Life at Massey College
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HE MASSEY JUNIOR FELLOWS Lecture WIDEN (Workshops for Interdiscipline Exchange and Novelty) series had another banner year in 2013-2014 under the guidance of the Junior Fellows Lecture Series Committee: co-chairs Christopher Maddison and Diana Withrow, and committee members John Anderson, Ashiq Aziz, Catherine Brown,
Junior Fellows Lecture WIDEN Series
Si Yue Guo, Ana Komparic, Elizabeth Krasner, Ruth Maddeaux, Johanna Pokorny, Meghna Rajaprakash, Julia Roy, Irina Sadovina, and Connor Sebestyen. At each of the monthly sessions (listed below in chronological order of their presentation), three Junior Fellows focused on a common theme to discuss their research and find out what, if anything, they had in common.
UNDERRATED
CHECKMATE
HEART AND SOUL
Moderator: Senior Fellow Michael Valpy • “African Teenagers – Diamonds in the Rough,” Chizoba Imoka (Educational Administration and International Development Education) • “Language: The Facts You Didn’t Know You Knew,” Ruth Maddeaux (Linguistics) • “Why the Usefulness of Pure Mathematics Should not Be Underrated,” Louis-Philippe Thibault (Mathematics)
Moderator: Senior Fellow Michael Valpy • “Checkmate? From Death Sentences to Mass Amnesties in the Dachau Trials,” Connor Sebestyen (History) • “The Importance of Alternative Sources in Solving Historical Mysteries: A Case Study of the Burial Garb of Eleonora da Toledo,” Kristina Francescutti (History) • “The Edge of Improbability: The Strange Universe of Self-Assembling Systems,” Trevor Plint (Chemical Engineering)
Moderator: Senior Fellow Bill Robson • “Sound and the Soul: Music as Medicine from the Renaissance to the Present,” Roseen Giles (Musicology) • “The Heart of the Matter,” Miles Montgomery (Biomedical Engineering) • “Compassion as Healing in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem “Parzival” and Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, Johanna Rodda (Medieval Studies)
SCIENCE AND FICTION
Moderator: Journalism Fellow Jody Porter • “The Disrupted Dinner Host (in Diabetes),” Ashraf Nahle (Physiology) • “Hosting in Time of Transition: The Case of Bulgarian Constitutional Court in the 1990s,” Peter Pangarov (History) • “The Earth as Host: Environmentalism, Endangered Species Protection, and Canadian Law,” Sara Elcombe (Law)
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Moderator: Senior Resident Sanjay Khanna • “The Cedar Revolution in the Context of Modern Lebanese Patron-Client Relationship,” Amir Abdul Reda (Near East and Middle East Civilization) • “How to Beat the Empire,” Alexander Mosa (Biology) • “The Society of Genes,” Arvid Ågren (Biology)
CONUNDRUMS Moderator: Senior Resident Brian Bitar • “Museums and ‘Difficult’ History: How Do We Exhibit the Unspeakable?,” Anne AhrensEmbleton (Anthropology) • “A Day in the Life: Some Modern Obstacles to the Pursuit of Medieval Philosophy,” Boaz Schuman (Medieval Studies) • “P vs NP; or, the Fate of Creativity,” Chris Maddison (Computer Science)
Moderator: Journalism Fellow José Peralta • “Alien Worlds: The Stuff of Science Fiction?,” Bryn Orth-Lashley (Astronomy and Astrophysics) • “Transhumanism: Does This Mean that Science and Modern Thought Go Out the Window?,” Joanna Pokorny (Anthropology) • “Narrative Medicine as an Antidote for Apathy in Healthcare Workers,” Jesse Kancir (Medicine)
OPEN & SHUT Moderator: Journalism Fellow Amara Bangura • “Plato on the Dangers of Intellectual Openness,” Bryan Reece (Philosophy) • “Use the Force, Luke: Applying the Law to Your Real Life,” Sarah Harland-Logan (Law) • “A Peek into the Massey Pop Machine, and How It Provides Us with Fizzy Delight,” Ruediger Willenberg (Computer Engineering)
THE HOST
SECRETS Moderator: Senior Fellow Kim Stanton • “Secret Plots and Their Debunkers, or Conspiracy Theorists Are Us,” Irina Sadovina (Comparative Literature) • “What Is Quantum Gravity?”, Yiannis Loizides (Mathematics) • “Demystifying Canada’s National Health Insurance: Looking Beyond the Rhetoric, Past and Present,” Ana Komparic (Pharmaceutical Science)
PUBLICATIONS TREVOR COOK, “The Scourge of Plagiary: Perversions of Imitation in the English Renaissance,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 83, 2014: 39-63. NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS, Zeny na Okraji: Tri Zivoty 17. Století, Zuzana Fritschová, trans. Prague: Argo, 2013. (Czech translation of Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives). —, “Histoire du livre, de Lyon à Fez: récit personnel,” Dominique Letellier, trans., in Nouveaux aspects de la culture de l’Imprimé: Questions et perspectives XVe-XVIIe siècle, Grégoire Holtz, ed. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2014: 381-401. SUSAN DELACOURT, Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them. Madeira Parc, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2013. JANICE Du MONT (with D. White), “Sexual Violence: What Does It Take for the World to Care About Women?”, Journal of Public Health, 35, 2013:182-184. —, (with T. Forte), “Intimate Partner Violence Among Women with Mental Healthrelated Activity Limitations: A Canadian Population-based Study,” BMC Public Health, 14, 2013: doi:10.1186/1471-2458-14-51. HOWARD ENGEL, City of Fallen Angels. Toronto: Cormorant, 2014. JUN FANG, China’s Second Capital : Nanjing under the Ming, 1368-1644. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. JACKIE FEKE, “Meta-mathematical Rhetoric: Hero and Ptolemy against the Philosophers,” Historia Mathematica, 41, 2014: 261-276.
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J. CAITLIN FINLAYSON, “Jacobean Foreign Policy, London’s Civic Polity and Squire’s Lord Mayor’s Show, The Tryumphs of Peace (1620),” Studies in Philology, 110, 3, 2013: 584-610. DAVID FORTE, The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, 2d. ed., Washington: Henry Regnery, 2014. —, “Life, Heartbeat, Birth: A Medical Basis for Reform,” Ohio State Law Journal, Vol. 74, 1, 2012. Cleveland-Marshall Legal Studies Paper No. 13-255. URSULA FRANKLIN (in collaboration with Sarah Jane Freeman), Ursula Franklin Speaks: Thoughts and Afterthoughts 1986-2012. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueens University Press, 2014. JOHN FRASER, The Master’s Menagerie: Gaudy Night Bedtime Stories. Toronto: The Quadrangle Society: 2013. JUDITH SKELTON GRANT (with Carl Spadoni), A Bibliography of Robertson Davies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. CHARLOTTE GRAY, The Massey Murder, A Maid, Her Master and The Trial that Shocked a Country. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2013. —, “Prime Minister in Waiting: Can Thomas Mulcair Finish the Project Jack Layton Started?”, The Walrus, November 2013: 34-41. < www.charlottegray.ca/reprints/ Walrus-Nov-2013.pdf > GORDON GRICE (co-ed. with Ian Ellingham), “100 + 25 Years: OAA Perspectives on a Quarter-Century.” Toronto: Ontario Association of Architects, 2014.
To be happy, you must be wise. – George Santayana