Professorial Lectures
From Beautiful Cockroaches to Beverly Hills Chihuahuas: A Humane Education Approach to Cultural Products for Latinx Children
Stacy Hoult-Saros, Ph.D. (Department of World Languages & Cultures)
The growing field of Humane Education provides a fruitful approach to teaching critical thinking while fostering empathy through the careful study of the cultural production of Hispanophone cultures. This solution-focused…
Read more »
Boredom, Contemplation, and Liberation: Education in an Age of Distraction
Kevin Gary, Ph.D. (Department of Education)
Boredom is an inevitable part of the human condition–but teachers and students alike get the message that boredom should be avoided at all costs, especially in the classroom. In this…
Read more »
Studying the Human Body: The Little Stuff and the Big Stuff
Beth Scaglione Sewell, Ph.D. (Department of Biology)
The human body can be studied both at the smallest level of ions and molecules and at the largest level of systems that affect the physiology of the whole organism….
Read more »
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…
Read more »
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…
Read more »
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…
Read more »
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…
Read more »
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…
Read more »
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…
Read more »