University of Maryland Distinguished Lecture Series

Note: Everyone is welcome to attend any of these lectures. No tickets are necessary.

Prof. Derek Walcott
1992 Nobel Laureate (Literature)
Professor of Creative Writing
Boston University “A Reading” Thursday, 17 September 1998
4:00 PM
Rm. 2203 Art-Sociology

Dr. Theda Skocpol
Professor of Government
Professor of Sociology
Harvard University “Civic Engagement in American Democracy” Wednesday, 21 October 1998
4:00 PM
Rm. 2203 Art-Sociology

Dr. Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor, Professor of Linguistics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lecture on Language and Cognition
“New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind”
An audiotape of this lecture can be purchased from the “University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics” program at: UM Working Papers - Orders, Dept. Linguistics, 1401 Marie Mount Hall, College Park, MD 20742-7515. (Email: umwpil@umail.umd.edu)
Monday, 30 November 1998
4:00 PM
Tawes Theatre

Lecture on Politics
“Whose World Order: Conflicting Visions ”
A videotape of this lecture, which was broadcast on C-Span, can be purchased from “C-Span Archives” at 1.800.2772698 (tape code #116018).
Monday, 30 November 1998
8:00 PM
Tawes Theatre

Prof. Helen Vendler
A. Kingsley Porter University Professor
Harvard University
“Robert Lowell: The Poetry of Depression” Thursday, 18 March 1999
4:00 PM
Rm. 2203 Art-Sociology Bldg

Sir Roger Penrose
Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics
Oxford University
“A Missing Link in the Science of the 20th Century” Monday, 26 April 1999
4:00 PM
Rm. 1410/1412 Physics Bldg

Directions to the University of Maryland and Parking Information:
http://www.inform.umd.edu/Visitor/directions.html
Map of the University of Maryland:
http://www.inform.umd.edu/CampusInfo/About_UMCP/Maps/

Prof. Derek Walcott
CAS Creative Writing
Boston University

The poet, dramatist Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles. After studying at the University of the West Indies, Walcott moved to Trinidad, where he worked as a theater and art critic. In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which produced many of his early plays. His breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962). His Omeros (1990) is a sweeping 64-chapter epic that intertwines Homeric legend, classics, folklore and history. Most recently, he has published another collection of poems, The Bounty (1997).

Walcott has been an assiduous traveler but he has always felt himself deeply rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. Growing up on an isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, influenced Walcott's work and life. He won a MacArthur "genius" award in 1981 and then began teaching at Boston University, dividing his time between Trinidad and Boston. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

Dr. Theda Skocpol
Departments of Government and Sociology
Harvard University

Theda Skocpol is an eminent political scientist whose work covers an unusually broad spectrum of topics including both comparative politics (States and Social Revolutions, 1979) and American Politics (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992). Among her other works are Bringing the State Back In (with Peter Evans and Dietrich Rueschmeyer) (1985), Social Policy in the United States (1995), and Boomerang: Clinton's Health Security Effort and the Turn Against Government in U.S. Politics (1996). Her books and articles have been widely cited in the political science literature and have won numerous awards, including the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in political science for the previous year. Her current research focuses on U.S. social welfare policy and on civic engagement in American democracy.

Professor Skocpol is co-chair of the Russell Sage Foundation's Working Group on States and Social Structures, co-editor of Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, Comparative and International Perspectives, and a member of the editorial board of the American Political Science Review. She has received the American Sociological Association Award for a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa. Skocpol has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Social Insurance.
“America has long been know as an unusually civicly engaged democracy, not only the world's first mass electoral democracy, but also a country whose citizens form and participate in all kinds of voluntary associations. Today, many observers feel that American civic engagement is in decline. What is happening and why? The best way to answer these questions is to look backwards in history. By understanding how America became a highly civic engaged democracy in the first place, we can cast new light on changes since the 1970s. Theda Skocpol uses history to comment on the present, drawing on a major research project tracing the emergence and development of voluntary membership associations since the 18th century.”

Dr. Noam Chomsky
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Noam Chomsky is a prominent American linguist and political activist. His impact on the field of linguistics has been profound and lasting, changing the focus from a concern with methods of classification to a search for explanatory principles. Chomsky's major claims about language include the following:

The ordinary use of language is creative (innovative and stimulus free).
There is a fundamental distinction between knowledge and behavior, and it is the former that is the proper focus of scientific study.
An adequate description of a speaker's linguistic knowledge requires positing a set of abstract principles. The discovery of such a set of principles, acquired uniformly in a relatively short time on the basis of fragmentary evidence, suggests a biological component of language acquisition of some complexity. These principles of universal grammar are specific to the language faculty and contribute to a view of the mind as a set of mental organs, language being the one that is perhaps the best understood.

