The Provost's Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series 2014-2015
All lectures are free and open to the public
Joanna Klink
Listening to Poems: A Reading and Lecture
Professor, Department of English
6 p.m. Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Dell Brown Room, Turner Hall
Why listen to poems? What do poems require of you, and what happens, exactly, when you find yourself under their spell? Klink will talk about the essential strangeness of poetry—its power to move you even when it doesn’t make sense. She will also read from her forthcoming book.
Joanna Klink is the author of three books of poetry, They Are Sleeping, Circadian, and Raptus. Her new book, Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy, is forthcoming from Penguin in April. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, most recently The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, Jeannette Haien Ballard, Civitella Ranieri, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. From 2008-2011 Klink was the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Montana.
Alan Sillars
Miscommunication and Misperception in Family Conflicts: Lessons from Research
Professor, Department of Communication Studies
6 p.m. Thursday, November 13, 2014
UC North Ballroom (UC 3rd floor)
Conflict is an inevitable part of family life that can be managed for better or for worse. This lecture will discuss areas of misunderstanding that commonly occur in family arguments, highlighting some surprising findings from studies of marital and parent-adolescent relationships.
Alan Sillars is Professor of Communication Studies at UM, where he has taught courses related to interpersonal communication, conflict processes, and family relationships for 29 years. In 2013, Sillars received the Bernard J. Brommel Award from the National Communication Association for outstanding scholarship in family communication and he was recently selected for the Mark L. Knapp Award honoring career contributions to the study of interpersonal communication.
Joel Berger
In the Pavilion of Snow-Oxen -- Big Animals in an Increasingly Peopled World
Professor, Division of Biological Sciences
6 p.m. Tuesday, December 2, 2014
UC North Ballroom (UC 3rd floor)
The world has a lot of people. Increasing human populations challenge the preservation of wild places and wildlife that requires large landscapes. The metaphorical 'snow-oxen' of the high, icy, and wild will help showcase how this dilemma takes place in the spectacular Arctic, the cold Tibetan-Himalayas and the American West. The lecture will highlight the necessity of seeing through the eyes of animals - such as musk oxen, polar bears, snow leopards and saiga antelopes - to create practices that will create a brighter future for these species and their habitats.
Joel grew up in LA, went to grad school in Colorado, and worked at Smithsonian's National Zoo for 7 years. Joel interfaces study of wildlife with conservation often by focusing on challenges (like climate, people, economics, or predation) involving iconic species -- black rhinos, muskoxen, bison, and moose, and those lesser known, wild yak, takin, and saiga. Joel has received lifetime achievement awards from Society of Conservation Biology and the American Society of Mammalogists, and is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He has authored five books, including 'The Better to Eat you With' and 'Horn of Darkness'. Joel was a finalist for the 2014 Indianapolis prize.