Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Each Friday during the Fall and Spring academic semesters, a faculty volunteer gives a 30 minute lunchtime talk on her/his scholarship and/or teaching practices. Faculty members are invited to learn a little more about their colleagues, chat with others that attend the presentations, and enjoy a wonderful buffet lunch. Talks start at 12:30 p.m. and are usually over a little past 1 p.m.

The event is sponsored by the Office of Academic and Faculty Affairs.

Spring 2025 Schedule

APR 18   Chris Fietkiewicz (Mathematics & Computer Science)

Teaching Computational Neuroscience



The field of “computational neuroscience” develops mathematical and computer science methods for the study of neuroscience. I will give an overview of a relatively new course at HWS on this topic (CPSC 310) that focuses on writing software to simulate the brain. The talk will include a variety of anecdotes, including a drug that cures arachnophobia, a story of how students inadvertently planted a false memory in my own mind, and a song about neurons that I will perform.

APR 11   Walter Bowyer (Chemistry)

When STEM Meets Art: A Productive Collaboration

Walter Bowyer and Liliana Leopardi have been interested in the overlap between art and science for a very long time. In 2018, we participated jointly in a one-week workshop at Yale University, which was the beginning of a wonderful collaboration in our course work and in our research. We describe some of our results.

APR 4   Morton Wan (Music)

Bubble Ballads: What Music Can Teach Us About the Financial Crisis of 1720

My book project, Songs of Speculation: Music and the Rise of Finance during the 1720 South Sea Bubble, explores how music can prompt us to think anew about the spectacular boom-and-bust of the world’s first modern bubble economy—not merely as a dramatic episode in our economic past but as a momentous chapter in the history of modern culture. This talk offers a snapshot of a key chapter from the book project, which examines the financial and economic significance of English ballads amid the rapid growth of Britain’s paper economy.

The 1720 crisis imploded a flurry of paper-based ephemera—stock certificates, credit notes, newspapers, pamphlets, and broadside ballads. Among these ballads emerged a distinctive strain I call “bubble ballads”: viral songs that combined musical entertainment with economic reportage. These ballads originated in London’s Exchange Alley, the epicenter of the trading frenzy, and soon traveled across the British Isles and beyond.

Contrary to prevailing musicological views that dismiss these ballads as mere trifles—lowbrow, slipshod musical consumables—I argue for their reassessment as significant early modern media artifacts whose impact belied their humble form. By applying a combined hermeneutic and media-material analysis to select bubble ballads, I bring music to bear on the recent historiographic turn towards a behavioral understanding of the nature of the South Sea crisis, increasingly seen as a public mania shaped by shifting economic narratives and their contagious spread. I contend that these ballads, as vectors of market narratives, not only chronicled but may have actively contributed to the Bubble’s inflation, persistence, and ultimate collapse.

On the one hand, I examine the bubble ballads alongside contemporary financial documents, focusing on their shared medium—paper. This reorientation toward the media attributes of these primary sources enables us to consider how musical meaning and asset value, conveyed by these market artifacts, functioned as forms of “paper knowledge,” charged with an aura of imagination veering between permanence and change. By tracing the combinatorial process behind the production of these ballads, I argue that they offer insights into the value mechanisms underlying the South Sea Company’s financial scheme, particularly its rampant development of derivatives finance, thereby illuminating an epistemic fragility at the heart of this market maelstrom.

On the other hand, shifting focus from the ballads’ ephemeral medium to their sensorial impact, I place these ballads—often pilloried by writers as contributors to London’s escalating noise—within contemporaneous discourse on the economic implications of the urban soundscape. I show how these bubble ballads uncover an early-modern conception of noise as more than just a sensory phenomenon, viewing it also as an economic barometer and an informational concept. Eighteenth-century commentators intuitively grasped these aspects of noise, foreshadowing theories of market noise that economists would only formalize in the twentieth century.

Mar 28   The Ethical Stewardship Task Force

Update on the Ethical Stewardship Task Force

Formed in 2023, the Ethical Stewardship Task Force meets regularly to identify human remains on campus and discuss best methods of care for them. During this presentation, members Lou Guard, Brian Clark, Meghan L. Jordan and Brandon Moblo will provide an update on the work, goals and accomplishments of the task force.

Mar 14   Tania Johnson (Director of Sponsored Research)

Sponsored Programs at HWS

In this talk, I will discuss how the Office of Sponsored Programs can support scholarly work at HWS, institutional processes related to grants, updates on the transitions in OSP, new and existing grantsmanship resources, and navigating the current funding landscape, among other topics.

Mar 7   Vikash Yadav (International Relations)

Freedom in an Algorithmic Society

The presentation examines how the spread of algorithms, combined with a relationship between tech corporations and the state, enhance the authoritarian trends of political capitalist regimes such as China. The presentation asks whether digital totalitarianism is the fate of liberal capitalist regimes or whether there are opportunities to subvert algorithmic technologies of surveillance, management, and repression.

