Guest Talks

E.J. Dionne, longtime op-ed columnist for The Washington Post; frequent commentator for NOR, ABC, and NBC; and award-winning author of four books including Why Americans Hate Politics. gives this year's Wilson Lecture on the timely topic of politics.

On February 17, 1960, Julius K. Nyerere, President of the Tanganyika African National Union, gave the closing speech at Wellesley College's Symposium on Africa entitled "Africa's Place in the World." He is introduced by Margaret Clapp, President of Wellesley College.

On February 17, 1960, Julius K. Nyerere, President of the Tanganyika African National Union, gave the closing speech at Wellesley College's Symposium on Africa entitled "Africa's Place in the World." He is introduced by Margaret Clapp, President of Wellesley College.

On February 17, 1960, Julius K. Nyerere, President of the Tanganyika African National Union, gave the closing speech at Wellesley College's Symposium on Africa entitled "Africa's Place in the World." He is introduced by Margaret Clapp, President of Wellesley College.

Steven Hamburg is a well-known forest ecologist, but he made a public name for himself by helping persuade Walmart to go green -- selling CFLs, retrofitting stores for energy efficiency, and developing a sustainability plan. Since 2008, Hamburg has been a Senior Scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund -- one of the nation's foremost environmental policy organizations -- where much of his work focuses on climate change. The Douglas Lecture honors Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998), a Wellesley Alumna (Class of 1912), a respected journalist, and the leading champion for protecting the Florida Everglades.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. has won numerous awards for its beer and also for its sustainability practices. Cheri Chastain, Sustainability Coordinator at Sierra Nevada, explained how the brewing company tracks and reports key performance indicators in energy, water, agriculture, transportation, recycling/recovery, greenhouse gases, and more for both our environment and the company’s bottom line.  The Sierra Nevada case study illustrates how science and economics are intertwined in the field of sustainability. The talk took place as part of the Celebrating QR Connections lecture series at Wellesley College in October 2011.

Joyce Klein Rosenthal, assistant professor of urban planning at Harvard University, gave a talk drawing on her expertise in environmental planning, sustainable development, and the public health effects of urbanization. Rosenthal moved from the history and design of cities to a discussion of the environmental impacts of urbanization and analyses of climate-related effects on health in today's urban areas. The talk took place as part of the Celebrating QR Connections lecture series at Wellesley College in October 2011.

Dr. Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google. In decades past, models of human language were wrought from the sweat and pencils of linguists.  In the modern day, it is more common to think of language modeling as an exercise in probabilistic inference from data: we observe how words and combinations of words are used, and from that build computer models of what the phrases mean. This approach is hopeless with a small amount of data, but somewhere in the range of millions or billions of examples, we pass a threshold, and the hopeless suddenly becomes effective, and computer models sometimes meet or exceed human performance.  This talk gives examples of the data available in large repositories of text, images, and videos, and shows some tasks that can be accomplished with the resulting models.

Paul Frommer, creator of the Na'vi language for James Cameron's 2009 film "Avatar," talks about his involvement in the project. He discusses how he got the job, developed the language and worked with Cameron and the actors. He also speaks about the interplay of language and culture in the creation of Na’vi and Na’vi post-“Avatar,” including the astonishing development of a Na’vi community, where passionate enthusiasts are using the language to communicate and helping with its further growth. The lecture is a highlight of a new course this fall at Wellesley. Angela Carpenter, assistant professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences at Wellesley, created the class, “Invented Languages: From Wilkins’ Real Character to Avatar’s Na’vi.” She hopes the lecture will ignite discussion on the topics of language learning and invention. “Over the centuries, invented, or artificial, languages have been devised for many reasons, including a desire to improve existing languages, an effort to unite the world, or a need to explore how languages are learned,” she said.

Peter Galison, Professor of History of Science and Physics at Harvard University, explores the technical, sociological, moral and philosophical questions at stake as we strive to determine who or what is to blame for the catastrophic failures of large technical systems.

Jacqueline Jones, Professor of Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin and former Wellesley College History professor, discusses Savannah throughout and after the Civil War.

