Forum Series
hosted by the Gordy Honors College
The W's Ina E. Gordy Honors College presents the Forum Series each semester, hosting national, regional, and local speakers and offering films and other special presentations.
Spring 2021
February 18
6 p.m.
Loosing Cents: Exploring the Role of Alternative Financial Services Among College Students
Dr. Cecy Brooks
Visiting Assistant Professor of Family Science, MUW
Dr. Brooks will discuss her research on college students’ use of alternative financial services such as selling personal property online or using payday loans or check cashing facilities. Because some college students receive lump sum financial aid payments or work intermittently, the convenience and ease of use of alternative financial services make them viable options. However, the convenience and ease of use could actually lower the long-term financial well-being of college students. Dr. Brooks will also discuss how young adults form financial habits and the importance of identifying financial barriers and opportunities for future well-being.
March 4
6 p.m.
Nell Peel Wolfe Lecture
Ben Raines, Environmental Journalist and Filmmaker
Author of Saving America's Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System
Raines has won more than two dozen awards for his coverage of environmental issues and natural wonders. He wrote and directed The Underwater Forest, an award-winning film about a 70,000-year-old cypress forest found off the Alabama coast. He also wrote and produced the America’s Amazon, aired on PBS stations around the country. His underwater film work has appeared on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic TV. He is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a degree in filmmaking and is a Coast Guard-licensed captain, giving tours of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and Alabama’s barrier islands.
March 25
6 p.m.
The Asylum Hill Cemetery Project
Dr. Ralph Didlake
Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Chief Academic Officer, University of Mississippi Medical Center; Visiting Professor of Surgery and Director, UMMC Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities
The Mississippi Insane Asylum operated in Jackson 1855-1935. During this period, a cemetery was maintained on the asylum grounds in which several thousand deceased patients were interred. This location is now occupied by the University of Mississippi Medical Center, for which mission-critical needs have raised numerous administrative, ethical, cultural, and practical challenges in the long-term management of these burial sites. Dr. Didlake will discuss the history of the asylum and a proposal to memorialize those buried in the Asylum Hill Cemetery in a manner that also creates a research and education resource.
April 8
Gordy Honors College Undergraduate Research Symposium (Part I)
April 15
Gordy Honors College Undergraduate Research Symposium (Part II)
Previous Events
Spring 2020
January 30
Black Women and the Suffrage Movement in Mississippi, 1863-1965
Dr. Shennette Garrett-Scott
Associate Professor of History and African American Studies, University of Mississippi
Dr. Garrett-Scott will discuss the ways that Black women in Mississippi actively participated in the suffrage movement after the Civil War. They fought for women’s suffrage even as they supported Black men and passage of the 15th Amendment. With passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, Black women could not claim victory. It would take another forty years before they could exercise the right to vote. This presentation provides an overview of the 100-year-fight by Black women in Mississippi to maintain their place in public political discourse, from the Civil War to passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Dr. Garrett-Scott is author of Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019), the first full-length history of finance capitalism that centers black women and the banking institutions and networks they built from the eve of the Civil War to the Great Depression.
February 27
Dr. Benjamin Onyeagucha
Assistant Professor of Biology, Mississippi University for Women
Dr. Onyeagucha’s research focuses on identifying and characterizing biomarkers and molecular drivers in cancer for the purpose of developing novel therapeutic strategies for breast cancer patients. Students in Dr. Onyeagucha's lab learn both basic and translational techniques while utilizing interdisciplinary approaches in biomedical sciences.
April 16
Gordy Honors College Undergraduate Research Symposium (Part I)
April 23
Gordy Honors College Undergraduate Research Symposium (Part II)
Previous Events:
Fall 2019
August 29
What's Wrong with Disabilities?
Dr. Josh Dohmen
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, MUW
Dr. Dohmen will discuss how disabilities come to be, interactions between disabled and non-disabled persons, and some ethical and epistemic considerations that arise from these interactions. Dr. Dohmen is author of “‘A Little of Her Language’: Epistemic Injustice and Mental Disability,” which won the 2016 Essay Prize from Res Philosophica, and of “Disability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, and Resistance," which appeared in Hypatia.
September 12
Is It Really OK to Die?
