2007
	Meredith West
	"Close Encounters of the Avian Kind: The Developmental Ecology of Vocal Communication in Birds"
In the Midwest, most farmers grow corn, wheat, or beans. Meredith West grows behavior. West co-directs the Animal Behavior Farm at Indiana University in Bloomington with her husband and research partner, Andrew King. Working with cowbirds, starlings, and other species, West has spent decades studying the social experience and competence of birds. Contrary to the image summoned by the term ³birdbrain,² she says, many avian species rely extensively on social learning to transmit culture. West has focused especially on avian vocal communication‹on the 200th anniversary of Mozart¹s death, her work on starlings made national headlines, as the media were eager to learn about a pet starling who played a musical role in Mozart¹s life and about an offbeat requiem by the composer that might have been inspired by the song of his starling friend. At the Animal Behavior Farm in Indiana, West and her colleagues were the first to discover that female cowbirds, who do not sing, still ³teach² males how to sing by using visual gestures to motivate and manipulate the male¹s vocal practice. In her 2007 Distinguished Faculty Research Lecture, West reflects on ³close encounters of the avian kind² she has experienced at the Animal Behavior Farm--a 93-acre laboratory-farm with several aviaries--as she has studied the multiple means by which animals guide one another¹s ability to learn. Employing state-of-the-art video and audio technology to document the actions of animals in semi-naturalistic environments, West and her Animal Behavior Farm colleagues are creating a new kind of laboratory for educating others and themselves.

2006
	Peter Bondanella
	“Fellini and Fantasy”
Italian director Federico Fellini (1920-93) is widely regarded as Italy's greatest film director. Many consider him to be Europe's most original 20th-century filmmaker, so famous that he has even inspired several new words or phrases in the Merriam-Webster English Dictionary. For example, “paparazzi,” a term universally employed to refer to aggressively annoying photographers seeking candid shots of celebrities, derives from the name of such a photographer in Fellini's blockbuster film La Dolce Vita (1959), the title of which has also become a popular English expression referring to the sweetness of life. Fellini's work garnered 23 Oscar nominations in an impressive variety of categories, and filmmakers and scriptwriters as different as Martin Scorsese, Bob Fosse, Woody Allen, Paul Mazursky, Peter Greenaway, François Truffaut, Lina Wertmüller, Giuseppe Tornatore, Spike Jonze, and Charlie Kaufman are deeply indebted to his work. Two successful Broadway musicals— Sweet Charity and Nine —were based respectively on The Nights of Cabiria and 8½ . The study of Fellini's works quite naturally focuses on the sources of such a fertile imagination. Bondanella's lecture provides a survey of the often surprising influences on Fellini's works. Pop culture icons plus Fellini's private dream world play a larger role in his creativity than the impact of other filmmakers. Such visual sources include early American cartoons by Winsor McCay and Frederick Burr Opper; Roman humor magazines of the fascist period; painters or artists as diverse as Giulio Romano, Fragonard, De Chirico, Picasso, and Scipione; and a Jungian analysis of the director's own dreams. The Lilly Library Fellini Archive, a collection of original manuscripts obtained from Fellini and scriptwriter Tullio Pinelli through Bondanella's efforts, are featured in this discussion of Fellini and fantasy.

2005
	Gary Hieftje
	“The Two Three Sides of Scientific Investigation”
There are several ways in which scientific investigation can proceed. The traditional “scientific method” is hypothesis-driven: a hypothesis is formulated, a procedure is devised to test the hypothesis, and the results of the test are used to determine the validity of the original idea. Unfortunately, this traditional approach generally yields only incremental gains in knowledge. Today, many of the most important scientific advances arise from true innovation: making connections between areas that have no apparent relationship. Consider the emergence of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) from its origins in the technical field of nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry. Or, an application may be sufficiently important that it encourages fundamental investigations to help characterize it. The current bioscience revolution is an illustration. Clearly, basic science can lead to the solution of significant applied problems, and important present problems can lead to better science. These two approaches—the applied leading the basic and the basic driving the applied—can be considered the two sides of scientific investigation. But both of these approaches require a catalyst. That catalyst is often instrumentation. It would seem, then, that there are three sides of scientific investigation. In this lecture, these three sides of scientific investigation are illustrated with work from Heiftje's laboratory.

