Engaging Emeriti Faculty
Emeriti Lecture Series Heading link
Retirement has become an increasingly fluid experience over the past few decades, with many Emeriti faculty still teaching the occasional course and/or continuing to use the resources of UIC in their research. The UIC Administration felt that many Emeriti faculty would welcome the opportunity to interact with their fellow Emeriti faculty and with the university administration beyond the Annual Emeriti Faculty Reception. Starting fall semester 2020, the Emeriti Lecture Series meets the last Tuesday of every month via Zoom during fall and spring semesters (except December) from 1:00 – 2:00 pm.
One project in which Emeriti faculty are involved is the Provost’s Mid-Career Faculty Writing Program in which they volunteer to work with Associate Professors who request advice in becoming full professors in activities ranging from time management and the setting and meeting if deadlines all the way to detailed comments on drafts of their writing.
If you are interested in attending the Lecture Series or mentoring an Associate Professor, please email facultyaffairsevent@uic.edu or by phone (312) 413-3470.
Fall 2020 Lecture Series Heading link
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The Noble Room: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple
Join David Sokol, Professor Emeritus of Art History on September 29, 2020 from 1:00 – 2:00 pm via Zoom
Frank Lloyd Wright stated that “Unity Temple is my contribution to modern architecture,” and it is certainly one of the most frequently illustrated American buildings of the 20th century. Join us for this presentation on the Unity Temple by David Sokol. This talk will take us from the destruction of the earlier church by a lightning-caused fire, through the planning and construction, and end with a look at the building after restoration.
David Sokol, PhD is Professor Emeritus of Art History at University of Illinois at Chicago where he taught courses in American Art, Museology, and Historic Preservation. He currently serves on the Oak Park Historic Preservation Commission and on the Board of the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission. He is a past member of the Board of the Illinois State Museum.
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Lightning Kills! Save a Life in Africa -- Development of ACLENet.org
Join Mary Ann Cooper, Professor Emerita of Emergency Medicine on October 27, 2020 from 1:00 – 2:00 pm via Zoom
There is a much higher risk of injury, death, and property damage from lightning in tropical countries than in the US, especially in developing countries, and there are many barriers to decreasing this risk which will be discussed. In addition to what is being done in Africa, we will touch on how Covid-19 has enabled rapid expansion of lightning safety efforts worldwide.
Mary Ann Cooper, MD, holds a BS in Biochemistry and an MD from Michigan State University. Trained in emergency medicine (EM), she was one of the early leaders, also being the first woman to be elected president of any of the national EM societies. She has a forty-year career in injury prevention and working with lightning and electrical injury survivors and has been active in the United States as well as internationally. She is the only physician to be elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and is recognized as an international expert in lightning injury and safety.
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Muslim Family Law and the Muslim Women's Movement in India
Join Sylvia Vatuk, Professor Emerita of Anthropology on November 24, 2020 from 1:00 – 2:00 pm via Zoom
In India distinct codes of family law apply to citizens of different religions. In the Muslim family code, several of the provisions that pertain to marriage and divorce code are markedly biased against women. In recent decades a number of activist Muslim women’s rights organizations have formed with the goal of bringing about changes in these laws. This talk will discuss this movement and assess what it has been able to accomplish to date.
Sylvia Vatuk is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. She taught undergraduate and graduate courses in social anthropology at UIC from 1970 until 2002, with a focus on kinship, family, intergenerational relations, gender, and the law in cultures around the world. During her career she conducted many seasons of ethnographic research in India and published extensively on various aspects of the society and culture of that country.
Spring 2021 Lecture Series Heading link
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Disparities in Access to Intervention for Children with Disabilities: Who Wins? Who Loses?
Join Suzann Campbell, Professor Emerita of Physical Therapy on January 26, 2021 from 1:00 – 2:00 pm via Zoom
Children with special health care needs have a federally guaranteed right to early intervention in the U.S., but states determine eligibility. As a result, wide differences exist among the states in how delay is identified, in the threshold for determining need for services, and in the amount of state funding added to that received from the federal government. Disparities also exist specifically for children of color and those living in poverty. Public health professionals have defined poverty as a health-related diagnosis in efforts to reduce disparities in access to care, but personal and collective action is needed to facilitate receipt of services for all children with special health care needs.
