“Genome Mining for New Natural Products and New Chemistry”webcast:https://web.mit.edu/webcast/chemistry/s25/1/

Join us on Monday, February 10, 2025, at 4pm in the Nexus, Hayden Library for a talk by Daniel Immerwahr, Humanities Professor at Northwestern University, on his upcoming book “This Too Shall Burn: America in the Age of Wood”.America has been, historically, a land of trees. This made its built environment thoroughgoingly wooden and, as a consequence, alarmingly combustible. In the same way that fossil fuels are today the source of our abundance but also the cause of a dreaded apocalypse, wood was the source of American abundance and the cause of constant, harrowing fires. In This Too Shall Burn, Daniel Immerwahr asks how those hair-raising fires have shaped—or scarred—the American past.Daniel Immerwahr is a historian at Northwestern University, where he is the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence. His most recent book, the award-winning How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, was a New York Times critics’ top book of 2019 and has been translated into seven languages. He is currently a 2024–2025 Radcliffe fellow performing research on this book.This jointly sponsored talk with STS, Anthropology, and History is free to the MIT community and to the public. We hope to see you there!

Christopher Walters University of California, Berkeley

Speaker: Ben Spitz (University of Virginia)Title: The Tambara Affine LineAbstract: In equivariant stable homotopy theory, objects called "Tambara functors" play the role of commutative rings. Tambara functors are abstract algebraic objects: they consist of sets with certain operations satisfying certain axioms; however, the theory of Tambara functors is much less developed than the theory of commutative rings, in part because it is not clear exactly how to define the "Tambara analogs" of many classical notions. Nonetheless, we expect that Tambara functors admit a theory of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, akin to the story for ordinary commutative rings. In this talk, I will discuss recent progress in developing such a theory for Tambara functors – in particular, we prove a version of the going-up theorem, which allows for the first computation of the "affine line" in Tambara algebraic geometry. This is joint work with David Chan, David Mehrle, J.D. Quigley, and Danika Van Niel.

Please join us for an Emerson/Harris Masterclass with pianist Scott Cuellar!February 10, 2025 4:30pm | Thomas Tull Concert HallPianist Scott Cuellar is an assistant professor of applied music and performance (piano) in the Setnor School of Music, where he teaches applied piano as well as other keyboard-related courses.In reviewing Cuellar’s debut recital at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, David LaMarche of the New York Concert Review described Cuellar’s performance as “virtuosic in scope and expression, like a great man of the theater,” and praised his “ability to illuminate both the external structure and the emotional core of the work he plays.” He has been described by Cleveland Classical as possessing “nerves of steel, a formidable technique, and an architect’s understanding of structure.” The San Antonio Express-News praised his “luxuriant exploration” of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto, adding that his “technique was clean, his melodies and cadenzas were expressive, but most noticeable was his keyboard fluidity.”Cuellar has given solo recitals at major venues around the world, including Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, the Newport Music Festival, the Polytheatre Chongqing and the Shenyang Conservatory of Music in the People’s Republic of China, and has been a guest recitalist at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, the Gijón International Piano Festival in Asturias, Spain, the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Lima, Peru, Boston Conservatory, and at the University of Washington. He has presented masterclasses at Renmin University in Beijing, Lee University, Grand Valley State University, and has lectured at the Juilliard School. He has appeared as a soloist with the San Antonio Symphony, the Louisiana Philharmonic, the Rochester Symphony Orchestra, the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra, the Oberlin Orchestra, the Lima Symphony Orchestra, and several others.Cuellar is featured on composer Gity Razaz’s debut album “The Strange Highway” (2022) with violinist Francesca DePasquale, released on BIS Records. He has performed with many of the world’s great artists, including Cho-Liang Lin, Jennifer Koh, Chee-Yun, Mark Nuccio, Desmond Hoebig, the Miró Quartet, and Timothy Jones. He is a founding member of the Rodin Trio, along with assistant concertmaster of the Cincinnati Symphony Philip Marten and current Karajan Fellow Joshua Halpern. He has performed at the La Jolla Music Society’s Summerfest, the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival and the Cactus Pear Chamber Music Festival. He has been heard on WQXR in New York, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Seattle’s King FM, Houston Public Media, and others.Cuellar won the gold medal at the 2016 San Antonio International Piano Competition, where he also received prizes for the best performance of both a Romantic work (Schumann’s “Humoreske”), as well as of a Russian work (Prokofiev’s 4th Sonata). He was the gold medalist in the solo division of the 2013 Virginia Waring International Piano Competition, where he was also awarded the silver medal in the concerto division, and was the winner of the Krenek Prize for the best performance of a sonata by Ernst Krenek. Additionally, he was the bronze medalist at the 2016 New Orleans International Piano Competition.Cuellar holds a doctor of musical arts from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where he studied with Jon Kimura Parker; he earned a master of music from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Julian Martin; and he received a bachelor of music from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Alvin Chow. During his time at Oberlin, he won three of the largest prizes offered to pianists: the Oberlin Concerto Competition, the Arthur Dann Competition, and the John Elvin Prize for Juniors. He was previously an assistant professor at the Oberlin Conservatory of music, where he taught chamber music, secondary piano, and class piano.The Emerson/Harris Masterclass Series is supported in part by the Robert L. Malster (1956) Fund.

Scott Taylor (University of Calgary)