It’s the start of the term and that means one thing: a new Big Picture Lecture series. The Toyota Motor Corporation Endowed Lecture Series brings visionary thinkers from around the world to campus to discuss the cultural and political currents shaping art and design.
The series kicks off today at 1 pm in the Ahmanson Auditorium at Hillside Campus. All lectures are free and open to the public. Coming up for Fall Term:
September 27: Joann Kuchera-Morin, Composing in N-Dimensions
Joann Kuchera-Morin is a composer, professor and researcher in multi-modal media systems, content and facilities design. The culmination of Kuchera-Morin’s research efforts is the one-of-a-kind Allosphere Research Facility—of which Kuchera-Morin serves as director—at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her years of experience in digital media research led to the creation of the University of California’s multi-million dollar sponsored research program, the Digital Media Innovation Program, of which Kuchera-Morin served as chief scientist from 1998 to 2003.
October 4: Hershel Parker, My 50 Years with the Confidence-Man
Hershel Parker is the author of Herman Melville, A Biography; Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons and Reading Billy Budd, among others. Professor emeritus of English at the University of Delaware, Parker co-edited the Norton Critical Edition of Moby Dick and served as editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence Man. He is associate general editor of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of The Writings of Herman Melville.
October 25: Lisa Margonelli, Designing for Cognitive Dissonance: The Weird Relationship Between Gas Pumps and US Energy Policy
Lisa Margonelli directs the energy policy initiative at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. She spent four years following the oil supply chain to write Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank , published in 2008. Recognized as one of the 25 Notable Books of 2007 by the American Library Association, Oil On the Brain also won a 2008 Northern California Book Award for general nonfiction.
November 1: Sandra Ball-Rokeach, The Seeds of Civic Engagement in Contemporary Urban Communities
Sandra Ball-Rokeach is a communication and sociology professor at USC and principal investigator of the decade-long research program, Metamorphosis: Transforming the Ties that Bind. The author and/or editor of six books, her latest, Understanding Ethnic Media: Produces, Consumers and Societies, will be published this year. She served as co-editor of Communication Research from 1992 to 1997, currently is a fellow of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the International Communication Association.
November 8: Dale S. Wright, Buddhist Wisdom and the Foundations of Ironic Humor is Zen
Dale S. Wright is the David and Mary Gamble Professor of Religious Studies and Asian Studies at Occidental College. His areas of expertise are Buddhist thought, particularly Chinese and Japanese, and modern continental European philosophy. Among his publications are Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character and a series of Oxford University Press books on the history of Zen Buddhism.
November 15: David Wilson, Nikolai Federov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the Roots of the Russian Space Program
David Wilson is the founding director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT), which he opened in 1988 in Culver City. MJT has exhibited internationally and Wilson has lectured throughout North America and Europe. He has produced eight independent films, most recently under the auspices of MJT in conjunction with Kabinet, an arts and science-based cultural institution located in St. Petersburg, Russia. The latest of their collaborative efforts is titled Bol’shoe Sovietskia Zatmenie (The Great Soviet Eclipse). In 2001, the MacArthur Foundation granted Wilson a fellowship in recognition of his accomplishments at the museum.
