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Early spring lectures in Center for Advanced Study series announced
Craig
Chamberlain, News Editor
217-333-2894; cdchambe@uiuc.edu
1/18/05
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
“Think globally” could be the theme for a series of six
early-spring lectures and one panel presentation at the University of
Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, all sponsored by the university’s Center
for Advanced Study.
Among the topics – two of which will be addressed by officials
from the United Nations – will be global food security; global
capitalism and race relations; changes in the Islamic faith over recent
centuries; and democracy in India. Also covered will be the history
of the Internet and the networked world, as well as the influence of
American-born art on a group of European surrealists.
The lectures are part of the CAS/MillerComm series, begun in 1973 and
supported with funds from the George A. Miller Endowment and several
co-sponsoring campus units. The CAS/MillerComm lectures provide a forum
for discourse on topics spanning the university’s many disciplines.
All CAS events are free and open to the public.
The first lecture of the spring semester will come on Jan. 31, with
“Other-Worldly and This-Worldly Piety and the Islamic Revival,”
presented by Francis Robinson, professor of the history of South Asia
at Royal Holloway, University of London. Robinson will discuss the shift
in Islamic thinking that began four centuries ago, bringing it from
an other-worldly faith associated with mysticism to a this-worldly faith
that emphasized God’s transcendence and the need to create a righteous
society on Earth. His talk begins at 4 p.m. on the third floor of the Levis Faculty Center, 919 W.
Illinois St., Urbana.
Subsequent CAS lectures and presentations through the end of March:
• Feb. 3, “Progress Toward Global Food Security: U.N. Development
Goals for the Millennium,” by Catherine Bertini, United Nations
under-secretary-general for management and past executive director of
its World Food Programme.
Bertini, who has helped administer aid to hundreds of millions of victims
of wars and natural disasters, will talk about the progress made toward
global nutrition goals set forth by the United Nations in its 2000 Millennium
Summit. Her lecture begins at 4 p.m. in the Knight Auditorium at the Spurlock Museum, 600 S.
Gregory St., Urbana.
• Feb. 17, “Origins of a Networked World: From World War
II to the Internet,” a CAS panel presentation featuring four Illinois
professors.
The panel is designed to stimulate discussion about significant changes
in organization and thinking about information and communications that
led to the development of the present-day networked world. Participating
will be Fernando Elichirigoity, Graduate
School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS); Mark Leff, history;
Boyd Rayward, GSLIS; and Christian Sandvig, speech
communication, with GSLIS Dean John Unsworth as the moderator. The
discussion will be held from 3- 5 p.m. on the third floor of the Levis
Faculty Center.
• Feb. 23, “Global Capitalism and the Changing Color Line:
A Pan-African Perspective,” by David Graham DuBois, founding president
and CEO of the W.E.B. DeBois Foundation Inc. This is the eighth annual
W.E.B. DuBois Lecture.
DuBois will discuss the global landscape of capitalism and its implications
for race relations, from a Pan-African perspective. His talk begins
at 4 p.m. on the third floor of the Levis Faculty Center.
• Feb. 28, “The Past and the Internet,” by Geoffrey
Bowker, the Regis and Dianne McKenna Chair and executive director, Center
for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University.
Bowker will discuss how – as with the advent of writing and the
printing press – we are constructing new personal, intellectual
and social pasts through the Internet and its associated technologies.
His lecture begins at 4 p.m. on the third floor of the Levis Faculty
Center.
• March 14, “From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond:
Democracy and Identity in Today’s India,” by Shashi Tharoor,
author of “Nehru: A Biography” and United Nations under-secretary-general
for communications and public information. This is the third India Studies
Distinguished Lecture.
Tharoor will discuss how issues of regional, social and religious identity
in India raise questions about the future of the world’s largest
democracy. His talk begins at 4 p.m. on the third floor of the Levis
Faculty Center.
• March 31, “The Real Meets the Imagined: Northwest Coast
Art, Claude
Lévi-Strauss and the Surrealists,” by Marie Mauzé,
senior researcher in the Laboratory of Social Anthropology, French National
Center for Scientific Research, Paris, and a George A. Miller Endowment
Visiting Professor at Illinois.
Mauzé will talk about how a group of prominent European artists
and intellectuals, exiled to the United States during World War II,
were drawn to art from the Northwest coast, which expressed their poetic
vision of the world. Her lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Knight Auditorium
at the Spurlock Museum.
