"The Dynamics of Verification when Searching for Quality" | Jonathan Libgober (USC)

Mikkel Sølvsten (Aarhus University)

Speaker: Melody Chan (Brown)Title: Moduli spaces in tropical geometryAbstract:I intend to give a true introduction, accessible to beginning graduate students, to the topics in the title: what is tropical geometry? What is a moduli space? And how can one be used to study the other? Then I’ll discuss some aspects of joint work with Francis Brown, Søren Galatius, and Sam Payne, in which we identify a Hopf algebraic structure on the weight 0 subspace of the compactly supported cohomology of the moduli space of abelian varieties and deduce a number of consequences.*Pre-colloquium reception at 4:00 pm in 553 Lake Hall.

Interasian Intimacies across Race, Religion, and Colonialismpresented by DR. CHIE IKEYA Associate Professor of History and Director, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers UniversityChallenging the Eurocentrism of postcolonial studies that remains preoccupied with Eurasian encounters and the European management of race, sex, and desire, this talk uncovers an obscured history of intimacy and estrangement between indigenous people and Asian migrants.

Chie Ikeya will discuss her research in transnational histories of Asian mobility and intimacy in the era of European colonial empires and her recent book, InterAsian Intimacies across Race, Religion, and Colonialism (Cornell University Press, 2024). Challenging the Eurocentrism of postcolonial studies that remains preoccupied with Eurasian encounters and the European management of race, sex, and desire, Ikeya uncovers an obscured history of intimacy and estrangement between indigenous people and Asian migrants. She will discuss how profoundly these “South-South,” interAsian interactions shaped modern understandings of identity and belonging that continue to vex Southeast Asian nations today.