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Enrichment Opportunities

Jefferson Fellows Symposium

The Jefferson Fellows Symposium, now a hallmark of the Jefferson Fellows Selection Weekend in February, gives Jefferson Fellow candidates and members of the University community an opportunity to hear from and engage with second year Jefferson Fellows who have been asked to present on a specific aspect of their research.  The presentations, held in various Pavilions and in the Rotunda, are intimate discussions aimed at giving second and third year Jefferson Fellows the unique opportunity of presenting research early in their Ph.D. pursuit.

The 2010 Jefferson Fellows Symposium will feature these Fellows and topics:

  • William Dirienzo, Stellar Nurseries: Recent Progress and Problems in Star Formation Research
  • Laura Goldblatt, An Abjective Art: The Interstitial Aesthetic of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and Mina Loy’s Anglo Mongrels and the Rose
  • Jameson Graber, Mathematical Analysis of Structural Acoustic Systems
  • Jenifer M. Guimond, “Greening” Operations Strategy: A lifecycle approach
  • Mary Hicks, Migration, Mobility, Gender, Race and Labor Relations among Urban Domestic Servants in Salvador, Brazil 1887-1893
  • Ray Lamas, Where’s the plane going?  The Future of the Large Commercial Aircraft Industry
  • Lindsay O’Connor, Loose Vowels: Linguistic Waste and Lil Wayne’s No Ceilings
  • Harold S. Reeves, Repetition and Variation in the History of Herodotus
  • Lanier Sammons, The Game of Notes: Composition as an Act of Play
  • Stacie Thyrion, An Organic Composition: The Pedagogical Value of Plato’s Phaedrus

    Forum for Interdisciplinary Dialogue

    In the fall of 2008, the Jefferson Fellows Program added a new series, the Forum for Interdisciplinary Dialogue, to its yearly round of activities.  The Forum was the idea of former Jefferson Fellow, who envisioned an annual cross-disciplinary conference that would make it possible for Jefferson Fellows to engage with the larger University community.  His plan was for the Fellows to convene a gathering of diverse scholars and citizens to address  a topic of broad social or cultural significance.  The interplay of their perspectives would illuminate the subject in novel ways, while highlighting both the differences and commonalities of their ways of looking at the world.  The inaugural conference, entitled “The Art of Science: the Science of Art,” incorporated contributions from more than a dozen faculty members including a keynote address from  Professor Bernie Frischer, the executive director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.

    Schedule of Events for 2008 Forum for Interdisciplinary Dialogue

    Panel I: The Origins and Engines of Design

    Dana M. Elzey, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

    Michael Kubovy, Department of Psychology

    John D. Summers, Department of Art

    Carl O. Trindle, Department of Chemistry

    Keynote Speaker

    Bernard Frischer, Director, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

    Panel II: The 21st Century Good Samaritan - Understanding the Imperative to Help

    Lise M. Dorbin, Department of Anthropology

    Jeanne M. Erickson, School of Nursing

    Robert J. Swap, Department of Environmental Sciences

    Panel III: Scaling the Ivory Tower - Adapting Specialized Knowledge to Mass Culture

    Robert J. Hirosky, Department of Physics

    Peter W. Ochs, Department of Religious Studies

    D. Mark Whittle, Department of Astronomy

    Faculty Interaction

    Each Fellow may identify one or more of the University’s most distinguished faculty members outside of the Fellow’s home department whose work relates in some way to his or her own for introduction by a member of the Foundation’s Faculty Advisory Committee. This introduction is intended to allow each Fellow to solicit feedback on his or her research from alternate perspectives and to broaden his or her intellectual resources at the University.

    The Foundation also hosts an annual Fellow-Faculty dinner to facilitate Fellow’s interaction with a diverse group of faculty members.  Held each fall, this dinner occurs in an intimate yet informal setting that allows Fellows to form relationships both with professors from within and outside of their own disciplines.