Friday Forums Fall 2026
Lunch will be available on a first-come, first-served basis in the Lyceum.
September 11, 2026
Rud Platt, Divonna Stebick, Melissa Forbes, Richard Russell
Navigating AI and Supporting Faculty
Come meet the divisional representatives of the AI Leadership Team and join a conversation about how AI is affecting teaching and learning across disciplines. Rather than focusing on what faculty “should” be doing with AI, we want to hear what you're noticing in your own areas so that the initiative can better reflect faculty perspectives and concerns.
September 25, 2026
Divonna Stebick
Supporting Teachers Through Act 48: Opportunities for Campus Programs
Interested in sharing your expertise with local teachers? Join the Office of Education and Teacher Certification for a practical overview of Act 48, Pennsylvania’s continuing professional education system for certified educators. This Friday lunch talk is designed for higher education faculty and staff who may be interested in developing workshops, trainings, or other professional learning experiences for PK–12 educators on our campus. We’ll cover what Act 48 is, what kinds of activities may qualify, how approved providers award hours, and what faculty and staff should consider when planning programs for teachers. We’ll also discuss important guidelines from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, including the requirement that professional development be related to an educator’s assignment or certification, and the fact that approved providers generally upload earned hours to PERMS within 30 days of completion pa.gov. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how campus-based workshops can support regional educators and what steps are needed to move from a good idea to an Act 48-eligible offering. If your department, center, or program is considering outreach to local schools, this session will help you understand the opportunities, responsibilities, and logistics involved.
October 9, 2026
Edudzi Sallah
"Your Voice Is My Voice": A Drum Across the Black Atlantic
In the Anlo kingdom, on the Slave Coast of West Africa, a pair of drums once sounded after an execution. One announced "we went by night and came by night." The other answered: "your voice is my voice." Together they declared that the verdict belonged to the whole community, revealing a deliberative custom of justice. European missionaries heard barbarism. When the African drum resurfaced in the New World, slaveholders heard insurrection, and colonial legislatures moved to silence it: Barbados in 1688, South Carolina in 1740, Jamaica in 1826. In 1878, Daniel Alexander Payne, a Black church leader trained at the Lutheran Seminary in Gettysburg, walked into a ring shout in the postbellum South and ordered the drumming stopped, calling it "heathenish" and a disgrace to the race. When the Black church reached the West African coast, its missionaries were still hearing heathenism in African drumming as recently as 1925. Yet Cudjo Lewis, an African survivor of the Clotilda, the last American slave ship, remembered the drums of home with admiration and nostalgia when Zora Neale Hurston interviewed him in Alabama in 1927. This talk follows the drum from the West African coast to the New World and into the Black church. It argues that the drum's contestation never ended, only changed hands, and persists in Black transatlantic relations today, from institutions to lived experiences. The talk offers the grounding for The Forbidden Drum on October 22 and 23, when a master West African drummer and the American who trained under him come to campus for a workshop, a performance, and an open community drum circle, giving us the opportunity to learn, witness, and partake with what Paul Gilroy, in The Black Atlantic, calls "the irrepressible rhythms of the once forbidden drum."
October 23, 2026
William O’Hara
Solfeggio Tones: Digital Mythology & The History of Music Theory
“Solfeggio tones” are a recent online phenomenon based on a mélange of ancient ideas. Named for the practice of solfege but unrelated to it, they are a set of seemingly random frequencies that are claimed to have healing powers. Largely through direct copying, solfeggio tones have proliferated through music and social media platforms (Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, etc.). The websites that promote them trace several spurious origins—from ancient knowledge lost or suppressed by musical or ecclesiastical authorities, to more recent numerological “discoveries” by homeopathic healers—and assign specific frequencies to healing actions such as “liberating guilt and fear,” “awakening intuition,” and even “DNA repair.” While they may resonate with a long tradition of medicalizing musical sound (Gouk 2005), solfeggio tones do not only fall therapeutically flat; they represent larger trends in contemporary society. As Hannah Gais (2019) has written, psychics and mystical healers tend to arise in moments of societal crisis, aided by mass communication technologies. Robin James (2020) argues that solfeggio tones are an updated version of Plato’s metaphors for music as the organizing principle of an ideal society, and a pernicious alignment of personal wellness with societal stratification and power. Building on Ruth Emily Rosenberg’s (2021) account of the conspiracy theories that surround 432Hz vs. 440Hz tuning, this presentation traces how real concepts from the history of western music theory—including overtones, hexachord solfege, and the division of the monochord—are blended with ideas appropriated from both New Age wellness fads and traditional global spiritualities, in an ecosystem of social media channels, enthusiast websites, and online boutiques. Arguing that social media has itself become an instrument for both inventing and circulating theories about music, sound, listening, a healing, I show how music-theoretical facts are mixed with fabrications (echoing but distorting music theory’s own origin myths), and argue for continued public engagement in order to understand how musical misinformation filters contemporary aesthetic and political topics through stubbornly persistent historical myths.
November 6, 2026
Kurt Andresen
Jiggling Spheres, Laser Tweezers, and Punting: A Physicist Joins the Oxford Chemistry Department
In this talk, Kurt shares his experience working at Oxford University during his sabbatical. He will share interesting work he did on fundamental questions about particles moving in water that have been vexing scientists since they were first discovered by Robert Brownin 1827. He will also tell you about his project to build a microscope that uses lasers to hold onto objects that are 1/100th the size of a human hair. Finally, to give a break in the science, he'll share some pictures of the wonders of Oxford and England.
November 20, 2026
Christopher Fee