Speaker Biographies - Fall 2022
Thomas Misa
Thomas J. Misa recently retired after serving for many years as Professor of the History of Technology at the University of Minnesota, where he directed the Charles Babbage Center, taught courses in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine and was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His many books include the acclaimed Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present, just re-published in an updated 3rd edition by Johns Hopkins Press, as well as Fast Lane: Managing Science in the Internet World (with Jeffrey Yost), A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865-1925 and the edited collections, Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing and Modernity and Technology (with Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg). The recipient of grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Department of Energy/Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, the Society for the History of Technology and the American Historical Association, Misa has published scores of major articles on topics in the history of science, technology and industry, modern machines and computers, and gender bias in computing and data analysis.
In Leonardo to the Internet – “closely reasoned, reflective, and written with insight, grace and wit” (Technology and Culture review) – Thomas Misa provides a sweeping and masterful history of the interactive relationship between technology and society over the past 500 years, revealing how technological innovations have shaped—and have been shaped by—the cultures in which they arose. Spanning the preindustrial past, the age of scientific, political, and industrial revolutions, as well as the more recent eras of imperialism, modernism, and global security, this compelling work evaluates what Misa calls "the question of technology."
In the new 3rd edition (2022), Misa brings his classic text up to date by drawing on current scholarship while retaining sharply drawn portraits of individual people, artifacts, and systems. Each chapter has been honed to relate to contemporary concerns. Globalization, Misa argues, looks differently considering today's virulent nationalism, cultural chauvinism, and trade wars. A new chapter focuses on the digital age from 1990 to 2016. The book also examines how today's unsustainable energy systems, insecure information networks and vulnerable global shipping have helped foster geopolitical risks and instability and looks at the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of Wuhan, China's high-tech district.
A masterful analysis of how technology and culture have influenced each other over five centuries, Leonardo to the Internet frames a history that illuminates modern-day problems and prospects faced by our technology-dependent world.
Sponsored by the College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, the Office of Graduate Education and Research and the EKU Honors Program
Sources:
https://tjmisa.com/
https://newbooksnetwork.com/leonardo-to-the-internet
https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12658/leonardo-internet
Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs
Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, who grew up as a child farmworker and the daughter of migrant farmworkers from Durango, Mexico, is now Professor in Modern Languages and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Seattle University, where she recently also held the Theiline Pigott McCone Endowed Chair in the Humanities (2018-2020) and served formerly as Director for The Center for The Study of Justice in Society. She received both her MA and the PhD from Stanford University.
A polylingual poet, critic and cultural activist, Gabriella is the author/editor of eight books of poetry, criticism and culture, and multiple articles, encyclopedia entries and opinion pieces. She is lead editor of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (U Colorado, 2012), “a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color,” and Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia (Utah State, 2020), and sole editor of several other books on Chicana criticism from the University of Arizona Press. Her many books of poetry include The Runaway Poems, A Most Improbable Life, The Plastic Book, Kneading Words: Intersectionality, Goddesses and Beyond and most recently, ¿How Many Indians Can We Be? (Flowersong, 2022).
Sponsored by the Department of Languages & Cultural Studies, Anthropology and Sociology, the Office of Student Life, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences and the Honors Program
Source:
https://www.flowersongpress.com/gabriella-gutirrez-y-muhs
Jack Halberstam
Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University and the author of seven books in gender studies, theory and cultural criticism, including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke UP, 2020). Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy.
In Wild Things, Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity's orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate. Throughout, Halberstam engages with a wide variety of texts, practices, and cultural imaginaries—from zombies, falconry, and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and the career of Irish anticolonial revolutionary Roger Casement—to demonstrate how wildness provides the means to know and to be in ways that transgress Euro-American notions of the modern liberal subject. With Wild Things, Halberstam opens new possibilities for queer theory and for wild thinking more broadly. Alongside other praise, Wild Things was hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “[A] creative, discipline-smashing study exploring the human attraction to ‘the wild.’ . . . equal parts academic and poetic… a dense and, at times, beautiful text… a work that demands attention, which it rewards with both insight and entertainment.” Read a Columbia News interview with the author about the book here.
Jack Halberstam earned a B.A. in English at the University of California, Berkeley in 1985, an M.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1989, a PhD in English from the University of Minnesota in 1991, and prior to arriving at Columbia taught at the University of Southern California and USC San Diego.
Sponsored by Women and Gender Studies, the Office of Student Life, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, EKU Libraries, and the Honors Program.
Sources:
https://www.proquest.com/pqdtglobal/docview/303945869/54C3EA21F7EA426EPQ/1?accountid=10628&parentSessionId=1QjIzyLGulSiqXclHjF1VwJx6CHHRInQ9hmnAFHVDoo%3D
https://english.columbia.edu/content/jack-halberstam
https://www.dukeupress.edu/wild-things
Supaman
Supaman is an acclaimed Apsáalooke rapper and ghost/thunder dancer who was born in Seattle, Washington and grew up in Crow Agency, Montana. He was the founder of the Native American hip-hop group, Rezawrecktion, whose first album won a Native American Music Award in 2005. Supaman has since released a series of solo albums to increasingly wide acclaim and has toured the country, simultaneously delighting and educating crowds with his live DJ, looping and rapping skills often combined with fancy dance. His two most recent albums, Illuminatives and Medicine Bundle, can be heard on his website and Medicine Bundle can also be heard on YouTube here: Medicine Bundle. His most recent music and video production, “Alright – Supaman feat. Neenah (Produced by Nottz)” is a time-travelling cinematic spectacle that features the DeLorean from the film, Back to the Future!, and a musical blending of Bob Marley inspirations with original contemporary hip-hop lyrics. It’s been viewed over a half million times since its release in April 2022. Supaman’s video collaboration with world champion dancer Acosia Red Elk for the song “Why” from Illumanitives has been viewed over 3 million times. More videos are available on Supaman’s YouTube channel.
As a member of the “Apsaalooke Nation,” Supaman makes his home on Apsáalooke lands in Montana. “Supaman” is Christian Takes Gun Parrish, a Native American dancer and innovative hip hop artist who has dedicated his life to empowering and spreading a message of hope, pride and resilience through his original art form. He has been the recipient of the 2017 MTV VMA award for “Best Fight Against the System”! He is also a Nammy “Native American Music Award” winner, North American Indigenous Image Award winner, and 7” Tunney Award winner. He was awarded The Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Award in Canada for best video and was voted MTV’s new Artist of the Week! His 2018 nominations brought him home awards for Best Hip Hop Album and Best Producer for the Indigenous Music Awards. His videos have received millions of views on YouTube and Facebook which has put him in high demand touring extensively throughout the U.S.A and internationally. His recent video for “He has performed for Google at the Google headquarters in San Francisco. He recently was asked to audition for America’s Got Talent and the Broadway play Hamilton. He is currently on tour around the country spreading the good medicine of resiliency, love, laughter and inclusion.
Supaman’s on-of-a-kind presentation combines Native culture, comedy and urban hip hop culture which dazzles audiences and captivates listeners. For this he has gained the respect of his community and generation. The communicative talent along with the compassion that exudes from his music allows him to connect with people from all walks of life. His uncanny ability to motivate, encourage, and inspire through dance, and hip-hop music keeps him at the forefront among his contemporaries which gives him a platform to educate on Indigenous issues.
Sponsored by the Office of Student Life, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, the Department of Languages & Cultural Studies, Anthropology & Sociology and the Honors Program.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mLTHXSyGLXyHGXotMr-ZxUcwmDhbiUhco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supaman
https://www.youtube.com/user/greasyface/featured