Matt Wray, a sociologist from Temple University, has been researching suicide across the United States.

From 2006-2008, Dr. Wray was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University and this talk is related to his work in medical sociology and public health on suicide. He is also well-known for his scholarship on whiteness and class relations. His books include Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Duke University Press, 2006), The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (coedited, Duke University Press, 2001), Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life (coedited, New York University Press, 1998), and White Trash: Race and Class in America (coedited, Routledge, 1997). He has published recent articles on suicide in the U.S. in Social Science Quarterly, Social Science & Medicine, and the Annual Review of Sociology.

Matt Wray examines health disparities among different regional populations in the U.S., particularly focusing on the widening gap in health and lifespan between white Appalachian residents and white U.S. residents overall. In his upcoming talk, he will raise the role of stereotyping and stigma as a factor in the population health disparities between regions and will explore the possibility of addressing this in health and social science research without furthering stigmatization and stereotyping of the Appalachian region.

A sign-up sheet is posted outside Julia Johnson's office door (1219 POT).  Please sign up to read a poem by you or by someone else.  Sign-up slots will be in 1/2 hour spots.  So, you will show up to read during your 1/2 hour.  Individual readings should be no longer than 3 minutes.  Invite your friends or just stop by to listen.

For more information contact julia.johnson@uky.edu

Swati Chattopadhyay is an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of British colonialism. She is interested in the ties between colonialism and modernism, and in the spatial aspects of race, gender, and ethnicity in modern cities that are capable of enriching post-colonial and critical theory. She has served as a director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a University of California Multi-campus Research Group, and is the current editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005; paperback 2006), and Unlearning the City: Infrastructurein a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012 forthcoming). Her current work includes a new book project, "Nature's Infrastructure," dealing with  the infrastructural transformation of the Gangetic Plains between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Tom Conley is Lowell Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media. In 2003, Dr. Conley won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in topography and literature in Renaissance France.

Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines traces the fascinating evolution and legacy of Wonder Woman. From the birth of the comic book superheroine in the 1940s to the blockbusters of today, Wonder Women! looks at how popular representations of powerful women often reflect society’s anxieties about women’s liberation.

 The Urban Age in Question

Neil Brenner, Harvard University

Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the coordinator of the newly founded Urban Theory Lab GSD.  Brenner’s writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual and methodological dimensions of urban questions.  His work builds upon, and seeks to extend, the fields of critical urban and regional studies, comparative geopolitical economy and radical sociospatial theory.  Major research foci include processes of urban and regional restructuring and uneven spatial development; the generalization of capitalist urbanization; and processes of state spatial restructuring, with particular reference to the remaking of urban, metropolitan and regional governance configurations under contemporary neoliberalizing capitalism.

Brenner is the author of New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford University Press, 2004).  Other book-length publications include Cities for People, not for Profits: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City (co-edited with Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer; Routledge 2011); Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World (co-edited with Stuart Elden, co-translated with Gerald Moore and Stuart Elden, University of Minnesota Press, 2009); The Global Cities Reader (co-edited with Roger Keil; Routledge, 2006); Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe(co-edited with Nik Theodore; Blackwell, 2003); and State/Space: A Reader (co-edited with Bob Jessop, Martin Jones and Gordon MacLeod; Blackwell, 2002).  Several scholarly articles and essays have been translated into other languages, including Chinese, Finnish, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Major current research and writing projects focus on:

                           Planetary urbanization

                           New conceptual and methodological challenges for 21st century critical urban theory

                           The future of ‘comparative’ urban studies

                           Neoliberalization:  geographies, modalities and pathways

                           The evolution of urban, metropolitan and regional governance in geohistorical and comparative perspective

                           The rescaling of state space in geohistorical and comparative perspective

                           Henri Lefebvre on space, politics and urbanization

Brenner serves on the editorial board of the Studies in Urban and Social Change (SUSC) book series, affiliated with the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and published by Blackwell-Wiley (Chief Editor, 2005-2009).  He also serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, includingInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research, CITY, Urban Studies, European Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, Geopolitics and Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economies and Societies.  He has served as a visiting professor or lecturer in several European universities, including the University of Amsterdam (Wibaut Chair of Urban Studies), the University of Bristol (Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professorship), the National University of Ireland/Maynooth and the University of Urbino (EUREX summer school in urban studies)