Carol Rifelj Lecture Series

The Invisible Mask: Tales of Latin American Ingenuity and Grace

What is a mask good for? Concealing, of course. And, in Gloria Estela González Zenteno’s new book of fiction, a mask reveals and empowers. Her stories recreate moments of grace in places spanning our continent such as Valparaíso, Tegucigalpa, Guadalajara, Sinaola, Bridport, or the Champlain Islands. Faced with patriarchal violence and environmental disaster; with migration, sexuality, and gender discrimination, Gloria’s protagonists respond to vulnerability with strength and a complex flow of identities.

Nutrient Pathways from the Abyss: Hydrothermal Influence on Surface Ecosystems in the Southern Ocean

Hydrothermal vents in the waters surrounding Antarctica have long been dismissed as insignificant sources of surface micronutrients due to their depth—typically 2000–4000 meters—and presumed isolation from surface processes. In this lecture Casey will present recent field observations and remote sensing data from the Southern Ocean that reveal that hydrothermal effluent can reach the sunlit surface within weeks, delivering iron-rich fluids that stimulate phytoplankton growth. These findings challenge prevailing models of nutrient supply, circulation, and carbon cycling in the Southern Ocean, highlighting a previously underestimated role for deep-sea hydrothermal systems.

J. M. W. Turner, Saint Michael's Mount, and Mont Saint-Michel

In 1811 J. M. W. Turner sketched Saint Michael’s Mount, a tidal island in Cornwall, England. Fifteen years later, he sketched Mont Saint-Michel, a tidal island in Normandy, France. In his London studio, Turner then made studies of both, a process that resulted in an oil painting of the former and a finished watercolor of the latter. Could it be that Turner also made an oil painting of Mont Saint-Michel, part of a pair that favorably compared Early Victorian England to Post-Napoleonic France? And, if so, could that painting be in a private collection right here in Vermont?

Culture War Politics: How the United States and Europe got "Woke"

Over the past decade, the culture wars have become a core component of political struggles in the United States and in many European countries. This presentation traces the trajectory of woke as a symbol of this political transformation, chronicling the rise of this word—and creative variations like “wokeness,” “wokery,” and “le wokisme.” It tracks the evolution from a positive call within the Black American community to remain awake to social and racial injustices to its weaponized use by the right to stigmatize the left. Connections between countries in the internet era help drive the spread of culture war dynamics across borders, though national differences shape the way a term like woke resonates in places like Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France. Using evidence from mainstream media, social media, and Google searches and illustrating the process with real-world examples shows just how central culture war politics have become in liberal democracies in our era.

Past Rainfall and Wildfire Patterns in the Western US: New Perspectives from Caves and Climate Models

Anthropogenic activities are pushing the climate system toward a new, warmer state that is outside the bounds of what human societies have experienced. The warming climate is driving changes in rainfall and wildfire patterns across the western US, but how these dynamics will continue to evolve remains uncertain. Geologic archives and climate models provide a key, longer-term perspective here, offering insight into the interplay between rainfall and wildfire across a variety of background climate states. This talk will describe recent efforts to use new types of data from cave systems and climate model simulations to explore how rainfall patterns and wildfire dynamics change over longer-than-human timescales, with an eye toward how they will continue change in the future.

Recycling the Apocalypse: Resurrection, Adaption, and Sacred Fragments on Medieval Iceland

On medieval Iceland, which visitors conceptualized as the very mouth of hell, drastic environmental change and resource scarcity was not a sign of apocalypse, but a daily lived experience. The island is subject to extreme weather and geothermal activity that renders any material production, particularly architecture, deeply unstable. As a result, the future of works of art produced on Iceland during the Middle Ages was always entirely uncertain. This lecture will explore the lifetimes of one apocalypse image that itself underwent apocalypse, or total destruction, and yet persisted over time. From the cathedral wall to the roof of a woodshed, the Hólar Last Judgment is a profitable ground to complicate issues of apocalyptic thinking amidst ecological adaption. The scarcity of timber access on Iceland meant that wooden structures and objects were endlessly at risk of being recycled, lending to wood a kind of material mutability unique to this context. Considered alongside the environmental histories of the island, discard studies, and twelfth-century formulations of the resurrected body, the ruins of the Hólar apocalypse opens new pathways for considering culturally contingent nature of both apocalypse and reuse, both in the Middle Ages and today.

