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Friday, January 25
Professor Myles Gartland (Helzberg School of  Management, Rockhurst University) will speak on New Institutional Economics and Old Institutional Economics- Friends or Foe?  Professor Gartland will talk and engage in methodological debate on the commonalities and differences of the NIE (Williamson, North, Eggertsson) and the modern work of the OLE (Tool, Hodgson, Rutherford, etc). Can these two methodologies ever be merged or are they forever at methodological odds with each other? Also, what can they learn from each other. Friday, February 22 Professor Andrew Bergerson (Department of History) will speak on the methodological role that cultural anthropology and literary and art criticism plays in his research in modern German history.  Further details are given below.

Friday, March 22
Professor Douglas Cowan (Departments of  Sociology and Religious Studies)

Friday, April 26
Professor Michael Tansey (Helzberg School of  Management, Rockhurst University) will speak    on the method and philosophy of Hayek.

Sponsored by:  Department of Economics
Interdisciplinary Faculty Workshop
Professor Andrew Bergerson
Professor Bergerson research and teaching focus is modern German history and he incorporates cultural anthropology as well as literary and art criticism into his research and pedagogy. He considers himself an historian of everyday life, which is someone who uses interdisciplinary approaches to try to understand how the seemingly ordinary behaviors of daily life influenced and were influenced by the traumatic events of world history. His doctoral dissertation explored informal social relations of neighborliness and friendship in the socially diverse, mid-sized, provincial town of Hildesheim in north-central Germany. Based on the integrative analysis of archival, bibliographic, visual, and especially oral sources, the dissertation reexamined the origins of the Nazi revolution from the perspective of everyday culture, particularly the customs of conviviality that constituted social, economic, and political relations and shaped the experience of life during the Third Reich. Significantly reconceptualized, expanded, and divided into two book-length manuscripts (The Birth of Normalcy: Alt-Hildesheim, 1900-30 and Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: Neu-Hildesheim, 1930-50, currently under review at Cornell University Press), these ethnographic histories respond to the debates of the last two decades about everyday life and the normalcy/normalization of the Third Reich by treating the history of normalcy as a category of experience, generated in everyday life as an indirect result of the struggles for meaning, identity and power. It offers a new, cultural answer to the question of the origins of the Holocaust and the culpability of ordinary Germans in the earliest stages of aryanization. His new research is on the cultural history of  bread in modern Germany. Expanding on his investigation into conviviality, this project focuses on a commodity that is both public and private, masculine and feminine, German and foreign, a handicraft and an industry. He intends on using bread to gain insight into the changing nature of German identities during denazification, 'coca-colonization', and the shift from modernity to postmodernity.