Carol Rifelj Lecture Series
Join faculty, staff, and community members at the Carol Rifelj Lecture Series to hear people discuss their research.
This lecture series is named for the late Carol de Dobay Rifelj, who came to Middlebury in 1972 as an Assistant Professor, serving also at that time as Director of the Château, and of the French House. Carol received tenure in 1979, was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 1985, and was named Jean Thomson Fulton Professor of French in 1993. She retired from Middlebury in spring 2010 after 38 years on the faculty. An energetic scholar, Carol was the author of several books and numerous articles and essays. She was also active and innovative in electronic publication, producing a significant website, Le Lexique, that won a prize in 1996 from the American Association of Teachers of French and has continued to be an influential resource for French teachers worldwide.
During her time on the faculty, Carol served on all the College’s major committees, and she held numerous administrative posts, serving as Dean of the French School from 1985 to 1987, as Dean of the Faculty from 1991 to 1993, and as the Dean for Faculty Development and Research from 2004 to 2007. Carol was an unstinting supporter and advocate for the faculty and their professional development. It is thus richly appropriate that this lecture series, which features Middlebury’s own faculty, bears her name.
2026/27 Schedule
Hillcrest 103
Making Movies
Jay Parini has worked on turning his books into films for nearly fifty years, with three major films having been made, including The Last Station and Borges and Me. In this talk, Parini will talk about his work in the film industry, as writer and producer, with clips from his films.
Hillcrest 103
Liberated Minds? How Chinese International Students Interpret Democracy
Do youth who were raised and educated in authoritarian states become socialized to embrace democratic values when attending college in a democracy? Or do they retain or even deepen their commitments to authoritarian values and norms? Based on focus group interviews and follow-up surveys with Chinese international students in Canada (University of Toronto) and the United States (Middlebury College), this study analyzes the political socialization process of university education on students’ political attitudes. A close examination of their interpretive narratives of democratic values and life reveals complex and internally contradictory views such that it becomes harder to disentangle the “authoritarian” versus “democratic” values that they embrace. On the one hand, Chinese international students embrace the democratic values including equality, ideological pluralism, civic engagement, and privacy. To the extent that they criticize certain features of a democracy, such as the prevalence of racial and wealth inequality, it is in reaction to the failure of democracies to deliver on their liberal promises captured by ‘democratic disillusionment’ (Norris and Inglehart 2019). On the other hand, certain authoritarian political values remain “sticky” in so far as they also prize personal safety and security over political freedoms, a tradeoff that has fundamentally altered the nature of citizenship in the modern state (Turner 2015). Combined, these results suggest universities’ socialization process is not a unidirectional impact of promoting more support for democratic values.
Hillcrest 103
Leaving Before Leaving: What Poetry Reveals About Arab Refugee Discourse
When does refuge begin: at the border, on arrival, or earlier, when leaving first becomes imaginable, debated, and judged? Across the Arab world, a shared language surrounds departure. It appears in everyday conversation, in the media, and in the verdicts families and communities pass on those who go and those who stay. This lecture argues that poetry makes this discourse unusually visible. Drawing on contemporary Syrian and Iraqi poets who later settled in Europe, read in the speaker’s own English translations, it follows poems that catalogue a neighborhood emptying under bombardment, answer the voices that blame those who leave, and, after arrival, imagine the newcomer as grass that survives only by bending, or as firewood for someone else’s winter. Returning to earlier research with new questions, the lecture asks how departure becomes a social and moral act long before it becomes a legal status. No knowledge of Arabic is needed.
Hillcrest 103
Fretboard Networks: Musical Understanding in the Self-Taught Musician Digital Ecosystem
As many as 72 million people play guitar, yet most don’t go on tour or make records. Instead, “…people want to play quietly and solo in their own home, singing along with their favorite songs,” notes Fender CEO Andy Mooney. In this talk, Nicholas explores how self-guided guitar instruction contributes to musical understanding — the awareness of musical organization in time — within an online community of mostly amateur and semi-professional guitarists. Drawing on sociolinguistics, embodied cognition, and data science, Nicholas offers practical insights into how the body, mind, and ear coordinate to signal genre and create coherent musical utterances in guitar-driven styles.
