English Professor Major Jackson’s Full Professor Lecture, “The Dadaab Suite and Other Poems,” Tuesday, October 4, at 5:00 p.m. Dadaab, Kenya is the home of the oldest and largest refugee camp administered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The camp was built for 90,000 refugees in 1991 as a consequence of the civil war in Somalia. Currently, the camp is now host to 380,000 people, and since the beginning of the summer, the current famine in Somalia has swelled those ranks even higher. As one reporter wrote, “this is one of the most desperate places on Earth.” As part of a cultural diplomacy trip sponsored by the United Nations, the United States Department of State, and the University of Iowa International Writers Program, Poet and Professor Major Jackson visited Dadaab to conduct creative writing workshops, meet with aspiring writers within the camps, and witness the current crisis in the northeastern region of Kenya. Professor Jackson will present a multi-media presentation of his experience and read new poems that address war, the limits of witnessing as well as the resilient spirit of the Somalian people.

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Jackson is the author of three books of poetry: Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and twice in the anthology Best American Poetry (2004, 2011). He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. He is the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review. He is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont.

Tracing the contours of power in cities, Professor Cope discusses ways that socially marginalized groups are subject to – and act upon – spatial constraints and restrictions in everyday life. Focusing on women, youth, and people of color, she draws on the idea of the mutual constitutions of society and space to illuminate intersections of identity, knowledge, and the production of place. She suggests that new methodologies of research and representation help reveal processes of exclusion, immobility, and constraint to further our understanding of the complementary roles of social practices and the built environment in (re)producing power relations.

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The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was designed to give newly promoted faculty an opportunity to share with the university community a single piece of research or overview of research trajectory meant to capture the spark of intellectual excitement that has resulted in their achieving full professor rank.

One reason the U.S. was late to create a central bank was that earlier renditions of central banks, the First and Second Banks of the United States (1791-1811 and 1816-1836, respectively), drew political fire as large, financially powerful corporations. Although both institutions performed well, it proved impossible for either to convince both a congressional majority and the President that they should continue to exist after their charters expired.  Why has the Federal Reserve Bank, also a center of concentrated financial power, succeeded in surviving where its predecessors failed?  An institutional comparison reveals that the Federal Reserve enjoys certain organizational advantages that the earlier central banks lacked.

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The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was designed to recognize faculty newly promoted to full professor rank.

It is well known that exercise improves cardiovascular fitness, promotes a stable and healthy body weight, and strengthens the immune system. There is now growing evidence that exercise also improves emotional health. Studies of humans and other animals have shown that voluntary exercise reduces many of the signs and symptoms of anxiety and promotes stress resilience. Professor Falls will review this literature and share some recent experiments carried out by him and his colleagues examining how exercise changes emotional circuits of the brain and how these changes may serve to reduce anxiety and promote stress resilience.

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Full Professor Lecture:
The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was designed to recognize faculty newly promoted to full professor rank.

The United States came to lead the world economy by the early 20th century. As symbolized by Henry Ford’s automobile production, it was the world’s most mechanized country. Among the factors accounting for the ascendance of this once-backward colony, the rapid diffusion of technological knowledge was particularly important. Supported by effective government policies and civil organization, networks of highly mobile machinists spread knowledge widely and generated broad ranges of new techniques, forming a distinctive American technology in the process. Professor Thomson will discuss how several prominent Vermonters played pivotal roles in this development.

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The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was designed to give newly promoted faculty an opportunity to share with the university community a single piece of research or overview of research trajectory meant to capture the spark of intellectual excitement that has resulted in their achieving full professor rank.

Building on his recent book, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet- a study of the role of culture in the social construction of internet technology-Tom Streeter looks at the persistence of romanticism in the twenty-first century. Communities as diverse as computer programmers, CEOs, and college students at times demonstrate a fondness for self expression, adventurous self-transformation, the impulsive overthrow of history and tradition, and other romantic gestures. These habits of thought have left their imprint on some very contemporary phenomena, such as internet regulation, trends in intellectual property law, and the self-concept of UVM undergraduates, with effects we cannot afford to ignore.

Slides and Lecture Notes (PDF)

The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was designed to recognize faculty newly promoted to full professor rank.