Upcoming Events
UIRA Presents Fiction in the City of Literature with Loren Glass
Wednesday, March 20, 2024 11:00am
Many novels and short stories are set in and around Iowa City during the period from the end of World War II until the present. Authors include participants in the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the International Writing Program. After the program, a reading list will be available.
Loren Glass is professor of English at the University of Iowa, specializing in 20th- and 21st-century literatures and cultures of the United States, with an emphasis on book history and literary institutions. He is the...
The Search for Race: Civil War Medicine and Science
Thursday, March 21, 2024 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Leslie uses the social and cultural history of Civil War medicine and science to probe the question of how and why anti-Black racism survived the destruction of slavery. Leslie's talk will describe how white Northerners—the U.S. Sanitary Commission and Army medical personnel—conducted wartime research aimed at proving Black medical and biological inferiority. She argues that this research not only led to the mistreatment of Black soldiers and civilians, it also promoted the notion of white...
All Things Water: Improving Community Resilience to Floods, Droughts, and Declining Water Quality
Tuesday, April 9, 2024 1:00pm
The State of Iowa recently completed a project entitled the Iowa Watershed Approach focused on improving community resilience to floods, droughts, and declining water quality. This science-based project followed a systematic process of hydrologic assessment, goal setting, development of watershed plans, installation of monitoring systems, project construction, community engagement, identification of vulnerable populations, and details participant surveys and quantitative assessment. The...
Note: Videos of past lectures may be available on the EFC Lecture Series page.
Past Events
EFC Lecture—Iowa Faces the 1960s—Charles Connerly, PhD
Thursday, February 22, 2024 4:00pm to 5:30pm
As Iowa entered the 1960s, it faced issues that reflected the transition from an agricultural, rural state to one that had become majority urban with consequent tensions between its urban and rural communities—tensions that continue to this day. At the same time, Iowa’s food-based economy seemed increasingly out of sync with a national economy driven proportionately less by the consumption of food and more by growing consumer demand for homes, cars, televisions, hi-fis, and clothes—items that...
EFC Lecture Series - George Weiner - Cancer Immunotherapy Comes of Age
Thursday, November 16, 2023 4:00pm to 5:30pm
The immune system normally detects and destroys bacteria and cells infected with viruses. However, cancer cells are able to avoid destruction by the immune system. Basic research exploring how cancer cells and the immune system interact has led to the development of new drugs and treatment modalities that use the power of the immune system to treat cancer. Dr. Weiner will review the successes, challenges, and opportunities related to using the immune system to treat cancer.
George Weiner is C...
EFC Lecture: A Dark, Unruly Space — Patricia Foster
Thursday, October 5, 2023 4:00pm to 5:30pm
What happens when a mother and daughter with different political concerns discuss issues of race in America?
In 2015 on a visit home to Alabama, Patricia Foster and her mother argue over the riots in Ferguson, Missouri. This encounter becomes the catalyst for Foster’s visit to Africatown in Plateau, Alabama (40 miles from her hometown), where the last American slave ship, the Clotilda, arrived in 1860 after the U.S. had abolished the international slave trade in 1808.
What Foster discovers...
EFC Lecture: Our Medical System is Frayed — Victoria Sharp
Thursday, May 18, 2023 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Our Medical System Is Frayed:
Why Did Humpty Dumpty Fall Off The Wall?
Victoria Sharp, M.D., M.B.A.
Professor Emeritus, Department of Urology
Acting Chief of Staff, Iowa City VA Healthcare System
Living in the United States, great health care is something we all expect to be available and reliable. Busy in our lives focusing on what is important to us and what we are good at, in general, you wouldn’t think we would need to do much more than eat healthy, exercise, drink alcohol in...
EFC Lecture: The Complex Relationship of Humans and Horseshoe Crabs — Jerrold Weiss, PhD
Thursday, April 20, 2023 4:00pm to 5:30pm
All multicellular organisms use “innate immune” receptors to detect and mobilize defensive responses to invading microbes. This includes proteins recognizing lipopolysaccharides (LPS) of Gram-negative bacteria. LPS-recognizing defense systems have been characterized in both humans and horseshoe crabs that have inhabited the Earth for 300+ million years.
The ability of horseshoe crab LPS-binding protein to detect minuscule amounts of LPS has prompted pharmaceutical development of the horseshoe...
Canceled
EFC Lecture: Walt Whitman Left to His Own Devices — Ed Folsom, PhD
Thursday, March 23, 2023 4:00pm
When you reach for your smartphone, is your hand reaching for it, or is the device now reaching for your hand, with its alerts, beeps, vibrations, and suddenly glowing screen? Does your hand want it, or does it want your hand?
In this talk, I want to think about Walt Whitman’s most intimate passages, with his claims of a sentient physical book (codex) in mind—a kind of proto-smartphone—and see how his words work to evoke, to enact, the physical interaction between a living reader and a book...
EFC Lecture: Retirement Time Management: Oxymoron or Essential? — Susan R. Johnson
Thursday, November 17, 2022 4:00pm to 5:30pm
In popular culture "time management" means planning every minute, being efficient, and getting everything done. It's something you need for your career, not your life.
This time management does not fit with anyone's vision of "retirement."
But there is another, more useful, more accurate version of time management: Time is all we have. We want to use our time to create a life worth living. To do that, we need to decide what to do, plan (enough) to make those things happen, and do them with...
EFC Lecture: Gun Safety is on the Ballot in November: Unpacking the Proposed "Right to Keep and Bear Arms" Amendment — Patricia Zebrowski
Thursday, October 20, 2022 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Patricia M. Zebrowski
On Nov. 8, 2022, Iowans will vote on the addition of an amendment to the state constitution. The "Right to Keep and Bear Arms" amendment uses language that goes beyond the protections laid out in the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment.
Specifically, the measure on the ballot will read: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The sovereign state of Iowa affirms and recognizes this right to be a fundamental individual right. Any and all...