Office of Advancement

Conspiracies and Disinformation: New Challenges or Sources of Timeless Turmoil?

Jason M. Blazakis will discuss the international security challenges posed by conspiracies and disinformation and how these have manifested during the COVID-19 pandemic. He will also share some observations from his own research and that of the Middlebury Institute Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism.

In this talk, James Chase Sanchez argues that contemporary rhetoric of white supremacy is built around structures of preservation. Using ethnographic and autoethnographic research in his hometown of Grand Saline, Texas, Sanchez pinpoints the ways communities preserve their white supremacy via tactics of identity formation, storytelling, and silencing.

After the last military dictatorship in Argentina ended in 1983, the long decades of post-dictatorship posed a challenge: how to transmit the memory of that period to younger generations. This talk will explore questions such as: Is there a pedagogy of memory? Is it possible to build a curriculum that addresses the difficult issue of traumatic memories? Are institutions willing or able to deal with this issue? Professor Evangelista will also address the complex ways in which Argentine schools and universities, along with human-rights organizations, have dealt with memory.

Last March, theatre professor Dana Yeaton and actor-playwright Cole Merrell ’21 started writing a play together. Their inspiration was the legendary teacher-student relationship between Aristotle and Alexander the Great. Actor Ethan Bowen joined the weekly Zoom sessions to improvise the role of Aristotle, with Merrill playing the teenaged Alexander. Join Bowen and Merrill for a performance of excerpts directed by Assistant Professor of Theatre Michole Biancosino.

Ekphrastic poetry—poetry that describes a work of art, real or imagined—has been around since Homer described the complex decorations on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, and countless poets since then have tried to translate visual artworks into words. How are we to understand this cross-media genre? Professor Antonia Losano will talk about a few notable examples of ekphrastic poets, including Keats, Browning, Auden, Sexton, Komunyakaa, and Trethewey. You’ll also look at the artworks they describe and explore the complex relationship of word and image.

Many of us first encountered algebra and geometry as two separate and very different areas of mathematics, but the two fields are intricately interconnected. Starting from the basics of Euclidean geometry and elementary algebra, award-winning teacher Emily Proctor highlights the relationship between these fields and shows how algebra is one of our strongest tools for understanding geometric objects and the world around us.

Join us for a reception and acknowledgements as Middlebury formally dedicates the “Bostwick Family Squash Center.”

Admission is free, however this event does require an advance RSVP by Friday, October 26, 2018. Please contact us at middevents@middlebury.edu if you would like to register to attend.

The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Institute uses technologies such as computer models and commercial satellite photographs to study nuclear weapons programs around the world. The results look like the work of an intelligence agency, but they are done entirely by faculty, staff and students using open information.

How does one write about challenging political issues for a medium that is primarily consumed as entertainment? How do we balance the specificity of a fictionalized story about individual characters with broader national issues like “Black Lives Matter” and abortion?

Middlebury Alumni Association event.

Closed to the Public.