November 3, 2009 THE COLLEGE COMMONS SIGNATURE EVENT Inventing Novel Networks:  Weather, Telegraphs, Railways and Novels 4 - 6 p.m. Doheny Memorial Library 240 To secure your spot please RSVP to:Event Code: CC1103

We think of ourselves as the first networked age — for the Internet promised to bring us together, to make a world without space and time, without borders, without difference. But a variety of devices, ranging from the railway to the telegraph to the telephone, made similar promises in the 19th century, and, not incidentally, promised to end war and bring an end to poverty. These devices did no such thing — but they did, miraculously, offer a new world of communication and understanding.

How have networks changed our understanding of the world? How do they map us — or do we map them? This program offers two brilliant examples: the first, the telegraph, which brought media technology to thousands of people suddenly able to send information faster than the fastest runner; the second, the railroad, which offered a new social network as well as rapid movement around the British isles. The wide-ranging discussion will feature University of Georgia's Richard Menke (English), author of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems, and UCLA's Jonathan Grossman (English), author of The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel. The two experts will join USC College's Hilary Schor in a discussion of the literature of technological transformation and the invention of the machinery of intimacy and innovation.

November 5, 2009 AT THE EDGE OF EMPIRE Spaces, Borders and Boundaries in Central Europe and Beyond 4 - 6 p.m. Doheny Memorial Library, Intellectual Commons RSVP to lrogers@usc.edu or (213)740-1653

This event brings together a panel of experts including Swarthmore’s Pieter Judson (History) and Harvard University’s Alison Frank (History) to discuss questions of empire and its repercussions, particularly on national identity, in the nations and spaces of central and eastern Europe. Can European empires within Europe be approached with the same conceptual tools as Europeans’ overseas empires? How do postcolonial studies contribute to our understanding of European borderlands in places like Croatia, Galicia or Geoa which lay at the edge of empires and nation building projects? How have literary and cultural movements in eastern and central Europe reflected and engaged with the imperial power? And finally, how does the imperial past shed light on the ethnic and political tensions that have roiled Europe since the end of the Soviet era?

November 6, 2009 THE COLLEGE COMMONS SIGNATURE EVENT Human Time, Geological Time:  Discrepancies and Adaptations Seminar 2 – 4 p.m. Hedco Neuroscience Building Auditorium To secure your spot please RSVP to:Event Code: CC1106

Do you know what time it is? USC College’s Lawford Anderson (Earth Sciences), David Bottjer (Earth Sciences) and Karen Pinkus (French and Italian, and Comparative Literature) ask us to consider the dis junctures between human time and geological time. How do humans fathom geological time and how have they adapted to the land in ways that reflect their relative degrees of thoughtfulness about this? This is one of the major issues in thinking about climate change (whether we look into the future or try to understand the past) and it is one of the central questions of how we measure “where we are” in time.

November 7, 2009 THE COLLEGE COMMONS SIGNATURE EVENT Human Time, Geological Time:  The Tour Bus will depart at 9:00 a.m. Bus Tour all around Los Angeles To secure your spot please RSVP to:Event Code: CC1106

Professors Anderson, Bottjer and Pinkus lead a bus trip to observe the range of time around us in Los Angeles, with stops at Silverado Canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains, the Laguna Beach area and Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area, visiting fossils and oil pumps, and discussing geological change, energy sources and land use along the way. 

November 10, 2009 TRANSNATIONAL CHARISMA AND TRAVELING SPIRITS Asian Religions in Transnational Perspective Janet Hoskins: “Spirits You See in the Mirror:  Possession Rituals in OC and Vietnam” Jane Iwamura: “Virtual Buddhas and  Asian Religions in Mass Media” 12 - 2 p.m. University Club RSVP to timothys@usc.edu or (213) 740-8562

Janet Hoskins: "The Spirits You See in the Mirror: Spirit Possession in Orange County and in Vietnam"
Respondent: Jane Iwamura, Religion/American Studies and Ethnicity

This paper draws on recent fieldwork and videotaping of rituals in both California and Vietnam to ask what is represented by the mirror that the spirit medium gazes into, and why that mirror is also a required object on all altars to "the mother goddesses" whose worship has just had a great resurgence in contemporary Vietnam, and is also practiced in diasporic communities in California and France. The significance of the mirror in a particular ritual context is explored in relation to wider questions of how rituals may serve to alter notions of identity, to imbue particular persons with a sense of connectedness to ancestral predecessors, and to reinforce ethnic identity in the context of displacement, marginalization and exile. Mirrors appear on all Vietnamese altars dedicated to a mother goddess, and may take the place of photographs of ancestors, tablets with Chinese characters, or statues in certain cases. What is really reflected in the mirror — the person making an offering or "serving" the spirits? The invisible essence of the goddess herself? The process of transformation?

