FRIAS Colloquium

The rise of the policy of “Indian removal”— the deadly expulsion of tens of thousands of Native Americans from eastern North America in the first half of the nineteenth century—transformed the United States. This talk revisits removal and reassesses its origins. Facing east from modern-day Missouri and Arkansas, it suggests that the St. Louis Superintendency, a regional unit for Indian affairs administration, played an important but largely uncredited role in shaping the series of events leading to the violent consolidation of eastern Native nations west of the Mississippi River.

Date: 28 April 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Robert Lee, History, University of Cambridge

Multiple interacting factors are driving declines in populations and communities of pollinators across the world.  Many of these factors are associated with landscape conditions, including poor nutrition due to reduced abundance and diversity of flowering plant species, unintended negative impacts of pesticide use, increased disease pressure in areas with high population densities of managed bees, and changing climate.  Our studies have demonstrated that access to improved nutrition can improve outcomes for bees exposed to diverse stressors, and thus we have been exploring bee nutritional ecology and strategies to improve pollinator forage and habitat in diverse landscapes.  Additionally, through several studies which leveraged long-term and large-scale data sets of honey bee and wild bee populations, we identified the most important land use and weather factors that are associated with honey bee colony growth, honey production and and mortality, as well as wild bee abundance and diversity.  Interestingly, weather conditions in previous years and seasons are a significant driver of bee health, likely due to impacts on the growth of flowering plants.  We are developing artificial-intelligence enabled automated monitoring systems to improve our ability to monitor bee species and community dynamics, to allow us to build more comprehensive and predictive models to better support management decisions.  Through the Beescape decision support tool, we are seeking to make information on landscape quality for bees accessible to the public, policymakers and a broad range of stakeholder groups. 

For more information, please see:

Penn State Center for Pollinator Research website: https://pollinators.psu.edu/

INSECT NET Graduate Training Program: https://insectnet.psu.edu/

Beescape website: https://pollinators.psu.edu/bee-health/beescape Penn State Honey and Pollen Diagnostic Lab: https://pollinators.psu.edu/research/the-penn-state-honey-and-pollen-diagnostic-lab

Date: 5 May 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Christina Grozinger, Entomology, Pennsylvania State University

This presentation will address the emergence of the colonial alphabet used to write Kaqchikel Mayan in the 16^th century. Developed by the Spanish Franciscan Friar Francisco de la Parra, it was partly inspired by the Arabic script. I discuss Parra’s engagement with Arabic and the influence of Antonio de Nebrija’s protolinguistics in developing a written one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes in colonial alphabets in the Maya Highlands. As an example, I examine the adaptation of Parra’s alphabet to Ixil, a Mamean language for which it was not originally designed. I consider also the appropriation of Parra’s alphabet by the Maya, and the Kaqchikel texts used by Parra’s Kaqchikel elite collaborators to teach the alphabet to Maya scribes. The circulation of alphabetic writing was mediated by divergent Maya and Spanish metalinguistic representations of sound and text, which I will also address in my conclusion.

Date: 12 May 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Sergio Romero, Linguistic Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

Chemical synthesis is fundamental to the development of medications, serving as the engine behind the creation and optimization of pharmacologically active molecules. Medicinal chemists design and synthesize new compounds with the potential to treat various medical conditions, striving to enhance therapeutic efficacy while minimizing adverse effects.

This process relies on a thorough understanding of the relationship between a molecule’s structure and its biological activity, known as structure-activity relationships (SAR). Because a molecule’s structure governs how it interacts with biological systems, insights into SAR are essential for designing drugs that are both safe and effective. Without chemical synthesis, the development of reliable and efficacious medications would be virtually impossible. Ultimately, it is a cornerstone of modern healthcare, enabling the introduction of new therapies and the improvement of existing ones, thereby benefiting patients around the globe.

Date: 19 May 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Debabrata Maiti, Chemistry / Catalysis, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai

In this paper I examine how the Zen Buddhist tradition has conceived of the relation between intellectual knowledge and holistic wisdom. I begin with some reflections on Aristotle and the history of Western philosophy and raise the question of whether, in modern times, philo-sophia has become more narrowly philo-epistemē. I then look to the Zen Buddhist tradition for an alternative conception of knowledge and wisdom and the relation between them. Drawing on and developing both Mahāyāna Buddhist and Daoist philosophy, the Zen tradition has not only questioned the limits but also elucidated the delimiting nature of knowledge. Moreover, Zen practice has aimed at awakening a wisdom with regard to when, where, and how to employ this or that perspectivally delimited form of knowledge.

Date: 26 May 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Bret Davis, Philosophy, Loyola University Maryland

Dokumentationszentrum Nationalsozialismus

We will meet at the FRIAS main entrance at 12:30h to walk to the museum together.

Date: 6 June 2025

Time: 12:30 – 14:30

This presentation will introduce FRIAS members to the work of the FRIAS Project Group “Post-War Periods”, which brings together scholars of law, history and literature to study post-war times from a trans-epochal and trans-cultural perspective.

It treats post-war periods as an ambivalent and heterogeneous phenomenon and is interested in how narratives, semantics, practices, legal concepts, images and artifacts play a role in the – highly diverse – cultural constructions of post-war periods. In addition, the project group focuses on the temporality of post-war conditions. To what extent are they seen as a purely transitory phenomenon between war and peace, and when can they be perceived as a (historical) “period” sui generis? In our presentation, we will focus on concepts and practices of reconstruction in physical as well as emotional, artistic-literary and legal terms by comparing early-modern and modern post-war societies in an exemplary way.

