Please sign up here if you would like lunch during the September Mini-Symposium. More information about the symposia is below.

The Mini-Symposia Series is a new extension of the Faculty and Staff Research Symposium. Spread across the academic year, it features four half-day events—two in the fall and two in the spring—designed to highlight and revisit presentations from the previous full symposium. The goal is to offer more opportunities to engage with colleagues’ work in a more focused and accessible format.

Four half-day symposia will take place throughout the academic year—two in the fall and two in the spring. These mini-symposia serve as curated showcases of talks and reimagined sessions from the previous year’s full-day symposium, giving attendees a chance to engage with presentations they may have missed.

Each symposium will feature interdisciplinary panels, roundtables, forums, and poster presentations. Participants might discuss elements of a current book project or an article; a program, initiative or partnership; an artwork or performance (with clips and examples); a current line of research experiments; an archive or digital project; a musical composition or a piece of creative writing; an experience in leadership or strategy — or any work in which they are engaged.

The 2025-2026 academic year will feature the Mini-Symposia on the following dates: Friday, September 26, 2025; Friday, November 7, 2025; Friday, January 30, 2026; and Friday, February 20, 2026.

The schedule for Friday, January 30, 2026, is as follows:

Session One: 10:30 - 11:45 a.m.

Panel 1: Knowledge, Persuasion, and Protest: Narrating Systems of Influence

Chair: Carrie Wu, Arts & Sciences, Biology

Jeff Seeman, Arts & Sciences, Chemistry - Revolutions in Science, Revolutions in Chemistry

Raika Sadeghein, Robins School of Business, Marketing - That’s Not What Happened: Dealing with Consumer-Generated Fake Reviews

Karen Masterson, Arts & Sciences, Journalism - Americans in Africa: How the Ghosts of Ohio's Republic Steel Corporation Helped the People of Liberia "Speak for the Trees"

Panel 2: Framing the Arts: Sacred Bodies, Sonic Spells, and Curated Canons

Chair: Paul Brohan, Modlin Center for the Arts

Anthony Russell, Arts & Sciences, English and Languages, Literatures, & Cultures - Body, Art, and the Sacred: From Michelangelo's Last Judgment to Serrano's Piss Christ

Jessie Fillerup, Arts & Sciences, Music - Ravel's Magical Harp Clichés

Sara Pappas, Arts & Sciences, Languages, Literatures, & Cultures - Organizing Nineteenth-Century French Art in Today's Museum

Lunch: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.

Session Two: 1:30 - 2:45 p.m.

Panel 1: Networks of Influence: Spies, Sovereigns, and the Art of Diplomacy

Chair: Allison Tait, School of Law

Elena Calvillo, Arts & Sciences, Art & Art History

Kristin Bezio, Jepson School of Leadership - End of an Era: The Change in Spycraft from the Tudors to the Early Stuarts

Sydney Watts, Arts & Sciences, History - Unlikely Agents under Britain’s Expanded Spy Network during the Revolutionary Wars

Panel 2: Models, Molecules, and Metrics: Mapping Influence Across Systems

Chair: Kathy Hoke, Arts & Sciences, Math

Christopher Shugrue, Arts & Sciences, Chemistry - Tools for Selectively Modifying Peptides

Jean L. B. Creamer, Office of the Registrar - Biggest Factor for a Healthy Life? It’s the Food.

Aslan Lotfi, Robins School of Business, Analytics & Operations - Modeling the Influence of Multichannel Digital Advertising: A Fractional Calculus-Based Approach

Bo Yun Park, Jepson School of Leadership Studies, Sociology - Big Data in a Small World: How Data Analytics is (Re)Shaping Presidential Elections

January Mini-Symposium Lunch