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 In his new book, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall (University of Washington Press, 2020), University of Rochester history professor Thomas Fleischman examines the socialist country’s history exclusively through the lens of pig farming. (Photo by Kenneth Schipper Vera at unsplash)
Pigs and East Germany's rise and fallThomas Fleischman has been obsessed with pigs for the better part of the last decade.
Tracing the history of East Germany’s birth in the immediate aftermath of World War II to its sudden collapse in 1989, the assistant professor of history has examined the socialist country’s history exclusively through the lens of pig farming. In his new book, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall (University of Washington Press, 2020), Fleischman argues that agriculture under communism was in many ways not that much different from capitalist agriculture.
“Pig and pig farming provide a clear case study of convergence,” says Fleischman, who spent years combing national and local archives in the US and former East Germany, as well as interviewing and visiting former industrial pig farmers in the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), an authoritarian satellite state of the Soviet Union.
The pig, he argues, played a fundamental role in the GDR’s attempts to create a modern industrial food system, albeit one based on communist principles of large-scale collective farming. By the mid-1980s East Germany produced more pork per capita than West Germany and the United Kingdom together.
But the small nation paid a high price for its pig prowess: from manure pollution to animal disease and rolling food shortages. The reliance on industrial pork, much of which was directly destined for export, foreshadowed the country’s ultimate environmental and political collapse in 1989. Read more here.
InVisible Culture special issue: Black studiesThe interdisciplinary journal InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) has published a special issue on the present and future of Black Studies.
Titled Black Studies Now and the Countercurrents of Hazel Carby, the issue was inspired by Carby’s presence at Rochester’s Humanities Center as the University’s Distinguished Visiting Humanist in 2019.
Now a professor emeritus at Yale, Carby is one of the most important scholars of the Black diaspora of the past 50 years. The special issue offers new work by Carby on Black futurities and imperial archives, essays by scholars from Princeton, Rutgers, Wesleyan, and Tulane, and a cluster of articles by faculty, staff, and graduate students at Rochester.
Graduate students in the University’s Visual and Cultural Studies (VCS) Program manage the journal, and VCS director Joel Burges, an associate professor of English; VCS PhD student Alisa V. Prince, and Jeffrey Allen Tucker, an associate professor of English co-edited the special issue. The issue can be found at https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/ .
Memory 'fingerprints' show how brain is organizedNew research shows how the differences between how people reimagine common scenarios can be observed in brain activity and quantified. These unique neurological signatures could ultimately be used to understand, study, and even improve treatment of disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
“When people imagine similar types of events, each person does it differently because they have different experiences,” says Feng (Vankee) Lin, an associate professor in the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience and the School of Nursing and co-author of the study which appears in the journal Nature Communications. “Our research demonstrates that we can decode the complex information in the human brain related to everyday life and identify neural ‘fingerprints’ that are unique to each individual’s remembered experience.”
In the study, researchers asked 26 participants to recall common scenarios, such as driving, attending a wedding, or eating out at a restaurant. The scenarios were broad enough so that each participant would reimagine them differently. For example, when researchers asked volunteers to vividly remember and describe an occasion involving dancing, one person might recall watching their daughter participating in a dance recital, while another may imagine themselves dancing at a Bar Mitzvah.
The participants’ verbal descriptions were mapped to a computational linguistic model that approximates the meaning of the words and creates numerical representations of the context of the description. They were also asked to rate aspects of the remembered experience, such as how strongly it was associated with sound, color, movement, and different emotions.
The study volunteers were then placed in a functional MRI (fMRI) and asked to reimagine the experience while researchers measured which areas of the brain were activated. Read more here.
Congratulations to . . .James Allen, the John H. Dessauer Professor of Computer Science, who has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Allen, who is also associate director and a senior researcher at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, is one of 489 fellows chosen this year. He is being recognized for “broad contributions to artificial intelligence and natural language understanding, including seminal contributions in temporal logic.” Read more here.
UR CTSI offers new Digital Health Seedling AwardThe University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI)’s new Digital Health Seedling Award provides up to $25,000 to support research that advances the development, approval or use of innovative digital health tools.
The one-year award is available to full-time faculty at the University of Rochester who are studying digital health approaches, tools, and data including sensors and mobile technologies, electronic medical records, real world data, social media and other approaches to advance clinical research and address regulatory science needs. Apply by Monday, February 8, 2021.
TriNetX offers new cohort discovery tools
Eastman Performing Arts Medicine seeks information from researchers
Eastman Performing Arts Medicine seeks to research the impact of arts in health and healing. With O. J. Sahler of Golisano Children’s Hospital leading our research component of this collaboration, we are asking any UR researcher working at the intersection of arts and health to contact us about their current or planned work using this form.
Contact Program Manager Gaelen McCormick with any questions at gmccormick@esm.rochester.edu
Keeping abreast of the University's response to COVID-19
Here are important links for researchers:
Please note that the University’s COVID-19 Dashboard is updated daily and dashboard numbers may reflect additional cases confirmed later in the day. When a new case is known, the contact-tracing process begins immediately with the Monroe County Health Department, with confirmed exposures being contacted and required to quarantine. Remember:
If you feel like you’re experiencing any COVID-19 symptoms, it’s best to report them through Dr. Chat Bot immediately. Even if you think your symptoms might be something else, like a cold, seasonal congestion, or allergies, it’s still important to tell University health professionals and contact tracers what you are experiencing—they always want to receive more, not less, information.
Common COVID-19 symptoms include:
- A temperature of 100 °F (37.8 °C) or higher
- Chills
- Muscle or body aches
- Severe fatigue
- Headache
- Congestion or runny nose
- Sore throat
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- Cough, shortness of breath, or difficulty breathing
- Nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea
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