March 4, 2010
AT THE EDGE OF EMPIRE
Central Europe under Communism:  Material and Consumer Cultures
4 p.m.
Wende Museum, 5741 Buckingham Parkway, Suite E, Culver City

The Wende Museum, a fascinating collection of ephemera from the world of East Germany, is the venue for a roundtable discussion of daily life and consumer culture under Communism with Justinian Jampol (Director, Wende Museum), and Wolf Gruner (Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History, USC College).


March 11, 2010
The Spiritual Life of Plants
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Animals (But Were Afraid to Ask Vegetables)
Guest Speaker: Timothy Morton, Professor of English (Literature and the Environment) and UC, Davis.
4 – 6 p.m.
Doheny Memorial Library 240

March 23, 2010
TRANSNATIONAL CHARISMA AND TRAVELING SPIRITS
Thomas Csordas, UCSD  “Charismatic Healing and Transnational Transcendence”
12 - 2 p.m.
University Club

March 23, 2010
THE CULTURAL LIFE OF OBJECTS
Sensing the Gods:  Materiality, Perception, and the Divine
3 - 6 p.m.
Location to be announced

How do material objects and spaces communicate and create knowledge about the divine? USC College’s James McHugh (Religion) and Lisa Bitel (History and Gender Studies) join Yale University’s Milette Gaifman (Classics and History of Art) in a discussion that moves beyond the strictly visual study of sacred images to investigate how the sacred is perceived by a wide range of bodily senses and understood through the material world of things. 


March 26, 2010
Beyond Neural Cartography, Mapping the Social Brain
8:30 a.m. - 4:15 p.m.
Hedco Neuroscience Building (HNB) Auditorium

What does it mean to “map the brain”? Despite the intuitive explanatory power behind maps as a basic functional neural unit and the proposition that they “underlie the derivation of the computational principles that govern sensory processing and the generation of perception,” we still do not know if the topographic maps of the brain are incidental or functionally essential to brain organization in health and disease. This symposium organized by USC College’s Tansu Celikel (Neuroscience), gathers scientists to discuss the proposition that topographical organization of the brain is essential to brain organization. Speakers include: USC College’s Judith Hirsch (Biological Sciences), UCSD’s David Kleinfeld (Physics), UCLA’s Dario Ringach (Behavioral Neuroscience),  UC Berkeley’s Friedrich T. Sommer (Neuroscience).

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