As a social critic and political activist, Chomsky, a libertarian socialist, is also acknowledged to be an articulate and persuasive critic of U.S. foreign policy. A fundamental aspect of his critique is the crucial role that U.S. academics and journalists play in the "manufacture of consent." His writings in this area include books on the Vietnam War (American Power and the New Mandarins, 1967), on the Middle East (Peace in the Middle East, 1974; The Fateful Triangle, 1983; and Mobilizing Democracy: Changing the U.S. Role in the Middle East, 1991), and on terrorism (The Culture of Terrorism, 1988).

Dr. Helen Vendler
Department of English
Harvard University

Helen Vendler is Poetry Critic for The New Yorker, and she writes regularly for The New York Times Review of Books, The New Republic, and The London Review of Books. Her seventeen books on poetry include On Extended Wings: The Longer Poems of Wallace Stevens (1969), The Odes of John Keats (1983), The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1998), and, most recently, Seamus Heaney, published as part of HarperCollins Modern Masters Series. She has received sixteen honorary degrees.

Robert Lowell said that a poem “is an event, not a record of an event.” What, then, is a poem to do when the aim is to enact depression? Depression is impoverished, emotionally speaking; it is apathetic, monotonous, bare, unmusical, discordant. What sort of a poem will depression produce as an image, a clone of itself? Professor Vendler will address this question through Lowell's For the Union Dead, written before Lowell was rescued by lithium from his recurrent yearly episodes of manic-depressive illness.

Sir Roger Penrose
Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics
University of Oxford

Professor Penrose is a mathematician best known for his popular books on physics and the mind, and for his fundamental work on general relativity theory, while his fascination with geometry has led to the discovery of the intriguing “Penrose tiles,” whose unexpected properties are still being investigated. His discoveries in the early 1960s showed that black holes are a clear implication of Einstein's general relativity. More recently, he has developed twistor geometry in an attempt to unite the general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics.

Prof. Penrose has won the 1988 Wolf Prize (which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their understanding of the universe), the Dannie Heinemann Prize, the Royal Society Royal Medal, the Dirac Medal, and the Albert Einstein Prize. His 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind became a best- seller and won the 1990 (now Rhone-Poulenc) Science Book Prize. His latest books are Shadows of the mind (1994), The Nature of Space and Time (1996) with Stephen Hawking, and The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (1997). In 1994 he was knighted for his services to science.

For more information, contact Acrisio Pires at (301) 405-3082 or pires@wam.umd.edu

View the 1997-98 Graduate School Distinguished Lecturers
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Prof. Derek Walcott 1992 Nobel Laureate (Literature) Professor of Creative Writing Boston University	*“A Reading”*	Thursday, 17 September 1998 4:00 PM Rm. 2203 Art-Sociology
Dr. Theda Skocpol Professor of Government Professor of Sociology Harvard University	*“Civic Engagement in American Democracy”*	Wednesday, 21 October 1998 4:00 PM Rm. 2203 Art-Sociology
Dr. Noam Chomsky Institute Professor, Professor of Linguistics Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Lecture on Language and Cognition *“New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind”* An audiotape of this lecture can be purchased from the “University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics” program at: UM Working Papers - Orders, Dept. Linguistics, 1401 Marie Mount Hall, College Park, MD 20742-7515. (Email: umwpil@umail.umd.edu)	Monday, 30 November 1998 4:00 PM Tawes Theatre
	Lecture on Politics *“Whose World Order: Conflicting Visions ”* A videotape of this lecture, which was broadcast on C-Span, can be purchased from “C-Span Archives” at 1.800.2772698 (tape code #116018).	Monday, 30 November 1998 8:00 PM Tawes Theatre
Prof. Helen Vendler A. Kingsley Porter University Professor Harvard University	*“Robert Lowell: The Poetry of Depression”*	Thursday, 18 March 1999 4:00 PM Rm. 2203 Art-Sociology Bldg
Sir Roger Penrose Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics Oxford University	*“A Missing Link in the Science of the 20th Century”*	Monday, 26 April 1999 4:00 PM Rm. 1410/1412 Physics Bldg
Directions to the University of Maryland and Parking Information: http://www.inform.umd.edu/Visitor/directions.html Map of the University of Maryland: http://www.inform.umd.edu/CampusInfo/About_UMCP/Maps/

Prof. Derek Walcott CAS Creative Writing Boston University
The poet, dramatist Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles. After studying at the University of the West Indies, Walcott moved to Trinidad, where he worked as a theater and art critic. In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which produced many of his early plays. His breakthrough came with the collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962). His Omeros (1990) is a sweeping 64-chapter epic that intertwines Homeric legend, classics, folklore and history. Most recently, he has published another collection of poems, The Bounty (1997).
Walcott has been an assiduous traveler but he has always felt himself deeply rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. Growing up on an isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, influenced Walcott's work and life. He won a MacArthur "genius" award in 1981 and then began teaching at Boston University, dividing his time between Trinidad and Boston. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

