Sponsored by the College Lecture Series, the event is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call the college concierge at 207-786-6255.

Alley is the Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include glaciology and ice sheet stability, as well as the use of ice cores to study past climates. His current work focuses on abrupt climate change and sea level change, and he is considered one of the world’s leading researchers in that field.

Alley is one of the scientists whose study of ice cores in Greenland in the early 1990s led to current theories about the potential for rapid large-scale changes in global temperature. Specificially, the team determined that the most recent Ice Age ended within only three years.

In The Two-Mile Time Machine, a Phi Beta Kappa national Science Award winner, Alley recounts the Greenland research and provides the first popular account of the wild climate fluctuations that prevailed through much of prehistory. He discusses the role that major ocean currents play in our weather, and how those in turn are affected by changes in massive ice sheets such as those around the North and South poles.

Explaining that human civilization has emerged during an unusually stable climatic era, Alley also warns that the environment that we consider normal could end within just a short span of years. He has brought these findings to a broad audience through appearances on television (including public television’s influential series Nova), radio and print (including The New York Times and Time Magazine). He has also served as an adviser on the topic to the U.S. government, including a variety of science agencies, the U.S. Senate and Al Gore during his tenure as vice president.

Alley received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Ohio State University and his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The focus of the talk will be how curricular materials in geoscience contain underlying assumptions that have implications for all students, particularly those who are traditionally marginalized. The talk, sponsored by the college’s Women and Scientific Literacy Seminar series and women’s studies program, and funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, will address how the integration of the natural and social sciences and women’s studies can change content and teaching methodology in the earth science classroom.

Hausbeck, Mayberry and Rees are members of a collaborative group PROMISE: Projects for Multicultural and Interdisciplinary Study and Education. Funded by the National Science Foundation, PROMISE is a social study of geology experiment, based on the contention that feminist theory and pedagogy have been marginalized in science and science education and that science had been marginalized in feminist education.

Mayberry, of the Department of Sociology, and Rees of the Department of Geoscience, are co-founders of PROMISE and team-teach Earth Systems: A Feminist Approach. Mayberry has written about feminist pedagogy and science education, and her articles have appeared in the Journal of Research on Science Teaching, Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering and the National Women’s Studies Association Journal. Rees teaches courses on sedimentology and specializes in Antarctic research.

Hausbeck, of the Department of Sociology, teaches feminist theory and environmental sociology courses. Her methodological expertise is in qualitative and quantitative content analysis. She has conducted a content analysis of geoscience texts for PROMISE and is the co-author of Just Beneath the Surface: Re-Reading Geoscience, Re-Scripting the Knowledge/Power Nexus.