Shulman Lectures in Science and the Humanities

The Alignment and Synchronization of Brain States Through Music

In this lecture, cognitive neuroscientist Jamshed Bharucha discusses the ways that music creates emotion and how these emotions work within human interactions and relationships. Professor Bharucha, who is also a classically trained violinist, has written extensively on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of music and has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health for his work. He began his academic career at Dartmouth College, where he was the John Wentworth Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

Adapted to a Symbolic Niche: How Less became more in Human Evolution

Terrence W. Deacon delivers a lecture on the neuroscience and development of the human capacity for language and musical perception. Prof. Deacon is the Chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests lie in the field of brain development and evolution, the origins of language, and bio-cultural evolution. Many of these interests are found in his book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain (1997).

Andrew Solomon, writer

Monday, April 13, 2015 | 5:00 pm

Far from the Tree

Andrew Solomon is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture, and psychology, and Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University. He is the author of the highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity; The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction; The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost; and the novel A Stone Boat.

Solomon is an activist in LGBT rights, mental health, education and the arts. He is founder of the Solomon Research Fellowships in LGBT Studies at Yale University and a member of the boards of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Trans Youth Family Allies.

He is a director of the University of Michigan Depression Center and Columbia Psychiatry; a member of the Board of Visitors of Columbia University Medical Center, the National Advisory Board of the Depression Center at the University of Michigan, and the Advisory Board of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance. He serves as special advisor on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Mental Health at the Yale School of Psychiatry.

Original event page

Angela Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania and James Gross, Stanford University

Monday, March 30, 2015 | 5:00 pm

Matter Over Mind: Situational Strategies for Self-Control

Angela Duckworth is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. She studies non-IQ competencies, including self-control and grit, which predict success both academically and professionally. Her research populations have included West Point cadets, National Spelling Bee finalists, novice teachers, salespeople, and students. Duckworth received a BA in neurobiology from Harvard and, as a Marshall Scholar, a Masters in neuroscience from Oxford. She completed her PhD in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her career in research, she founded a non-profit summer school for low-income children, which won the Better Government Award for the state of Massachusetts and was profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study. Duckworth has also been a McKinsey management consultant and, for five years, a math teacher in the public schools of San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York City.

James Gross is Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory (http://spl.stanford.edu). He earned his BA in philosophy from Yale University and his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a leading figure in the areas of emotion and emotion regulation, and has received recognition from the American Psychological Association, the Western Psychological Association, and the Society for Psychophysiological Research. Gross has won numerous awards for his teaching, including the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Stanford Postdoctoral Mentoring Award, and the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and Director of the Stanford Psychology One Teaching Program. Gross has an extensive program of investigator-initiated research, with grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Institute of Education Sciences.

Original event page

Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago

Monday, March 2, 2015 | 5:00 pm

Gesture as a Mechanism of Change

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her focus is on the ways that the body can affect learning––how it provides insight into a learner’s skills and contributes to changing them.

More specifically, she studies movements of the body that are representational––the gestures we produce when we talk—and contrasts them with movements that have a direct effect on the world––actions on objects.

She is a co-investigator of the NSF-funded Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) and co-director of the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language at the University of Chicago. In 2001, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship.

She has published two books, The Resilience of Language and Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Learn. In 2005, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2015, she will receive the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement in Basic Research from the Association for Psychological Science.

Original event page

David Pizarro, Cornell University

Monday, February 9, 2015 | 5:00 pm

Understanding the Moral Mind

David Pizarro, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, will deliver the opening 2015 Shulman Lecture in Science and the Humanities.

The Shulman Lectures are organized in conjunction with a Yale College seminar taught by Professors Paul Bloom and Tamar Gendler. The four lectures in the series will explore the topic of “Habits of Mind.”

Pizarro’s primary research interest is in how and why humans make moral judgments, such as what makes us think certain actions are wrong and that some people deserve blame. He also studies how emotions influence a wide variety of judgments. These two topics come together in much of his recent work, which has focused on disgust and the role it plays in shaping moral, social, and political judgments.

Poster
Press release

Original event page

MARTIN J. SHERWIN

Walter S. Dickenson Professor of English and American History, Tufts University, Pulitzer Prize biographer

Thursday, February 13, 2014 | 6:00 pm

Oppenheimer’s Shadow: His Nuclear World and Ours

EDWARD J. LARSON

University Professor of History and Darling Professor of Law, Pepperdine University, and Russell Professor of American History, University of Georgia, Pulitzer Prize historian

Thursday, January 30, 2014 | 2:45 pm

Dayton to Dover: A Brief History of the Evolution Teaching Controversy in America

Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht

Stanford University

Tuesday, April 8, 2014 | 5:00 pm

All That Matters Is Invisible: How Latency Dominates Our Present

"All That Matters Is Invisible: How Latency Dominates Our Present"

Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature at Stanford University. He teaches Romance and Comparative Literatures.

His lecture “All That Matters Is Invisible: How Latency Dominates Our Present” was given on April 8, 2014, as part of the Spring 2014 Shulman Lecture Series in Science and the Humanities at the Whitney Humanities Center. This series was organized in conjunction with the Yale College seminar “The Question of Evidence,” taught by Rüdiger Campe, Professor and Chair of German Language and Literature.