Previous Issues

Gay and lesbian studies lecture series welcomes Tom Boellstorff of Duke University

Tom Boellstorff, professor of anthropology at Duke University, recently spoke on the globalization of Western lesbian and gay identities and their impact on traditional Indonesian gender and sexual formations as part of Trinity’s Gay and Lesbian Studies lecture series. Boellstorff’s lecture was entitled “From Texas to Tomboi: Gender, Globalization, and National Belonging in Postcolonial Indonesia.” The lecture was co-sponsored by the Committee for Lesbian and Gay Studies and the following departments and programs: English, American studies, sociology, psychology, modern languages, international studies, multicultural affairs, political science, and the Office of the President.    “Boellstorff has done very exciting work on the globalization of gender and sexual identities,” says Robert Corber, visiting associate professor of American studies. “This is increasingly becoming the hot topic in lesbian and gay studies.”    Corber says the annual series began in 1997 to make students and faculty members more aware of the work on gender and sexuality being done in the field of lesbian and gay studies. “It’s part of a larger initiative of the College to make issues of gender and sexuality more central in the curriculum and in the larger community,” Corber says, noting that this initiative benefits greatly from the support of the Office of the President and the dean of faculty.

TEACHING		Rebecca Goldstein
		Bridging the gap between the humanities and the natural sciences

Is mammography an effective tool in the battle against breast cancer? Every other day, newspapers print a different finding from the scientific community. The debate is a perfect example of what Visiting Professor of Philosophy Rebecca Goldstein calls “the tenuousness of scientific knowledge.” In her “Philosophy of Science” course, Goldstein and her students delve deeply into what—if anything—makes scientific knowledge special. They ask: What questions arise when we confront the inherent presuppositions in various scientific paradigms? What happens when we consider the role of interpretation in what is deemed conclusive? Caleb Thayer Fox ’03, a philosophy major, says the course has made him “question a lot of things that I’d taken for granted in high school, like trial and error and other methods which are the accepted way to gain knowledge through science.”

A MacArthur Foundation fellow

Goldstein, who has received fellowship awards from the National Science Foundation and others for her work in the field of analytic philosophy, is also a writer whose novels and short stories earned her a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly called a “genius grant,” in 1996. She is thus interested in questioning the truth of scientific fact as well as exploring the universal truths found in fiction. In her books, including the most recent, called Properties of Light, a novel of love, betrayal, and quantum physics, Goldstein often threads philosophy, science, and fiction together. Meanwhile, in her “Philosophy in Literature” course and her “Writing Philosophy and Fiction” workshop, Goldstein prompts her students to do the same. Marlene P. Schade ’05, an IDP student with an English major and a concentration in creative writing, describes how students in the writing workshop were first assigned the task of writing a philosophical dialogue in the classical Greek tradition. Next they had to write a short story centered on that philosophical idea. For Schade the approach was fruitful, especially since Goldstein has provided both encouragement and inspiration along the way. Says Schade, “From the first day I could tell she was going to let the writer in me loose.”

Professor of Philosophy Maurice Wade, Goldstein’s colleague and department chair, believes there is a “two cultures problem” that often divides a liberal arts campus between those in the natural sciences and those in the humanities. He says, “Part of what is unique about Rebecca is that in her own professional life she bridges that gap between the two cultures. When you talk about interdisciplinarity, she embodies it.”

The yin and yang of Goldstein’s intellectual inclinations goes back to her childhood, when as a new reader she would go to the library and always take out two books: one a “fun” storybook, and the other a “good-for-me” book that would teach her something about science or history. One day she selected a book that explained how all of the material objects in the world were really made up of invisible, constantly spinning particles known as atoms. Stunned by this revelation, Goldstein came to believe that scientists had the answers to all of her questions about the world. As an undergraduate at Barnard College, she signed up to be a physics major—until her disillusionment. Says Goldstein, “It was quantum physics that sent me running to the philosophers because there are all sorts of conceptual problems in quantum physics that the scientists have agreed to ignore.” Science, she came to believe, was “not the secure enterprise that people think it to be.”

Exploring the borders of human knowledge

And so the former practitioner of science began her journey as a critical thinker to explore the borders of human knowledge. Philosophers, says Goldstein, “are probing the very limits of understanding and our limitations as a species. This is what philosophy does in general, but it’s particularly true in the philosophy of science because science seems to be our strongest candidate for certain, solid knowledge.”

Goldstein, who earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University, was an assistant professor at Barnard when she wrote her first novel and unexpectedly became a published author. Ever since, she has alternated teaching and writing, always wanting to stay close to the philosophy of science, her “first love.” Unlike a more conventional academic, however, Goldstein prefers to explore the ideas and issues of her discipline through fiction rather than through academic papers. She hopes her books will “make these very difficult, complex ideas eminently accessible and fun and amusing and connected with life.”

Her current project is actually a nonfiction book on Kurt Gödel, whose incompleteness theorem made him the 20th century’s greatest logician, but whose personality was as enigmatic as his proof was transparent. And with four more years of her visiting professorship at Trinity ahead, she’ll continue to prompt students to grapple with hard questions. She doesn’t want to impose a particular dogma or doctrine. Rather, she says, “The thing that I aim for in all of my courses is that the students will have integrated these ideas we’re studying, that they will exit with their minds permanently changed.”

                                                                                               – Leslie Virostek