2020 Speakers & Panel Discussions

This year has been rife with important and thought-provoking events and challenges worthy of considerable thought and investigation. The Levitt Center’s Fall 2020 Speaker Series has reflected current events with talks on the Pandemic, Police Violence and Racial Justice and the 2020 Election, as well as presentations by the Levitt Summer Research Fellows and Groups whose experiences during the time of COVID were unlike summer research experiences of the past.

Biology professor Herm Lehman gave a talk in September entitled “The Fundamentals of COVID 19, Contact Tracing and Campus Safety” which highlighted his experience training and volunteering as a contact tracer over the summer with the Oneida County Health Department. Later in September, Colgate Professor Matt Luttig gave a talk on his upcoming book “The Bipartisan Closing of the Partisan Mind” in which he argues that highly polarized Republicans and Democrats are both psychologically close-minded and dogmatic. In October, Professor of Africana Studies Donald Carter delivered a talk entitled “Fashioning the Unseen: Blackness, Invisibility and Our Moment of Reckoning” which explored the themes of visibility and invisibility as they relate to the experience of being Black and how these concepts have implications for the heightened tension around race and police brutality in 2020.

Additionally, in collaboration with five other colleges in Oneida and Herkimer Counties, the Levitt Center co-sponsored a series of talks on Racial Justice and Criminal Justice Reform in Oneida and Herkimer Counties. You can view these talks and learn more about this collaboration at community4justice.org.

For a list of upcoming talks, visit our events page.