Date: 16 June 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
FRIAS Project Group Post-war Periods

Roller skates and Return of the Jedi. Leg warmers and Michael Jackson. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. AIDS and Chernobyl. “Live Aid” and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 1980s were a decade full of neon colors and existential angst, fears of nuclear war and popular protests for peace. Mix tapes and video cassettes circulated as Glasnost and Perestroika fueled legions of Soviet hippies and metal heads. Hip Hop, roller skating, and aerobics conquered the globe while Bruce Springsteen traveled east for a rock concert in Radrennbahn Weissensee in in July 1988. Donald Trump was still building gaudy casinos while the Walkman made our music portable for the first time. My new book project will consist of a series of interrelated essays on the cultural zeitgeist of the 1980s from six countries on either side of the East-West Divide: The USA, the USSR, the FRG, the GDR, the Republic of Ireland, and the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. Although politics and economics divided the citizens of these countries, a new global popular culture brought them closer together. Rather than focusing on official rhetoric or political narratives of the 1980s, my ethnographic study will rely on primary source analysis, archival research, and oral histories to paint a vibrant picture of popular culture and everyday life among populations living through the final decade of the Cold War. 

Date: 23 June 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Kristen Ghodsee, Anthropology/Gender Studies/East European Studies, Bowdoin College

The 6^th/12^th century Muslim scholar Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī is known for his synthesis between Islamic theology (kalām) and philosophy (falsafa). A close analysis of al-Rāzī’s legal thought shows that he is not just a theoretical thinker but also a pragmatist when it comes to Islamic law (fiqh). This talk presents three areas of al-Rāzī’s legal thought, namely his epistemology, his understanding of legal analogy (qiyās), and his interpretation of divine command (amr). Analysis of these three areas display how al-Rāzī, on the one hand, provides stability to the epistemological framework in which the divine law operates and to its methodology, and, on the other hand, uses accepted legal mechanisms and linguistic interpretations that allow for flexibility in interpretation the content of the revealed law. He thereby contributed to the success of the theological-jurisprudential approach, exemplified by Ashʿarism, that claims an all-encompassing divine law that is able to coherently address all matters of human experience within the confines of Scripture. This system allows the religious law to provide a stable social order that nevertheless attends to the flexibility needed to accommodate legal change and different interpretations of Scripture.

Date: 30 June 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Felicitas Opwis, Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

This paper examines the concept of miracle as expounded by a twentieth century South Asian Muslim exegete Abdul Majid Daryabadi in his English and Urdu Quranic exegetical works. His work is significant in the milieu of the influx of Quranic exegesis, in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on reconciliation of science and religion in the Indian sub-continent in particular and the Muslim world in general. His approach towards miracles is essentially rooted in Islamic epistemology which articulates the reality of nature against the backdrop of the ontology of divine creation. He posits that God is above nature and laws of nature and His agency is absolute, transcending the causative means so nothing is unusual for Him. Man is limited by the laws of nature and causative agencies so every natural phenomenon is miraculous to him, being the sign of God. He resolves the conflict of prophetic miracles with the laws of nature by shifting the locus of the agency from prophets to God as “no miracle, however clear its evidentiary value, is ever an act of a mortal”. Differentiating between the ‘occurrence’ and ‘possibility’, he explains that in the divine realm every occurrence is contingent and it is God’s will that chooses a particular event over other infinite possibilities hence every miracle is a possibility even if it occurs once. He discards the attempts to reconcile the narrative of miracles with the scientific explanations by inferring from the Quran that God is the ‘author’ of laws of nature (operative methods of God) so He is not bound by these laws in His acts. This research paper explores the specific debates and challenges surrounding the concept of miracles in the 20th century, particularly within South Asian Muslim thought and highlights the uniqueness of Daryabadi’s stance. It further analyses that how does Daryabadi’s concept of God’s agency relate to other theological perspectives on divine action, signs of God and miracles?

Date: 7 July 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Ayesha Qurrat ul Ain, Religious Studies, International Islamic University Islamabad

‘Empathic AI’ is being adopted in clinics as a means of offloading some of the work of clinician-patient encounters. Indeed, a recent study reported that generative large-language models were perceived as being more empathetic than human physicians. I argue that encounters between AI chatbots and patients lack an essential feature of good clinical encounters – recognition. More fundamental than empathy, Hegelian recognition is a precondition for features such as honesty and respect for autonomy that are central tenets of medical ethics. I argue that patients have a justified expectation of mutual recognition in a clinical encounter, and that given specific limitations of AI chatbots, this justified expectation cannot be met by AI chatbots. Problematically, however, AI chatbots are designed to mimic human expressions of recognition, resulting in an alienating absurdity at the heart of ‘empathic AI’. Beyond being a mere philosophical curiosity, this fundamental incoherence must be directly addressed if AI chatbots are to take on roles in clinical encounters.

Date: 14 July 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Karola Kreitmair, Bioethics / Philosophy, University of Wisconsin

A cochlear implant’s ability to restore hearing to a deaf person is due to a ‘perfect storm’. The cochlea is exquisitely arranged like a piano with ‘tonotopic mapping’, where the location of a key corresponds to the tone it produces. Electrical impulses from a cochlear implant elicit tones corresponding to electrode positions within the cochlea. With as few as 12 electrodes, a child born deaf can live their life in the hearing world. 

This exquisite arrangement is absent in other neural disorders, meaning that many hundreds or thousands of electrodes are needed to deliver meaningful benefit. This presentation will describe the findings of the FRIAS/FRESCO NERRV Project that may provide a solution to this complex challenge.

Date: 21 July 2025

Time: 15:00 – 16:00

Speaker:
Gregg Suaning, Neuroprotheses, The University of Sydney