Suzann K. Campbell, PT, PhD, FAPTA, is Professor Emerita and former Head of the Department of Physical Therapy at UIC. She was the founding editor of Physical Therapy for Children, a major textbook in the field. She is a developer of the Test of Infant Motor Performance (TIMP), a functional motor scale used in more than 40 countries and 6 languages to identify delayed development in infants. Dr. Campbell currently is a Partner in Infant Motor Performance Scales, a publishing and education group offering e-Learning courses for health professionals on early infant assessment.
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Preston Sturges, Sullivan’s Travels, and Film Authorship in Hollywood, 1941
Join Virginia Wright Wexman, Professor Emerita of English and Art History on February 23, 2021 from 1:00 – 2:00 pm via Zoom
Dr. Wexman encourages you to watch Sullivan’s Travels prior to the session. It can be found on YouTube, Amazon, and it is also available at the Richard J Daley Library.
Thanks to the growing influence of the auteur theory, many people today think of directors, even Hollywood directors, as the authors of their films. In the 1930s and 1940s, however, few directors were well-known. Audiences of the time commonly viewed movies not in relation to their directors but as products of the studios where they were made or as vehicles for the stars who appeared in them. Even within the studios claims to authorship were challenged as directors vied with screenwriters and others for authority. Preston Sturges’s 1941 production Sullivan’s Travels, which focuses on a Hollywood director, necessarily confronts this issue and addresses a series of questions. How could a moviemaker working in the American film industry at that time be seen as an author whose art emerged from a passion for aesthetic expression? If a studio movie is made by a group rather than a single individual, how could people understand it as the expression of the inner life of a unique creative genius? And how was it that such a genius became identified with the role of director? Our discussion of this film will focus on this issue, but we will be open to engaging with other issues the movie raises as well.
Virginia Wright Wexman is Professor Emerita of English and Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her books include Hollywood’s Artists: The Directors Guild of America and the Construction of Authorship (Columbia, 2020), Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (Princeton University Press, 1993), A History of Film (7th Edition: Allyn and Bacon, 2009), and the anthology Film and Authorship (Rutgers University Press, 2002). Wexman served as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies from 1993-95.
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Why Closed Primaries Are Unconstitutional
Join Michael Polelle, Professor Emeritus of the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law on March 30, 2021 from 1:00 – 2:00 pm via Zoom
As of 9/14/2020, Gallup polling found that 48% of voters in the United States consider themselves Independents, 28% Republicans, and 27% Democrats. At least thirteen states, plus Washington D.C., have closed primaries barring voters who are not politically affiliated with a party from voting in state primaries. The thesis of this presentation is that the discrimination against independent voters in primaries is a violation of the First Amendment right guaranteeing freedom of political association and of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.
Michael J. Polelle is a Professor Emeritus of UIC Law where he taught courses in constitutional law, First Amendment law, and media law. He also directed an annual Media Law Conference at the law school. He is also a novelist. His debut novel was The Mithras Conspiracy (Lido Press: 2019) a history-based mystery now available on Amazon. He is currently at work on American Conspiracy. This work in progress explores constitutional booby traps involving presidential elections.
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Computational Approaches to Hypothesis Generation in Social Psychology: What’s Wrong with My Discipline, and How I Hope to Fix it in Retirement
Join James R. Larson, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Psychology on April 27, 2021 from 1:00 – 2:00 pm via Zoom
There is a “replication crisis” in social psychology—too often, the results of well-known published studies cannot be replicated by others. One cause of this crisis is the loose reasoning and imprecise language used to develop the hypotheses tested in empirical research. Greater formalism in hypothesis generation would help to solve this problem. Agent-based modeling (a type of computer simulation) can supply that formalism. Moreover, agent-based models have the capacity to quantify the degree of predictive precision contained in the theories they embody. These ideas will be demonstrated with 2 (maybe 3) agent-based models of collaborative group behavior.
Jim Larson is Professor Emeritus of Psychology both at the University of Illinois at Chicago and at Loyola University Chicago. He holds a PhD in Psychology for the University of Washington (Seattle). He was a member of the faculty of the Department of Psychology at UIC from 1984 to 2010 and served as Chair of the Department of Psychology at Loyola from 2010 to 2019. He is a past associate editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and currently is an associate editor of Group Processes and Intergroup Relations.