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2007-2008 Distinguished Speaker
Series
The Division of Student Affairs is pleased to announce that the following speakers will participate in the 2007-2008 Distinguished Speaker Series:
- Dr. Michael Shermer and Dr. Paul
Nelson
Evolution vs.
Intelligent Design - A Debate
Thursday, September 20, 2007
7:30 p.m. - Wolf Kuhn Theatre - Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts
- Joe
Klein
Inside Washington: American Politics and
the Politicians
Thursday, November 15, 2007
7:30 p.m. - Devorris Downtown Center
- Anna
Deavere Smith
Snapshots: Glimpses of America in Change
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
7:30 p.m. - Wolf Kuhn Theatre - Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts
Dr. Michael Shermer and Dr. Paul Nelson
(link to downloadable poster)
Evolution vs. Intelligent Design - A Debate
Dr. Michael
Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Director
of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist
for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science
Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the
co-host and producer of the 13-hour Family Channel television series, Exploring
the Unknown.
He is the author of Science Friction: Where the
Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong.
His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care,
and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality
and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin's Shadow,
about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred
Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy
land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust
denial and other forms of pseudo history. His book How We Believe: Science,
Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of
religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People
Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions
of our time.
According to the late Stephen Jay Gould (from
his Foreword to Why People Believe Weird Things): "Michael Shermer, as
head of one of America's leading skeptic organizations, and as a powerful
activist and essayist in the service of this operational form of reason, is an
important figure in American public life."
Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from
Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State
University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont
Graduate University. Since his creation of the Skeptics Society, Skeptic
magazine, and the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, he
has appeared on such shows as 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Larry King Live,
Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries, and other shows as a
skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as interviews in countless
documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science
Channel, and The Learning Channel.
D r.
Paul A. Nelson is a philosopher of biology who received his Ph.D. from the
University of Chicago (1998), where he specialized in the philosophy of biology
and evolutionary theory. He is currently a Fellow of the Discovery Institute and
Adjunct Professor in the MA Program in Science & Religion at Biola University.
Paul’s articles have
appeared in Biology & Philosophy, Zygon, Rhetoric and Public
Affairs, and Touchstone, and chapters in the anthologies Mere
Creation, Signs of Intelligence, Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics,
and Darwin, Design, and Public Education. His forthcoming monograph,
On Common Descent, critically evaluates the theory of common descent.
Paul is a member of the
Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) and the International Society for the
History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB).
Paul resides in Glenview, Illinois, a northern suburb of
Chicago. He is married to Suzanne P. Nelson, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant
professor of pediatric gastroenterology at Northwestern University, and has two
daughters, Hannah (age 13) and Olivia (age 11).
Joe Klein
(link to downloadable poster)
Inside Washington: American Politics and the Politicians
Columnist, TIME; Political Commentator, CNN; Author of Primary
Colors and Politics Lost
Joe
Klein writes the “In the Arena,” a weekly column in
TIME Magazine which covers national and international affairs. In 2004 he
won the National Headliner Award for best magazine column.
Prior to TIME, Klein joined The New Yorker in December of 1996 as
Washington correspondent; he eventually became a Writer-at-Large, addressing
events in our nation’s capital and abroad. Mr. Klein came to The New Yorker
from Newsweek, where he served for four years as a political
columnist. He joined Newsweek during the 1992 Presidential race, and his
column, "Public Lives," addressed both national and international affairs. In
1994 he received a National Headliner Award for "Public Lives." His Newsweek
reporting also helped the magazine earn a National Magazine Award for Best
Single-Topic Issue (on Bill Clinton's 1992 victory).
As “Anonymous,” Mr. Klein was the
author of the critically acclaimed novel Primary Colors, which was
inspired by the 1992 Presidential race. Primary Colors was the first book
in history to simultaneously make the bestsellers lists on three continents on
the same day and spent 25 weeks on the The New York Times bestsellers
list — nine of them at the number one spot. The paperback edition of the book,
published in the fall of 1996, was also a national bestseller. His follow-up
political novel was The Running Mate.
In 2002, Klein published The
Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton (March 2002). This
definitive analysis of what happened and why during the Clinton years became an
instant New York Times bestseller. Publishers Weekly wrote, “There
will be numerous books written about Clinton and his presidency, but they will
be hard pressed to capture the public and private Clinton as well as this one.”
