First Annual Science and Technology Festival

For more information on the E-Festival

The Life Sciences and Religion:
VCU Community Forum

The Life Sciences and Religion Community Forum of Central Virginia provides a structured forum for citizens to educate themselves through dialogue about science and religion.  For 2006-07, they will play host to the lecture series ‘Science, Reason and Faith’ (co-sponsored by the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, the VCU Office of the President; additional support provided by the Metanexus Institute and the John Templeton Foundation) featuring some of the world’s most prominent and engaging scientists, philosophers and theologians. The speakers will address several important questions, such as: Is Intelligent Design a genuine scientific theory? What is our place in the universe? Is it reasonable to believe in God? Can science tell us whether prayer works? Do our genes hold evidence for belief? Are God and evolution compatible?

The VCU Life Sciences Initiative

VCU Life Sciences is a university-wide matrix academic organization that includes more than 150 faculty members in 35 departments in 11 schools on the Monroe Park (humanities and sciences) and Medical College of Virginia (health system) campuses.  From its various research collaborations, new perspectives, new methods of investigation and new questions related to life and its complexities have surfaced. VCU Life Sciences also has robust activities at the local, regional and national level to increase public literacy in the life sciences (such as “The Secrets to the Sequence” film and curriculum series) and to provide an important neutral assessment of American public attitudes toward the life sciences (such as the annual VCU Life Sciences Survey).

VCU’s 2007 Templeton Research
Lectures Proposal

The primary aim of the Templeton Research Lectures is “to promote the constructive engagement and original research between the physical, biological, and human sciences and those modes of inquiry and understanding generally found within the domains of theology, religious studies, and philosophy.” The program seeks to create long-term networks for vibrant and broadly significant scholarly exchange and continuing interdisciplinary endeavors.   In collaboration with the Life Sciences Initiative, the STS Initiative has just submitted a proposal for a series of Templeton Research Lectures entitled, “En-gendering Science and Religion: Possibilities for the Dialogue.”  We proposed to host a 4-year program that will explore the usefulness of gender as an analytic resource for the science and religion dialogue. Our working assumption is that a methodology that brings women’s voices to the center of this collaborative interdisciplinary enterprise will yield greater understanding of the complex and varied manifestations of gender– and their consequences.  For more information, contact Karen Rader [email link here to: karader@vcu.edu]

NSF CAREER Grant (Rader):
“Biology on Display: Museums and the New American Life Sciences, 1900-1980”

This CAREER Award, recently transferred from Sarah Lawrence College to VCU, integrates research and teaching toward a detailed exploration of the historical relations between academic and public understandings of biology in the twentieth century United States. The multi-year research project (2002-2008) examines with historical research methods the changing display patterns of life science exhibitions in American museums between 1900 to 1980 -- a subject uncharted by historians of science. This study clarifies central issues about the academic and social reconfiguration of biology as a science, including the relationship of the people and practices involved in life science laboratory research to those involved in its public presentation; the interplay of disciplinary and material forces that led biological exhibits to play a central role in newer science and technology museums, as well as in American culture more broadly; and, ultimately, the changing institutional role of the museum in sustaining social support for the twentieth-century life sciences. Research activities include a program of museum fieldwork in New York and at archives and museum sites in Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.

VCU’s Women’s Studies Program: Focus on Women, Health and Science

At VCU a Bachelor of Arts in Women’s Studies was approved and replaces the BIS major track in Women’s Studies effective spring, 2007.  You may choose from two concentrations in the new BA, one of which is called a “Women, Health and Science Focused Interdisciplinary Concentration.”

VCU Institute for Women’s Health National Center of Excellence    

The VCU Institute for Women's Health was established in 1999 to promote standards of excellence in women's health care, advance cutting-edge research, foster community outreach and collaboration, enhance women's leadership, and provide training and education toward the goal of improving the health of women. At the heart of the Institute is the VCU Women's Health Center at Stony Point, a nationally recognized multidisciplinary "one-stop shopping" health care facility for women, which opened in 1993.

VCU’s Media, Art, and Text [MATx] Ph.D. Program

This new VCU degree program is administered by a Director of Graduate Studies and a Graduate Studies Committee drawn from faculty in the Department of English, the School of the Arts, and the School of Mass Communications. The program is not limited to one department or discipline within the participating units. Rather, it is designed to break down “disciplinary walls” in order to cultivate the research possibilities available to students, allowing them to fashion new intellectual areas for the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Reflecting this interdisciplinary concept, faculty members from many units and with many different perspectives are participating in this program. While the Ph.D. focuses on new media, it also retains a historical and theoretical dimension by including study in the production, dissemination, and employment of literary texts, art, and other kinds of texts, and in turn how these texts function within specific settings informed by gender, ethnicity, race and other cultural factors. The creation of a Ph.D. that extends its reach to film and New Media, television and advertising, addresses the growing need for the study of virtual and visual texts – critical developments in this history of technology and technological literacy.