Professor Jim Leary: 'Dreaming About Folksongs of Another America'
Thursday March 21 at 7:00pm
The first lecture of 2019 in our popular 'Scholar'd for Life' series! Professor Emeritus Jim Leary presents a multi-media lecture on the vibrant yet largely neglected folk/ethnic/roots music of diverse peoples in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest and what that tradition tells us about the American experience. Join Leary for an evening enlivened by sounds and images from his recent Grammy-nominated productions: Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest (2015) and Alpine Dreaming: The Helvetia Records Story, 1920-1924 (2018). Copies of his latest book, Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946 will be available for purchase and the evening will conclude with a book signing. From UW Press, publisher of Folksongs of Another America: "Challenging and considerably broadening popular and scholarly definitions of American folk music, Folksongs of Another America recovers the diverse, multilingual traditions of immigrant, Native American, rural, and working-class performers in America's Upper Midwest during the 1930s and 1940s. The book extensively documents 187 tunes and songs in more than twenty-five languages, with full original lyrics and English translations, biographical notes on the performers and field workers, and many historic photographs. Spanning ballads, hymns, laments, versified taunts, political anthems, street cries, and recitations, these performances were captured during a transformative era in American history and culture." Jim Leary is a public folklorist who was born and raised in Rice Lake in northwestern Wisconsin. He earned a B.A. in English Literature, Notre Dame (1972); an M.A. in Folklore, University of North Carolina (1973); and a Ph.D. in Folklore and American Studies, Indiana University (1977). Since the early 1970s his research has focused on the traditional songs, stories, customary practices, and handwork of indigenous and immigrant peoples and their mostly rural and working class descendants in America's Upper Midwest, resulting in numerous museum exhibits, folklife festivals, public radio programs, documentary sound recordings, films, essays, and books. Leary is a faculty member in the Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies and in the Department of Scandinavian Studies. He is also affiliated with the Celtic Studies Program, the Labor and Working Class Studies Project, and the joint UW-Madison/UW-Milwaukee Building, Landscapes and Cultures Program. Director of UW's Folklore Program from 1999-2009, Leary co-founded and currently directs the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, a populist public humanities center devoted to research, the development of archival collections, and public programs regarding the languages and folklore of the region's diverse peoples. Scholar'd for Life is a lecture series presented by the Middleton Public Library in partnership with the UW Madison Speakers Bureau. Taking the "Wisconsin Idea" as its starting point, this series aims to promote lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and engagement between academics and the community as a whole. More information, including recordings of past lectures, at www.midlibrary.org/sfl.
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Professor Alta Charo on Human Genome Editing
Thursday April 18 at 7:00pm
The second lecture in our ongoing Scholar'd for Life series in partnership with the UW-Madison Speakers Bureau! Alta Charo, Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics at UW-Madison's Law School, will present a lecture entitled “Human Genome Editing: Policy and Politics” Genome editing makes genetic engineering cheaper, easier, and more precise. It can be used to delete, alter or add a genetic trait and is just now entering clinical trials for treatment of a few human diseases. Its powerful potential for preventing and treating disease has, however, also raised questions about its potential uses for enhancing otherwise already healthy human traits, or even more dramatically, making changes in eggs, sperm and embryos that would affect not only our children but our descendants. This talk will briefly describe the technology, its current and near-term uses for human health, and the surrounding policy and politics—much of it connecting to the political debates surrounding abortion, disability rights, and even genetically engineered foods. R. Alta Charo is the Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In the past, she also has served on the faculty of the UW Masters in Biotechnology Studies program and the Dept. of Medical History and Bioethics at the School of Medicine & Public Health. From 2015 - 2017 she was a member of the National Academies' Human Gene Editing Initiative and co-chaired its committee charged with making recommendations on the use of gene-editing for both somatic and germline (heritable) changes in humans. Charo (B.A. biology, Harvard 1979; J.D. Columbia, 1982) is an elected member (2004) of the World Technology Network and (2005) the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. And in 2006 she was elected to membership in the National Academies' Institute of Medicine (IOM) (now known as the National Academy of Medicine). In 2013 she was awarded the Adam Yarmolinsky Medal for her service to the IOM. She served on President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and as a transition team member and then senior policy analyst at the FDA under the Obama administration, where she was a member of the Health and Human Services review team, focusing her attention particularly on transition issues related to NIH, FDA, bioethics, stem cell policy, and women's reproductive health. Scholar'd for Life is a lecture series presented by the Middleton Public Library in partnership with the UW Madison Speakers Bureau. Taking the "Wisconsin Idea" as its starting point, this series aims to promote lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and engagement between academics and the community as a whole. More information, including recordings of past lectures, at www.midlibrary.org/sfl.
