Events

You are cordially invited to the Official Inauguration of the Canada Research Chair in Minority Studies. The event will take place on September 20 and will include a talk (in French) by Distinguished Professor Emeritus François Paré on ethnocultural and linguistic minority studies in the world. This talk will be followed by a reception.

Join Waterloo's Associate Vice-President, Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs, Jeff Casello at this Grad Talks event exploring the role of the university in today's world, featuring Brittany Etmanski, PhD Candidate,Sociology and Legal Studies, and Christin Taylor, PhD Candidate English Language and Literature.

The Waterloo Centre for German Studies welcomes Silke Reineke of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) for a talk on her work with corpora of spoken German. The “Archive of Spoken German” at IDS in Mannheim is comprised of a large corpora of audio and video recordings from different periods and settings, ranging from biographical interviews, everyday interactions, to spoken academic discourse.

The Department of Political Science is the local host for this country-wide initiative: 100 non-partisan all-candidate debates on the environment will be happening all across Canada before the October 21 election. Join us on campus in Theatre of the Arts with the Waterloo riding candidates!

Confirmed participating candidates are: Lori Campbell (NDP), Bardish Chagger (Liberal), Kirsten Wright (Green), Erika Traub (People's Party), Jerry Zhang (Conservative). 

Please join the Department of Philosophy for a public lecture by Dr. Kyle Whyte, professor, Timnick chair, and environmental activist at Michigan State University. His work focuses on problems and possibilities facing Indigenous peoples regarding climate change, environmental justice, and food sovereignty.

The 2019-20 Bridges Lecture Series presents The Glass Problem: Changing and Challenging Material Definitions. Despite thousands of years of history, glass still challenges our perceptions and definitions. Drs. Patrick Charbonneau and Katherine Larson tackle “the glass problem”, to explore and understand the mutable properties of a material which is, by definition, disorderly.

Child health is increasingly understood to be a critical form of human capital, but only recently have we begun to understand how valuable it is and how better to support its development. This lecture provides an overview of recent work demonstrating the key role of public insurance in supporting longer-term human capital development, and pointing to improvements in child mental health as an especially important mechanism.

Please join the Department of English Language and Literature for a public talk by Dr. George Elliott Clarke, Waterloo Arts alumnus and Professor of English, University of Toronto. Dr. Clarke will be reciting from his latest work Canticles, an ongoing project started in Zanzibar in 2008 and expected to conclude in 2021.

Join the Waterloo Centre for German Studies as Professor James Diamond, Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo, gives his talk, The Buried Raging Sermons of the Warsaw Ghetto Rabbi. During World War II, a group of poets, artists, and historians in the Warsaw Ghetto buried thousands of documents attesting to their suffering and resistance as Jews under Nazi rule. Among those recovered was a manuscript of weekly sermons delivered in the Ghetto by a Hasidic rabbi desperately trying to preserve his faith in the face of unimaginable loss and pain. It is a rare testament to one human being’s struggle with the incomprehensible evil of the Holocaust.

Dr. Arnold T. Blumberg presents a whirlwind look back at 100 years of cinematic zombies and their evolution into a modern pop culture icon, with special attention to the ways in which Night of the Living Dead permanently impacted the media landscape. Robert Smith looks at zombies as a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic.