Professorial Lectures
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…
Read more »
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…
Read more »
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…
Read more »
Christ in the University: Schlink’s Vision and the Valpo Tradition
Matthew Becker, Ph.D. (Department of Theology)
In the wake of the Nazi transformation of Heidelberg University in the 1930s and early 40s, several individuals who were called to Heidelberg after 1945 began to work toward that…
Read more »
Putting Walt Whitman to Work: The Employment of English Majors
Martin Buinicki, Ph.D. (Department of English)
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 triggered a wave of protest writing, and many of these works are now considered classics of American literature. Today, as our…
Read more »
The Business of Climate Change
Elizabeth Gingerich, JD (Department of Business)
In December 2015, world leaders converged in Paris for the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to collectively…
Read more »
Some Interesting Characteristics of Human Memory and How to Take Advantage of Them in Academic Settings
Kieth Carlson, Ph.D. (Department of Psychology)
The human brain is obviously tremendously complex, and yet, 6 basic principles describe its general functioning fairly well. I will use demonstrations, research and commonly held, but false, beliefs about…
Read more »
Games on Graphs
Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo, Ph.D. (Department of Mathematics)
One relatively recent field of mathematics is graph theory. Vertex-edge graphs have been studied by mathematicians since the 18th century, but they have prominent roles in many modern mathematical applications….
Read more »
Gold Chains to Rusty Shackles: Justice and Defiance in Imperial Ethiopia
Chuck Schaefer, Ph.D. (Department of History)
In the 1916 Battle of Segele, a select body of Ethiopian aristocrats overthrew Emperor Lidj Iyasu. They believed that the Emperor’s commitment to social and political change threatened the very…
Read more »
It Starts with a Question: A Reflection on 15 years of Evidence-Based Librarianship
Ruth Connell, M.S (Department of Library Science)
Most academic librarians wear many hats and work across diverse areas, especially at smaller institutions such as Valpo. Because work informs research and research informs work, Connell’s research spans many…
Read more »