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Provost Melanie Stein invites us to celebrate the intellectual and creative accomplishments of our colleagues. Presenters will share from the research and/or creative activity they engaged in during their sabbatical. Light refreshments will be served. We hope to see you there.

Thursday, March 9th, 4:00-5:30pm
Clark Lounge, Campus Center

Presenters:
Evgenia Ilieva, Department of Politics
Title: Notes on Dialectics: C.L.R. James’s Hegel

Hegel’s philosophy has been a fundamental reference point for a broad network of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thinkers and activists, a major inspiration for the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Martin Luther King Jr., and Angela Davis, among others.  James’s Notes on Dialectics (1948) is by far the most significant textual engagement with Hegel from within that internationalist tradition, but the book is woefully understudied and remains out of print. In comparison to the abovementioned thinkers, all of whom drew inspiration from Hegel’s social and political philosophy, in his monograph James turns instead to Hegel’s most difficult text, the Science of Logic, as the true locus of Hegel’s critical theory. Situating James’s study within the Marxist philosophical tradition, my project examines work by other scholars who have written substantially on Hegel’s Logic. At issue here is how James reads Hegel’s text differently from these commentators and how he refashions Hegel’s dialectic in the process.


Pearl Ponce, Department of History
Title:  “A Strange System of Terrorism”:  Federal Power and the Fraying of Democracy in Utah, Washington, and Kansas Territories in the 1850s

Pearl’s sabbatical was dedicated to working on a current project, a comparative history of three territories created in the 1850s.  Although Kansas is the best known—marked by its “Bleeding Kansas” sobriquet—two other territories organized at the same time illuminate the ways in which democracy was fraying in the United States even before the American Civil War broke out in 1861. Each suffered terrorism, the imposition of martial law, and residents charged with treason.  The territories are critically important, serving as crucibles of limited self-government where questions about American democracy played out, but their relationship with the federal government has been comparatively neglected in favor of the states.  Pearl’s work reclaims territorial history while shedding light on questions that still plague us today about the formation and support of democratic government.

Kari Brossard Stoos, Department of Health Promotion and Physical Education
Title:  Isolation of novel bacteriophage infecting Vibrio parahaemolyticus (a seafood-borne human pathogen)

This presentation will discuss a collaborative project that involved isolating novel bacteriophage (viruses that infect bacteria) from coastal waters.  The continued purpose of the project is to develop an approach to monitor coastal waters for the presence of Vibrio parahaemolyticus, a bacteria often associated with seafood-borne illnesses.  The development of a monitoring test would serve as a public health measure to potentially prevent epidemics of human vibrio-related illnesses associated with consumption of contaminated shellfish and increase consumer confidence in aquaculture farming and wild harvested shellfish.

Facilitator: Luke Keller, Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Organized and supported by the Center for Faculty Excellence

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Colette Matisco at cfe@ithaca.edu or 607-274-3734. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.

CFE events and collaborative workshops are displayed on IC Engage. Click the “View More Events” for the full list.