Emerging Disciplines

Katherine Hayles
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Literature at Duke University and author of (among others) How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies (2009),Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008), My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), Writing Machines (2002), and How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999).
"How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies"
Compared to the practices of print-based research, the Digital Humanities initiate new kinds of research strategies, new forms of pedagogy, and new modes of explanation and expression. This talk will explore the implications of these changes and speculate on the future of the Digital Humanities as an emerging discipline.

John J. May
John J. May is an Assistant Professor in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Urban Design at the University of Toronto. May is a graduate of Harvard University (Architecture) and UCLA (PhD, Geography). He previously held joint appointments in the departments of Geography and Architecture + Urban Design at UCLA, where he was also a research fellow in the Institute of the Environment.
"One Continuous Lie" (excerpts from The Control Papers)
Within the short span of a few decades, the digital control surface has supplanted nearly all other representational techniques within the design fields (including industrial, architectural, landscape-architectural, and urban design). In doing so it has rather silently erased an older mode of representation--which was essentially geometrical and mechanical--substituting in its place an entirely different visual logic, rooted in an ongoing coalescing between statistical reasoning and electrical engineering. Although the most obvious effects of this substitution are aesthetic, its reverberations are in fact extensively epistemological and even (increasingly) ontological, undercutting and refashioning certain long-standing conceptual divisions among technology, subjectivity, perception, and political agency.

Christopher McKenna
McKenna is University Reader in Business History and Strategy at the Said Business School, a Fellow of Brasenose College, and the Research Director of the Novak Druce Centre for Professional Service Firms, all within the University of Oxford.  A graduate of Amherst College and the Johns Hopkins University, McKenna’s research focuses on the historical development and evolving strategies of professional firms and their role in the global transformation of business, nonprofits, and the state.  His first book on the growth of the elite management consulting firms, The World's Newest Profession, was awarded the Newcomen-Harvard Book Award by the Business History Review, the Hagley Prize by the Business History Conference, and named one of the best books of the year by the Financial Times.  McKenna's next book, Partners in Crime, will examine the international history of white collar crime from the eighteenth century to the present.
"The Very, Very Long View: Reintegrating Corporate Strategy and History"
McKenna will talk about a re-emerging discipline that is reuniting two academic fields that were divided for more than thirty years: corporate strategy and  business history.  Corporate strategy, an academic discipline which began in the 1960s through the work of historian Alfred Chandler is now returning to its origins in business history through the work of a group of “Neo-Chandlerians” who are challenging the ahistorical theories of the recent scholarship.  The re-emerging discipline is pushing both business historians to consider more clearly the long-run strategies of corporate executives and corporate strategists to reconsider their analytical theories within the long-run evolution of industries and firms.

Randolph Roth
Roth is Professor of History and Sociology at Ohio State University. Randy’s work focuses on the history of violent crime and violent death. His most recent book is American Homicide (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), an interregional, internationally comparative study of homicide in the United States from colonial times to the present. He is also the co-founder and co-director of the Historical Violence Database (http://cjrc.osu.edu/researchprojects/hvd/), a collaborative effort to gather data from medieval times to the present on accidents, homicides, suicides, and non-lethal assaults. Randy recently received the Teaching Award of the Ohio Academy of History (2007) and the Ohio State University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching (2009).
"Can We Learn to Play Well with Others? Enlisting the Humanities, the Sciences, and the Social Sciences in the Study of Violence"
We humans are, as primatologist Franz de Waal observes, a “bipolar” species. Our capacity for cooperation, teamwork, friendship, empathy, kindness, forbearance, forgiveness, compromise, and reconciliation is unparalleled, because our happiness and survival depend on the strength of our social groups and on our commitment to them. But we also have an unparalleled capacity for competition, factionalism, hostility, sadism, cruelty, intransigence, and domination. Which side of our nature prevails depends on historical circumstances, especially the effects of those circumstances on our feelings and beliefs (a humanistic concern) and the impact of those feelings and beliefs on our brains, hormones, and behavior (a scientific concern). I will discuss the deep patterns that social science historians are discovering in the history of homicide, and suggest how collaboration among humanists, scientists, and social scientists could further our understanding of why humans can be prone to violence in one circumstance and to nonviolence in another.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp
Before moving to Harvard in 2011, Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupied the Rosina Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000. A cultural historian with interests extending from antiquity to the present, his most recent books are Italiamerica,Speed Limits, and The Electric Information Age Book (forthcoming with Princeton Architectural Press). His pioneering work in the domain of digitally augmented approaches to cultural programming have included curatorial collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Iris and Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. His Trento Tunnels project — a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels in Northern Italy repurposed as a history museum– was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale. He is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature and also regularly teaches courses at the Graduate School of Design. He currently directs metaLAB(at)Harvard, a brand new digital humanities and arts research center hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
"Knowledge Design"
Knowledge Design [=KD] is an unidentified disciplinary object that has been seen by a few observers of the contemporary scholarly scene. The cohort of true believers in KD, once a small but dedicated group associated with the art/technology, counterculture/cyberculture criss-crossings of the late 1960s, has recently grown thanks to the digital turn of the past few decades. True believers describe KD as the field of experimentation that arises when the well-oiled machinery of print culture finds itself jammed by a volatile intermedia mix with the consequence that the form that knowledge assumes can no longer be considered a given. Knowledge-making and knowledge-design become radically intertwined endeavors. Most cool-headed observers doubt the field's existence (or, if it does exist, would prefer that it become the business of Schools of Education).

Liane Young
Liane Young is a post-doctoral associate in the Brain & Cognitive Sciences Department and a visiting scholar in the Philosophy Department at MIT. Starting Fall 2011, she will be an an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston College. Young studies the cognitive and neural basis of human moral judgment. Young's research employs methods of social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), examination of patient populations with selective cognitive deficits, and modulating activity in specific brain regions using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Young received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University in 2008, and her B.A. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2004.
"The Brain Behind the Moral Mind"
When we make moral judgments of people's actions, we consider not only the outcomes of the actions but also people's mental states concerning their actions. Typically, beliefs and intentions match the outcomes: when a person thinks she is sweetening her friend's coffee by putting sugar in it, she is usually not mistaken. Mismatches occur, however, in the case of accidents (e.g., when the ''sugar'' is in fact poison) and failed attempts to harm (e.g., when the ''poison'' is in fact sugar). The current work uses behavioral methods, functional neuroimaging (fMRI), TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), and neuropsychological methods to characterize the cognitive and neural mechanisms for judgments of innocence and guilt. Behavioral and fMRI results suggest that mental states such as beliefs and intention matter more for moral judgments of harmful actions than actions considered to be morally impure (e.g., incest avoidance, food taboos).