Saberi discussed her memoir, “Between Two Worlds. A reporter, she was arrested at her Tehran apartment while researching a book on Iran. She was promised freedom only if she confessed to being a spy.

The Director of Programs at Childbirth Connection makes the case for stakeholders from across the health care system to join in making health system improvements that foster more reliable delivery of evidence-based maternity care.

Dr. Lerner discusses three issues (Radical mastectomy, screening mammography, and stem cell transplantation) from his book, The Breast Cancer Wars. He focuses on concepts of proof and evidence.

The executive director of the National Women's Health Network and the dean of BU's School of Public Health debate the new national guidelines. Moderated by Susan Reverby. Part of the Celebrating QR Connections series.

Ecological designer Dave Jacke discusses permaculture and the planned Edible Forest Garden at Wellesley College.

Robert J. Lieber is Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University. He is author or editor of fifteen books on international relations and U.S. foreign policy and has been a foreign policy advisor in several presidential campaigns and a consultant to the State Department and for National Intelligence Estimates. His most recent book is The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century (2008). Michael Allen is Special Assistant to the Vice President, Government & External Relations, at the National Endowment for Democracy. He is editor of Democracy Digest, an online publication covering democratization and democracy assistance. He is currently researching a book on the cultural Cold War and its implications for the current "war of ideas." Bill Kauffman is the author of eight books, among them a novel, Every Man a King, a memoir, Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, a biography, Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin, and a work on the Middle American antiwar tradition Ain't My America. He has won the national "Sense of Place Award" from Writers & Books and the Andrew Eiseman Writers Award. Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he received his Ph.D. in American diplomatic history from Princeton. He is the author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005) and The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008), among other books.

Bliss Broyard grew up feeling there was something about her family that she didn’t know. As her father Anatole — a literary critic for The New York Times — lay dying, her mother revealed what her father wouldn’t — he was part black. “My father truly believed that there wasn’t any essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person responsible for determining who he was supposed to be was himself,” Broyard wrote in One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life — a Story of Race and Family Secrets. Following her family’s revelation, Broyard — who was raised as white— began to look into her father’s Creole history and genealogy and learn about the family she had never known. She will present the lecture “From Passing to the Post-Racial: Does Race Still Matter?” Annie Seaton ’90, who has accepted a position as assistant professor and dean of multicultural affairs at Bard College, will be on hand to provide a response and frame discussion around the question: Does race still matter? She has written on race mixing in 20th century culture and has organized courses and conferences around the intersection of race and new media, examining visual constructions of race, such as blackness and Jewishness, via literature, literary theory, psychoanalysis and film. Ten years after DNA tests proved that a male in the line of Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his slave — and on the eve of an election that might see the first black president — discussions of race are still evolving. “These private stories are changing the ways we view race in America,” said Diana Williams, history.

Charles Franklin, co-founder of Pollster.com, discusses the state of the 2008 Presidential race and logic of statistical comparisons as he heads to ABC News' Decision Desk to project the winners on Election Night.

Dr. Hillygus discusses her book "The Persuadable Voter" and how it relates to the McCain vs. Obama race. Topics include who can be persuaded by campaign information, the impact of race, wedge issues, and micro-targeting.

Anna Greenberg, an expert on public opinion and survey design, discusses the recent history of polling and politics, the skills needed to be a pollster, and the race between Barack Obama and John McCain.

David Card, Prof. of Economics, Berkeley, discusses "Social Interactions, Tipping, & Segregation". Many behaviors are affected by what other people do, e.g., living in a neighborhood. Choice models with social interactions can have unstable equilibria.

Journalist and women's rights advocate Gloria Steinem speaks about reproductive freedom. She focuses on treatment of women by Native Americans and their reproductive rights in the colonial era.

Actor LeVar Burton talks about his mother's love of reading; his role as host and producer of Reading Rainbow; and television's power to create social change.

Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben speaks about climate change, saying that global warming can be stopped if people begin to organize politically. This lecture was hosted by Wellesley Focus the Nation.