April 1, 2010
MEASURING POLITIES, MEASURING BODIES
Medicine, Race, and Social Policy: Eugenics across the United States-Mexico Border in the First Half of the 20th Century
12 – 2 p.m.
Social Sciences Building (SOS) 250

Alexandra Stern (Associate Professor of American Studies, History and Medicine, University of Michigan) discusses some preliminary findings in her current work in progress, titled “Eugenic Sterilization and the Politics of Diagnosis and Classification in 20th Century California.” In this paper, she explores the relationship between eugenic sterilization, psychiatric diagnosis and mental classification in California’s state institutions during the 20^th century. Her work reveals that Mexican-origin patients were disproportionately sterilized in California, above all in feebleminded homes, and situates this history of radicalized and medicalized discrimination in the broader framework of Chicana/o studies and borderlands history. Aiming to generate an interdisciplinary discussion on these topics, several USC College professors from history, anthropology, biology, and American Studies and Ethnicity including Philippa Levine (History), and Roberto Delgado (Anthropology and Biological Sciences) will prepare comments and participate in the discussion.


April 6, 2010
THE COLLEGE COMMONS SIGNATURE EVENT
Lorraine Daston: Order, Wonder, Things
4 – 6 p.m.
Hedco Neuroscience Building (HNB) Auditorium
To secure your spot please RSVP to: Event Code: CC406

Lorraine Daston, historian of science and cultural critic, is the director of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, and the author of some of the most influential works of recent years. Her work on the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early modern science, the emergence of the scientific fact, scientific models, objects of scientific inquiry, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity is consistently groundbreaking and challenging. Most recently, she has begun to think deeply about “things that talk” and “moral and natural orders.” 

In this lecture, she brings her laser intelligence to the idea of mapping and measuring, drawing out the ideas implicit in such central volumes as Wonders and the Order of Nature and Biographies of Scientific Objects, writing a kind of “biography” of our moment in intellectual history.

April 19, 2010
WRITING IN TIME
“Marking Time: On Time and Place in Poetry and Film,” a reading and discussion with Robert Pinsky
Presented by Visions & Voices and The College Commons
4 – 6 p.m.
Doheny Memorial Library 240
To secure your spot please RSVP to: Event Code: CC419

Robert Pinsky is a world-renowned poet, literary critic and translator; his translation of Dante’s Inferno is among the most praised poetical re-imaginings of our time, and his own poetry, including such prize-winning volumes as An Explanation of America, The Figured Wheel and Sadness and Happiness, continues to reach a wide range of readers. A brilliant formalist but also a remarkably thoughtful writer, he has in his most recent work moved even farther afield. In the book-length essay Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town he travels seamlessly from personal history to literary analysis to the incorporation of film — the works of Preston Sturges and Alfred Hitchcock meet up with dazzling insouciance with such writers as William Faulkner, Willa Cather and Thornton Wilder. 

Pinsky is a poet who continues to ask us (and to ask himself) where meaning resides: How do our lives add up, what do they mean, and where are we going? In his work as United States Poet Laureate and the creator of the Favorite Poem Project, he makes all of us take literature more seriously  — and makes us see the way the artistic imagination creates, recreates and transforms the world around us.

In this reading and lecture, he will bring together his work as poet and essayist, much as he brings together the very different media of poetry and film, helping us to map the terrain of the contemporary world and the literature we have inherited. 


April 20, 2010
THE COLLEGE COMMONS SIGNATURE EVENT
The Poetry of California/The Beauty of the World:  A Tribute to Carol Muske-Dukes, Poet Laureate of California
5:30 p.m.
Natural History Museum
To secure your spot please RSVP to: Event Code: CC420

Poet Robert Pinsky joins USC College’s Carol Muske-Dukes (English) in a reading and celebration of the vast diversity of California in language, images and objects, as The College Commons concludes its year of “mapping the world.” We return to the Natural History Museum to add the rich language of poetry to its other dazzling riches, as these brilliant writers open up the world of the west, from migration to the millennium and beyond — the fantasy of Hollywood; the lure of the endless horizon; and the promise of (literary) transformation. 

Events and details subject to change. For more information, email tcc@college.usc.edu.