Friday Forums Spring 2026
Lunch will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
January 30, 2026 (CUB 260)
Josef Brandauer
Holistic Advising at Gettysburg
This interactive session will address the many ways in which we support student success at Gettysburg. This conversation will be focused on evidence-based strategies to support students in taking charge of their educational experience at Gettysburg.
February 13, 2026 (Library Apse)
Kristofer Monson
Piano Rolls, Sheet Music, and the Dissemination of Jazz and Blues, ca. 1915-25
Presented in collaboration with Musselman Library (Betsy Bein) and Special Collections (Carolyn Sautter), this presentation will showcase piano rolls and sheet music that both reflected and fueled the public’s fascination with jazz and blues in the early twentieth century, as Black musicians scrambled to monetize and protect their compositions amid the rapidly developing popular music industry. Piano rolls and sheet music from the library’s collections will be shared and contextualized, showcasing works by influential composers such as Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy, Jelly Roll Morton, and James P. Johnson.
February 27, 2026 (CUB 260)
Brent Harger
Unsettled Lives in Unsettled Times: College Student Strategies of Action in Response to COVID-19 Regulations on Campus
Coauthored with Julia Piness ('23), this paper was recently accepted at Sociological Inquiry. We use in-depth interviews to explore the ways that on-campus students at a “selective liberal arts college” responded to COVID-19 regulations in spring 2021. Our research shows that the “risk frames” these students adopted emphasized the social (wanting to be with friends) and situational (wanting to avoid punishment) concerns for their risky behavior in a setting where the risk of getting others sick was not a salient influence on their behaviors. The focus on students at a selective liberal arts college also allows us to contribute to research on student responses to risk during the COVID-19 pandemic, which typically focuses on quantitative surveys of students at large institutions, and provides insight into student responses to college behavioral regulations more broadly.
March 20, 2025 (Penn Hall Lyceum)
David Walsh
Inviting Fire: Indigenous Dene Hunters, Animals, Ancestors, and Climate Change
I am excited to present my in-progress book manuscript on Indigenous Peoples' spiritual and ecological relationships in a more-than-human world. Based on my ongoing ethnographic work, since 2010, with Dene People in the Northwest Territories, Canada, I propose a new language from which to understand how Elders, hunters, and community members orient their life ways toward ecological relationships. I take my cues from my Dene consultants, mentors, and friends in privileging the role of ancestors, women, and animals themselves in their traditions. In the current era of climate change and devastating loss of caribou herds—their primary animal relationship—respecting Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty is paramount; thus, I invite you to join us by the fire.
April 3, 2026 (CUB 260)
Tina Gebhart
He’s My Left Hand: Tandem Throwing
Tina Gebhart (Associate Professor of Art & Art History) and Lucas Pacuraru (Art Studio, Public Policy ’27) will give a live demonstration of tandem throwing on the potter’s wheel. This innovation minimizes the disability of the master potter while haptically teaching the apprentice throwing skill subtleties. This is not a scene from Ghost, nor a silly exercise. It is a fusion of technique with a lead and partner, much like dancing. They will have demonstrated their throwing innovation at the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) conference on March 26, 2026, in Detroit, MI.
April 17, 2026 (CUB 260)
Alice Brawley Newlin
No Boss, No Coworkers, No Problem? Rethinking Selection and Assessment in the Gig Economy
Gig work looks like it has no selection process - no interviews, no training, no boss - but if we look closer, the picture only gets weirder. Platforms quietly screen, clients choose, and workers self-select into the tasks and conditions they’ll tolerate, creating a tangled system of “hiring” without anyone officially doing the hiring. At the same time, algorithmic management shapes who gets work, how performance is judged, and who disappears from the system altogether. In this talk, I'll explore this paradox (perhaps a kind of Schrödinger’s selection?) and how it complicates what we think we know about management.
Friday Forums Fall 2025
Lunch will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
September 5, 2025 (CUB 260)
Aaron Lacayo
A Haunting Legacy of Insults in Jayro Bustamante’s Guatemalan Film Trilogy: Ixcanul, Temblores & La Llorona
La Llorona (The Weeping Woman, 2019) completes Jayro Bustamante’s film trilogy on contemporary Guatemala, following Ixcanul (2015) and Temblores (Tremors, 2019). This talk considers the ways in which the three films epitomize what Bustamante calls “the three biggest insults” in Guatemalan society. These insults, related to Indigenous heritage, sexuality and political ideology, form part of the legacies of the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-96). The last film in the trilogy (La Llorona) also illustrates the enriching challenges of adapting the well-known Latin American folklore of La Llorona (“The Weeping Woman”) into a specific Guatemalan scenario: the search for justice in a nation haunted by silence, complicity, and impunity.
September 19, 2025 (CUB 260)
Rebecca He
Employee Wrongdoing and Moral Repair
Workplace wrongdoing represents a pervasive and costly challenge faced by managers and organizations. In addition to traditional punishment, management research has begun to explore other alternative ways (such as moral repair and restorative justice) to address employee wrongdoing. This presentation will talk about what moral repair is, and how and why managers attempt to facilitate the moral repair of offenders in the aftermath of workplace wrongdoing, as well as the beneficial (i.e., “bright side”) and negative or harmful (i.e., “dark side”) outcomes for the offender and the broader organization after managers engage in moral repair.
October 3, 2025 (CUB 260)
Jennifer Dumont
Educator's Resources from the Council on Foreign Relations
In this talk, I will familiarize faculty and staff about the educator's resources produced by the Council on Foreign Relations and help them make cross-disciplinary connections in order to appeal to faculty from different divisions. This is a follow-up to my attendance at the CFR Educator's Workshop in April 2025.
October 17, 2025 (CUB260)
Alvaro Kaempfer
Why Languages?
Looking back at the role of college-level language instruction and its place as a core component of higher education moving forward.
October 31, 2025 (CUB260)
Junjie Luo
Humanities Teaching and Artificial Intelligence
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools have become impossible to ignore in the teaching and learning of the humanities. Drawing on my own experience designing courses and crafting assignments around GenAI, I reflect on the opportunities and challenges these tools present. I explore how my students and I work to cultivate a deeper understanding of AI and to develop thoughtful approaches to collaborating with these technologies in the context of humanistic inquiry.to develop thoughtful approaches to collaborating with these technologies in the context of humanistic inquiry.
November 14, 2025 (CUB 260)
James Day
Meet Me in Soulsville
This forum will share the adventures and outcomes of the 2025 Inside Civil Rights trip, a collaboration between James Day, Traci Potts, Eisenhower Institute staff, and a group of eight students. The forum will focus primarily on exploration of two sites: Stax Records in Memphis, TN and Dreamland Ballroom in Little Rock, AR. At the time of its founding in 1960, Stax Records was among the few truly integrated spaces in Memphis and much of the South. Stax served as a nexus for community collaboration and expression that fostered the talents and careers of artists such as Rufus and Carla Thomas, Booker T. & the MG’s, Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Isaac Hayes, thus earning the moniker “Soulsville, USA.” Dreamland Ballroom is in a once-thriving African American business district of West Ninth Street in Little Rock referred to as “The Line.” In its heyday, the Ballroom was an important space for religious, cultural, and artistic expression, and a source of economic growth until the district was destroyed by a misguided urban renewal program. Together these sites offer fascinating case studies in inclusive spaces and the importance of preserving them, thereby yielding lessons we can apply to our home communities now and for generations to come.
December 5, 2025 (CUB 260)
TBD