Dean's Distinguished Lecture series

Presented by Lisa J. Lucero, professor in the Department of Anthropology, on February 22, 2023.

In this presentation, Lisa J. Lucero describes how the ancestral Maya (c. 250-900 CE) landscape was a mosaic of cities, farmsteads, forests, seasonal wetlands (bajos), and sacred places. Each city had its own king who attracted subjects via dry-season urban reservoirs. When droughts struck between c. 800-900 CE, reservoir levels plummeted and crops failed. Subjects did not revolt or resort to violence. Instead, Maya farmers/subjects deserted kings and southern lowland cities to find more stable water supplies and to take care of their families. Maya kings disappeared. Farmers adapted and moved on. Yet Maya kings and cities lasted 1,000 years, a feat that has implications and insights for today.

Presented by Travis L. Dixon, professor and director of graduate studies for the Department of Communication, on March 23, 2022. 

 In this presentation, Travis L. Dixon provides evidence for the power of media stereotypes and stereotyping over our collective consciousness. Specifically, he argues that news and race imagery drive political polarization and distort our notions of social reality. His talk focuses on the relationship between stereotypical portrayals in the media, crime policy, and political decision-making. The presentation highlights two decades of research findings that build a compelling case regarding the importance of assessing racial considerations when trying to assess political opinion.

Presented by Rana Hogarth, associate professor in the Department of History, on April 29, 2021.

Race mixing—particularly between Blacks and whites—alarmed American eugenicists in the early 20th century. Charles B. Davenport, one of the nation’s leading eugenicists, was so preoccupied by race mixing that he published two studies on people of Black and white ancestry—a class of people he concluded was “badly put together” and “ineffective.” These two studies serve as points of entry for examining early 20th-century efforts to define people of African descent as inherently unfit.

During this presentation, Rana Hogarth, associate professor in the Department of History, draws attention to the ways anti-Blackness and slavery-era ideas about race informed scientific knowledge production. She demonstrates how early 20th century attempts to measure, objectify, and pathologize mixed race individuals with Black and white ancestry rendered Blackness an unfavorable trait in white eugenic discourses and beyond.

Presented by Gene E. Robinson, Director of the Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and Swanlund Chair of Entomology and Neuroscience, on October 29, 2019.

Increasing our understanding of Earth's biodiversity and responsibly stewarding its resources are among the most crucial scientific and societal challenges of the new millennium. These challenges require fundamental new knowledge of the organization, evolution, functions, and interactions among the entire planet's organisms.

This lecture describes the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), a moonshot for biology that aims to sequence, catalog, and characterize the genomes of all of Earth's eukaryotic biodiversity over a period of 10 years.