Feb 28   Seraphine Hamilton (WS Basketball Head Coach)

Own Your Power: Teaching Student-Athletes Resilience and Self-Belief

Student-athletes face high demands and expectations on their time and performance. They must balance rigorous, time-consuming training; academic obligations and opportunities; and the constant pressure from within (and without) to perform. In “Own Your Power,” I will address the ways in which I work to foster resilience and confidence within each student-athlete and build their capacity to set and continually raise their own standards and expectations for their own learning and performance.

Feb 21   Lisa Yoshikawa (History)

Hunting Taiwan: empire building, animal conservation, Indigenous peoples

Modern sport hunting culture entered Japan in the 19th century from Britain/Europe, and as in those places, quickly became popular as manifestation of modernity, celebration of masculinity, emblem of colonial conquest, and more. When Japanese colonizers began to occupy Taiwan in 1895, they brought along sport hunting with them. Yet, these hunters had to negotiate their culture as the Japanese faced armed resistance in their new territory, agricultural extraction became a main industry, and they discovered a different kind of hunting tradition already extant on the island. This talk introduces some early discoveries from hunting (including head-hunting)-related sources that I read over the break for a co-authored project.

Feb 14   Bill Waller (Economics)

The Cambridge Tradition in Economics and Original Institutional Economics: Reflections on the connections between two heterodox traditions.

This presentation is preparatory for the 120th anniversary of Joan Robinson’s birth and the 40th anniversary of her passing. To be presented at Cambridge University in March.

Feb 7   Gabrielle LaBare (Warren Hunting Smith Library) and René Guo (Intercultural Programs & Initiatives )

Reimagining Black Creativity: The Living Legacy of the New Negro Movement (AIC and Library Collaboration)

The New Negro Movement, otherwise known as the Harlem Renaissance, interrogates a central question: What does blackness mean in modernity? This presentation explores how the movement’s intellectual, artistic, and political currents reverberated globally, reflecting the internal diversity and contested potentiality of Black identity—simultaneously inviting and resisting reductive categorization. Through poetry readings of Langston Hughes, live musical performances, and faculty presentations, this collaborative event bridges creative expression and academic inquiry to animate the era’s interdisciplinary spirit. Faculty and staff will demonstrate pedagogical approaches that integrate this period into engagement events and curricula across disciplines.

Like Christi Belcourt’s Walking With Our Sisters, which materialized absence through collective creation, our project harnesses collaboration—between library archives, faculty and staff—to honor the New Negro Movement/Harlem Renaissance’s legacy as a site of communal reimagining. The movement’s enduring power lies in its refusal of monolithic narratives, offering instead a dynamic lens to confront past and present struggles for Black liberation. In echoing Hughes’ declaration that “the past has been a mint / Of blood and sorrow,” we invite audiences to engage with this era not as a closed chapter, but as an ongoing conversation about belonging, resistance, and the boundless possibilities of Black creativity and identity.

Jan 31   Angelique Symanek (Art and Architecture)

Materializing the Missing: Christi Belcourt’s Walking With Our Sisters

In 2012, Métis artist Christi Belcourt used social media platforms to solicit donations to Walking With Our Sisters (WWOS), a public arts project commemorating the thousands of ‘disappeared’ women and girls from communities across Canada and the U.S, a disproportionate number of whom are Indigenous. Belcourt had hoped to recruit 600 people to create and mail moccasin “vamps,” the top portion of the shoes which are traditionally stitched and beaded by hand. In just over a year, the artist received over 1,600 uniquely decorated pairs, many of which were created in beading circles lead by Indigenous community members in various sites across Turtle Island (North America).  Lead by ancestral knowledge and produced through community collaboration, this paper contends that Walking With Our Sisters both honors the dead and those who mourn them while foregrounding that which is always already ‘disappeared’ under colonial logic: Indigenous humanity. To use Maya Ode’Amik Chacaby framing, through its materiality, process, and public engagements, WWOS offers an “un-settling presence that brings awareness of relationships that have for too long been occupied with erasure.”

Jan 24   Craig Talmage (Business Management & Entrepreneurship)

Neolocalism and Craft Breweries: Navigating the Authenticity Dilemma

Craft breweries are more than just places to grab a drink—they’re community hubs where neolocalism shines, celebrating local identity for visitors and residents alike, creating third places that build social capital and democracy, and fueling economic growth through collaboration rather than cut-throat competition. But with rising property values and gentrification, how do they stay true to local roots without excluding longtime residents? From the Finger Lakes and beyond, across rural, suburban, and urban landscapes, we’ll explore real-world stories of how these enterprises balance authenticity, sustainability, and inclusivity, especially looking at tethers between marketing and reality. Whether you’re a fan of craft beer, a champion of local culture, a skeptic about development in general, or curious about local community economic development, this session will serve up fresh insights into how these "hoppy" spaces can bolster resilient, welcoming, and forward-thinking neighborhoods.