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MECHANIZATION: Aspects of its historical development
Fall 2007 Lecture Schedule
Jonathan Sawday, Strathclyde University
Calculating Engines: Minds, Bodies, Sex and Machines on the Eve of the Enlightenment
Thursday, September 27 - 4:30 PM
Adamson Wing, Baker Hall 136A
Robert Myers, Playwright and Professor of English and Creative Writing, American University in Beirut
Playing With History: Political Theatre in Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East
Thursday, October 11 - 4:30 PM
Richard Rauh Theater in the Purnell Center
Co-sponsored by the Humanities Scholars Program and the School of Drama
Norton Wise
Why Were Victorian Auomata Female?
Monday, October 15 - 12:00 noon
University Center, Rangos 1
Joel Mokyr, Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences; Professor of Economics and History, Northwestern University; Sackler Professor (by special appointment), Eitan Berglas School of Economics,
Tel
Aviv University
Mechanization, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution in Britain
Friday, November 2 - 4:30 PM
Adamson Wing, Baker Hall 136A
Martin Davis
Alan Turing's Computers and Our Computers
Thursday, November 29 - 4:30 PM
Adamson Wing, Baker Hall 136A
Associated Event:
Italian Futurism - elucidated and performed with the participation of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
and Luigi Russolo
Thursday, November 15 - 4:30 PM
Adamson Wing, Baker Hall 136A
Jonathan Sawday
Calculating Engines: Minds, Bodies, Sex and Machines on the Eve of the Enlightenment
The lecture explores the fascination with the idea of creating artificial life and 'thinking machines' in the pre-enlightenment period. It concentrates on the pertinent ideas of Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, and Leibniz, but ends by exploring the 'anti-machine' of the late seventeenth-century, i.e., the malfunctioning sex machines of the notorious John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.
Robert Myers
Playing With History: Political Theatre in Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East
Taking as its starting point The Persians, by Aeschylus, this talk explores some of the roots of the impulse to represent history theatrically in Eastern and Western traditions. After a brief survey of various manifestations of historical and political theatre in Europe in the past five centuries (Shakespeare’s history plays, Wallerstein, Danton’s Death, Saint Joan, In Spite of Everything, Galileo, etc.) the talk will focus on contemporary historical and political plays in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. Recent American plays to be discussed include Fires in the Mirror, Slavs and Gross Indecency; Europeans plays include The Investigation, In the Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer and contemporary British history plays, especially Mad Forest; and recent Middle Eastern works include pieces by the Lebanese performance artists Rabih Mroue and Lina Saneh and the plays of the Iraqi playwright/director Jawad Al Assadi, especially his most recent, Baghdadi Bath, which I co-translated. Excerpts of several works by Jawad Al Assadi, including the Damascus production of Baghdadi Bath, will be screened.
Martin Davis
Alan Turing’s Computers and Our Computers
In 1999, TIME magazine proposed their list of the twenty greatest “scientists and thinkers'” of the twentieth century. Explaining their choice of Alan Turing as one of the twenty, they wrote: “everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.” Although these “machines” were only mathematical abstractions that Turing had introduced in a technical paper published in 1936, they implied a whole new way of thinking about computation and revealed the goal of an all-purpose machine that could be “programmed” to carry out arbitrary computations. In this talk I will tell the story of Turing’s rich, eventful, and ultimately tragic life, and explain some of his ideas.
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Applications are now being accepted for 2009-2010 academic year residential fellowships in Global Connections, Global Responsibilities.
Fall 2008 Events
Links
Humanities Departments:
English
History
Philosophy
Modern Languages
College of Humanities and
Social Sciences
Center for the Arts in Society
The Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics and Political Philosophy
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