Distinguished Visiting Professor

2009

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Alain Berthoz,
Professor of Physiology, Collège de France

An internationally-renowned neurophysiologist and an expert on perception and movement, Alain Berthoz holds the Chair in Physiology of Perception and Action at the Collège de France in Paris, and is Director of the Laboratory of Physiology of Perception and Action. Through brain imaging, recording movements, and the use of virtual reality, Prof. Berthoz and his research team study the neural basis of four major types of cognitive- motor functions: eye movements, generation of locomotion trajectories, strategies for cognitive spatial memory, and perception and expression of emotions and actions of others. Prof. Berthoz is a member of numerous academies and learned societies, and has won many prestigious awards and prizes including Chevalier de l’Ordre de a Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honour. He is an Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many authored and co-authored books include Les Sens Du Movement (Editions Odile Jacob, Paris, 1997) and (co-editor) Neurobiology of "Umwelt": How Living Beings Perceive the World (Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2009). His most recent book is La Simplexité (Editions Odile Jacob, Paris, 2009).

During his month-long stay in September, Professor Berthoz pursued a scholarly agenda and participated in Institute programs and events. Among other events, Professor Berthoz gave a Faculty Associates Forum talk, two public talks, and participated in many research discussions, including with the Wall Major Thematic Grant on Sensorimotor Computation.

September 1 - 30, 2009

2008

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Roald Hoffman,
1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Writer

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U. S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962). Since 1965 he is at Cornell University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).

"Applied theoretical chemistry" is the way Roald Hoffmann likes to characterize the particular blend of computations stimulated by experiment and the construction of generalized models, of frameworks for understanding, that is his contribution to chemistry. The pedagogical perspective is very strong in his work.

Notable at the same time is his reaching out to the general public; he participated, for example, in the production of a television course in introductory chemistry titled "The World of Chemistry," shown widely since 1990. And, as a writer, Hoffmann has carved out a land between science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays and three books, Chemistry Imagined with artist Vivian Torrence, The Same and Not the Same and Old Wine (translated into six languages), New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition, with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt.

Hoffmann is also an accomplished poet and playwright. He began writing poetry in the mid-1970s, eventually publishing the first of a number of collections, The Metamict State, in 1987, followed three years later by Gaps and Verges, then Memory Effects (1999), Soliton (2002), and most recently, in Spanish, Catalista. He has also co-written a play with fellow chemist Carl Djerassi, entitled Oxygen, which has been performed worldwide, translated into ten languages. His second play, "Should've", is a play about the social responsibility of scientist and artists. It debuted at the 41st Annual International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Congress in Turin, Italy.

The Vancouver premiere of Should've the week of March 3, 2008 at UBC's Frederic Wood Theatre created the occasion for the visit of Dr. Hoffmann to the Institute as 2008 Wall Distinguished Visiting Professor. Among other contributions in the space of one extraordinary week, he attended the Institute reception and opening night of the play, participated in the talk-back session and gala reopening of the Department of Chemistry’s heritage building that followed; gave a Wall Associates Forum lunch talk, and a lecture at the Department of Chemistry; and led a Wall Fireside Chat on topics that ranged from chemistry to poetry.

March 3 - 7, 2008

2005

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Arif Dirlik,
Professor Emeritus, History, Duke University

Professor Dirlik is a distinguished intellectual historian of modern China and of revolutionary thought, a noted critic of the Age of Global Capitalism, and an international expert on Asia-Pacific as a space of cultural production. He has been remarkably engaged in nurturing new areas of inquiry and new scholars by organizing workshops and symposia, editing special issues of journals and heading book series for Rowman & Littlefield, SUNY, and Duke University; participating on editorial and advisory boards of several dozen journals and series in a diverse range of fields; and contributing key note addresses at conferences and seminars around the world. His published articles and chapters, including on subjects outside the China and Asia-Pacific field, such as "The Past as Legacy and Project: Postcolonial Criticism in the Perspective of Indigenous Historicism," American Indian Culture and Research Journal (1996), republished in Troy R. Johnson (ed), Contemporary Native American Political Issues (1997), are seminal contributions in dozens of fields.

He has authored, co-authored, and edited over twenty book-length studies, many of which have been expanded and translated into half a dozen languages. These include Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Capitalism (2007); Pedagogies of the Global: Knowledge in the Human Interst (2006); Marxism in the Chinese Revolution (2005); (ed) Chinese on the American Frontier (2003); (ed) Locating Asian American Studies Today (2003); (with Zhang Xudong, eds.) Postmodernism and China (2000); (ed.) What is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (1998); The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (1997); After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (1994); Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (1991); The Origins of Chinese Communism (1989); Culture, Society and Revolution (1985), Revolution and History (1978).

Born in Mersin, Turkey, Arif Dirlik took a BSc in Electrical Engineering at Robert College, Istanbul (1964) and a PhD in History at the University of Rochester (1973). A member of the History faculty at Duke University from 1971 to 2001, he moved to the University of Oregon in 2001 as Knight Professor of History and Anthropology, Director of the Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies, and member of the Executive Committee of the Comparative Literature Program.

At the Institute, he completed his book on Global Modernity and held an all-day workshop that discussed various chapters in the book. He returned to the Institute for a book launch in the fall of 2006. He co-directed the Wall Summer Institute for Research "The End of the Peasant?" in 2008 and the follow-up retreat in 2009 in Hong Kong and Beijing.

October 23 - November 17, 2005