From Kinsey to Kaatzi
Richardson Auditorium, Morse-Ingersoll Hall
Elizabeth Kaatz Mooney'48 will present a lecture about her work in the field of Human Sexuality. Her talk will encompass important research findings that have been made in the last 50 years, including her own research results, as well as her views on the important role of human sexuality education in this era of infertility problems.

Elizabeth Kaatz Mooney'48 holds an M.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Doctor of Arts degree from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. She has spent 45 years educating young people about sexuality as a therapist and a teacher and has been an award-winning faculty member in the sociology department at Indiana University-South Bend for the last two decades. Her Marital Relations and Sexuality class attracts 100 students a semester and is one of the department's most popular courses. She received a Distinguished Service Citation from Beloit in 1973.

Beloiters in the BWCA-Quetico Wilderness: What Have They Accomplished?
Wood Room, Mayer Hall
The rocky cores of the continents were constructed early in Earth’s history by stacking together even earlier portions of the Earth’s crustal rocks. For more than 30 years, faculty and students from the department of geology at Beloit, and from the Keck Consortium colleges, have been making detailed observations and measurements along a 125 km segment of the junction formed by the Quetico terrane to the north and the Wawa terrane to the south. These studies were carried out in an attempt to better understand the mechanics of how these segments of Earth’s crust became juxtaposed. This illustrated talk by Hank Woodard, professor emeritus of geology, will try to give both a picture of what it is like to work and live in a wilderness area and how we go about trying to unravel a bit of very ancient Earth history.

Hank Woodard joined the faculty in 1953 and has been an emeritus faculty member since 1992. Though retired, at times it seems as if Hank teaches as much as the other faculty! His teaching interests included mineralogy and petrology. His research has focused on the complex geology in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (Minnesota) and Quetico Provincial Park (Ontario), where he has sponsored numerous undergraduate research projects.

What Saturn's Rings Reveal
Room 450, Center for the Sciences
Join Britt Scharringhausen, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and Samantha Wolfe’10, McNair Scholar, as they reveal their research results on Saturn’s F ring based upon data analysis taken from the Cassini spacecraft’s ring-plane crossings. The F ring is a narrow, dusty ring that lies outside the brighter main rings. Inside the F ring, the tidal force from Saturn is equal to the self-gravity of a satellite and it is common for ring particles to clump together due to their mutual gravitational forces, replaying the early stages of planet formation.

Britt Scharringhausen is assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Beloit College. Britt's research interests are in the area of planetary astronomy, particularly rings and satellites of Saturn and solar system dynamics. She received her PhD in Astronomy from Cornell University in January 2007.

Samantha Wolfe’10 is a McNair Scholar from Beloit, Wis. majoring in Physics and Astronomy.

Meditation 101
Spirituality Room, Pearsons basement
Meditation deepens one’s capacity to be aware, awake and accepting...curious, compassionate, and courageous in moment-to-moment life. There is nothing mystical, magical or otherworldly about it. It's not about escaping to a serene state of mind (though moments of serenity often do come). It's about being here, now, whatever is happening in us and around us, and cultivating patience, loving kindness and equanimity (being OK with whatever is happening).

