The event features Dr. Anne Prescott, Director of Five College Center for East Asian Studies, Smith College, and will be the combination of koto performance and commentary of the music she will play.  This event is free and open to the public, and is organized by the UK's Japan Studies program with support from the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures & Cultures and the International Studies Program.





Dr. Anne Prescott has a BM (music education) from Cornell College in Iowa and an MM (clarinet performance) and PhD (ethnomusicology) from Kent State University. She has been studying the koto since she was a sophomore at Cornell College, and she spent eight years living and studying koto and shamisen in Japan, including one year as a research student at Tokyo University of the Arts. While in Japan she performed with Kisokai and Group Aya, and she is a member of the Miyagi Koto Association. Her dissertation focused on the life and works of koto master and composer Miyagi Michio. She is currently the Director of the Five College Center for East Asian Studies located at Smith College in Northampton, MA, and previously worked and taught at the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and Augustana College in Illinois.

For decades, many linguists have framed the study of language in terms of a language faculty, a specialized cognitive ‘organ’ unique to humans.  In the last decade, even the most stalwart proponents of this view have come to acknowledge the existence of other factors in the organization of human languages. In this talk, I will concentrate on two of these factors, embodiment and competition, drawing examples from the morphology of spoken and signed languages. Neither is unique to language, nor especially human or cognitive in nature.  Their role in the structuring of languages points to a new research paradigm in the study of language, in which no single factor is privileged and the importance of any one of them is gauged only by the insights it provided, not by its uniqueness to language.

A panel featuring diverse members of the legal profession and Lexington comunity discussing citizen's rights as they relate to law enforcement and recent events surrounding this topic. 

Sponsored by the African American & Africana Studies Program and the UK College of Law Student Public Interest Foundation. 

Free and open to the public.