The Committee on Social Theory is excited to announce the 2014 Fall Distinguished Speaker, Dr. Margaret Archer.

On Friday, December 12th at 4p.m., Dr. Archer will present her talk, “The Relational Subject versus the Plural Subject: We Believe, Plan and Want, but Who or What are We?” in the President's Room of the Singletary Center for the Arts.

A catered reception will be held from 6:30-8:00 p.m. at the Gaines Center Commonwealth House.

Margaret Archer was Professor of Sociology for thirty years at the University of Warwick, UK, where she developed her ‘Morphogenetic Approach’ and wrote her trilogy of books on Reflexivity. She then became Professor of Social Theory at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and launched the Centre d’Ontologie Sociale/Centre for Social Ontology that produces a book a year from an international group of theorists on the possible transition from late modernity to a global Morphogenic Society. She was elected as the first woman President of the International Sociological Association at the 12th World Congress of Sociology, is a founding member of the (British) Academy of Social Sciences and a trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism. In April this year, Pope Francis appointed her as President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Ödön von Horváth’s plays, although popular in Germany, are notoriously difficult to translate due to the stylized speech and cultural references von Horváth used in his desire for a realistic portrayal of the bourgeoisie of the Weimar Republic. Under the guidance of the skilled Scottish director and writer Alan McKendrick, students in GER 352 will perform a dramatic reading of their own translation of von Horváth's Kasimir und Karoline. There will also be a Q&A with the students and director after the reading. Reception with refreshments to follow.

Viewer discretion is advised. Both the original text and the translation contain phrasing that is sexual in nature which might make some viewers uncomfortable. 

The event features Dr. Anne Prescott, Director of Five College Center for East Asian Studies, Smith College, and will be the combination of koto performance and commentary of the music she will play.  This event is free and open to the public, and is organized by the UK's Japan Studies program with support from the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures & Cultures and the International Studies Program.





Dr. Anne Prescott has a BM (music education) from Cornell College in Iowa and an MM (clarinet performance) and PhD (ethnomusicology) from Kent State University. She has been studying the koto since she was a sophomore at Cornell College, and she spent eight years living and studying koto and shamisen in Japan, including one year as a research student at Tokyo University of the Arts. While in Japan she performed with Kisokai and Group Aya, and she is a member of the Miyagi Koto Association. Her dissertation focused on the life and works of koto master and composer Miyagi Michio. She is currently the Director of the Five College Center for East Asian Studies located at Smith College in Northampton, MA, and previously worked and taught at the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and Augustana College in Illinois.

Title:  Introduction to vector bundles and their classifications

Abstract:  We will introduce the definition of a vector bundle and look at a few examples. Next we will look at how to make new vector bundles from old bundles using familiar algebraic operations like direct sum, tensor product, and the pullback. Finally we will discuss classifying isomorphism classes of bundles over a topological space X, and time permitting, we will show these isomorphism classes are in bijection with homotopy classes of maps from X to Grassmanians on R infinity.