The Provost's Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series 2015
All lectures are free and open to the public
Bénédicte Boisseron
Afro-Dog: The Animal Question in the Black Diaspora
Associate Professor, Department of Modern & Classical Languages & Literatures
6 p.m. Wednesday, September 30, 2015
UC North Ballroom (UC 3rd floor)
Bénédicte Boisseron, Associate Professor in French and Francophone Studies, was born in France to a French mother and Caribbean (Guadeloupean) father. She received an M.A. in English from Université Denis Diderot (Paris, France) and a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies from the University of Michigan. She is the author of Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora (UP of Florida, 2014), 2015 winner of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. She is also the co-author of La culture Francophone (Focus Publishing, forthcoming) and co-editor of Voix du monde (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2011). Her articles have appeared in Etudes Francophones, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and Yale French Studies, among others. She is the recipient of an Alexander Von Humboldt Research Fellowship (Berlin, Germany) and of an Animals & Society Institute and Animal Studies Program Research Fellowship (Wesleyan University, CT).
George Stanley
Mass Extinctions in Geologic Time and the Implications for the Past, Present and Future
Professor, Department of Geosciences
6 p.m. Tuesday, October 20, 2015
UC North Ballroom (UC 3rd floor)
Professor Stanley's research and teaching experiences are international in scope dealing with paleontology and paleoecology, modern and ancient reefs and Mesozoic paleontology. He lectures and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in paleontology and evolution, leads field trips, and supervises masters and doctoral-level research students. Professor Stanley directs the UM Paleontology Center and was named a Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in late 2014.
Kyle Volk
Minority Rights and the Making of American Democracy
Associate Professor, Department of History
6 p.m. Wednesday, December 2, 2015
UC North Ballroom (UC 3rd floor)
Kyle Volk's research and teaching focus on the political, legal, social, and intellectual history of the United States. He is especially interested in the history of democracy, the problem of dissent and difference in American society, the place of morals in American law and politics, civil rights and civil liberties, and the changing meaning of freedom in American life. Volk's research has been supported by the American Society for Legal History, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Antiquarian Society. His first book, Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2014), explores the pioneering popular struggles over minority rights that developed out of conflicts over race, religion, and alcohol in nineteenth-century America. Moral Minorities received two major honors from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in 2015: the Merle Curti Prize for Best Book in American Intellectual History; and honorable mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for the Best First Book in American History. Future projects will explore resistance to government in the long Progressive era and the centrality of debates over alcohol to cultural conceptions of liberty in U.S. History.
Professor Volk directs the History Department's graduate program and advises its chapter of Phi Alpha Theta (the history honor society). He founded the department's Lockridge History Workshop and continues to coordinate it each year. Volk is also a Prelaw advisor for history undergraduates and an affiliated faculty member of the African American Studies Program. He was the 2014 recipient of the Helen and Winston Cox Award for Excellence in Teaching and the University of Montana's 2015 nominee for CASE Professor of the Year.