Category Archives: Rowland

Whither the soul?

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Julien Musolino

 

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The growth of the cognitive and brain sciences has raised interesting questions about the brain and the mind.  No less, it raises interesting questions about traditional notions of the  soul.  Julien Musolino, professor of Psychology at Rutgers University and the director of its Psycholinguistics Laboratory, is interested in science in the public interest and in communicating scientific ideas to the general public.  He is writing a book on the soul for a general, popular audience which looks at the current scientific evidence for the soul’s existence.  Since I’m the classics, philosophy, and religion librarian – all disciplines that have had a long interest in the soul – I thought it was incumbent upon me to find out the latest on the soul.  Julien Musolino was kind enough to share a copy of his introduction with me and agree to an interview.

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—Fred Rowland

 

Philly’s New Urban Dining Room

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Can restaurants serve as a means of urban economic development? Sure seems like Philadelphia is trying, as restaurants proliferate in Center City and environs.  If you’re interested in studying this question, I recommend you look at Stephen Nepa’s 2012 dissertation, There Used to be Nowhere to Eat in this Town: restaurant-led development in postindustrial Philadelphia, available through the Temple University Libraries’ digital collections.

You can also read Stephen Nepa’s article in Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (Fall 2011),  “The New Urban Dining Room: Sidewalk Cafes in Postindustrial Philadelphia” (Temple-only).  With over 300 sidewalk cafes opening up since the late 1990s, this is an important urban phenomenon that deserves study.  Why such an explosion?  Why did it take so long?  What does it mean for the future of our city?

I interviewed Stephen Nepa on July 19, 2012 to talk about “The New Urban Dining Room.”

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—Fred Rowland

 

 

Pennsylvania in Public Memory

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Journalism Professor Carolyn Kitch

Earlier this year, Carolyn Kitch’s book Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (print) (online-TU only) was published by the Penn State University Press. She investigated industrial heritage sites across the state in an attempt to understand how Pennsylvanians understood their state’s rich history of business and industry.  As one learns from her introduction, she visited 224 sites and events, including museums, heritage sites and festivals, worker memorials, and factory tours. She explains that,

What I did do, I hope, was to visit enough sites, talk to enough people, and read or view enough media to gain some sense of patterns in tourism, museum interpretation, memorials, and other forms of public memory of past industry. This book recounts the stories and imagery that I heard and saw repeatedly across the state and across industries.

On a personal note, I was drawn to Pennsylvania in Public Memory because I’m fascinated in general by the ways communities understand, interpret, and sometimes fantasize and mythologize their collective pasts.  I was also interested in learning whether an understanding of the last century of Pennsylvania industrial history — through sites, museums, and antique trains and trollies — might provide some insights on the way forward out of our current rather dark economic times.  Could the struggle of workers in the past give courage to the present? Could our industrial history provide inspiration and hope to Pennsylvanians?

There are many very good scholarly works coming out on Pennsylvania history and related topics these days, among which journalism professor Carolyn Kitch’s is a good example. I was very pleased that Professor Kitch agreed to speak with me from Harrisburg, via Skype, on Monday, July 9, 2012.

Below are some incidents and sites mentioned in our interview.
Lattimer Massacre
Homestead Strike
Anthrocite Museum
Drake Oil Museum
Grey Towers
Eckley Miners’ Village
Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania
Rivers of Steel National Heritage Center
Historic Bethlehem

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—Fred Rowland

Preaching Death

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Lucy BregmanProfessor Lucy Bregman of the Temple University Religion Department is the author of Preaching Death: The Transformation of Christian Funeral Sermons (Baylor University Press, 2011). She uses collections of funeral sermons and manuals for practicing clergy as a lens through which to illuminate changing notions of death in American society. On Thursday, July 5, 2012 she stopped by my office to talk about her book. At the end of this fascinating interview, she strongly recommends that an interested scholar write a similar book on changes in notions of love and marriage using collections of marriage and wedding sermons and related clergy manuals. Perhaps a doctoral student looking for a good topic will do so.

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—Fred Rowland

Victorian Fetishism

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PetePeter Loganr Logan is a professor of English and the director of the Center for the Humanities at Temple University.  He is the author of Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (1997) and, more recently, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (2009).  On May 15, 2012, he stopped by my office to discuss Victorian Fetishism, which details the development of ideas about the primitive and how these concepts set the boundaries of culture in Victorian Britain.  Drawing from Lucretius, Vico, and Auguste Comte, Peter Logan explains how fetishism – the defining feature of culture’s absence – figured in the works of literary and cultural critic Matthew Arnold, realist novelist George Eliot, and anthropologist Edward Tylor.

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—Fred Rowland