The College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the continuation of the LTU College of Arts and Sciences Seminar Series.
This lecture series invites the campus community to join us as we explore the relationships between the arts and sciences through a dedicated annual theme. Our three college departments -- Math and Computer Science; Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication; and Natural Sciences -- invite internal and external speakers to help us discover links between each other's disciplines through seminars, lectures, and roundtable discussions.
Each event is free and open to the public. Pizza will be served at 12:15 prior to the event.
Experimental Curiosity
Through a diverse series of events hosted by our three departments, we invite the campus community to join us as we explore the relationship between experimentation and curiosity in the many senses of each term. How does experimentation fuel curiosity? How does curiosity lead to new experimental methods and approaches? How do researchers take their curiosity and transform it into tangible experiments that yield knowledge? How does experimentation and curiosity vary across disciplines? How does experimental curiosity change the way we approach our personal and professional development? Does it make us bolder in our quest to satisfy the unknown?
Upcoming Lecture
Thursday, September 19th, 2024
12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Location: S321
Speaker: Dr. Vivian Kao, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication
The Empire Walks: The Scholarly Monograph as an Experiment in Curiosity
The Empire Walks is the title of Dr. Kao's current scholarly book project. The book examines depictions of pedestrian movement in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature about the British Empire, and explores the relationship between foot travel and questions of gender, race, progress, and power. In this talk, Dr. Kao uses her book project as a case study for thinking about the scholarly monograph as an experiment, much like a scientific experiment that utilizes an experimental method. The monograph takes a scholar's personal curiosity and grounds it within the framework of a field or discipline. The talk is a meta-cognitive exploration of humanistic experimental method, and of what it means to use the scholarly book as a mechanism by which to put one's curiosity in the service of disciplinary knowledge-making.
