IU Themester

Dr. Jonathan Crystal wants to know how rats think. Dr. Crystal is a professor in the Department of psychological and Brain Sciences, and he studies how rats think and learn and how they’re affected by degenerative neurological diseases. He hopes to use this information to better understand how those neurological issues, such as Alzheimer’s, affect humans.

Dr. Michael Wasserman wants you to know that you are what you eat. As a researcher in the Anthropology Department, he studies how hominid’s diets influence their behavior and change throughout the millennia. He looks at the diets of gorillas and how human interference is gradually beginning to change their behavior. He also examines human diets throughout our development and how a growing population is impacting what we eat.

Diversity and difference are at the heart of many contemporary social challenges. Changing demographics provoke national debates about citizenship and basic human rights. Humans and associated global economic activity contribute to the spread of invasive species and declines in native biodiversity. Colleges and universities struggle to recruit and retain diverse faculty and students. Efforts to develop collective responses to these and other challenges are often stymied by increasing political polarization, decreasing empathy, and the entrenchment of difference. This podcast series is created from the College of Arts and Sciences of Indiana University.

Diversity and difference are at the heart of many contemporary social challenges. Changing demographics provoke national debates about citizenship and basic human rights. Humans and associated global economic activity contribute to the spread of invasive species and declines in native biodiversity. Colleges and universities struggle to recruit and retain diverse faculty and students. Efforts to develop collective responses to these and other challenges are often stymied by increasing political polarization, decreasing empathy, and the entrenchment of difference. This podcast series is created from the College of Arts and Sciences of Indiana University.

Diversity and difference are at the heart of many contemporary social challenges. Changing demographics provoke national debates about citizenship and basic human rights. Humans and associated global economic activity contribute to the spread of invasive species and declines in native biodiversity. Colleges and universities struggle to recruit and retain diverse faculty and students. Efforts to develop collective responses to these and other challenges are often stymied by increasing political polarization, decreasing empathy, and the entrenchment of difference. This podcast series is created from the College of Arts and Sciences of Indiana University.

Biologist and photographer Roger Hangarter and artist and curator Betsy Stirratt are long-time collaborators who share an idea of beauty as an experience found in nature. Together they discuss a photograph of a spider web taken by Hangarter during an ordinary walk in the woods. They examine beauty as a phenomenon that inspires both scientists and artists, and find common ground in the pursuit of mystery and light.

Folklorist and ethnographer Jason Jackson has a refined eye and a passion for discovering beauty in everyday objects. When asked to choose a “thing of beauty,” Jackson selected a woven basket made by Cherokee artist Rowena Bradley in the 1970s.The basket’s unique beauty, as Jackson sees it, derives not only from the artistry reflected in the object, but from a complex web of history and meaning surrounding it.

A recent encounter with a gorgeously illustrated compilation of Shakespeare forgeries, housed in IU’s Lilly Library, prompts MacKay’s strange tale of falsified beauty. In the years following the “discovery” (around 1795) of William Henry Ireland’s forged manuscripts, their presence played a surprising role in the construction of an idealized vision of Shakespeare that is still embraced today.

Kate Rowold is a professor of fashion design and a leading expert in the social and aesthetic history of Western fashion. Her chosen object of beauty, a corset from IU’s Sage Collection, reveals the tension between ever-shifting perceptions of beauty and the natural body, and the role of fashion as an instrument of cultural conformity and gatekeeping.

A professed historian of the Milky Way, astronomer Catherine Pilachowski exalts the beauty of the ancient spiral galaxy that we call – at least in a galactic sense – home. She describes the glorious physical beauty of the Milky Way, and the beauty inherent in the work of science that leads to new knowledge of its history and future.