Professorial Lectures
The Ups and Downs of Building the Chinese and Japanese Studies Program at Valparaiso University
Zhimin Lin, Ph.D. (Department of Political Science)
The Chinese and Japanese Studies Program was founded in 1986 by Professor Keith Schoppa. The Program’s success is a tribute to all the students, faculty, staff, and administrators involved, as…
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From Vinaigrettes to Virtual Cookbooks: Culinary Discourses in Early Modern France
Timothy Tomasik, Ph.D. (Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures)
Why study cookbooks? Early modern French cookbooks have gotten a bad rap. They have been plagued by misconceptions, stereotypes and outright errors that have held on with uncommon tenacity. One…
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What’s in the Water? A Glimpse into the Challenges of Our Most Precious Resource
Julie Peller, Ph.D. (Department of Chemistry)
Clean fresh water is a requirement for all forms of life. Yet water scarcity and water quality are under some level of threat in most places worldwide. Around the Great…
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Crimmigration in Gangland: Race, Crime, and Removal During the Prohibition Era
Geoffrey Heeren, LL.M. (School of Law)
Criminal and immigration law have increasingly merged in a development labeled “crimmigration” by many scholars. This development is constituted by several elements, including a popular preoccupation with “criminal aliens” and…
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Using Things You Can’t See to Study Things You Can’t See
Andrew Richter, Ph.D. (Department of Physics and Astronomy)
How do we see things that are too tiny to actually see? One way is to use beams of x-rays or neutrons, which are also invisible to human eyes, but…
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The Protestant Encounter with Modern Architecture
Gretchen Buggeln, Ph.D. (Department of Christ College)
Twentieth-century architectural modernism revolutionized the way designers, builders, and clients thought about buildings. Modernism’s rationalism, preference for industrial materials, lack of ornament, and negation of tradition presented both material and…
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Title IX Rhetoric: The Fight for Equity in College Sports
Kelly Belanger, Ph.D. (Department of English)
Rhetoric is the strategic use of language to influence actions and perceptions. In this talk, I share images and interview excerpts from my study of how advocates for college women’s…
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Do You Mate Randomly? The Biology of Mate Choice
Rob Swanson, Ph.D. (Department of Biology)
Do you mate randomly? How do you choose a mate? How do other animals choose mates? What about plants? Mate choice mechanisms are varied in nature, and have striking evolutionary…
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The Most Interesting Woman You’ve Never Heard Of –The Life and Work of San Francisco’s Sarah B. Cooper
Mike Owens, Ph.D. (Department of English)
If this were 1897, most all of us would be familiar with the name Sarah B. Cooper of San Francisco. Initially with aspirations of being a fiction writer, Cooper found…
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Ecology in the Field: Doing Inquiry-based Projects as Service Learning in Science
Laurie Eberhardt, Ph.D. (Department of Biology)
Valparaiso University’s mission statement says that we prepare students to lead and serve in society. Service learning may conjure images of social work students placed in social service agencies, education…
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