2004
	Alex Dzierba
	“Exotic Particles and the Confinement of Quarks”
Understanding the confinement of quarks—fundamental constituents of matter—is recognized as one of the important and outstanding problems in physics. This lecture describes one search for an explanation of quarks' confinement (in the vibrations of flux-tubes)—a project the Secretary of Energy included as a short-term priority in its 20-year strategic plan of the Office of Science in the Department of Energy. Like the electron and proton of the hydrogen atom, quarks are bound together, but the force binding the quarks is dramatically different than the force that holds the atom together. The interquark force is many times stronger. Even more amazing, quarks are forever confined within the subatomic particles of which they are a part. The proton and electron of the hydrogen atom can be separated with relative ease, but no one has ever freed a quark from a baryon or a meson. Recent decades of experimentation and theoretical progress have led to the theory of quantum chromodynamics, or QCD. This theory postulates that quarks are bound by exchanging gluons, the quanta of the chromodynamic field. Gluons carry the analog of electrical charge, called color charge, meaning quarks carry color charge as well. Gluons can self-interact and form flux-tubes, which are the collapse of flux lines together to form a slender tube. These flux-tubes explain why quarks are confined—a meson is a quark and antiquark connected by a flux-tube. Furthermore, the vibrations (or excitations) of these flux-tubes should lead to a whole new family of mesons—called exotic mesons.

2003
	David C. Williams
	“Civic Constitutionalism, the Second Amendment, and the Right of Revolution”
Judges and lawyers commonly regard the U.S. Constitution as a juristic document—a set of legal rules, enforced through the judicial process, to govern the interaction of the government and citizens. Many citizens, however, have regarded the Constitution in a different way—as a civic text, an expression of transformative ideals never perfectly realized and always contested, that constitutes the American citizenry as a people. In this vision of civic constitutionalism, the Constitution does not belong ultimately or exclusively to the courts. Instead, the people are co-responsible for its interpretation, maintenance, alteration, and unmaking. In this lecture, Williams explores this civic version of the Constitution. He argues that it is a necessary backdrop for an adequate understanding of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Williams argues that from the beginning, the amendment arose from popular myths about the relationship between American civic identity and political violence. For the Framers of the Constitution, that myth was about a united people making a revolution against a corrupt government bent on subverting the common good. More recently, however, the Framers' myth of unity has been supplanted by myths about the inevitability of disunity and the resulting need for “good” Americans to control “bad” Americans through force of arms. Williams concludes that none of these myths serve modern Americans well in taming political violence: the Framers' myth calls for a unity that we do not possess, and the modern myths encourage violence by reinforcing our disunity. He suggests that the amendment should serve primarily not as a rule of law but as a cultural icon directing us toward greater unity on the use of political violence while celebrating our diversity in other areas of life.

2002
	Ellen D. Ketterson
	“Is It Just Hormones? Testosterone, Mating Systems, and Parental Care in Birds”
Ellen Ketterson has spent more than 20 years exploring the hormonal basis of reproductive behavior and physiology in a common species of songbird, the dark-eyed junco ( Junco hyemalis , also known as the snowbird). Employing techniques from animal behavior, evolutionary biology, ornithology, and behavioral endocrinology, Ketterson and her colleague and husband, Val Nolan Jr., have conducted long-term field studies of the junco. Their goal is to understand variation in avian mating systems and parental behavior. To determine why an animal behaves the way it does, Ketterson and Nolan use hormones to induce it to behave otherwise and calculate the consequences, both beneficial and detrimental. Ketterson's lecture describes the results of field and laboratory studies and relate these to larger themes in behavioral biology. Ketterson and Nolan's research helps to clarify how evolution produces complex adaptations, particularly those mediated by hormones and involving trade-offs. On a broader scale, their research methods may help to quantify the impact of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment and lead to a deeper understanding of the relationship between sex and gender.

2001
	Roger G. Newton
	“Alien Science”
Imagine that sometime in the future we will make contact with intelligent, technologically advanced beings on a far-away planet. Will their science and mathematics resemble ours or be totally different? In this lecture, Newton argues that scientific theories are not logical deductions from experimental and observational data, but are products of the human imagination. Apart from certain basic scientific facts, then, the big wide-ranging physical theories of the aliens should not be expected to be very much like ours. While Newton disagrees strongly with those who claim science is a social and cultural construct whose content and form are determined by the race, gender, or the milieu of scientists, he does not defend the position that our theories are etched in stone or that alien science must be just like ours.

