Faculty at Home
Join some of Middlebury’s expert and engaging faculty members for interactive talks—from home.
Faculty at Home extends Middlebury’s academic reach to our community around the world. This webinar series invites you to engage in the digital space, to stay connected with faculty members, with big ideas, and with each other.
Moderated by Caitlin Knowles Myers, John G. McCullough Professor of Economics, Sarah Stroup, professor of political science, and Bert Johnson, professor of political science, this series stimulates thought-provoking online conversations for the benefit of the Middlebury community far and wide. Faculty at Home is supported by numerous offices at Middlebury including the Office of the Provost, Advancement, Media Services, and Communications.
Generally, we open up the webinar 5 – 10 minutes ahead of the start time. This offers attendees the chance to let everyone know (via Zoom chat) that they are present and where they are joining from. Zoom settings only allow attendees to see the chat activity from the time they log in, so if you’d like to say hello, consider logging in early.
Recordings are posted about two weeks after the live event.
Avner Cohen
The talk will look into the October 7 war—the longest and most devastating war in the history of the century-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict—in broad historical terms and from a personal perspective of a liberal Israeli-American. It starts with a historical assessment of the significance of the catastrophe of October 7 itself, then moves on to explore the origins and causes that made such a catastrophe possible, and ends with personal reflections on the profound impact of October 7 on both sides of the conflict—Palestinians and Israelis—and whether this tragic conflict can be resolved in our lifetime.
Avner Cohen is a professor in the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies (NPTS) program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. Trained as a philosopher and historian of ideas, Dr. Cohen turned early on in his career to nuclear history. He is widely known for his pioneering work on Israel’s nuclear history. Among his books are The Nuclear Age as Moral History (1987), Israel and the Bomb (1998), and The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel Bargain with the Bomb (2010). He is a two-time winner of the MacArthur Foundation research and writing awards. He has been a professor at the Middlebury Institute since 2011.
Erik Bleich and Christopher Star
In this talk we trace the development of the word apocalypse from ancient texts to modern media. Originally meaning simply “uncovering,” the word came to denote a “revelation” of God’s plan for how the world will end. In recent years, apocalypse has come to refer to an ever-growing list of catastrophes, such as the “COVID Apocalypse,” or the “AI Apocalypse.” We use data from several U.S. newspapers to show what crises and threats are most commonly evoked as apocalypses. Our findings reveal our biggest fears for the present and the future, and how a term from the ancient world helps us define them.
Erik Bleich is Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science. He is interested in media coverage of political, social, and cultural phenomena. He is the author of Covering Muslims: American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective (with A. Maurits van der Veen), and his public-facing work has appeared in the Atlantic, Asahi Shimbun, the Conversation, the Financial Times, and the Washington Post. He has held visiting positions at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris and the Collegium de Lyon, and as a 2021–22 Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair.
Christopher Star is professor of classics and the associate director of the Axinn Center for the Humanities. His most recent book is Apocalypse and Golden Age: The End of the World in Greek and Roman Thought. Currently, he is at work on an anthology of texts by ancient philosophers about global catastrophes and their aftermath.
Florence Feiereisen and Erin Sassin
Hearing is an integral part of our perception of the world, a “lens” through which society, both past and present, can be investigated. In this talk, we showcase our collaborative research at the intersection of acoustic ecology, urban studies, architectural history, and German studies.
Acoustic ecology, as defined by Canadian composer and soundscape pioneer R. Murray Schafer, is “the study of sounds in relationship to life and society.” We ask: How do sounds shape social dynamics and the built environment? By applying this framework to architecture and urban space, we explore how listening to history uncovers layers of lived experience often overlooked by visual analysis alone.
We demonstrate this through three case studies from Germany’s past. Our first study explores the sonic heritage of Meyershof, a massive tenement in Berlin-Wedding. By reconstructing the sounds of the street, as well as communal and domestic spaces within this “city within a city” in 1932, we sought to capture the auditory experiences of residents and workers only one year before the advent of the Third Reich. In our second case study, we examine the soundscapes of the Western Front during World War I. In the trenches, auditory vigilance was critical, as soldiers learned to distinguish between the sounds of danger and safety. This exposure to wartime sounds left lasting impacts on interwar society that echoed through technological advances for the hearing impaired and the psychological trauma of shell shock. Our third case study addresses the impact of gentrification on the formerly working-class district of Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. Our approach reveals how the interplay of visual and sonic elements shape class dynamics within gentrifying neighborhoods.
By prioritizing sound, our shared work de-emphasizes persistent visual biases in the study of the built environment. In recording a fuller, multisensory experience of the past, we hope to reinscribe marginalized voices in the historical record.
Florence Feiereisen is professor of German at Middlebury. She studied German and computational linguistics at the University of Heidelberg in Germany (MA 2003) and received a PhD in German cultural studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2007 before joining the Middlebury faculty that same year. Florence teaches language classes as well as upper-level courses focusing on German history, national identity, gender, linguistics, and sound.
She has published various books and articles in the fields of contemporary literature, sociolinguistics, and acoustic ecology/sound studies. Of note in the context of this talk is the coedited volume Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012; with Alexandra Hill). Her current research is situated at the intersection of urban history (Berlin!), architecture, and acoustic ecology. Florence and Erin’s latest publication is an article in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture titled “Sounding Out the Symptoms of Gentrification in Berlin.”
Erin Eckhold Sassin is associate professor of the history of art and architecture at Middlebury, where she teaches modern architectural history and theory. She received her PhD in the history of art and architecture from Brown University in 2012. Her research is closely linked to her teaching interests: she has published articles on gender and design, the intersection of architecture, power, and ethnicity on the borders of the German Empire, and the impacts of conflict on design work, as well as on acoustic ecology and the built environment. Her 2020 book, Single People and Mass Housing in Germany (1850–1930)—(No) Home Away from Home, was awarded a 2019 fellowship from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Her 2022 coedited volume, States of Emergency: Architecture, Urbanism, and the First World War, helped inform her most recent exhibition at Middlebury; she worked with Special Collections, colleague Sarah Rogers, and their students to curate WWI: Here and There (winter 2023). With her students, Erin has also curated two exhibitions at the MCMA: Bloom and Doom: Vienna 1900 (fall 2016) and Weimar, Dessau, Berlin: the Bauhaus as School and Laboratory (winter 2020).
Cláudio Medeiros
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published in 1928, was the author’s most popular novel during her lifetime. She wrote it as a tribute to her longtime lesbian partner, Vita Sackville-West. Vita’s interest in crossdressing most likely inspired Orlando’s change of gender halfway through the novel. Vita’s son described it as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.” Unlike Woolf’s other works, Orlando is comic and whimsical. In the spring of 2024, Theatre professor Cláudio Medeiros brought American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of the novel to Wright Theatre with a group of talented young actors. Medeiros joins us to talk about why he chose to work on this play with students in 2024, to give us a glimpse of the rehearsal process, and to share some of the images of the stunning production that Middlebury’s Theatre Department proudly put on stage.
Cláudio Medeiros ’90 is a professor of theatre and the current chair of the Theatre Department at Middlebury. Some of the classes he teaches include 20th/21st-Century Performance Aesthetics, U.S. Queer Drama, and Theatre History. He has directed a wide range of plays while at Middlebury: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cabaret, Spring Awakening, Hecuba, and Lotus Lives: A Multimedia Chamber Opera, to name a few. He is currently putting the final touches on a translated collection of plays by Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro; they will be published by the Modern Humanities Research Association in the UK. Medeiros holds a PhD in theatre from the University of California, Berkeley.