The Palindromes of Sidonius Apollinaris

The only palindromes found in a book from Roman antiquity are those found in the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris. However, different palindromes appear in different ancient manuscripts. Mark Saltveit relates his new research into which of these were original, and who may have written them.

AI in Higher Education: Who Uses It, How, and Does It Hurt Learning?

Generative AI has swept through college campuses with unprecedented speed, but what do we actually know about its impact on student learning? Drawing on two studies at Middlebury College, this talk presents systematic evidence on how students are using AI tools and whether these tools deliver on their educational promise.

The Story Behind "Witness Marks: Anatomy of a Memory"

“Witness Marks: Anatomy of a Memory” is a multi-media installation, premiering at the Kent Museum, in Calais, VT, in September, in which I explore how we create, store, and access memory. While there have been theories of how the brain works for millennia, we only have accurate imagery of brain structures based on dissection spanning from the 1860s (drawings by scientists Deiters, Golgi, Bevan-Lewis, and Dejerine, to name a few), to Ramon y Cajal’s drawings of neurons (1899 – 1930s), all the way to the colorful and beautiful photo imagery of neuronal circuits generated by supercomputers. But what do scientific portraits of the brain tell us about the inner workings of the mind and the inner workings of personal perception and human nature? As a visual artist I have been exploring this question by asking: is there a way to both honor the inherent natural structure of neuronal pathways – the physical side – while capturing some of the richness of human perception? My metaphorical portrait of a memory includes 60 small panel paintings installed in a pattern and setting that evokes neuronal structure/function. The installation is bathed in a commissioned electronic music soundscape, imagined, felt and built by electronic music composer, Dr. Peter Hamlin, Christian A. Johnson Professor Emeritus of Music, Middlebury College.

Hungry Monsters: Feeding and Quenching of Black Holes

The existence of supermassive black holes, with millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, residing at the centers of galaxies throughout the universe is well supported by a substantial body of indirect and, more recently, direct imaging evidence. When mass is pulled into a black hole gravitationally, in a process called ‘accretion’, a tremendous amount of energy is released signaling this growth in the form of a ‘quasar’. This growth is stochastic and episodic with a variety of routes for triggering and quenching. Eilat’s research focuses on understanding the quasar phenomenon which addresses how these black holes grow to such extreme masses, what makes them stop growing, and how this growth influences the black hole’s host galaxy. In this talk, Eilat will present the work she has done to identify statistically significant and complete samples of quasars. Eilat uses these samples to constrain different stages of evolution in a quasar’s life cycle and the physical processes by which they forever impact their host galaxies.

Russian Public Opinion, the War in Ukraine, and the Lingering Effects of the Soviet Collapse

Will will draw on research that he has done over the past half decade on the shorter and longer-term consequences of Russia’s painful exit from communism in the early 1990s. He will give particular attention to public opinion in the past several years, including through the fall of 2025, drawing on his own and others’ survey data to trace the influence of the War in Ukraine on Russians’ life satisfaction, their commitment to democratic values, and their attachment to their country.

Between Islamism and Modernism: Morteza Motahhari and the Making of the Islamic Revolution in Iran

GDE Signaling in the Vertebrate Nervous System: Bridging the Gap Between Development and Degeneration

Successful development and healthy aging require proteins that can participate in multiple cellular processes. My research program studies a family of multifunctional enzymes called Glycerophosphodiester Phosphodiesterases (GDEs). Middlebury undergraduates in my laboratory utilize molecular genetic approaches to discover new roles for GDE proteins in the nervous system. In this talk, I will illustrate how GDE signaling is necessary for both the embryonic formation and the long-term health of the nervous system. Our work addresses the misconception that outwardly distinct diseases in different stages of life are unlikely to involve the same cellular mechanisms.

