University of New England

Core Connections Lecture Series focuses on 'The Problem of Happiness'

The University of New England's Core Connections Lecture Series in 2007-08 will explore the theme of "The Problem of Happiness" from political, historical, citizenship, scientific, and environmental perspectives.

The Core Connection lectures are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Amy Deveau, assistant professor, Department of Chemistry and Physics, at 207-602-2813, or via email at adeveau@une.edu

Upcoming

April 9
CoREACTIONS Student Panel
St. Francis Room, UC Campus, Ketchum Library, 4-5 pm

The CoREACTIONS Student Panel is the capstone event in our 'Problem of Happiness' lecture series intended to faciliate critical thinking and analysis by our students.  Students Ashley Uhuad '09  (Medical Biology), Nathan Zapka '08  (Medical Biology), Alissa Ehmke '08 (English) and Dora Clements '10 (Political Science) will critically analyze one or more of the series seminars and place the seminars in greater context while also considering aspects of UNE's Core Curriculum.   The CoREACTIONS Panel will be moderated by Matthew Anderson, Ph.D., associate professor, English Department.  Light Hor'doeurves will be served.

Past Lectures

September 17
Darrin M. McMahon, Ph.D., Professor of History, Florida State University
"Pursuing Happiness Through the Ages: Some Thoughts on an Elusive Quest."
Multi-Purpose Rooms, Campus Center, UC, 12-1 pm

Darrin M. McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University.  Educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, where he received his PhD in 1997, McMahon is a specialist in European culture and thought, with an emphasis on the eighteenth century.  He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Rouen, France.  His books include Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into nine languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate Magazine, and the Library Journal.  McMahon’s writings have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Daedalus, The Wilson Quarterly, and the New Republic’s “Open University,” where he is a regular contributor.  He is currently writing a history of the idea of genius in Western thought, under contract with Basic Books.    In his Core Connections seminar, Professor McMahon will consider how the pursuit of happiness in contemporary society relates to its long and often paradoxical Western history.

Useful Links:
http://www.fsu.edu/~history/staff/mcmahon.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/29/opinion/
29McMahon.html?ex=1293512400&en=dc1074a5364e3d82&ei=5090&
partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
http://www.fsu.com/pages/2006/01/12/EverybodyHappy.html

October 4
David Myers, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Hope College
"The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness"
Multi-Purpose Rooms, Campus Center, UC, 12-1 pm

Social psychologist David Myers, is a Professor of Psychology at Hope College and known as a scholar and communicator of psychological science to college students and the general public.  His scientific writings, supported by National Science Foundation grants and fellowships and recognized by the Gordon Allport Prize, have appeared in two dozen academic periodicals, including Science, the American Scientist, the American Psychologist, and Psychological Science.   Professor Meyers has digested psychological research for the public through articles in more than three dozen magazines, from Scientific American to Christian Century, and through fifteen books, including general interest books and psychology textbooks.     He is a Seattle native, an all-weather bicyclist, and an avid noontime basketball player and fan of his college's basketball teams.   In his Core Connections seminar,  Dr. Myers will explore the things that do, and surprisingly don't, predict people's feelings of well-being. Does happiness favor those of a particular age or sex? Does wealth enhance well-being? Does it help to have certain traits? to have close friends or be married? to have religious faith? New studies explode some myths about what makes for happiness, and reveal the marks of joy-filled people.

Useful Links:
http://www.davidmyers.org/Brix?pageID=2

October 22
Margo Lee Sherman, Theatrical Performance Artist
"What do I Know About War?"  
Multi-Purpose Rooms, Campus Center, UC, 7:30 pm
                                
"What Do I Know About War?"  is an internationally acclaimed one-woman show by theater artist, Margo Lee Sherman, which tells accurate and truthful stories about our men and women stationed in Iraq.  This one-hour performance, followed by Q & A, takes an unflinching look at the human cost of war and its tragic dehumanization with true accounts from fifteen real life characters. From two innocent 19-year olds who leave home for the first time and are killed in combat to a professional soldier who re-examines his belief in the wake of Abu Ghraib and becomes a conscientious objector, these remarkable stories, performed with Sherman’s unique intensity and concentration, convey the many dimensions of this complex tragedy with power and immediacy offering new insights.  The New York Times calls it “Brilliant…surreal…the experience is like evesdropping on a small sorrowful town.” 

Useful links:
http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/theater/reviews/14war.html

November 7
Julie Norem, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Wellesley College
"Happiness is Not Always the Point: Different People, Different Goals, Different Strategies"
St. Francis Room, UC, 12-1 pm

Dr. Norem holds the Margaret Hamm Professorship in Psychology at Wellesley College, where she is department chair, and has taught for fifteen years.  In addition, Professor Norem is the President of the Association for Research in Personality.  Prior to coming to Wellesley, Dr. Norem taught at Northeastern University.  She received her A. B. from the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.   Norem’s training and research interests hover around the fluid boundaries between personality and social psychology.  She has spent 20 years exploring defensive pessimism, its implications for the adaptation of those who use it, and the ways in which it stems from and influences other aspects of self-concept and personality.  Her book The Positive Power of Negative Thinking (Basic Books, 2001) summarizes some of the research she has done, which has appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the Journal of Personality, and the Journal of Research in Personality. Her current research examines the relationship between impostor feelings, self-knowledge and adjustment. In her Core Connections Seminar she will review the undervalued potential benefits of pessimism, and the often-ignored costs of optimism.  She will argue that understanding the “problem of happiness” depends greatly on our willingness to accept the complexity of individual differences and contextual influences on human endeavors.