Three themes will be developed: (1) the mirror as an emblem of displacement, and the fact that spirit possession is a modality of religious experience in which the body is the carrier of a sacred geography, which is made present through the possession itself, (2) the relation of mirrors to ethnic fluidity ethnic fluidity, and in particular to distinguishing Vietnamese spirits from Chinese ones, "black" goddesses from white ones, and "Asian" spirits form newly racialized alternatives in the California context, (3) the relation of mirrors to gender identity, expressed through forms of cross dressing which also cross borders of age, class and nationality.

Seating is limited to those who RSVP by Monday Nov. 9 to timothys@usc.edu. Paper to be discussed will be emailed to the participants.

November 17, 2009 WRITING IN TIME Russell Banks and Atom Egoyan: The Sweet Hereafter (1997) 6 – 9 p.m. Seely G. Mudd Hall (SGM) 123 To secure your spot please RSVP to:Event Code: CC1117

The award-winning collaboration between novelist Russell Banks and filmmaker Atom Egoyan, examines the effects on a small town of a terrible accident, and the lawsuit that follows. The film probes questions of memory and guilt, and asks, how do we know where the truth lies? Haunting and deeply moving, the film also raises fascinating questions of the adaptations of novels into film.

November 19, 2009 THE CULTURAL LIFE OF OBJECTS From Clay Tablets to Cameras: Objects That Transform 3 – 6 p.m. Doheny Memorial Library 240

This event focuses on objects that record — objects that have, since the beginning of history, accomplished a plurality of purposes, one of which, paradoxically, is the recording of objects.  What is the relationship between this duality and its consequences, starting with the invention of writing as way of ordering the universe to currently evolving forms of communicative technologies? How do the worlds of “writing about objects” and “objects that write” overlap, and what do ancient tablets and camera phones have in common?

Anne Porter, Near Eastern Archaeologist (USC): Cuneiform, Cosmology and Control
Van Dixon, Astronomer (Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute): Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand
Mike Parker Pearson, Old World Archaeologist (University of Sheffield): Megaliths and Henges: Records Before Writing
Michael Arbib, Neuroscientist (USC Brain Project): The Subject as Object

Please click the following link for the Event Program.

November 23, 2009 WRITING IN TIME Russell Banks and Atom Egoyan:  The Scripting of Time Presented by Visions & Voices and The College Commons 7 – 10 p.m. Bovard Auditorium To secure your spot please RSVP to:Event Code: CC1123

Russell Banks is a novelist whose work spans the bleakest of contemporary stories (The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction) and a dazzling piece of historical recreation, Cloudsplitter, his novel recounting John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, the anniversary of which falls in 2009. His novels turn on the understandings and misunderstandings brought by time, as characters return to past actions and challenge each others’ versions of the truth, and it is that sense of the treachery of memory that Atom Egoyan’s films (Calendar, Ararat, Exotica, Adoration) so powerfully evoke, but in his case through an eerie and haunting visual style.

The collaboration between the two resulted in The Sweet Hereafter (1997), widely heralded as one of the most brilliant (if not the most brilliant) film adaptations of all time. The two writers will speak about their individual work, and then we will open a larger conversation about the particular challenges and excitement of writing about history and moving between media.

November 24, 2009 THE COLLEGE COMMONS SIGNATURE EVENT Birthday Party — The Origin of Species and Flock of Dodos Film Screening 4 – 9 p.m. DML 240 To secure your spot please RSVP to:Event Code: CC1124

On November 24, 1859, the world changed, for with the publication of a small volume on that day, the modern world unfurled its banner. The book sold out instantly — and indeed, has never been out of print since — and The Origin of Species is that rare book to be celebrated in everything from t-shirts to bumper-stickers to “monkey trials.”
 
And yet, Darwin's elegant and brilliant volume continues to be the center of enormous controversy — battles over evolution, natural selection and adaptation continue to rile our culture. What’s at stake — why does Darwin still matter so much — and where are the battle-lines being drawn today?
 
USC College faculty, including Professor David Bottjer and Hilary Schor, will join filmmaker and USC alumnus Randy Olson for a discussion of the debates surrounding Darwin in his age and ours, and for a screening of Olson’s film Flock of Dodos which fearlessly and humorously takes on the clash over Evolution and Intelligent Design. Join us for a celebration, a debate, a film, and birthday cake!

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