Past Ada Comstock Lecture Series
SPRING 2007 LECTURE
Shake, Rattle, and Roll: Testing Structures to Their Limits
March 22, 2007, 7:30 p.m., Cowles Auditorium, Hubert H. Humphrey Center
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Featuring Professor Catherine French
Here at the University of Minnesota, far from major fault lines like the San Andreas Fault in California, Catherine French, Professor of Civil Engineering, investigates the effects of earthquakes and other extreme natural and human-made events on structures such as skyscrapers and bridges. An award-winning researcher, Professor French was one of the primary collaborators on the development of the University of Minnesota Multi-Axial Subassemblage Testing (MAST) Laboratory, which is one of six large-scale structural testing facilities in the United States that form part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Collaboratory. Professor French will discuss the process and potential promise of her research on the effects of earthquakes on structural systems, various means to mitigate these effects, and how her work has led to significant improvements in building codes and structural design.
FALL 2006 LECTURE
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “The Solitude of Self ”: Woman’s Rights are Human Rights
October 25, 2006 7:30 p.m. Cowles Auditorium, Hubert H. Humphrey Center
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Featuring Professor Karlyn Kohrs Campbell
Dr. Campbell is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, and a consummate scholar of feminist rhetoric. She is author of Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric and co-author with Kathleen Hall Jamieson of Deeds Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genres of Governance and The Interplay of Influence: News, Advertising, Politics, and the Mass Media. Her awards and honors include a Joan Shorenstein Center fellowship in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the Distinguished Woman Scholar Award in the Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, the National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar Award, and the Woolbert Award for scholarship of exceptional originality and influence. Campbell’s presentation will highlight the life and speeches of first wave feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and illuminate how a humanistic appeal for woman’s rights in a particular speech found a responsive chord with Senate and House committees assigned to consider woman suffrage.
SPRING 2006 LECTURE
The Universal Appeal of the Particular
March 21, 2006 7:30 p.m., Cowles Auditorium, Hubert H. Humphrey Center
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Featuring Professor Ruth-Ellen Joeres
Dr. Joeres is Professor of German and Women’s Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the author or editor of thirteen books. Her awards and honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, as well as the 2004 Distinguished Women Scholarship Award. Professor Joeres will speak about the tension between the particular and the universal that feminism (or perhaps any other discipline that bases itself in part on political and social convictions) represents. The particular here involves the personal, the subjective, the experiential, and the practical, whereas the universal calls to mind the generalizing, the theoretical, the abstract, and the decidedly non-practical. Related tensions include theory vs. practice; action vs. thought; experience vs. abstraction. Join us for an intriguing and thought-provoking lecture and conversation.