The first event in the "Bodies in Motion" series, this film screening will feature Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a film that uses 17 cameras to document Zinedine Zidane's movements during the course of a single match in April, 2005. The result is more a stunning real-time study of time and motion than a sports documentary.

This joint presentation by Patrick Manning (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History, University of Pittsburgh) and Siddharth Chandra (Professor of Economics, Michigan State University) will show how plague in the fourteenth century and influenza in the early twentieth century seriously shook up global population and society, with attention to the new research methods than have enabled scholars to understand more about these pandemics themselves and their implications for human society.

Professor Karla Mallette (Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan) will visit Pitt’s campus in January 2016 to present her current work on cosmopolitan languages in the Medieval Mediterranean, as well as discuss her participation in a large collaborative research project headed up by David Wallace of the University of Pennsylvania.

From the Sophists down to Plato and Aristotle, through the Scholastics and on to Kenneth Burke, rhetoric—understood not just as stylistic flourish, but as the communal process of knowledge making--has long been how humans debate and decide what it means to be human. And whether in speech or thought, the figure of the human can’t be drawn without reference to its binary opposite: the animal. Penn State professor Debra Hawhee’s upcoming talk and graduate student workshop, “At the Feet of Rhetorica,” will trace these intertwined relationships.