The 2025-26 Explorations lecture series will be hosted by The Penn State Emeritus Academy, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Penn State and will showcase the ongoing intellectual contributions of Penn State’s esteemed emeritus faculty. Through this series, retired faculty members share their groundbreaking research, creative projects, and unique perspectives with the wider Penn State community and beyond.
Kenji Uchino is a practitioner of Zen Buddhism and an educator interested in imparting the principles of Zen Buddhism and Buddhist practices to the public.
Dr. Uchino is an Academy Professor at the Emeritus Academy Institute for Electrical Engineering and the Founding Director of the International Center for Actuators and Transducers, Materials Research Institute. He was also a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Material Science and Engineering at Penn State; Associate Director (US Navy Ambassador to Japan) at The US Office of Naval Research – Global Tokyo; and the Founder, Senior Vice President & CTO of Micromechatronics, Inc., State College, PA from 2004 till 2010.
Recording Link: https://psu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/1_8uyuajqw
Every research project and almost every scholarly paper begins with a literature review. The process of conducting literature reviews and the quality of the results obtained will vary according to the AI tools a researcher employs, and academic integrity remains a paramount concern. This research evaluates the process, quality, rigor, and trustworthiness of the results obtained when using AI review tools and contemplates their impact on the advancement of scientific knowledge.
Denise Potosky, Academy Professor and Professor Emerita, Management and Organization. Prof. Potosky is a Fulbright laureate and international scholar whose research balances applied measurement with theory development to address key questions regarding the role, use, validity, equivalence, and impact of digital tools and technology-mediated processes.
Recording Link: https://psu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/1_e70q6159
This talk will provide the conceptual background for bridewealth payments, payments associated with marriage in many sub-Saharan African settings, and argue that it is precisely such payments that undercut women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy within marriage.
Francis Dodoo, Academy Professor and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Demography & African Studies. Dr. Dodoo has worked in the areas of gender, power, and sexual decision making; demographic and health outcomes associated with urban poverty; and inequality among Africans in the diaspora. He continues to write on bridewealth payments and women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as on urban poverty and health issues in the region.
Recording Link: https://psu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/1_h6gmd0w8
Just as feminists took upon themselves the goal to recover lost writing by earlier women authors, so Jewish women academics in the 1990s undertook to discover their own lost “treasures,” writing by their Jewish women forebearers that was unknown, untranslated, and unpublished in book form. A trove of translated novels, stories and poetry is the result of their efforts. This lecture will introduce the audience to the lives and literature of several of these recovered Yiddish writers. What can we gain from this literature? Insight into different worlds of commune, shtetl and ghetto; the pleasure of reading a newly discovered body of literature; and most of all, the satisfaction of viewing female characters (represented by women authors) as people with complex identities and resilient natures.
Dr. Lois Rubin, Emeritus Associate Professor of English at Penn State New Kensington, taught literature and composition there for thirty-one years. She also published articles on women writers and edited and contributed to the collection, Connections and Collisions: Identities in Contemporary Jewish-American Women’s Writing. Since retiring, she has taught literature courses for OLLI’s at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University. In 2024, a grant from the Pitt Jewish Studies Department enabled her to study women writers at the YIVO Archives in New York.
Recording Link: https://psu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/1_gptnabk0
