Past Events
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Laurie Halse Anderson’s books include historical thrillers, fiction and non-fiction for young readers, and compelling novels for young adults that address relevant themes of being a teenager in today’s world, such as Speak, about bullying, Wintergirls, which addresses anorexia, and Twisted, which shares the challenges of being a young man. This program includes local school events, a community event, and an evening presentation where Ms. Anderson will engage and inspire members of our faculty, students and graduates, along with Bradford and the surrounding communities in discussions of how her books provide insight into what it means to “Be Human” as a young adult in today’s world.
Thursday, March 31, 2016
This symposium on New Perspectives on Latin American Documentary Film will feature invited filmmakers and film scholars from the U.S. and Latin America. Documentary filmmaking has a strong tradition and a special status in Latin America, and its impact can be traced worldwide over almost six decades. Reflecting the social, cultural and political challenges of the region in the late twentieth century, perhaps its most salient characteristic has been its intense focus on the cultures and traditions of indigenous peoples, woman and underrepresented and marginalized populations.
Thursday, March 31, 2016 - 4:00pm Chevron Science Center, Room 154
Join Carl Sagan Medal winner David Grinspoon for this talk on astrobiology and the human impact on Earth from a planetary science perspective. According to Dr. Grinspoon, we have now reached a pivotal moment when humans have become a dominant force of planetary change, and geological and human history are becoming irreversibly conjoined. Is this a likely or even inevitable challenge facing other complex life in the universe? Is it one we can handle on Earth?
Friday, April 1, 2016
Stories and Storytellers will be a day-long celebration of story -- why we tell them, why we love them, why stories help us understand what it means to be human, how stories and storytelling can help us reclaim our humanity in a time of overwhelming technology, how stories help us survive, and how they help us make sense of the world and our place in it.
Friday, April 1, 2016 - 8:30am Biomedical Science Tower 1 Conference Center
A conference on the ethics of reproductive health sponsored by the Center for Bioethics and Health Law. The conference will feature presentations from Lisa Tetrault, associate professor of history at CMU, and Sonya Borrero, associate professor of medicine and director of the Center for Women's Health Research and Innovation at Pitt.
Saturday, April 2, 2016
This ground-breaking regional conference will draw together students in English, French, and Spanish literatures. The conference will provide a forum for the shared exploration of literature and allow an opportunity for students to present their work to an audience of their peers. Students will consider their literature with the theme “Generation and Regeneration.” The keynote speaker, Pitt-Johnstown alumna Kathleen George will speak about the sources for her book The Johnstown Girls, which considers the legacy of the Johnstown flood in Johnstown's present.
Saturday, April 2, 2016 - 9:00am
The theme of this one-day conference sponsored by the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) program is “Gender and the Body.” The conference will include panels throughout the day where undergraduate students from Pitt and around the region will showcase their work. At the closing of the conference, leading gender theorist Kate Bornstein will be the keynote speaker.
Saturday, April 2, 2016 - 8:00pm Andy Warhol Museum
Arguably the best contemporary music ensemble in France today, Ensemble Linea, a seven-member performance ensemble, will be in residence at the University of Pittsburgh from March 31 through April 5, 2016. This event will feature a concert of contemporary French music presented by Music on the Edge. Several of the works being performed use advanced signal processing and sound specialization techniques, some of which were developed at the IRCAM Center in Paris.
This conference will include discussion of how to represent and study literary manuscripts, with a focus on questions that have arisen in conjunction with digital technologies.
Monday, April 4, 2016
Continuing the discussion in the fall panel on adoption and narrative, this event will bring to Pittsburgh Linda J. Seligmann, author of Broken Links: Enduring Ties: American Adoption Across Race, Class, and Nation ( Stanford, 2013). This book is in part an ethnographic study by Seligmann, an anthropologist, but in it she also engages with memoirs, films, and works of ethics, religious studies, and critical theory. One of the many ways in which this book differs from much scholarship on adoption is that Seligmann interviews not only adoptive parents but also their children, producing a more complex version of adoptive family life.