Debra Rhinewalt, RN, BSN, CHPN
Director, Council on Nursing Practice, Mississippi Nurses' Association
Palliative Care Clinical Coordinator, Baptist Memorial Hospital Golden Triangle
Co-Sponsored by the College of Nursing & Health Sciences
Rhinewalt will discuss palliative care—what it is and isn’t—and the decisions patients and their families must make about goals of care and quality of life when dealing with serious or terminal diagnoses. This event is in conjunction with The W's 2019-20 Common Reading Initiative focus on When Breath Becomes Air, neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi's memoir about living with a terminal illness after being diagnosed with cancer at the age of 36.
September 26
How to Develop Leadership Skills through Volunteerism
Dr. Sarah Petschonek
Founder and CEO, Volunteer Odyssey
Dr. Petschonek founded Volunteer Odyssey after completing her project Mission Memphis: 30 Consecutive Days Volunteering with 30 Non-Profits, chronicled on her blog, Confessions of a Volunteer, and conducting a cross-country volunteer tour researching volunteerism in nine U.S. cities from Portland, Oregon, to Jacksonville, Florida. Volunteer Odyssey now links volunteers to opportunities with 60+ nonprofits throughout Memphis. Petschonek was named as one of Memphis Flyer’s 20 Under 30 and American Express’ 50 Under 40 Social Entrepreneurs.
October 10
Kiese Laymon
Keynote, Welty Writers' Symposium (7:30 p.m., Poindexter Hall)
The Forum Series supports the Welty Writers' Symposium as Kiese Laymon reads from Heavy: An American Memoir, winner of the Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction, the LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award and named one of the Best Books of 2018 by the The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Library Journal, The Washington Post, Southern Living, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times Critics.
October 24
Study Abroad and Away: MUW's Passport to the World
The Forum Series' annual focus on study abroad and away will focus on the question: In the high-impact educational combination of travel and study, what are the greatest lessons to be learned? Students who studied in Spain and Scotland and faculty will give their answers. The event will also include a preview of upcoming study abroad and away programs.
November 7
No Exit
The Forum Series joins The W's Department of Theatre for their production of Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 existentialist play No Exit, in which three deceased characters are punished by being locked into a room together for eternity, becoming mirrors for each other's darkest secrets.
November 21
Gordy Honors College Undergraduate Research Symposium (Part I)
December 5
Gordy Honors College Undergraduate Research Symposium (Part II)
Spring 2019
February 14
Film Screening: Death by Design: The Dirty Secret of Our Digital Addiction
Consumers love their smartphones, tablets, and laptops. By 2020, five billion people will own a mobile phone and four billion will have a personal computer. But this revolution has a dark side most consumers don’t see. In an investigation that takes her around the world, filmmaker Sue Williams investigates the underbelly of the electronics industry and tells a story of environmental degradation, health tragedies, and the unsustainability of consumerism.
February 28
Dr. Travis Hagey
Assistant Professor of Biology, MUW
Dr. Hagey will discuss his work on the biomechanics, evolution, and ecology of gecko lizards, with special attention to their adhesive toes, and more generally how animal performance works and why animals are built the way they are. He will also discuss his science education outreach to K-12 students, museums, and the general public. He has published numerous studies of gecko species and animal performance and was a Science Communication Postdoctoral Fellow at the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action at Michigan State University before coming to MUW in 2018.
March 21
Dr. Rachel Allison
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Mississippi State University
author, Kicking Center: Gender and the Selling of Women's Professional Soccer
a Women’s History Month event
In spite of recent progress for women’s soccer, gender disparities in opportunity, compensation, training resources, and media airtime continue, and since 2000, two professional leagues for women have started up and folded. In Kicking Center, Dr. Allison analyzes the complexities of striving to break into male-dominated U.S. professional sport and the challenges and opportunities in selling and marketing women’s soccer.
March 28
Nell Peel Wolfe Lecture
Tracy Crow
editor, It's My Country Too: Women's Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan
author, Eyes Right: Confessions from a Woman Marine and three other books
Crow is a former Marine Corps officer and President/CEO of the community arts foundation Milspeak, which supports the creative endeavors of military servicemembers, veterans, and their families. She will discuss her own and American women’s experience in the military and what it means to tell one’s own story. Barnes & Noble will offer her books for sale in the Hogarth Student Center and at the event.
April 11
Poetry Reading and Conversation
Kris Lee
Assistant Professor of English, MUW
author, To Square a Circle
C.T. Salazar
Graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program, MUW
author, This Might Have Meant Fire
in celebration of National Poetry Month
April 25
Gordy Honors College Undergraduate Research Symposium (Part I)
May 2