2000
	Fedwa Malti-Douglas
	“Clinton, Lewinsky, and the Great Books”
After Kenneth W. Starr's multi-year and multi-million dollar investigation of President Clinton that culminated in the document known as The Starr Report, the report began creating waves among leading thinkers. Public intellectuals and professor-pundits rushed after The Starr Report, attempting to define it in broader civilizational terms. Malti-Douglas's lecture takes off where her study, The Starr Report Disrobed, ends. In that work, Malti-Douglas analyzed the obsessions of Judge Starr's text, paying particular attention to the intersection of gender, sexuality, and the body with American legal and political conceptions. The cultural fall-out from the Report has much to say about America and its fixations. Gender and sexuality play a central role, as the various literary allegiances open fascinating and provocative critical paths.

1999
	Larry N. Thibos
	“Perfecting the Optical System of the Human Eye”
The nineteenth-century German scientist, Herman von Helmholtz, once remarked that if a lens maker were to deliver a lens with such poor optical quality as the human eye he would be summarily dismissed as a very careless fellow! Of course the eye was not designed by a lens maker, it evolved over hundreds of millions of years in response to evolutionary pressure on sensory organs to extract biologically useful information from the environment. As an eye grows over the life span, automatic mechanisms help coordinate changes in its optical system, but occasionally these mechanisms fail to produce a well-focused eye. Fortunately for modern humans, the focusing errors associated with near-sightedness, far-sightedness, and astigmatism are easily corrected with spectacles or contact lenses, but there are many other kinds of optical imperfections found in eyes that are not as easily corrected. Consequently, the quality of the optical image which falls upon the retina is considerably less than is theoretically possible. For this reason the human eye falls short of its true potential as the organ of sight. Thibos's lecture focuses on the eye as an image-forming device and exciting approaches to the measurement and correction of its imperfections developed at the IU School of Optometry. These methods utilize adaptive-optical components from astronomy to make complex, computer-controlled lenses to correct the highly irregular aberrations of eyes. One aim of this work is to create “electronic spectacles” which have the potential to raise the quality of vision to unprecedented heights, giving human observers an opportunity to experience the visual world, in a way never before possible—unencumbered by the optical imperfections of the human eye.

1998
	Charles S. Parmenter
	“Laser Studies of Energy Flow in Molecules”
Based on more than 30 years of his research, Parmenter focuses on the ways in which the understanding of how molecules acquire and use the vibrational energy needed for chemical reaction can be illuminated with lasers, both figuratively and literally.

1997
	Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas P. Toth
	“The Role of Rock: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Technology”
Schick and Toth's lecture focuses on the archaeological evidence for the emergence of stone tool-making and tool-using hominids (protohumans). About 2.5 million years ago the first recognizable stone artifacts, archaeological sites, and larger-brained hominids are found in the prehistoric record. What are the evolutionary implications of these new features? What biological changes and cultural innovations can be seen as human evolution proceeds? Schick and Toth have spent decades investigating the Early Stone Age in Africa, Europe, and Asia through conventional archaeological fieldwork as well as “experimental archaeology,” attempting to re-create aspects of prehistoric lifestyles through an experimental approach. These studies have included experiments in making and using primitive stone tools, examining how stone age sites could form and become buried, and teaching an African ape to make and use stone tools. A wide range of approaches to addressing questions about our Paleolithic ancestors or near-ancestors is presented.

1996

Eugene D. Weinberg

“Iron Withholding: A Defense Against Disease”

In the mid-1970s, the conventional wisdom was that it was impossible to get too much iron, which is needed to prevent anemia a condition in which the blood cannot carry the amount of oxygen required by cells. Surplus iron was thought to be stored in the liver and bone marrow. By the mid-1990s, it was known that excess iron is a significant risk factor for the development of disease. In his lecture Weinberg describes the "iron withholding defense system", a major mechanism used by animals and humans to protect themselves against microbial infection and cancer.

1995

Ronald A. Hites

“The Movement of Toxic Pollutants through the Environment”

Professor Hites's research has applied sophisticated techniques of organic analytical chemistry to the understanding of environmental problems. His lecture centered on the sources and behavior of potentially toxic organic compounds in the environment.