Posts categorized Society & Culture

Pianist Kazarzyna Musial will perform music by Polish composers, including including Ignacy Jan Paderewski—Poland’s first prime minister—in a celebration of 100 years of Polish independence.

The work of Charles Plosser, former dean of Rochester’s Simon Business School and past president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, was the focus of the Carnegie-Rochester-NYU Conference on Public Policy, which convened in Rochester this past April.

Both the general public and political science experts rate the performance of US democratic institutions significantly lower than half a year ago, according to the fifth and latest survey from Bright Line Watch.

Painstakingly searching through three colonial archives in Puebla, Mexico, assistant professor of history Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva reaches beyond traditional master-slave narratives in his latest study of afro-indigenous interactions in Mexico’s urban centers.

While in Rochester, Distinguished Visiting Humanist W. J. T. Mitchell will participate in lectures and discussions probing psychology, politics, and culture.

Ronald Grigor Suny, one of the preeminent historians of the Soviet Union, ethnic conflict, and nationalism, will speak as part of the Russian Studies program’s commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

The Early Worlds Initiative—an interdisciplinary research project at the University of Rochester—connects faculty researching social and cultural developments worldwide from medieval times to the early modern period.

“One of the greatest threats to democracy is the idea that it is unassailable.” That’s the tagline of Bright Line Watch, which neatly sums up the group’s motivation. Made up of four political scientists including University of Rochester professor Gretchen Helmke, the non-partisan initiative has set out to monitor democratic institutions in the United States and potential threats to those practices.

More than a dozen researchers—from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and other major institutions around the country—presented at the two-day symposium, aimed at addressing dearth of research data on gun violence.

The Humanities Center’s year-long look at memory and forgetting continues with a public lecture from neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, whose work on the malleability of memory has promise for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, addiction, and phobias.