Upcoming Events
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Taking Responsibility: Europe's role in adressing climate change
2 - 3:20 pm, Location: Shiffman 219
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Saturday, February 11, 2012
The Music of Heinrich Schütz (1585 - 1642)
Slosberg Music Center
7 p.m. symposium, 8:30 p.m. concert
Heinrich Schütz brought German church music to a pinnacle of interpretive depth that would be equaled only by J. S. Bach a hundred years later. Musicology professor Eric Chafe and guests discuss Schütz’s musical interpretation of texts from both Jewish and Christian perspectives. Professional early music singers and instrumentalists join the Brandeis University Chorus, the Chamber Choir and the Early Music Ensemble for a performance of Schütz cantatas. Sarah Mead and James Olesen, directors. Co-sponsored by the Brandeis Arts Council and the Poses Fund.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Documentary film screening "Mother: Caring for 7 Billion"
6:30pm in the Wasserman Cinematheque (Sachar International Center)
Followed by a discussion with Robert Walker, new President of the Population Institute (voice on Capitol Hill since 1969), and Purnima Mane, recently of the UNFPA and now incoming President of Pathfinder International (providing reproductive health services in the developing world since 1957).
The event is being co-sponsored by the School of Science, the Center for German and European Studies, Environmental Studies, Sustainable International Development, Women's and Gender Studies and perhaps (application pending) the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life.
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Tuesday, March 13, 2012
All-Day Symposium "The Grimms in the Digital Age"
with Maria Tatar (Harvard) and Donald Haase (University of Detroit) among others. Symposium will be held in Rapaporte Treasure Hall all day.Thursday, March 22, 2012
Troubling Futures: The Emotional Impact of Climate Change Cinema
with Alexa Weik von Mossner (University of Fribourg and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society)
2 - 3:20 pm, Location: Shiffman 219
Troubling Futures: The Emotional Impact of Climate Change Cinema
Affect and emotion are of central importance to our enjoyment and understanding of film and, as an integral part of human cognition, they also play a major role in our assessment of various risk scenarios. Because of their extraordinary ability to engage audiences emotionally, filmic representations of ecological risk sometimes interact in powerful ways with media reports on real-world events and scientific projections of possible future developments. My talk investigates how, exactly, cinema-released documentaries, such as An Inconvenient Truth and The Age of Stupid, and blockbuster disaster films, such as The Day After Tomorrow, engage viewers emotionally and cognitively in their imagined climate risk scenarios. Drawing on cognitive film theory and the findings of empirical audience response studies, it aims to provide a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of how popular culture texts influence their audiences’ perceptions of the personal, societal, and ecological risks associated with global climate change.
Alexa Weik von Mossner is a literar y and cultural studies scholar with an interest in the relationship between cultural texts and the environment. She is Docteure of American Literature and Culture the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and an Associate at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the LMU Munich. She worked for several years in the German film and television industry as a production manager and later scriptwriter before earning her PhD in Literature at the University of California, San Diego in 2008. She has published articles on ethnic and transnational American literature, postcolonial literature, environmental justice, cosmopolitanism, cognitive ecocriticism, and environmental film. Her current research project focuses on the imagination of global ecological risk scenarios in American popular culture.