UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Rock Ethics Institute (REI) recently conducted the first two events in its Author Meets Critics series.

Featuring critical analyses of new books by REI Core Faculty Jonathan H. Marks and Hil Malatino, Author Meets Critics events allow authors to receive critical commentary about their work from experts in their fields in front of a live audience.

Clarence Lang, Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts, welcomed a near-capacity crowd to 110 Henderson Building to consider Marks’ book “The Perils of Partnership: Industry Influence, Institutional Integrity, and Public Health.” As public health agencies try to solve some of our most challenging public health problems by partnering with corporations responsible for creating or exacerbating those problems, Marks questions the efficacy and ethicality those partnership paradigms in “The Perils of Partnership.”

Lisa M. Lee, Associate Vice President for Scholarly Integrity and Research Compliance at Virginia Tech and former executive director of President Obama’s Bioethics Commission, as well as Leland Glenna, professor of rural sociology and science, technology, and society at Penn State, offered critical commentary.

Marks is director of the Bioethics Program and professor of Bioethics, Humanities, Law and Philosophy. The entire discussion can be seen here on the Rock Ethics Institute YouTube channel.

Hil Malatino — assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts and research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute — and critics Amanda Swarr and Tim Johnston considered Malatino’s book “Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience.”

Swarr is associate professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Johnston is director of national projects at SAGE|Advocacy & Services for LGBT Elders.

Merging critical theory, autobiography and sexological archival research, “Queer Embodiment” provides insight into what it means, and has meant, to have a legible body in the West. The book combines personal accounts and archival evidence on the medical, scientific, and philosophical discourse on intersexuality underlying our contemporary understanding of sexed selfhood requires theoretical and ethical reconsideration in order to facilitate understanding gender anew as an intra-active and continually differentiating process of becoming that exceeds and undoes restrictive binary logic.

In addition to the Rock Ethics Institute, