Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Each Friday during the Fall and Spring academic semesters, a faculty volunteer gives a 30 minute lunchtime talk on her/his scholarship and/or teaching practices. Faculty members are invited to learn a little more about their colleagues, chat with others that attend the presentations, and enjoy a wonderful buffet lunch. Talks start at 12:30 p.m. and are usually over a little past 1 p.m.

The event is sponsored by the Office of Academic and Faculty Affairs.

Fall 2024 Schedule

Nov 22   Michelle Martin-Baron (Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectional Justice) and Susan Pliner (Associate Provost)

Reflections on the Two-year FSEM Pilot

Our FSEM program offers the one course that is common to all students at HWS. In the last two years, in collaboration with Orientation, Student Life, the Dean's Office, Admissions, and Housing, we've piloted substantive changes to how we integrate first-year students into our campus community. Within the FSEM program itself, we've piloted changes to course enrollment, advising, outreach, the calendar, communications, mentorship models, and more. The results have already begun to pay off, with a significant reduction of our summer melt numbers (down to 8.22% from 12.5% the previous year) and mounting qualitative evidence about increased confidence and belonging for first-year students.  In this presentation, Susan Pliner, Associate Provost of Academic Faculty Affairs and Strategic Initiatives and Michelle Martin-Baron, Chair of the Committee on Academic First-Year experience, will showcase these changes, their impact, and what's next for continuing to enhance the first-year experience. 

Nov 15   Matt Crow (History)

Auden and Arendt on Melville and Mercy

Late in life, the poet W.H. Auden and the political theorist Hannah Arendt corresponded on what role, if any, mercy and related ideas should play in law and politics. Auden thought it essential, while Arendt thought it a dangerous breach of the wall separating the human city of law and politics from the state of nature and necessity outside it. Of course, the differences reflect their respective identities as Anglican and Jewish thinkers, but the origins of their dialogue might also have a more specific provenance: their radically different readings of Herman Melville’s short story, Billy-Budd. I’ll talk about HWS’s own connection to this story, and then share this, the conclusion of my recently completed second book manuscript, Even in the Lawless Seas: Legal Imagination and Oceanic History in the World of Herman Melville.

Nov 8   Katie Flowers (CCESL) and Christopher Lavin (Boys & Girls Club of Geneva)

LEAPS: Faculty Engagement Sought to Further Support Children in Our Community  (Learning and Enrichment After School Programs)

The Geneva community received a New York State grant of $900,000 to launch LEAPS (Learning and Enrichment After School Programs Support), a five-year initiative in collaboration with the Boys & Girls Club of Geneva. The program aims to address root causes of poor school attendance and academic performance by coordinating with community organizations to tackle issues like nutrition, mental health, and access to after-school tutoring. The grant will be facilitated by the Boys and Girls Club, and aims to engage partners including Geneva 2030, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva General Hospital, Cornell AgriTech, among others.  Panelists will outline plans and collaborative opportunities for HWS academic departments in the short and longer term.

Nov 1   Michael Dobkowski, Blaize Gervais, and Richard Salter (Religious Studies)

The March: Bearing Witness to Hope—Reflections on this Unique Student Learning Experience

Since 2002 the Colleges have offered this 9-10 day study trip to Germany and Poland. The program involves visits to museums, memorials and monuments that focus on the once thriving Jewish cultural centers in Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin as well as the vibrant life in smaller towns and cities, that were destroyed during the Holocaust. We walk through the death camps of Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto, as well as other important historic sites that provide insight into what existed before and what was tragically decimated.  We try to help the students enter back into history, process those “silent places,” uncover “traces of memory,” and become, as one of our colleagues suggests, “memory pilgrims.” We are assisted by experienced educators and have been privileged to be accompanied by Holocaust survivors who help us move away from depersonalized and abstract narratives and see a particular face, a story, connected to tragedy and loss but also, maybe most importantly, to the resilience of the human spirit. Hence the hope… Many are left with the commitment to bring back to our campus and communities the insights and inspiration generated by the experience.