Arendtian Peace: Transforming Conflict through Wordly Politics

People often say that they love peace—but what exactly do we mean by peace? Is it an aspirational ideal or an achievable reality? Is it an end in itself or a means to a greater goal? Peace is a contested concept; it is frequently criticized as utopian, ineffective, or even dangerous—sometimes generating more harm than anticipated. This lecture examines how Hannah Arendt’s thought offers distinctive insights into contemporary peace discourse and practice. Despite her status as one of the most original political thinkers of the twentieth century, Arendt’s relevance to peace studies remains underexplored. James argues that for Arendt, peace is achieved and sustained by balancing the forces of change and continuity in political life: by revealing our distinctiveness and difference through action in the public sphere, and by building and preserving enduring institutions. This vision of Arendtian peace is rooted in her idea of worldliness: an attitudinal quality that balances agonistic action with institutional stability. Arendtian peace does not seek to suppress conflict but to transform it through worldliness toward free politics beyond enforcement, domination, and violence.

She Who Knows: Resistance to Gendered Racialization in Early-19th-Century Ottoman Tunis and Present-day Reverberations

This lecture turns to the Ottoman province of Tunis, a terminus for trans-Saharan human trafficking in the late 18th and early 19th century, to center the lives of enslaved women forcibly conveyed to the province. It examines how the violence of slavery intersected with French economic intervention in the region as well as with emerging racial ideologies held by Tunisian and western African elites. This lecture critiques disembodied historical perspectives conventionally preserved in state archives, like those of the chief doctor to the Ottoman governor of Tunis. Instead, we read primary sources like medical memoirs to amplify rich and challenging narratives from enslaved people of presumed sub-Saharan African descent whom the physician frequently treated. These episodes of disease, while heavily mediated, offer narratives of refusal and dissemblance, negotiation and resistance. We examine these accounts alongside visiting Fulani Islamic reformer Aḥmad Ibn Al-Qāḍī al-Timbuktāwī’s 1808 polemic against Stambeli, widely popular therapeutic practices led by enslaved and freed people living in Tunis. Ultimately, this lecture contends that these residents were popularly considered healing practitioners as much as individuals like the elite physician.

Thirty Years of Chinese Transformation: the View from One Village

Ellen has been engaged in fieldwork in one village in China since 1993, visiting periodically and writing two monographs based on that fieldwork (one on morality and one on food). Having just come back from fieldwork again this past sabbatical year, in this lecture she would like to take the long view and ask how the transformations, continuities and emerging contradictions she has observed can provide us a more microscopic and longitudinal understanding than we often get based on journalistic accounts or urban-based research.

The Liberal Arts and National Character: Lessons from John Witherspoon

John Witherspoon (1723-1794) was a clergyman and important political figure in the American Revolution, the only minister among the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He also served as president of what is now Princeton University. At the confluence of those roles, Witherspoon argued that the cultivation of public character among leaders and citizens was an essential guarantor of the health of a nation, especially a newly formed one. He also believed that higher education played a key role in the promotion of public character. This lecture will explore what Witherspoon meant by public character, how he thought higher education contributed to it, and what that might mean for an understanding of the public purposes of liberal education in the US today.

Wait, What?!? How My Global Textile Project Took a Surprisingly Local Turn

Armed with a metal detector, Rutland resident John LaFountain discovered a small lead seal while exploring a farm in Middlebury in 2011. Bigger than a quarter, but smaller than the palm of a hand, this seventeenth-century seal was a rare find. Decorated with the civic crest of Leiden, a Dutch city known for its production of fine wool, the seal would have originally been attached to a length of cloth, assuring consumers of its quality. But how did it end up in Middlebury, Vermont? This talk will try to reconstruct the path of this well-traveled lead seal, contextualizing it within the early modern global textile trade.

Can Machines Think? 75 Years of the Turing Test

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed an “imitation game” to address the question of whether computers could exhibit intelligence. His paper, published in a philosophy journal, sparked and continues to spark many responses. We review the background of Turing’s paper, the history of these responses and examine how Turing might view the current state of Artificial Intelligence.