Hillcrest 103
Dear Aborted Apostle (1 Cor 15:8): Reproductive Loss and Women’s Rituals in Ancient Corinth
In 1 Corinthians, Paul uses an unusual metaphor to describe his past, saying that Christ appeared to him “as to one untimely born” (ektrōma; ἔκτρωμα). Because ektrōma can denote “abortion,” “miscarriage,” or “stillbirth,” scholars have long debated Paul’s use of the term, often interpreting it as a form of rhetorical self-defense. Yet little attention has been paid to how this expression might have resonated with women in Corinth, especially those who had experienced ektrōma in a newly established Roman colony. Bringing biblical interpretation into conversation with Mediterranean archaeology, this paper foregrounds the emotional and ritual dimensions of reproductive loss. Drawing on uterine amulets, devotional practices surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, and perinatal burials, it considers Corinthian women not merely as recipients of Paul’s rhetoric but as primary bearers of child loss and religious actors whose embodied experiences helped shape ritual practices and theological ideas in the Corinthian church.
Hillcrest 103
Adventures in Insect Smell
Join us for this Odyssey of Olfaction! Insects use smell as their primary sense to detect mates, food, threats, and places to lay their eggs. Over his career, Greg has used a myriad of interdisciplinary approaches to explore the genetic basis of smell in mosquitoes, ants, fireflies, and now butterflies!
Hillcrest 103
Ornament, Crime and the Reglet
In 1910, the architect Adolf Loos gave a lecture titled “Ornament and Crime.” The lecture gave voice to a conviction central to early Modernism: that a building should honestly express its own structure, materials, and purpose, and that the historical ornament being layered onto the architecture of the time, by disguising all three, was a kind of deception. More than a century later, its influence can still be felt in contemporary architecture that reads as seamless and unadorned. Alongside architectural theory and criticism from Loos to the present, this talk explores examples, from shutters to baseboards to AI-generated images, that test this conviction. It traces the increasing complexity of building construction and considers, from a practitioner’s perspective, the technical challenges this poses for creating architecture that appears honest. Using one seemingly innocuous building component, the reglet, as a case study, it asks whether the absence of ornament can itself become a form of ornament.
Hillcrest 103
The Mathematical Heart of Tom Stoppard
The references to mathematics in Leopoldstat, Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award winning play from 2020, form a notable bookend with the musings on probability from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which launched the playwright’s career back in 1966. Mathematics, in fact, represents a conspicuous through line in Stoppard’s writing. Over six decades, the playwright’s self-education in mathematics surfaces in a series of cleverly staged debates about providence vs freewill, the existence of moral absolutes, and the origins of human consciousness. The decision to place a pure mathematician at the center of Leopoldstat, an autobiographically-inspired family epic about the Holocaust, reveals the depth of Stoppard’s faith in the potential of mathematics to tell human stories. As it has in earlier plays, the mathematics in Leopoldstat offers its distinctive commentary about the tension between rational order and randomness, while also making a quiet case for the persistence of beauty in the darkest of possible worlds.
Hillcrest 103
Party Capture and Democratic Backsliding
Democratic backsliding is typically explained by what aspiring autocrats do once in power: capture courts, weaponize law, and polarize electorates. This lecture traces the process further back, to its origin inside political parties: How do insurgent factions seize control of ruling parties before subverting democratic politics? What role do financial resources, party rules, and media control play in allowing a captured faction to consolidate power within the party before turning against democratic institutions? By locating the origins of backsliding within parties, this lecture explores the connections across social forces, party organizations, and executive attacks on democracy, and shows that backsliding is less a sudden rupture than a gradual repurposing of the same institutions that once sustained democratic competition.
Hillcrest 103
Governing in the Gaps: Refugee Removability and Partisan Citizenship in Turkey
Since the start of the Syrian war, Turkey has hosted millions of Syrians under a legal regime of temporary protection. The governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) initially defended their reception through a language of humanitarian responsibility, Muslim solidarity, and hospitality. Yet many of the party’s own supporters have also come to criticize the long-term presence of Syrians in Turkish cities, especially Istanbul. How can political loyalty persist alongside disagreement with a major government policy? Drawing on twenty-six months of ethnographic research with Turkish citizens and displaced people from Syria in Istanbul, this lecture examines how some AKP-supporting residents responded not by abandoning the governing party, but by trying to actively correct what they saw as the failures or excesses of refugee policy in everyday life. Through decisions about housing, commerce, neighborhood complaints, deservingness, and eventual return, they claimed a role in determining who should be allowed to remain and through what conditions. Fulya calls this practice adaptive gatekeeping. Following these judgments alongside refugees’ efforts to anticipate and navigate them, the lecture asks how the possibility of removal can become a terrain of political participation for citizens as well as a condition of insecurity for refugees.