This workshop will teach students how to tie the traditional Indian woman dress, the sari. Once students learn how to tie a sari, there will be a small competition to see who can tie their sari the fastest. Refreshments will be provided.

In this lecture/workshop, Dr. Donna Lee Kwon will introduce Korean music and facilitate its understanding by focusing on its unique characteristics. She will discuss traditional folk genres such as p'ungmul drumming, p'ansori, and folksongs but also bring out cultural continuities in Korean popular music as well. Come prepared to sing, dance and tap the rhythms of Korean music. 

Have you ever thought about German culture? Do you want to know some cultural differences between colleges in Germany and the US? Are the grades any different? How are the teachers in Germany? The classes? College life? Dorms? Come to Kaffeestunde (Hour of Coffee) to hear about Germany's culture! Refreshments will be provided.

Hosted by the German Department and sponsored by the Cultural Diversity Festival.

Title:  Sub-Exponential Decay Estimates on Trace Norms of Localized Functions of Schrodinger Operators

Abstract:  In 1973, Combes and Thomas discovered a general technique for showing exponential decay of eigenfunctions. The technique involved proving the exponential decay of the resolvent of the Schrodinger operator localized between two distant regions. Since then, the technique has been applied to several types of Schrodinger operators. Recent work has also shown the Combes–Thomas method works well with trace class and Hilbert–Schmidt type operators. In this talk, we build on those results by applying the Combes–Thomas method in the trace, Hilbert–Schmidt, and other trace-type norms to prove sub-exponential decay estimates on functions of Schrodinger operators localized between two distant regions.

Locations:

• April 4 - Niles Gallery (9AM - 1:30PM)
• April 4 - Library Multipurpose Room (3-5PM)

Religions have received much bad press in this new age of anxious states. Theorists of globalization, world economic uncertainty, and ‘national security’, for example, publicly worry about the role politicized Islamic religiosity might be playing in the press-termed ‘Arab Spring’ and its connection to violence. Other thinkers and policy mavens, particularly those associated with the burgeoning field of ‘risk analysis’, are increasingly edgy about religiously inflected Hindu and Buddhist nationalisms in South Asia, the rise of new forms of Christianity in Africa, or the possibly ‘destabilizing’ consequences of new religious enthusiasms in Russia and China. In this conference we seek to explore the many ways religions as practices are participating in the lives of people and groups living within the increasingly fragile and unsettling developments of our hyper age.

In the wake of the triple disasters of March 11, 2011 which devastated the Tohoku region of Japan with a massive earthquake, an enormous set of tsunami, and the catastrophic failure of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor, both Japanese and foreign observers struggled to make sense of these events.  Bestor examines some ways in which Japanese culture frames disasters, and based on fieldwork in Tohoku in 2011 and 2012, how local meaning-making unfolds.

Dr. Bestor earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University and is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies  at Harvard University. His books include: Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society (edited with Victoria Bestor and Akiko Yamagata, 2011), Doing Fieldwork in Japan (2003), and Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (2004).

The Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) invites you to join the Department of Anthropology for our 13th annual Distinguished Lecture Series featuring cultrual anthropologist Dr. Thedodore Bestor. This event is free, and open to all. 

Title:  On the ground state of the magnetic Laplacian in corner domains

Abstract:  I will present recent results about the first eigenvalue of the magnetic Laplacian in general 3D-corner domains with Neumann boundary condition in the semi-classical limit.  The use of singular chains show that the asymptotics of the first eigenvalue is governed by a hierarchy of model problems on the tangent cones of the domain. We provide estimations of the remainder depending on the geometry and the variations of the magnetic field. This is a joint work with V. Bonnaillie-Nol and M. Dauge.