Please check the details of each event for format and location. All events, as always, are free and open to the public.
Jennifer Saul // University of Waterloo
Dr. Saul will explore how a linguistic device -- the figleaf -- allows speakers to insert claims into public discourse which are widely recognized as false or even absurd. Common figleaves include utterances like "I just think we should investigate," "I'm just asking questions," "I was only joking," and "I'm not saying I agree, just that it's interesting." Figleaves, she argues, help to raise doubts about the facts and play an important role in the rise of blatant falsehoods of all kinds.
Jennifer Saul is Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language at the University of Waterloo. She researches and writes about Philosophy of Language, Feminism, Philosophy of Race, and Philosophy of Psychology. Her book Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Christopher Stewart // Google, University of Memphis Institute for Intelligent Systems
Moving between sectors, industries and countries isn’t as hard as it might sound. Dr. Stewart will explain how he went from French doctoral student to Google Computational Linguist and now Research Associate at the University of Memphis’ Institute for Intelligent Systems. The focus will be on the ideas behind practical research and development, emphasizing the translation of graduate training to a flexible, stimulating career. Come for the shameless plug of his forthcoming book on language technologies, stay for the tips on approaching the academic and non-academic job markets!
Dr. Christopher Stewart holds a PhD in French Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has held a tenure-track academic position, but also worked in text-to-speech synthesis R&D, data science, and human computation. In addition to his day job as a Computational Linguist at Google, he mentors linguistics PhDs looking for jobs outside academia. He volunteers on the Linguistic Society of America's "Linguistics Beyond Academia" Special Interest Group and is currently working on a book project on "An Introduction to Language Technologies." He lives in Memphis with his wife, son, and dog.
In conjunction with the Memphis Reads book program, which this year selected Robert Samuels’ and Toluse Olorunnipa’s Pulitzer Prize-winning His Name is George Floyd, the University of Memphis will host a screening of the USA Today documentary The Tyre Nichols Beating: What Went Wrong in Memphis?, followed by a panel discussion on journalism, policing, and race in Memphis.
The panel will take a local focus on the national issues covered in the Memphis Reads book by inviting reporters, historians, and community activists to reflect on what we can learn about Memphis from Samuels’ and Olorunnipa’s book—and what Memphis can teach others about the relationship between investigative and public interest reporting, community activism, and the police.
Panelists:
Micaela Watts (Commercial Appeal)
Andre Johnson (Benjamin W. Rawlins Jr. Professor, Department of Communication & Film, University of Memphis)
Laura Kebede-Twumasi (Coordinator of Civil Wrongs, Institute for Public Service Reporting, University of Memphis)
Charles McKinney (Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of History, Rhodes College)
Department of History Sesquicentennial Lecture
Fallou Ngom // Boston University
Sub-Saharan African is generally misconstrued as largely illiterate due to the legacy of the Eurocentric tradition that defines literacy as the ability to read and write only in European languages and the Latin script. Yet, millions of sub-Saharan Africans have been reading and writing in classical Arabic and their local languages using enriched forms of the Arabic script known as Ajami or locally invented scripts such as Ge’ez, Bamum, Nko, and others writing systems. This lecture focuses on African Ajami manuscripts and shows what scholars, educators, and students of Africa stand to gain by studying Ajami texts produced by both the elites and the masses across Africa.
Fallou Ngom is Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the African Studies Center at Boston University. His research interests include the interactions between African languages and non-African languages, the adaptations of Islam in Africa, and Ajami literatures (records of African languages written in Arabic script). His book, Muslims Beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of Ajami and the Muridyya (Oxford University Press, 2016), won the 2017 Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the best book in African studies.