Themester 2016 is exploring why beauty matters and how it shapes human consciousness, human history, and our effort to understand the world around us.
The first-ever Themester podcast series features College of Arts and Sciences’ faculty, each exploring a “thing of beauty” of their own choosing. These artifacts of material culture, deemed beautiful by their beholders, spark conversations that touch on aesthetics, art, discipline, and passion, and elicit surprises along the way.
Folklorist and ethnographer Jason Jackson has a refined eye and a passion for discovering beauty in everyday objects.
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As a professor of English and a scholar of the Shakespearean stage, Ellen MacKay knows the thrill of working with rare manuscripts.
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Biologist and photographer Roger Hangarter and artist and curator Betsy Stirratt are long-time collaborators who share an idea of beauty as an experience found in nature.
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As a self-described “undisciplined” academic and believer in beauty, Eric Sandweiss thinks broadly about the role of beauty in the world.
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Kate Rowold is a professor of fashion design and a leading expert in the social and aesthetic history of Western fashion. Her chosen object reveals the perpetual tensions between ideas of beauty, the body, and fashion.
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A professed “historian of the Milky Way,” astronomer Catherine Pilachowski exalts the beauty of the ancient spiral galaxy that we call—at least in a galactic sense—home.
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Our podcast host is Claire Repsholdt, a senior majoring in English and history in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The College of Arts