With 2023 around the corner, here's a sampling of the many initiatives on the horizon in the Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth. Stay tuned for more details about these and many more activities soon!
Foreign Study Programs Pick Up Speed
Following a pandemic hiatus, Dartmouth's foreign study offerings continue to resume and expand. This winter, professor Brian Chaboyer will lead the Department of Physics and Astronomy's Foreign Study Program to Cape Town, South Africa. The popular trip includes a week at the national observatory of South Africa in Sutherland, four hours north of Cape Town, which is home to the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. Because of the remote location, students will see "a very different view of the night sky than here in Hanover," Chaboyer says, with visibility of more than four times as many stars.
The Religion FSP, now offered biennially, will return to Edinburgh in the fall. Additionally, because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, faculty in the departments of Russian, Government, and the Irving Institute re-envisioned their collaborative program as situated across the Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. "We expect the initial offering of the 'Baltics Language, Energy, and Policy' program will take place during the 2023 summer term,' says John Tansey, executive director of the Frank J. Guarini Institute for International Education.
Intellectual Luminaries Visit Campus
An array of leading scientists and scholars will continue to engage with Dartmouth's academic community, including the distinguished philosopher Michele Moody-Adams, the Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University. The Department of Philosophy will welcome Moody-Adams to deliver its annual Gramlich Lecture on April 12. Moody-Adams' pioneering work explores equality and social justice, moral psychology, and the philosophical implications of gender and race.
Scholars Convene to Push the Boundaries of Discovery
A number of conferences are in the works for 2023, including the Leslie Center's spring humanities institute. With a focus on "Affective Currents: Moving the Environmental Humanities," the institute will be co-directed by Dartmouth faculty Matteo Gilebbi, Damiano Benvegnù, and Laura Ogden. The interdisciplinary program will engage with themes of air and water currents, undercurrents, tides, and streams, both symbolic and material.
From Feb. 16 to 18, the Department of Anthropology will host a conference reflecting on Charles Darwin's impact on the study of human evolution and biological diversity a century and a half after he published The Descent of Man. The event will feature contributors to the book A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin's 'Descent of Man' Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution, which was edited by department chair Jeremy DeSilva.
In May, the Department of Native American and Indigenous Studies will host a symposium marking the 200th anniversary of a major Supreme Court case, Johnson v. McIntosh, which in 1823 introduced the "doctrine of discovery" into US law—"a decision that effectively made Native peoples squatters on their own ancestral homelands," says department chair N. Bruce Duthu. The symposium will feature a screening of a new documentary on the discovery doctrine by Gwendolyn Cates.
Cutting-Edge Artists Interface with Students
On Wednesday, Jan. 11, at 6 p.m., the Department of English and Creative Writing will host a reading featuring three writers from The Best American Essays 2022, which was edited by professor and acclaimed writer Alexander Chee: Ryan Bradley, Naomi Jackson, and Justin Torres. (Read a Q&A with Chee about the book.)
On Thursday, Jan. 12, at 7:30 p.m., the Neukom Institute will present a reading of 2022 Neukom Playwright Winner Matthew Libby's Sisters in the Hinman Forum, Room 105 in Dartmouth Hall. A partnership between the Neukom Institute, the Department of Theater, and Northern Stage, the annual Neukom playwriting award considers full-length works for the theater that address the question, "What does it mean to be a human in a computerized world?"
Innovative Public Programs Engage Community
The Rockefeller Center is working with students in the Dartmouth Political Union to produce a "Democracy Summit" in 2023 with public events across campus. Proposed topics for the summit include threats to democracy in the United States and around the world as well as the future of journalism, free speech, the rule of law, and election administration.
On Wednesday, Feb. 15, the Comparative Literature Program will host an event featuring translations by local, faculty, and student translators in the Treasury Room of Dartmouth Library—a fitting program in light of the department's new offering of a minor in translation studies.
Among many other community initiatives, the Department of Mathematics' "Biographies of Contemporary Women In Mathematics" essay contest challenges middle and high school students in the Upper Connecticut River Valley (and Dartmouth undergraduates) to showcase women mathematicians, physicists, and engineers in compelling prose.