OCT 25   Louis H. Guard (Vice-President and General Counsel) & Joyce P. Jacobsen (Economics)

All the Campus Lawyers: Litigation, Regulation, and the New Era of Higher Education

Not so long ago, colleges and universities had little interaction with the law. In the 1970s, only a few well-heeled universities even employed in-house legal counsel. But the pressures of regulation, litigation, and legislation have fostered a new era in higher education, and institutions must know how to respond. Based on a forthcoming paper in the American Bar Association’s journal The Urban Lawyer and on our recent book (All the Campus Lawyers: Litigation, Regulation, and the New Era of Higher Education, Harvard University Press, 2024), we discuss the latest legal and regulatory developments affecting higher education as well as how we got to this point.

OCT 18   Robin Murphy (Environmental Studies)

"Trans*ing the Death Drive in the Graphic Novel Adaptation of Parable of the Sower"

This paper argues that Octavia Butler’s apocalyptic cult, the Pyros—whose identity is tied to arson as an orgiastic release—embodies the unchecked death drive, and reflects the novel’s broader apocalypse in which socio-political breakdown mirrors environmental devastation, and vice versa. However, while the Pyros represent the death drive in its most destructive form, protagonist Lauren Olamina’s Earthseed, fueled by her hyperempathy, embodies the potential to harness that same drive to confront the existential threats of climate change. Through Earthseed, Butler offers a speculative yet pragmatic blueprint for how the death drive can be redirected toward a sustainable and just future.

OCT 11   Ervin Kosta & Piper Polga (sociology)

Articulating FLX: Winemaking, Cultural Wealth, and Landscape Representation in the Finger Lakes

(This talk outlines research conducted by this summer by a research team sponsored through the Mentored Research Opportunity program). Sociological literature has explored interconnections between place-branding and economic growth at multiple levels, from the neighborhood to the city, from the regional to the national level. We were intrigued by winemaking, a simultaneously pre-industrial and post-industrial, agricultural and craft production industry, and its role in the historical articulation of a regional economic cluster, as well as place-identity for the FLX. Through content/media analysis and in-depth interviews with upwards of thirty winemakers, tasting room managers, winery owners and employees, and regional marketing organizations, we attempted to understand the genesis of the latest era of the coming of age of winemaking in the region, as well as its tight coupling with tourism as a larger branding strategy of economic development in the region. While our research has produced far more data than we could hope to analyze amidst a busy semester, we will discuss preliminary findings of how the Finger Lakes transitioned from being known as the land of crowd-pleasing sweet wines from native grapes, to “world class” dry wines like Riesling, Gewurztraminer, etc. We discuss how the region sees itself at a crossroads, revealing wider contestations over the future direction of development in the Finger Lakes.

OCT 4   Stephanie Anglin (Psychological Science)

Scientist and Non-scientist Perceptions of Issues in Research Practice

Widely publicized cases of research misconduct and replication failures have raised concerns about the scientific conduct and reputation of psychology and other fields. Although research has examined psychologists’ perceptions of issues in psychology research and public perceptions of replication failures and questionable research practices, to our knowledge, studies have not compared scientist and non-scientist perceptions of issues in research practice across different science disciplines. This study investigated scientist (n=1287) and non-scientist (n=2673) perceptions of issues in psychology, medicine, computer science, and overall scientific research practice. Scientists and non-scientists agreed on what constitutes some issues (e.g., sample size) but not others (e.g., replication). Scientists rated the prevalence of some issues as lower than non-scientists (e.g., research misconduct), and others as higher (e.g., selective reporting). Overall, participants perceived the issues to be prevalent in 36% of published research from the past decade, with the lowest prevalence ratings for computer science. Greater perceived prevalence of issues was associated with less support for research in each field. This work suggests a need to improve the conduct and public image of scientific research and psychology’s potential to collaborate with other fields to address these issues.

SEPT 27   Alden Gassert (IRP)

An introduction to our first-year students --- First-year survey results

Every year, during orientation week, our incoming first-year students take the CIRP First-year survey.  I'll share some of the results and highlight recent trends. 

