Stony Brook Manhattan Events

FACULTY/ALUMNI LECTURE SERIES: SPRING 2004

Each lecture in this ongoing series, organized by Dr. Lester Paldy, features an engaging topic presented by a Stony Brook faculty member. The talks begin at 6:00 pm, following light refreshments at 6:00pm. There will be ample time for audience discussion and questions following each lecture. These talks are free, but since seating is limited, alumni and/or guests interested in attending should call now, (631) 632-6330, for reservations. Stony Brook Manhattan is located at 401 Park Ave. South at 28th Street. Special thanks to Les Paldy for organizing this series.

Thursday, May 6, 2003

Fred Goldhaber: "Einstein the Radical vs. Einstein the Conservative"
Albert Einstein was chosen by the editors of Time Magazine as Person of the Century, meaning that his impact on the world as a whole, not just the physics community, was at least as great any one else's in the last hundred years. Another measure of his achievement is a conservative count of Nobel prizes for work testing or based on Einstein's contributions — at least twelve, including his own.

This talk, intended for a general audience, involves no equations or fancy mathematics, or indeed any visual aids. It is an exploration of the amazing way in which Einstein blended old and new, managing to preserve and strengthen the successes of established physics while setting out in astonishing and unexpected directions.

Professor Fred Goldhaber is a member of Stony Brook's C.N. Yang Institute of Theoretical Physics, specializing in particle and nuclear physics, and former president of the University Senate. He has taught and conducted research programs at Stony Brook for 37 years.

A Conference on Ethnicity and Emotion: Fall 2004

Public Feelings/Affective Difference Spet. 30 - Oct.1, 2004

This conference builds on the Humanities Institute's ongoing "Transmission of Cultures" Seminar with a new focus on issues of emotion, including emotion in diasporic, postcolonial and indigenous contexts. We respond in part to the explosion of interest in affect in humanities research in recent years starting perhaps with Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank?s 1995 co-edited collection of psychologist Silvan Tomkins' research on affect, but continuing in recent books such as Sedgwick's Touching Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich's An Archive of Feelings, Teresa Brennan's Transmission of Affect, Elspeth Probyn's "Everyday Shame,"and most recently Martha Nussbaum?s Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law. In addition, there have been studies of affect in poetry, history, the arts, and philosophy. Long a familiar area in psychology and anthropology, why has affect moved to the fore in the humanities and arts at this time? This conference aims to address this question but also in particular the implications of research on affect for postcolonial and cross-cultural studies not usually a main focus. What is the importance of affective difference in the context of normative "public" feelings in different nations and communities?

schedule

Stony Brook -Manhattan
401 Park Avenue South, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10016