Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems, Coffin Honey, and Native Species. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize and the Chautauqua Editors Prize. His poems appear in such journals and magazines as Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Orion and Prairie Schooner. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies, creative writing and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

The English Department’s Visiting Writing Series brings esteemed poets, fiction writers, and non-fiction authors to our campus and community for engaging literary events. These events include public readings and allow students and the community to engage with contemporary literature and the creative process. The series features a diverse lineup of nationally and internationally recognized authors. Previous visiting writers have included such award-winning poets and authors as Ada Limón, Ann Beattie, Silas House, Roxane Gay, Viet Thanh Nquyen, Li-Young Lee, Nicole Chung and Tayari Jones. 

This program enriches the academic environment and provides aspiring writers with inspiration and practical knowledge from leading figures in the literary world. All events are free and open to the public. Support for the Visiting Writers Series is provided by generous donors. We welcome contributions to the English MFA Visiting Writers Fund.

Van Winter Memorial Lecture in Mathematical Physics: What is Quantum Field Theory?

Speaker: Nathan Seiberg, Charles Simonyi Professor,  Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Abstract:  We will review the status of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) as the language of physics. We will stress that despite enormous success and a lot of progress, we still do not have a completely satisfactory presentation of the theory. In particular, QFT is not yet mathematically rigorous. This will lead us to discuss the symmetries of QFT as associated with topological operators. This modern view has generalized our ideas of symmetries and has led to many new results.

The Van Winter Memorial Lecture in Mathematical Physics honors the memory of Clasine van Winter, who was a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Physics and Astronomy from 1968 until her retirement in 1999.  The annual lecture is jointly sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Physics and Astronomy.