SEPT 20   Feisal Khan (Economics, International Relations, and Asian Studies)

The Pakistan Puzzle or How is Participatory Islamic Finance Possible?

Islamic Banking and Finance (IBF) advocates relentlessly promote it as a more inclusive and less rapacious (“participatory”) alternative to conventional finance as IBF ostensibly eschews interest-based, collateralized debt in favor of Profit and Loss Sharing (PLS, aka Islamic venture capitalism) that “invests” in a wide range of economically beneficial activities and expands the pool of eligible beneficiaries.

IBF’s critics have long argued that it is “a distinction without a difference” that uses close analogues of conventional financial products, and direct equity participation (PLS) is an insignificant part of IBF.

However, between 2006–2020, Pakistani Islamic banks seemingly successfully transitioned away from conventional debt-analogue “Islamic” financial products to PLS financing. How was this achieved in Pakistan but not in the rest of the Muslim world’s Islamic banks?  Is very large-scale Islamic venture capitalism actually possible? If so, why only in Pakistan? Or is there something else going on?

SEPT 13   Sooyoung Lee (Economics)

The Effect of Local Content Requirements on Imports: Evidence from Canada’s Renewable Energy Sector

This paper investigates whether local content requirements (LCRs), imposed by the Green Energy Act of 2009 as an eligibility condition for generous feed-in tariffs to renewable energy producers, discourage renewable-energy-generation equipment imports in Ontario, Canada. While Canadian provinces have similar domestic importing conditions and overlapping renewable energy procurement policies, Ontario uniquely attached the LCR to a price-based procurement policy. Such similarities result in comparable pre-trends in equipment imports between Ontario and other provinces, which allows causal analysis of LCRs on imports. Empirical analyses using provincial import statistics find evidence of a reduction in importing products non-exclusive to renewable energy generation (i.e., tower materials or electronic control equipment.) The import reductions due to Ontario’s LCRs in the wind energy sector incurred a deadweight loss that increased the implicit operation costs of the feed-in tariff program by 0.86 percent. However, there is little evidence that LCRs decreased imports of the main renewable-energy-generation equipment (i.e., solar photovoltaic modules or wind turbine gearboxes), which suggests that Ontario’s LCRs were ineffective in increasing domestic production capacity for sophisticated renewable-energy-generation equipment.

SEPT 6   Lisa Yoshikawa (History & Asian Studies)

The Great Barrier Reef of northwestern Pacific?: Biological Coral Research in the Japanese Empire

Corals and their reefs, as home to a quarter of marine diversity including the seafood we and other animals consume, are crucial to our planet and world. These corals are now threatened due to anthropogenic causes and saving them has become a priority. To this end, understanding of coral biology is critical, yet this science is barely a century old with the bulk of research taking place in the post WWII decades. The history of this field is often traced to the interwar Low Isles Expedition, aka the Great Barrier Reef Expedition led by Charles Maurice Yonge (1899-1986). Under Imperial Japan, the biological turn happened earlier, however, first in the raw precious coral industry that the empire all but monopolized by the early twentieth century, centered initially in southern Japan and soon thereafter in northern colonial Taiwan. Imperial Japanese scientists followed up with research in the colonial Palau Tropical Biology Station that the government established in the mid-1930s. This talk examines the empire’s early evolution of biological coral studies, shaped in part by Pacific imperialist politics, zoogeographical distribution of corals determined in part by the Kuroshio, the empire’s natural resource availability that impacted colonial science priorities, and more. 

AUG 30   Kazim Ali (Trias Writer-in-Residence)

Strangers Talk to Me About My Hair: How a Poem Wanders Away 

This year's Trias Resident Kazim Ali will discuss the essential slipperiness of a poem. What is a poem ever "about"? Ali contends that the strongest and most interesting poems are ones that evade becoming fixed points, with stable relationships of speaker to subject or writer to reader. By reading some of his own work and several poems from 19th and 20th Century American writers, Ali tries to make an argument that all poems, in the phrase of Langston Hughes, wonder as they wander.