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Dr. Laura Kramer has 50 years’ experience studying arboviruses in the field and laboratory, from both experimental and observational approaches, using both classical and molecular tools. She was Director of the Arbovirus Laboratory, Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health from 2000 – Dec 2020 when she retired, and Professor of Biomedical Sciences, State University of New York (SUNY) School of Public Health, Albany, NY. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Biology department at SUNY Albany. Dr. Kramer also is a virology moderator of ProMED-mail [Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases] where she reports on COVID-19 and Ebola as well as vaccine-preventable diseases. In this MOOD Science Webinar, Laura discussed her comprehensive research paper "Introduction, Spread, and Establishment of West Nile Virus in the Americas" published on the Journal of Medical Entomology, illustrating the complex relationships among West Nile Virus (WNV), vector mosquitoes and vertebrate hosts, as well as how certain environmental variables - including land use and climate - affected the spillover risk to humans in the United States since its introduction.

ispartof: American Novelists’ Autobiographical Acts: Nonfictional Disruptions location:Aix-Marseille Université date:6 Jul - 7 Jul 2023 status: published

Webinar presentation by the co-chairs of the Alberta Council on Academic Integrity working group on cheating cheating. In this eye-opening webinar Eaton & Boisvert talk about contract cheating in Alberta, including about essay mills, homework completion services, unethical tutoring services, and thesis consultation services that all cross the line into academic misconduct. Participants learned about the size and scope of this predatory industry and how it preys on our students, including engaging in blackmail and extortion. By the end of this session engaged participants will be able to: (1) Describe what contract cheating is; (2) analyze how contract cheating impacts students; and (3) discover practical tips and strategies to promote academic integrity. Cite this presentation as: Eaton, S. E., & Boisvert, S. (2021, October 20). Contract cheating in Alberta and beyond. Paper presented at the Academic Integrity Week: Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, University of Calgary [online[Calgary, Canada.

In 1939, due to WWII and the Nuremberg Laws, the revolutionary Czech structural engineer Jaroslav J. Polívka arrived in the United States. After his arrival, he started a research job at UC Berkeley, renewed his engineering practice, and offered his services to the US military as many businesspersons did during this era. Polívka worked for Henry Kaiser who turned Richmond, CA, into a vibrant, fast developing workers city. New residential districts, hospitals, hangars, docks, and warehouses were built there. Henry Kaiser approached the structural development of the city in the same way he revolutionized the construction of battleships: from prefabricated, standardized parts. He supported research and development of new technologies. Mobile, round-shaped hospitals from prefabricated aluminum frames were one of the results of that research. In 1946, Jaroslav J. Polívka introduced himself to the “starchitect” Frank Lloyd Wright. A productive mutual co-operation that lasted 13 years and resulted in eight spectacular projects had started and Polívka, who had been working on extensive research both at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, came up with many technological, structural, and material innovations over the period. In 1957, Henry Kaiser funded the construction of one of the two geodesic domes designed by Richard Buckminster Fuller in Hawaii and in the process he invited Frank Lloyd Wright to consult the project. Jaroslav J. Polívka was probably in direct contact with Fuller, since he wanted to include him in his unfinished project of an encyclopedia of the world-famous structural engineers. On this particular story and a social matrix evolving around Henry Kaiser and Frank Lloyd Wright, the lecture seeks to rethink architectural global modernism as a cooperative project rather than a series of individual innovations manifested by isolated genius figures.

Invited lecture, invited by: The University of Texas at Austin, Department of English (Hannah C. Wojciehowski and Anna Schwartz) ispartof: location:The University of Texas at Austin (Austin, Texas, United States) status: published

The Romantic sublime, which has influentially shaped the Western relationship with nature, is no longer viable in the Anthropocene because it views nature as separated from humans and does not fully represent the intricacy of human/non-human relationship (Caracciolo 2021). This paper assesses the limits and affordances of the notion of the “haptic sublime” (McNee 2016) for challenging the Eurocentrism, androcentrism, and ocularcentrism of the Romantic sublime in a way that would also lead to heightened self- and/or environmental awareness. To that end, it analyzes extracts from American ecobiographical memoirs that build on American Romanticism’s, and more specifically Henry D. Thoreau’s multisensorial approach to nature (Lombard 2019), which suitably integrates the subjective and embodied dimensions of the haptic sublime. Inspired by insights from affective ecocriticism and rhetorical (eco)narratology, these analyses show that the haptic sublime involves bodily and multisensorial contact with material environments which induce affects such as guilt, satisfaction, and joy, that move beyond the confines of the romantic experiences of awe and horror. Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Silvia Vásquez-Lavado's In the Shadow of the Mountain are considered so as to argue that recent mutations in the rhetoric of the sublime retrospectively unearths haptic dimensions to the experience of the sublime. ispartof: The American Comparative Literature Association's 2023 Annual Meeting location:Chicago, IL, United States date:16 Mar - 19 Mar 2023 status: published