Dear colleagues,

We are writing to invite you to participate in the 2018 Undergraduate Bio-Humanities Symposium, which will be part of the campus wide Undergraduate Research Week (URW) taking place the week of April 15-21, 2018. We invite you to adapt the research presentation you will already be making for the URW so that you can engage in a thoughtful interdisciplinary conversation with other undergraduate researchers. Our particular symposium is scheduled for the early afternoon of Friday, April 20th in the lecture hall on the 4th Floor of the Levis Faculty Center and will include a free catered lunch.

We are IPRH-Mellon Undergraduate Interns working with Prof. Samantha Frost to explore how working with the life sciences and the humanities together can give us rich insights into questions about human experience. In our particular project, we examine the biological and cultural dimensions of time. We are particularly interested in what happens when the varied directions and paces of cultural and biological time come into conflict, or are in tension with one another.  At the symposium to which we are inviting you, we will be presenting our research on what these tensions and conflicts might mean for the ways that humans experience social and cultural life.

We would like you to participate in a panel discussion in which you consider how your current project relates to similar questions about time and temporality, whether in a cultural, psychological, biological, or other domain. Please note, we are not asking students to create a new project. Rather, we would like you to participate in our multi-disciplinary research using insights from your current research projects. We hope that by encountering researchers from different fields talking about a similar topic, everyone will gain a greater appreciation for the insights acquired through interdisciplinary research.

If you are interested in participating, we would like to receive your response by Wednesday, March 14th. Please send a 300-word abstract of your current research project, including a short description of how you envision connecting your research to the questions concerning of time and temporality that orient our own project. Please send this abstract to: biohumanitiescollab@gmail.com.

Thank you for your consideration. Please let us know if we may answer any questions.

Best, Henry Yeary, Hyun Seon Park, and Victoria Halewicz