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.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
The Quiet Past and the Stormy Present: What Political Science Can Tell Us about the 2024 Election
Bert Johnson
Academic assessments of elections improve on journalism or commentary by placing current events into the relevant context of the past. But in an election year that is seemingly without precedent, how much of the past is relevant, and what insights can we draw from research conducted in quieter times? In this webinar we will consider these questions as we examine the current state of the 2024 election from the perspective of a political scientist.
Bert Johnson, professor of political science, began teaching political science at Middlebury College in 2004 during the comparatively ordinary presidential race between George W. Bush and John Kerry. He has authored or coauthored books and articles on U.S. politics, state and local politics, Vermont politics, and campaign finance, and serves as a moderator for the Faculty at Home webinar series.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Tom Sawyer's Wreck (and how did I go from studying gauchos to shipwrecks???)
Miguel Fernandez
This talk has two goals: on the one hand, to discuss my current research on the 1853 shipwreck of the steamship Independence that sank off the coast of Baja California during the Gold Rush; and on the other, to share insight on how Middlebury’s academic environment has encouraged a curious faculty member to constantly explore and discover new areas of interest over a 30-year career.
Miguel Fernández, professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies, is a Middlebury alumnus from the Class of 1985. He earned a PhD at Johns Hopkins University, and his teaching interests center around Hispanic theater and performance studies employing problem-based learning. Miguel’s research has focused on 19th-century Latin America, and he is currently working with marine archaeologists on shipwrecks from the California Gold Rush era.
Caitlin Myers
The end of Roe sparked seismic shifts in the landscape of American abortion access, and two years later it is far from stable. Abortion bans have shuttered providers, and the resulting flows of patients across state borders have taxed a small number of facilities at the front lines. As doors closed at brick-and-mortar abortion clinics, digital windows opened. Online abortion providers have proliferated, and virtual abortion services provided by mail-order pills have surged by more than 80 percent. Professor Myers will present the most recent available evidence on how these changes are affecting people seeking abortions, with a focus on quantifying how many people are “trapped” by abortion bans and how many continue to find a way to access these services. She also will discuss the potential impacts of the presidential election.
Caitlin Myers is the John G. McCullough Professor of Economics and director of the Middlebury Initiative for Data and Digital Methods. She primarily teaches courses on statistics, regression analysis, data science, and causal inference, and her scholarship applies these tools to identify and measure the causal effects of abortion policies and abortion access on people’s lives. Her work has been published in leading academic journals as well as featured by media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and NPR. Professor Myers led the economists’ amicus brief in Dobbs and has testified before the U.S. Senate on the economic implications of reproductive rights.
Rebekah Irwin
Sometimes described as a “museum for old books,” Special Collections could more accurately be described as a petting zoo. Each year, thousands of students visit to touch the animal-skin pages of old books, flip through newspapers, and smell aging paper from the medieval to the modern era. Given that all of Middlebury’s current undergraduates were born after the year 2000, and most reach for a phone before a book, Rebekah will describe how she teaches students not merely to appreciate old books but to understand that the history of the book is at the heart of understanding technological innovation.
Rebekah Irwin is the director and curator of Special Collections. In this role, she oversees the College’s rare book and manuscript collections, the College archives, digital projects, and the preservation of Middlebury’s library collections. Rebekah has served on national and international professional committees, including as a member of the Library of Congress and UNESCO World Digital Library project, and as chair of the Digitization in Special Collections Task Force of the American Library Association. Before arriving at Middlebury in 2011, Rebekah worked for a decade at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.