Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Lecture Series highlights faculty excellence in learning, discovery, and engagement in Iowa State’s largest college. The dean invites LAS faculty of distinction to present lectures from their own areas of expertise on topics of interest to the general public, designed to stimulate high-quality, intellectual discussion among faculty, staff, students, and community members.

Lectures are held during the fall and spring semesters during the academic year.

Fall 2024 Lecture

Climate, Communities, & Collaborative Action: Lessons from Shakespeare’s Theatre

Linda Shenk, professor in the Department of English, was selected by Dean Benjamin Withers to deliver the Fall 2024 LAS Dean’s Distinguished Lecture on Monday, November 4, at 6 p.m. The lecture, “Climate, Communities, & Collaborative Action: Lessons from Shakespeare’s Theatre,” will be presented in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union and will also be available virtually.

In her research, Linda Shenk applies methods from her training in Shakespeare and performance to foster collaborative storytelling among researchers and community members that supports climate action and resilience. In particular, she works with women farmland owners in Iowa—some of the most potentially powerful but often unheard land stewards in the Midwest. She co-leads multiple transdisciplinary research projects, including as a Lead PI for “Central Midwest Climate Opportunities & Learning: CO-Learn,” a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/NOAA’s Climate Adaptation Partnerships Project.

Shenk’s lecture bridges the humanities and the sciences to explore how practices from Shakespeare and his theatre support climate research that fosters collaborative, community action. These practices allow communities and researchers to tell stories with each other rather than simply to each other, thereby weaving together their diverse understandings and experiences into coherent, productive action. Shenk has conducted this research for nearly ten years, including currently as a Lead Principal Investigator of a $6M NOAA Climate Adaptations Project for the Central Midwest. She has worked with communities as diverse as middle-school youth in inner city Des Moines and women farmland owners throughout Iowa.

Sprinkling her talk with stories of action, Shenk will include how she came to realize the storytelling connections between Shakespeare’s “playbook” and climate work. She will share the way some of these techniques can enable all of us—from campus to community members—to be better collaborators who learn with and from each other.

Shenk became interested in this work because it joins two areas important to her—the power of local knowledge in creating resilience (that she learned from living in Alaska and from a group of middle schoolers in Des Moines) and collaborative theatre (that she learned from performing Shakespeare since she was in high school).

A live Q&A session with Shenk will follow the lecture.

This event is free and open to the public.

Climate, Communities, & Collaborative Action: Lessons from Shakespeare’s Theatre

Dean’s Lecture History
Term	Speaker	Topic	Link
Spring 2024	David Vogel Professor, Department of Psychology	“How Stigma Derails the Help Seeking Process”	View lecture
Fall 2023	Elizabeth Swanner Associate Professor, Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences	“They contain depths: What Midwestern lakes tell us about early Earth and Mars”	View lecture
Spring 2023	Amy Andreotti University Professor, Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology	“How are we approaching cancer treatment? From cyclops sheep to vaccines”	View lecture
Fall 2022	Scott Feinstein Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science	“Russia, Ukraine and the U.S.: Monsters and myths”	View lecture
Spring 2022	William Gutowski Professor, Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences	“Climate Change in Iowa: How We Got Here, How We Can Choose a Better Future Together”	View lecture
Fall 2021	Amy Rutenberg Associate Professor and Social Studies Education program co-coordinator in the Department of History	“Uncle Sam Wants Who? Women, Men and the Meaning of American Selective Service”	View lecture
Spring 2021	Don Sakaguchi Morrill Professor	“Stem Cells and Bioengineering for Brain Repair Strategies”	View lecture
Fall 2020	Novotny Lawrence Associate Professor of Communications, Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication	“White Mansions, Black Bodies: Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the New Age Slave Plantation”	View lecture
Fall 2019	Kelly Winfrey Assistant Professor of Journalism, Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication	“Gender and Communication on the Campaign Trail”
Spring 2019	Borzoo Bonakdarpour Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science	“Designing Secure Fleets of Drones: Possibilities, Challenges, and Limitations”
Fall 2018	Robbyn Anand Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry	“Divide and Conquer: Stopping Cancer One Cell at a Time”
Spring 2018	Eric William Davis Department of Computer Science	“Is Your Data Safe? Corruption, Money Laundering, and the Malicious Side of Data”
Fall 2017	Matt DeLisi Department of Sociology	“Severe 5%: Understanding the Criminal Justice System”
Spring 2017	Robyn Lutz Department of Computer Science	“Programming Molecules in the Age of Nanotechnology”
Spring 2016	Michael Christopher Low Department of History	“ISIS, Jihadist Violence, and the Quest for an Idealized Islamic State”
Fall 2015	Alison Phillips Department of Psychology	“Health-Related Habits…Scientifically Speaking”
Spring 2015	Mayly Sanchez Department of Physics and Astronomy	“Measuring the Elusive: How to Catch Neutrinos and What They Tell Us About the Universe”