Every Christmas there are children lacking life’s vital needs because their families are struggling financially and cannot afford the expense. The Angel Tree is a unique holiday assistance program that connects a generous individual or group with a deserving child in need. The program has been running over 30 years to ensure children in need have a wonderful holiday season with their families.

If you or a group would like to help a child in need this holiday season, you may take a tag from the Angel Tree located in the South Atrium. Each tag provides specific needs and wants for the child. Additional directions for providing the gifts are located on the backside of the tag. Unwrapped gifts need to be delivered to the Salvation Army 111 N. Rogers Street by December 10th (gifts cannot be left at Fountain Square). Questions may be directed to The Salvation Army at 812.336.4310.

Thank you for helping our local children in need.

Located in the South Atrium
Accessible during Lobby Hours:
Monday – Saturday 7am – 9pm
Sunday 12pm – 7pm

At 4:00 pm on Thursday, November 15, in the President’s Room of the University Club at the Indiana Memorial Union, Professor Laurie Shannon (Northwestern University) will give a talk on Human / Animal Attributes and the Rise of the Microscope.

Though humans have worked tirelessly to distinguish ourselves from non-human animals, the nature of the “slash” we use to divide us from them varies profoundly over time. This talk will explore an important pivot in the history of that “slash” by considering the state of affairs around the rise of the microscope (c. 1600). It will also calibrate these two, before-and-after regimes of vision to more broadly philosophical developments, particularly the Cartesian dispensation between human and animal. Montaigne and Shakespeare, Thomas Moffett’s The Theatre of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures (1658), and Robert Hooke’s meticulous recordings of “minute bodies” under the microscope (Micrographia, 1665) will be considered.

More specifically, the notion that an upright posture indexes human privilege seems perennial; the vertical vector of the human body has long been said to assure our ascendancy over other creatures. But this traditional conceit sidesteps a basic logical and physical glitch: the human incapacity to fly. While human theorizing made an uneasy peace with birds, appropriating their flight as an allegory of the (human) soul, this lecture will analyze an early modern revolution in our attention to winged insects. For a lay observer like Shakespeare, flying insects were very admirably borne on “slender gilded wings.” But when insects began to be scanned with the newfangled microscope in the seventeenth century, what new challenges did they pose? In a rising technoscientific regime of visibility and mechanism, how did the tiniest of insects, the “fabrick” of their wings, and the dizzying new micro-scale they revealed affect conceptions not only of the human, but of the very “empire” humans constantly claimed over other creatures? Viewing flies under the microscope, as we will see, sent human claims to exceptional status in a new, more extreme direction.

The lecture will be followed by a roundtable discussion featuring Constance Furey (Religious Studies), Abby Ang (English), and Domenico Bertoloni Meli (History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine).
Laurie Shannon is Franklin Bliss Snyder Professor of English Literature and Chair of the English Department at Northwestern University. She has written two field-defining books: Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts(University of Chicago Press, 2002) and the award-winning The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Laurie Shannon’s visit to Bloomington is made possible through the support of the College Arts and Humanities Institute, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English, the Department of Religious Studies, and Themester 2018: Animal/Human. The event will be followed by a reception.

Ivy Tech – Bloomington will be hosting College 101 on Thursday, Nov. 15 from 6 to 8 pm. College 101 is great way for students and parents to learn more about the various opportunities that Ivy Tech has to offer. We will have a series of workshops to choose from so that students and parents can learn more about various aspects of college such as financial aid, 21st Century Scholars, early college opportunities, and general admissions. We will also have faculty from several areas available to answer questions regarding students’ interest areas. IU admissions will also be available at the Bloomington location to discuss their transfer process in partnership with Ivy Tech Bloomington.

We hope to see you there!