October 3, 2003

Biever Guest Lecture Series

Loyola continues its distinguished Biever Guest Lecture series, bringing renowned scholars and authors from across the disciplines and across the world to campus. Lectures begin in the fall and will run throughout the 2003 ­ 04 academic year. All lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures for fall 2003 include:

Waterblind: Poetry of Ralph Adamo
Tuesday and Wednesday, October 7, 8 p.m. - Nunemaker Auditorium
Ralph Adamo, a former professor of English, and editor of the New Orleans Review at Loyola, will read his poetry.

Companion Animals as Models for Human Disease and Traits
Thursday, October 9, 12:30 p.m., 5 p.m. - Monroe Hall, Room 157
A seminar by Leslie Lyons, Ph.D., assistant professor of genetics in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis is an expert on animal genetics. Lyons' lab demonstrated that CC (for copy cat) was actually the first cloned cat to be produced. She did not help produce the cloned cat but did analyze its DNA. Lyons has worked in animal genetics for more than 18 years and published more than 30 scientific articles on her work mapping disease genes in domestic cats and dogs as models for human disease.

From Pangrams to Pentameters: The Art and Mathematics of Constrained Writing
Thursday, October 23, 7 p.m. - Monroe Hall, Room 157
The presentation will give an overview of the art of constrained writingliterary creation that is governed, either tightly or loosely, by a pre-specified set of rules. Michael Keith, president of freelance company Anata Production, will lead the discussion. He is well known in the field of recreational mathematics and frequently talks about his work in combining arts and sciences. With coauthor Richard Brodie, Keith wrote the book The Anagrammed Bible: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, where three complete books of the King James version are rendered as verse-by-verse anagrams with the letters in each verse rearranged to form a different text having more or less the same meaning.

Peace in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Prospects and Possibilities
Thursday, October 23, 7 p.m. - Nunemaker Auditorium
Jonathan Adleman, Ph.D., professor of international relations at the University of Denver, and Joseph Massad, Ph.D., assistant professor of modern Arab politics at Columbia University, will debate the prospects and possibilities for peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Six students will respond to Adelman's and Massad's presentations. Following this, the speakers will answer written questions from the audience. Adelman is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. Massad is the author of several books and numerous articles, and he is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

The Salem Witchcraft Crisis: Myth and Realities
Friday, October 24, 7 p.m. - Nunemaker Auditorium
Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of History at Cornell University, is one of the best-known scholars of early U.S. history and American women's and gender history. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Allan Nevins Prize, Norton is the author of numerous books including In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 and Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society.

Yoruba Myths and the Humanization of the Gods
Wednesday, November 5, 8 p.m. - Location TBA
A lecture is presented by Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright and Nobel Prize laureate. In 1986, Soyinka became the first African writer ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his prolific and rich body of work, which includes plays, novels, poems, and essays, Soyinka draws on both Yoruba and western culture to weave a subtle understanding of the tragedy and comedy of the human condition. In 1960, the playwright founded the Masks, a theatre company that would present his first major play, A Dance of the Forests, in which the spirit world and the living world clash over the future of a half-born child.

Christianity and Capitalism: Old Ethical Principles for the New Corporate Culture
Thursday, November 6, 7 p.m. - Miller Hall, Room 114
The Rev. William J. Byron, S.J., will explore the relevance of ancient Christian ethical principles to the dynamics and pressures of the new corporate culture in the United States. Bryon will discuss some of the hottest business issues with a wealth of experience as distinguished academic, chief executive officer for universities, and an influential voice in the political arena in Washington, D.C. A member of Loyola's Board of Trustees, Byron is the former president of The Catholic University and the University of Scranton. He has authored five books and held several teaching positions in his field of social ethics and economics.

The Revolt Against the Communist System in Romania
Thursday, November 6, 7 p.m. - Monroe Library, Multimedia Room 2
A lecture by Miodrag Milin, a Romanian professor of history at the University of Banat in Timisoara, Romania. Milin was in Timisoara in 1989 during the Romanian Revolution, the last and most violent. He has first-hand experience about this historical moment and has written several books on the transformation in Romania from communism to a free society.

Wars for Freedom, Wars on Freedom: Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis
Thursday, November 13, 7 p.m. - Nunemaker Auditorium
Alan Brinkley, provost and Allen Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, will place the recent controversy over the Patriot Act in historical perspective as he discusses other moments of national crisissuch as the Civil War, the Red Scare, and World War IIwhere the U.S. government placed constraints on its citizens' civil liberties. He will assess whether those constraints were necessary in the past and whether they are necessary now. He is author of Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin & the Great Depression, which won the National Book Award.