Game days feature more than football on campus. Now in its 23rd season, the College of Arts and Science’s Pregame Showcase has been giving fans the chance to hear from esteemed UT faculty prior to each gridiron matchup.
This year’s first showcase will be held at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, September 8, before the home opener against Georgia State.
Supreme Synergy on Stage: Presenting Sweeney Todd will feature Cal MacLean, professor and head of the theater department, talking about the collaboration that went into this theater production. Joining him in the discussion will be Maestro Lucas Richman, music director of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.
Free and open to the public, each showcase features a thirty-minute presentation followed by a fifteen-minute question-and-answer session. Presentations begin two hours before kickoff in the Carolyn P. Brown University Center Room 213. A brief reception will be held immediately following each program. Door prizes will be awarded.
This season will feature a wide range of topics, including theater, space exploration, political science, philosophy, microbiology, history, and philosophy.
Here’s the lineup for the rest of the season:
- September 15—Exploring Asteroids with the Dawn Spacecraft. Hap McSween, Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, will explain how NASA’s Dawn spacecraft operates and what it discovered while exploring the large asteroid Vesta for the past year. This showcase begins at 4:00 p.m.
- September 22—The Politics of Income and Inequality in the United States. Nathan Kelly, associate professor of political science, will examine the causes of income inequality and the role political policy decisions have played in it.
- October 20—The Tales Bones Tell. Dawnie Steadman, anthropology professor and director of the Forensic Anthropology Center, also known as the Body Farm, will discuss how the science helps locate and identify crime victims and missing persons. She also will highlight research taking place at the Forensic Anthropology Center.
- November 3—The Authority of Citizens: Its Nature and Limits. David Reidy, professor and head of the philosophy department, will talk the nature and limits of democratic citizenship, looking particularly at how people can determine if officeholders are legitimately exercising their authority.
- November 10—Protecting Our Water Resources: A Microbioogist’s Perspective. David Wilhelm, a microbiology professor who has done research in the United States, Canada, China, and New Zealand, will talk about how scientific tools can help us understand how natural water systems work and how we can protect them.
- November 24—Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse. Jay Rubenstein, history professor, former Rhodes Scholar, and 2007 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, will explain how apocalyptic thought motivated the Crusaders and why this history is relevant to the modern world.
The Pregame Showcase is supported by WUOT 91.9 FM, the Office of Alumni Affairs and UT Athletics. For more information, visit pregameshowcase.utk.edu.
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C O N T A C T :
Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)