Klein’s latest bestseller is
Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re
Stupid. The New York Times called it “an entertaining, valuable
work,” and said, “Klein possesses one of the more musical ears in American
politics, a gift for hearing what others miss.”
Mr. Klein has been a consultant
for CBS News and provided commentary on American politics for various broadcasts
from 1992 until July of 1997; during the 2004 presidential campaign, he was a
regular contributor to Paula Zahn Now and other broadcasts on CNN. He now
appears frequently on Meet the Press, The Chris Matthews Show and
other broadcasts.
From 1987 to 1992, Mr.
Klein was political columnist at New York magazine, where he won a number
of awards, including the Peter Khiss Award, which honors reporting on New York
City government and public affairs, for a series on the 1989 mayoral campaign.
In addition, he has written articles and book reviews for The New Republic,
The New York Times,
The Washington Post, Life, Rolling Stone,
and other publications. He is also the author of two nonfiction books,
Payback: Five Marines After Vietnam
(1984) and Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980).
Joe Klein began his journalism career as a
reporter with the Essex County Newspapers in Massachusetts in 1969. In
1972 he worked as a reporter for WGBH-TV in Boston, and from 1972 to 1974 he was
a news editor at The Real Paper, also in Boston. From 1975 to 1980 he was
a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, also serving as its Washington
Bureau Chief from 1975 to 1977.
Mr. Klein graduated from the University of
Pennsylvania with a degree in American civilization. He is a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Guggenheim fellow. He lives with
his wife and two children in Westchester County, New York, and he is also the
father of two adult sons.
Anna Deavere
Smith
(link to downloadable poster)
Snapshots: Glimpses of America in Change
Playwright, Actor, Scholar
Anna
Deavere Smith appeared in such publications as The New York Times,
The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek,
The New Yorker, O Magazine, A Public Space, Essence,
and The Drama Review.
In 1997, Smith became the Ford
Foundation’s first Artist-in-Residence.
During this time, and with funding from Ford, Smith founded and directed the
Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue, a
three-year experiment that was held from 1998- 2000, at Harvard University. The
Institute now enters its second phase, which will center on the dissemination of
materials about things learned so far. The Institute is dedicated to supporting
the development of works of art that deal with social issues in a
cross-disciplinary atmosphere that includes artists, scholars, and audiences.
The Institute is principally funded by a generous grant from the Ford Foundation
(where Ms. Smith served in 1997 as its first artist-in-residence).
Ms. Smith has been awarded
honorary degrees from Northwestern, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, Holy Cross, and
Cooper Union (forthcoming). Currently she is a tenured professor in the Tisch
School of the Arts at New York University and she is affiliated with the NYU
School of Law. Prior to this, she was the Ann O’Day Maples Professor of the Arts
at Stanford University where she taught from 1990 – 2000. She has also taught at
Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Southern California, and from 2001 -
2004, was Artist-in-Residence at MTV Networks.
In film, Smith has played roles
in Ivan Reitman's Dave, Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia, Robert
Benton’s The Human Stain and Christopher Columbus’ Rent. In Rob
Reiner's The American President, starring Michael Douglas and Annette
Bening, she played the White House Press Secretary. On television, she played
National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on NBC’s The West Wing and
appeared in a recurring role in the acclaimed ABC series, The Practice.
She also co-starred in the CBS drama, Presidio Med, a series by the
award-winning producing-writing team of NBC’s ER.
At present, Smith is working on a
new play for her On The Road series called Let Me Down Easy. Its subject
will be the resilience and vulnerability of the human body. The play was
inspired by Ms. Smith’s visiting professorship at the Yale School of Medicine,
where she presented a performance for medical ground rounds called Rounding
It Out (2000). As part of her preparation for Let Me Down Easy, Smith
traveled to Rwanda to interview survivors of the Genocide and to Uganda and
South Africa to do research on the effects of the AIDS pandemic. She also
interviewed victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
A native of Baltimore, she
currently lives in New York City, where she is on the board of the Museum of
Modern Art and chairs the museum’s Committee on Film.
The Distinguished Speaker Series is free and open to the public, and each program will be presented in the
Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts unless otherwise noted. Tickets are available at the Penn State Altoona Bookstore Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.,
on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and at the door if not sold out in advance.
Penn State Altoona provides the Distinguished Speaker Series as a student and
community service. It is partially sponsored by the Margery Wolf Kuhn Fund, the
John and Ann Wolf Family Speakers Series Fund, the Sarah Simonton Fund, and the Student Activities Fee.
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