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Sir Run Run Shaw Lecture Series
Spring 2024 

 

Künü: A Space for Dialogue
Francisco Huichaqueo
Francisco Huichaqueo
Professor, School of Visual Arts
University of Concepción, Chile

Friday, February 9, 2024
4:00 pm
Wang Center Lecture Hall 1

Mapuche filmmaker Francisco Huichaqueo joins us for a screening of Künü, a documentary that captures the collaborative efforts of 80 Mapuche communities to reclaim part of their ancestral lands from a large transnational forestry company in Chile, in the Araucanía-Loncoche region. Following will be a conversation about global timber industries’  environmental and social impacts on indigenous territories, the history of Mapuche land
recovery efforts, and the multi-year process of making this film.

Francisco Huichaqueo is a filmmaker, artist, curator of memory garments, and professor whose films have been showcased in various Chilean and international venues, including the Mother Tongue Film Festival at the Smithsonian, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Museo Reina Sofía, and the 11th Berlin Biennale.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Changing Systems of Power, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center (LACS), and the Departments of Hispanic Languages and Literature, Sociology, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.


Journeys that Led to Collaborations:
Poetry and Visual Art
  
E. Miller  E. Ethelbert Miller
  Literary Activist, Author, Host, Poet

 


 Teklaeb Kebedech Tekleab
  Associate Professor
  City University of New York

  Tuesday, March 26, 2024
  4:00 pm
  1008 Humanities Institute 


This talk will be an exploration of Miller’s and Tekleab’s works ranging from poetry and visual art to literary activism as well as the intersections between them – a product of years of collaborations. They’ll discuss their latest exhibition,On Blue and Gray: This Era of Exile, a critical reflection on exile, displacement, and spiritual resilience that treks across borders of media in poetry, sculpture, visual art, blues, and literary translation. 

E. Ethelbert Miller
is a literary activist, author and poet. He currently hosts the WPFW morning radio show
On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller. Miller received a 2020 congressional award in recognition of his literary activism, received the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and was named a 2023 Grammy nominee for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. 

Kebedech Tekleab is a published poet, painter, and sculptor who has had solo and group exhibitions in several national and international venues. Her commissioned and collected works are on permanent display at numerous institutions including the Navy Memorial Archives in Washington, DC. Tekleab is an associate professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), Queensborough Community College.

Presented by the Department of Africana Studies and the Humanities Institute 


Algebraic Models for Linguistics Inspired by Theoretical Physics
Matilde Marcolli
Matilde Marcolli
Robert F. Christy Professor of Mathematics and Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Caltech

Wednesday, March 27, 2024
4:00 pm
Wang Center, Lecture Hall 2

Behind their linear arrangement of words, sentences contain more significant but not immediately visible structure. It is this structure that truly determines the properties of syntax. Just like proteins are the result of arranging amino acids in complex structural configurations, sentences are intricate, tree-like structures built from words. 

Over the last 30 years, Noam Chomsky has argued that this structure-building process is best understood in terms of a specific operation called Merge. In this talk, Matilde Marcolli will take an in-depth look at Merge through the mathematical lens of abstract algebra, unearthing the mathematical elegance of this operation and its surprising parallels to quantum physics. 

This mathematical model of the syntax semantics interface has direct relevance to the transformers architectures of large language models, which are driving the current developments of AI and language technology. Sentence structure thus reveals itself as a highly principled mathematical object.

Matilde Marcolli is a self-described “drifter of Dadaist persuasion” whose research spans computational linguistics, theoretical physics, and mathematics. She has written six books and more than 150 research papers covering topics such as quantum statistical mechanics, information theory, geometric models of particle physics and cosmology, physics and number theory, and mathematical aspects of theoretical linguistics. Marcolli’s most recent collaborators include Roger Penrose and Noam Chomsky. Together with the latter and Robert Berwick, she is currently working on a three-part series of papers and a book that investigate the algebraic properties of sentence structure.

Presented by the Departments of Linguistics and Mathematics


Morpho-phonology of Verb Root Allomorphy
in Indo-Aryan  
Paroma Sanyal
Paroma Sanyal
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Thursday, April 4, 2024
9:00 am
Student Activities Center (SAC), Room 306

The phonological form of a morpheme distinguishes it from other morphemes within the lexicon. Consequently, morphological well-formedness requires lexical entries to have  unique phonological tags that remain unchanged across morpho-syntactic domains. Theoretically, these correspond to the principles of Paradigm Uniformity (Steriade 2000) and Antihomophony (Crosswhite 2001).

Verbs in modern Indo-Aryan languages exhibit systemic verb root allomorphy with predictable vowel ablaut. Not only does the allomophy violate Paradigm Uniformity but also creates contexts for potential homophony. In this paper, I analyze the morphological domains of three Indo-Aryan languages, Bangla, Odia and Hindi to propose that the degree to which allomorphy is induced into the verbal domain is directly proportional to the degree of phonotactic restrictions within the phonology of the language. Hindi, with minimal phonotactic restrictions, has three morphological sub-paradigms that correspond to two verb root allomorphs. Odia with two phonotactic restrictions, has two sub-paradigms. Finally, Bangla with systematic vowel regressive harmony and prosodic restrictions on vowels, has five morphological sub-paradigms that correspond to two verb root allomorphs. In both Hindi and Bangla, two allomorphs must correspond to more than two morphological paradigms. Consequently, both languages attest Similarity-Based syncretism (Steriade 2016) where morphosyntactically unrelated paradigms surface with the same exponent.

Paroma Sanyal is a phonologist and syntactician who works on the correspondence between phonological well-formedness and morpho-syntactic realization of words in South Asian Languages. She has worked on the morpho-phonology and syntax of the following languages: Ao, Meiteilon (Tibeto-Burman), Malayalam, Telugu, Telangana Telugu, Kannada (Dravidian) and Bangla, Odia, Sylheti, Hindi, Wagdi, Punjabi (Indo-Aryan).

Presented by the Department of Linguistics. Co-sponsored by Faculty in the Arts, Humanities and lettered Social Sciences (FAHSS), Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS), and the Mattoo Center for India Studies.


Redoubling Metaphysics?
A Phenomenological Approach  
Jean-luc marion
Jean-Luc Marion
Professor Emeritus and Immortel
Académie Française

Monday, April 8, 2024
4:30 pm
Harriman Hall, Room 214

The process of overcoming metaphysics implies a strict and historical definition of the very meaning of metaphysics. On this basis, we may be able to reinterpret it so that new possibilities are open for metaphysics itself.

Jean-Luc Marion is simultaneously one of the world’s leading authorities on the philosophy of Descartes and modern philosophy more broadly, a major figure in the development of phenomenology and philosophy of religion, and a prominent Roman Catholic theologian. He has been professor of philosophy at the University of Poitiers, Paris X – Nanterre, Paris IV (Sorbonne), and the University of Chicago, in addition to many shorter visiting positions around the world. Marion has published more than 20 books, nearly all of which have been translated into multiple languages. In 1992, he won the Grand Prix de philosophie de l'Académie française for his lifetime work and in 2008, won the Karl Jaspers Prize in Heidelberg and was elected an immortel by the Academie Francaise.

Presented by the Department of Philosophy