February 7
Jeff Ferrell, Ph.D., Professor of Criminal Justice, Texas Christian University
"Happiness is a Warm Dumpster"
St. Francis Room, Ketchum Library, UC Campus, 12-1 pm

Jeff Ferrell earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently Professor in the Department of Sociology, Criminal Justice, and Anthropology at Texas Christian University, and Visiting Professor of Criminology at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. He is the author of Crimes of Style (Garland, 1993; Northeastern University Press, 1996), Tearing Down the Streets (Palgrave/Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 2001/2002), Empire of Scrounge (New York University Press, 2006), and, with Keith Hayward and Jock Young, Cultural Criminology: An Invitation (Sage, London, forthcoming). He is also the co-editor of the books Cultural Criminology (Northeastern University Press, 1995), Ethnography at the Edge (Northeastern University Press, 1998), Making Trouble (Aldine de Gruyter, 1999), and Cultural Criminology Unleashed (Routledge/Cavendish/Glasshouse, 2004).  Dr. Ferrell is the founding and current editor of the New York University Press book series Alternative Criminology, and one of the founding and current editors of the journal Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal (Sage, London), winner of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers’ 2006 Charlesworth Award for Best New Journal. In 1998 he received the Critical Criminologist of the Year Award from the Division of Critical Criminology of the American Society of Criminology.    In his Core Connections lecture Ferrell will discuss the perspectives gained from mixing free-form survival, adventure, and field research when he resigned a tenured professorship and spent a year living as a dumpster diver.  A year of dumpster diving revealed an astounding assortment of discarded objects, new and old—but it revealed even more about contemporary consumerism, and its false promises of happiness and fulfillment.

March 4
Pamela Stone, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, Hunter College
"Women, Careers, and Family: The Rhetoric and Reality of “Opting Out”"
St. Francis Room, Ketchum Library, UC Campus, 12-1 pm

Pamela Stone is professor of sociology at Hunter College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has written widely on such topics as gender inequality in employment, occupational classification and measurement, job segregation, pay equity, and the work-family interface. Her research has been supported by a variety of funders including the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Sloan Foundation. Former chair of the Department of Sociology at Hunter, Stone was the recipient of a Public Policy Fellowship at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, where she also served as associate director of the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute. She is currently a fellow of Hunter’s Gender Equity Project, supported by NSF’s ADVANCE program, the goal of which is to promote women in science. Her recent book, Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (University of California Press, May 2007), has been featured on NBC’s “Today” and “Weekend Today,” “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,” and “ABC World News Tonight,” among other TV and radio appearances, and she has been widely quoted in such publications as Time, USA Today, US News & World Report, Newsweek, and More. An honors graduate of Duke University, Stone received her PhD in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Stone will focus her Core Connections seminar on the topic of "Women, Careers, and Family: The Rhetoric and Reality of “Opting Out.”"

Useful Links:
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/genderequity/
GEPAssociates/stone.html
http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/socio/
faculty/stone.html

March 31
Eric Hooglund, Ph.D., Visiting Professor, Bates College
"Iranian Conceptions of and Attitudes Toward Happiness”
St. Francis Room, Ketchum Library, UC Campus, 12-1 pm

Bates Visiting Professor of Politics and Maine native Eric Hooglund sees his classroom as a forum in which students can confront stereotypes about Muslim countries and Islam by learning about the diverse societies and complex politics that characterize a region popularly known as the Islamic world and too often is portrayed, especially in the media, as a potentially threatening monolith. His background includes 30 years of research, teaching, and writing about the domestic politics and international relations of countries in the Middle East and also of U.S. foreign policy toward that region.

His particular expertise is Iran, a country in which he is one of very few American scholars who continues to undertake field research. Prior to coming to Bates, Hooglund taught at several universities, including Bowdoin College, the University of Shiraz in Iran, Ohio State University in Columbus, the University of California at Berkeley, St Antony’s College at Oxford University, and Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Since 1995, he has been the editor of Critique: Critical Middle East Studies, a unique scholarly journal that examines issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and religion in the history and politics of the Middle East.

In addition to writing more than 100 articles and book chapters about the history, politics and society of Iran and other Middle Eastern countries, he is the author or contributing editor of the following books: Land and Revolution in Iran (University of Texas Press, 1982); Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic (with Nikki Keddie, Syracuse University Press, 1986); Crossing the Waters: Arabic-Speaking Immigration to the United States before 1940 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987); Twenty Years of Islamic Revolution (Syracuse University Press, 2002); and Encyclopaedia of the Modern Middle East, 2nd ed., 4 volumes (with Philip Mattar, et al, Thomsen-Gale, 2004). Currently he is writing a book about Iran and the international community for Polity Press of Cambridge.