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Professor Christy Clark-Pujara on 'Why History Matters'
Thursday June 20 at 7:00pm
The latest in our ongoing lecture series, Scholar'd for Life! Join us as we welcome historian Christy Clark-Pujara, Associate Professor of Afro-American studies at UW-Madison, to present a lecture entitled "Why History Matters: The Creation of the Black White Binary in the United States." Why does race matter? Why is there such tension, division and disparities among racial groups in the United States of America, especially among white and black Americans? How and why did blackness and slavery become synonymous? How and why did a nation founded upon liberty and freedom perpetuate human bondage? What are the legacies of race-based slavery in America? These are a few of the questions explored in this lecture Christy Clark-Pujara is a historian whose research focuses on the experiences of black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examined—-small towns and cities in the North and Midwest. She contends that the full dimensions of the African American and American experience cannot be appreciated without reference to how black people managed their lives in places where they were few. Her first book Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island examines how the business of slavery—economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slave holding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods—shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War. Her current book project, From Slavery to Suffrage: Black on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1740 to 1866, will examine how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and black rights shaped white-black race relations in the Midwest. Scholar'd for Life is a lecture series presented by the Middleton Public Library in partnership with the UW Madison Speakers Bureau. Taking the "Wisconsin Idea" as its starting point, this series aims to promote lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and engagement between academics and the community as a whole. More information, including recordings of past lectures, at www.midlibrary.org/sfl.
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Professor Ankur Desai on Climate Change
Thursday September 19 at 7:00pm
The latest in our continuing lecture series Scholar'd for Life, in which we invite great professors to share a lecture on their area of expertise! Ankur Desai, Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Studies at UW-Madison, presents a lecture entitled "Are We All Doomed? An Optimist's Guide to How Research and Policy Can Reduce the Harmful Effects of Climate Change, Protect Wisconsin's Landscapes, and Grow the Economy." Ankur Desai is Associate Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the UW–Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Sustainability and Global Environment (SAGE), the Freshwater and Marine Science Interdisciplinary Graduate Program, and the College of Engineering. He studies how ecosystems respond to climate variability and how the climate responds to ecological patterns and processes. Scholar'd for Life is a lecture series presented by the Middleton Public Library in partnership with the UW Madison Speakers Bureau. Taking the "Wisconsin Idea" as its starting point, this series aims to promote lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and engagement between academics and the community as a whole. More information, including recordings of past lectures, at www.midlibrary.org/sfl.
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Professor Lee Palmer Wandel on the Reformation
Thursday October 10 at 7:00pm
The final lecture of 2019 in our Scholar'd for Life lecture series. Just over 500 years have passed since Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation at the Wittenburg Castle church. Join Professor of History Lee Palmer Wandell as she presents a lecture entitled "Human Hands and Divine Revelation: The Reformation and Matter." In challenging the medieval Mass, sixteenth-century reformers called into question the relationship of matter, and particularly the things made by humankind, to divine revelation. That changed not only the place of painting and sculpture in worship, but understandings of the human hand and of matter itself. Lee Palmer Wandell is the WARF Michael Baxandall and Linda and Stanley Sher Professor of History at UW-Madison. She specializes in studying the ways Christianity has shaped our understanding of persons, time, things, and space, perusing that question in European history. Professor Wandel was a recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012, one of the highest honors for a professor at UW–Madison. She has been with UW–Madison since 1998, previously teaching at Yale and Stanford. Scholar'd for Life is a lecture series presented by the Middleton Public Library in partnership with the UW Madison Speakers Bureau. Taking the "Wisconsin Idea" as its starting point, this series aims to promote lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and engagement between academics and the community as a whole. More information, including recordings of past lectures, at www.midlibrary.org/sfl.
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