This talk argues that “state allegory” has become a dominant narrative form for the critical representation of American empire and U.S. foreign policy. Allegory is of course a familiar method for representing international relations, but it flourished in the decade after September 11, 2001 as a way of interrogating the strange conditions of public knowledge and citizenship in the War on Terror.





Timothy Melley is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at Miami University. He is the author of many essays and two books, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Cornell 2000), and The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Cornell 2012). His work has been covered by The Nation, The L.A. Times, Scientific American, The Village Voice, Le Figaro, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Canadian Public Television, and NPR, and his fiction has been featured on “This American Life.”

"Our Town" brings the extraordinary out of the ordinary lives of the people of Grover's Corners New Hampshire in the beginning of the 20th century.

Callie Babcock, a member of the Wired community, will be playing the character of Mrs. Myrtle Webb!



This will count as a Wired event!!  

"Academic Careers at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions - Faculty Perspectives from Sciences and Liberal Arts"

5:00 pm, CP-114B

Professors from local liberal arts institutions will speak about their experiences in this panel discussion.  Faculty speakers include: 

• Prof. Jennifer Muzyka, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry, Centre College
• Prof. Sarah Bray, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biology at Transylvania University
• Prof. Saori Hanaki, Assistant Professor of Exercise Science, Pre-Health Committee Advisor, Transylvania University

This event is hosted by the Society of Postdoctoral Scholars.  

Moderators: Prof. Susan Odom (UK chemistry) and Dr. Ellen Crocker (UK forestry)

All members of the Math Department and their guests are invited.  Light refreshments will be served.

Some of the most critical reactions for the understanding of the synthesis of elements in stars are the stellar neutron sources. These are reactions that produce neutrons during certain phases of stellar burning, which in turn initiate slow neutron capture reactions (s-process) gradually building up heavier elements towards lead and bismuth. The s-process depends sensitively on the neutron flux or the strength of the neutron sources. A measurement of these reactions in laboratory experiments is handicapped by the fairly large background from cosmogenic neutrons above ground. The accelerator facility CASPAR has been build 4950 ft underground to measure these neutron sources in a cosmogenic background free environment. The challenges and the status of this project will be discussed as well as the impact of the experiment on s-process nucleosynthesis.

We investigate causality constraints on the time evolution of entanglement entropy after a global quench in relativistic theories. We  provide a general proof that the so-called tsunami velocity is bounded by the speed of light. We discuss various models of entanglement propagation. In particular, for free streaming models we prove an upper bound on the the tsunami velocity which is more stringent the speed of light, and smaller than what one gets for quenches in holographic theories. This highlights the importance of interactions in the spread of entanglement in many-body systems. We propose an interacting model which we believe provides an upper bound on the spread of entanglement for interacting relativistic theories. 

Columba Stewart, OSB, is a Benedictine monk of Saint John’s Abbey and Executive Director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, MN. HMML began as a project in 1965 to microfilm monastic manuscripts in Cold War Europe. Since then the project has spread to libraries in Ethiopia, the Middle East, South India, and the Timbuktu region of Mali. HMML digitized manuscripts in Syria from 2005-2012 and has been active in Iraq since 2009, working in many areas since devastated by civil war and the forces of the Islamic State. In current projects, HMML is digitizing the major Islamic manuscript collections of the Old City of Jerusalem and family libraries rescued from Timbuktu. This presentation will introduce the various manuscript cultures represented in HMML’s projects, survey recent threats to them, and describe HMML’s efforts to ensure that the contents of these irreplaceable witnesses to centuries of thought and history will not be lost forever.

Co-Sponsored by the Cottrill-Rolfes Chair of Catholic Studies