Elevating award-winning work
Published Dec. 4, 2023
The Insights Speaker Series highlights College of Liberal Arts faculty shedding light on engaging topics from their unique perspective. This installment features four award-winning CLA faculty talk everything from Korean media to the power of community. These brief, exciting presentations seek to generate discussion and stimulate ideas that highlight the value of the liberal arts.
PRESENTATIONS
Guess Who’s for Dinner
Dr. Michael Pante, associate professor of Anthropology and OVPR Impact Award recipient (2022), studies questions surrounding evidence for human cannibalism. Cut marks on fossilized bones have been historically difficult to identify and differentiate from other kinds of marks. However, using a combination of quantitative methods and machine learning, Pante and collaborators have shown that cut-marked hominin fossils appear early in the archaeological record. As Pante also discusses here, careful study of Neanderthal remains from Krapina demonstrates they very likely cannibalized each other—for food or ritual purposes—but we may never know why.
From Okja to Squid Game: The Netflixization of New Korean Media
Communication Studies Professor and OVPR Impact Award (2023) recipient Hye Seung Chung is an internationally respected expert on Korean film—and a fan too. Here Dr. Chung talks about Squid Game—as of 2023 still the biggest, most watched show in Netflix history—and makes a passionate case that the show is not promoting violence and self-preservation, but rather altruism, selflessness, and compassion. (Warning! This video contains spoilers for Squid Game.)
How to Trespass
English Professor and Stern Distinguished Professor Sasha Steensen is an award-winning poet and essayist. She lives west of Overland Trail just outside of Fort Collins, Colorado, and has recently begun a multi-genre project exploring what it means to call herself a “trespasser” on the land around her home: as an artist, as a hiker, and as a white homeowner on Indigenous land. This presentation offers a glimpse of Steensen’s current work.
Community Kinections
In this interactive, multimedia presentation, assistant professor of dance and Emerging Community Engaged Scholarship Award recipient (2023) Grace Gallagher and several of her students demonstrate the power of dance to build community among various groups, from mall walkers and festival attendees to people experiencing homelessness or—as you’ll see—watching a faculty member deliver a talk.
Check out the collection of Insights Speaker Series presentations on our YouTube channel.