuracy. Music, as an art with a complex, intangible materiality and one that was believed to have a more immediate effect on nervous and emotional dispositions than others, played a key role in such diagnoses—notably in the figure of Richard Wagner, who was identified in Max Nordau’s influential Degeneration (1892) as chiefly responsible for the sorry state of Western culture. The idea of degeneracy allowed cultural products to become readable in two ways: as the necessary results of a degenerate culture and, simultaneously, as dangerous objects whose consumption might induce further degeneracy. We wish to examine the intricate workings of this powerful trope in selected historical and theoretical contexts—touching on discourses such as race, nationhood, gender, and technology—to understand its function within the framework of modernity up to the present day.
December 7–9
State Responses to Terrorism: A Cross-National Comparison
Advanced Seminar; Social Science
Philip Heymann (Harvard Law School, Harvard University)
The purpose of the seminar is to investigate and compare the political and legislative responses to terrorism in eight countries over the past five years. A diverse group of scholars ranging across several disciplines and areas of expertise will focus on a set of five themes: treatment of immigrant/minority communities, domestic and international intelligence gathering, emergency/war powers, international relations, and influencing attitudes. We will explore these themes with a view to assessing the effectiveness of policies in these areas, the conditions under which these policies are more or less likely to succeed, and how the pursuit of policies in one area can advance or undermine the achievement of national goals.
Spring 2007
February 2–3
The Place of Native Americans in United States History
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities, Social Science
Malinda Maynor Lowery (History, Harvard University)
Rachel St. John (History, Harvard University)
Lisa Brooks (Literature and Folklore and Mythology, Harvard University)
The central question of this exploratory seminar is: how do we create a United States history survey course that fully takes into account Native American histories? Native Americans have been instrumental in US state formation, law, diplomacy, labor struggles, frontier settlement, civil rights, popular culture, and literature since the American Revolution, yet their histories are often completely absent from any United States survey. Our objective is to convene a group of twelve to fifteen scholars, editors, and educational experts from around the country to discuss developing a US history survey curriculum that incorporates Native American histories beyond the early American period. Our goal is to write and distribute a report that summarizes the challenges, opportunities, and resources available to all those who develop and teach survey courses.
March 9–10
Transnational Armed Groups: Legal and Policy Responses
Advanced Seminar; Social Science
Claude Bruderlein (Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research, Harvard University)
Allan Hill (Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University)
Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou (Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research, Harvard University)
This project aims to develop and stimulate new research into how the increasingly prominent role played by transnational non-state armed groups is changing the landscape of warfare and challenging traditional understandings of the laws of war.
To conduct this initiative, the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard University (HPCR) will convene a two-day advanced seminar to examine in detail this topic of critical and growing importance to international security.
The purpose of the seminar, to which a select group of senior international experts will take part, will be to share research internationally and stimulate further discussion among scholars and policymakers in order to understand how the strategies employed by transnational non-state armed groups, and the responses by state actors are changing the international order.
March 23–24
New Discoveries from Old Excavations
Advanced Seminar; Humanities
Betsey A. Robinson (Classics and History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University)
This seminar represents a first step towards a critical history of archaeological excavation written by and for classical archaeologists. It comprises case studies of German, British, and American excavations in Greece between 1875 and 1941. Valuable new discoveries about ancient and medieval culture are to be made through the careful examination of early excavation records, particularly dig notebooks, photographs, drawings, and correspondence. To interpret such source material, archaeologists must carefully inform themselves about the specifics of excavation and record keeping—and of artifact collection, conservation, and storage—on a case-by-case basis. Archaeological source criticism is not only an important tool for remedying past problems and incorporating new evidence, but it offers the material basis for documenting the evolution of the discipline over its formative years. The lessons learned are relevant to all consumers of archaeological results, not only archaeologists, current and future, but also historians, art historians, philologists, and specialists in museology, conservation, and heritage management.
May 4–5
Contesting Theory
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities
Stanley Cavell (Philosophy, Harvard University)
Tom Conley (Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University)
David Rodowick (Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University)
From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the institutionalization of cinema studies in universities in North America and Europe became identified with a certain idea of theory. This was less a theory in the abstract or natural scientific sense than an interdisciplinary commitment to concepts and methods derived from literary semiology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism, echoed in the broader influence of structuralism and post-structuralism on the humanities. However, the evolution of cinema studies since the early 1980s has been marked both by a decentering of film with respect to media and visual studies and by a retreat from theory that is characteristic of the humanities more generally. No doubt this retreat had a number of salutary effects: a reinvigoration of historical research, more sociologically rigorous reconceptualizations of readers and texts, and the placement of aesthetic work in the broader context of visual culture and popular culture. But not all of these innovations were equally welcome. In 1996, the Post-Theory debate unleashed by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll argued for the rejection of 1970s "Theory," as incoherent. Almost simultaneously, other philosophical challenges to Theory came from scholars influenced by analytic philosophy and the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Here, Theory finds itself challenged by both history and philosophy. "Contesting Theory" will bring together a key group of scholars to examine the vicissitudes of ideas of theory in the past twenty years in cinema and visual studies, as well as in the wider context of debates in the humanities. Confusing "theory" with Theory, often lost in these debates is the acknowledgment that no judgments can be advanced—in history, criticism, or philosophy—in the absence of qualitative epistemological commitments. The exploratory seminar on "Contesting Theory" will promote a vigorous debate on what should constitute a philosophy of the humanities critically and reflexively attentive to its epistemological and ethical commitments.
May 11–12
Reading Chrétien de Troyes (New Directions)
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities
Virginie Greene (Romance Languages, Harvard University)
Zrinka Stahuljak (French and Francophone Studies, University of California at Los Angeles)
The purpose of this exploratory seminar is to bring together a small group of scholars specialized in medieval French literature to work on a volume of essays on Chrétien de Troyes. The small corpus of texts attributed to him has been the object of the earliest medieval criticism, starting with the originator of the French medieval discipline Gaston Paris. Likewise, some of the greatest French medieval scholarship has been written on the Chrétien corpus, in France, Germany, Britain, and the United States. Our project is to continue this tradition by looking forward and using current tools of interpretation. The Chrétien corpus occupies an important place in the intellectual trajectory of each participant in the seminar. We have been confronted with the difficulties that its numerous ambiguities offer, and we have faced the richness and the contradictions of the Chrétien scholarship. We hope that this encounter will allow us to engage in a wide-ranging collaborative exploration, each one of us from her own theoretical and intellectual perspective, in the collective effort to understand the larger cultural, historical, and literary moment of the second half of the twelfth century.
May 18–19
Genetics and Genomics of Emerging Model Species
Exploratory Seminar; Science
Elena Kramer (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University)
The modern field of molecular developmental evolution (evo-devo) was largely founded on comparisons that were drawn among existing model species such as Drosophila (fruit fly), Caenorhabditis (nematode), Mus (mouse), and Gallus (chick). It has rapidly become clear, however, that since phylogenetic position was not generally considered as a factor when these models were selected, new model species are needed in order to achieve a better understanding of the evolution of developmental genetic mechanisms. The development of a new model species is not trivial, however, and requires a significant investment in money and time. Many laboratories around the world are currently engaged in this challenging process, for both plants and animals. The goal of the proposed workshop is to create a forum for leading researchers that will facilitate the exchange of new ideas and techniques. Although there are aspects of every model species that are unique, there are numerous common issues and problems that can be addressed with broadly applicable approaches. This workshop will help these small communities of researchers create a larger support network that will further the development of a wide array of new model species.