Bill Conover has been the director of the Spiritual Life Program since it was launched in August, 2004. An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is at home serving students of diverse faiths and perspectives. Bill received an undergraduate degree in East Asian Studies (Chinese history and language) from Princeton University in 1989, followed in 1993 by an M.Div from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.  Before coming to Beloit College, Bill served churches in Solomon, KS and Madison, WI, and worked for two years in a campus ministry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mountains in History and Culture—From China to the Beloit College Archives
Library, lower level, north lounge
In this session we will examine the way that various thinkers have engaged the greatest monuments in their midsts—the mountains that dominate certain parts of the human landscape. Mountains have figured prominently in writings and oral traditions from earliest times, and the fascination with them continues in the disciplines of history and anthropology, where the study of lofty terrain has alternately framed and dominated research work. We will examine the role of mountainous terrain in classical statements by Confucius, Vasari, in the Bible, and other sources. In particular, we will study the five “marchmounts” or cosmological mountains of China —Mt. Heng in the north, Mt. Tai in the east, Mt. Song in the center, Mt. Hua in the west, and another Mt. Heng in the south. Since early times, the Chinese imagined heaven as round and earth as square, and their linkage played a prominent role in three thousand years of political and historical writings. To this day, the mountains remain important as cultural sites and pilgrimage centers, and we will look at their role in multiple levels of Chinese economic, cultural, and political life. Our mountain journey will come full circle to Beloit College, as Rob LaFleur’s current research on Chinese mountains connects with the Chinese travels of T.C. Chamberlin almost one hundred years ago.

Robert André LaFleur is Professor of History and Anthropology at Beloit College. He teaches a wide range of courses on East Asian history and culture, and is currently working on several different books—a general overview of China that has as contributors almost all of the Asian Studies faculty members at Beloit College, a study of an eleventh-century Chinese historical text that has very modern “management” implications for businesses today, and a work on China’s five “cosmological mountains,” which figure prominently in Chinese history and culture. He has a B.A. in history and anthropology from Carleton College, and a doctorate from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. He has taught at Beloit College since 1998.

Encountering China: Twenty Years of Teaching, Textiles, Peasant Art, and Poetry
Room 349, Center for the Sciences
In 1987 Ann Arbor and John Rosenwald traveled to China for the first time to teach as part of the Beloit/Fudan Exchange, one of the first programs to link a major Chinese university with an American undergraduate college by bringing to Beloit students and faculty from Fudan University in Shanghai and sending Beloit students and faculty to Fudan. This experience, begun in the narrow window between the student protests in 1986 and the massive demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, has led to twenty years of teaching in China, advising students from both China and the U.S., and, less predictably, deep engagement with major contemporary Chinese poets, with two internationally-famous schools of Chinese peasant artists, and with minority craftswomen whose wealth resides in their skill at embroidery. Rosenwald and Arbor will share stories from the past twenty years as well as samples of the textile work, peasant art, and poetry they have gathered in their roles as informal ambassadors between these two countries.

John Rosenwald divides his time between Beloit, Wisconsin, where he is Professor of English; the People’s Republic of China, where he has held three Fulbright grants to teach American poetry and culture; and Farmington, Maine, where he serves as co-editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. He has published in numerous magazines and given readings, more than 500 of them, in England, Canada, Germany, China, and the U.S. Much of his recent work involves collaborative translation of contemporary Chinese poets and organization of exhibitions of Chinese peasant paintings.

Ann Arbor is a photographer, novelist, and poet. Since 1975 she has been a participant at Robert Bly's Annual Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father. She’s taught English to students from pre-kindergarten to graduate school, coached the Beloit College women’s basketball team, and served as Foreign Expert in China at Fudan, Nankai, and Zhejiang Universities. As a photographer she has published work in national and international magazines ranging from The Chicago Tribune to Geo (Germany). Her most recent show was Journey to the Middle Kingdom, photographs from her years of travel and teaching in China.

The 2008 Bear Market - A Hundred Year Storm or the Next Great Investment Opportunity?
Room 249, Center for the Sciences
Easy credit, the 'bubble' in residential real estate, and the ensuing collapse of the sub-prime lending market have all set the stage for the current economic slowdown, a bear market in stocks, and potentially worse. Are we now in the economic equivalent of a hundred year storm, or just another bump in the road of long term economic growth? While not exhaustive, this talk will examine a sample of contemporary market bubbles, their economic roots, and the long term implications for investors. Along the way, we'll also look at the post-WW II history of market cycles and, perhaps, the roots of the next great investment idea/bubble.

Election 2008: About the Campaigns, Media, and U.S. Democracy Cancelled
Room 150, Center for the Sciences
Lecture Description forthcoming