Dr. Theda Skocpol Departments of Government and Sociology Harvard University
	Theda Skocpol is an eminent political scientist whose work covers an unusually broad spectrum of topics including both comparative politics (States and Social Revolutions, 1979) and American Politics (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992). Among her other works are Bringing the State Back In (with Peter Evans and Dietrich Rueschmeyer) (1985), Social Policy in the United States (1995), and Boomerang: Clinton's Health Security Effort and the Turn Against Government in U.S. Politics (1996). Her books and articles have been widely cited in the political science literature and have won numerous awards, including the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in political science for the previous year. Her current research focuses on U.S. social welfare policy and on civic engagement in American democracy.
Professor Skocpol is co-chair of the Russell Sage Foundation's Working Group on States and Social Structures, co-editor of Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, Comparative and International Perspectives, and a member of the editorial board of the American Political Science Review. She has received the American Sociological Association Award for a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa. Skocpol has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Social Insurance.
“America has long been know as an unusually civicly engaged democracy, not only the world's first mass electoral democracy, but also a country whose citizens form and participate in all kinds of voluntary associations. Today, many observers feel that American civic engagement is in decline. What is happening and why? The best way to answer these questions is to look backwards in history. By understanding how America became a highly civic engaged democracy in the first place, we can cast new light on changes since the 1970s. Theda Skocpol uses history to comment on the present, drawing on a major research project tracing the emergence and development of voluntary membership associations since the 18th century.”

Dr. Noam Chomsky Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Noam Chomsky is a prominent American linguist and political activist. His impact on the field of linguistics has been profound and lasting, changing the focus from a concern with methods of classification to a search for explanatory principles. Chomsky's major claims about language include the following: The ordinary use of language is creative (innovative and stimulus free). There is a fundamental distinction between knowledge and behavior, and it is the former that is the proper focus of scientific study. An adequate description of a speaker's linguistic knowledge requires positing a set of abstract principles. The discovery of such a set of principles, acquired uniformly in a relatively short time on the basis of fragmentary evidence, suggests a biological component of language acquisition of some complexity. These principles of universal grammar are specific to the language faculty and contribute to a view of the mind as a set of mental organs, language being the one that is perhaps the best understood.
As a social critic and political activist, Chomsky, a libertarian socialist, is also acknowledged to be an articulate and persuasive critic of U.S. foreign policy. A fundamental aspect of his critique is the crucial role that U.S. academics and journalists play in the "manufacture of consent." His writings in this area include books on the Vietnam War (American Power and the New Mandarins, 1967), on the Middle East (Peace in the Middle East, 1974; The Fateful Triangle, 1983; and Mobilizing Democracy: Changing the U.S. Role in the Middle East, 1991), and on terrorism (The Culture of Terrorism, 1988).

Dr. Helen Vendler Department of English Harvard University
	Helen Vendler is Poetry Critic for The New Yorker, and she writes regularly for The New York Times Review of Books, The New Republic, and The London Review of Books. Her seventeen books on poetry include On Extended Wings: The Longer Poems of Wallace Stevens (1969), The Odes of John Keats (1983), The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1998), and, most recently, Seamus Heaney, published as part of HarperCollins Modern Masters Series. She has received sixteen honorary degrees.
Robert Lowell said that a poem “is an event, not a record of an event.” What, then, is a poem to do when the aim is to enact depression? Depression is impoverished, emotionally speaking; it is apathetic, monotonous, bare, unmusical, discordant. What sort of a poem will depression produce as an image, a clone of itself? Professor Vendler will address this question through Lowell's For the Union Dead, written before Lowell was rescued by lithium from his recurrent yearly episodes of manic-depressive illness.

Sir Roger Penrose Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics University of Oxford
Professor Penrose is a mathematician best known for his popular books on physics and the mind, and for his fundamental work on general relativity theory, while his fascination with geometry has led to the discovery of the intriguing “Penrose tiles,” whose unexpected properties are still being investigated. His discoveries in the early 1960s showed that black holes are a clear implication of Einstein's general relativity. More recently, he has developed twistor geometry in an attempt to unite the general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics.
Prof. Penrose has won the 1988 Wolf Prize (which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their understanding of the universe), the Dannie Heinemann Prize, the Royal Society Royal Medal, the Dirac Medal, and the Albert Einstein Prize. His 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind became a best- seller and won the 1990 (now Rhone-Poulenc) Science Book Prize. His latest books are Shadows of the mind (1994), The Nature of Space and Time (1996) with Stephen Hawking, and The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (1997). In 1994 he was knighted for his services to science.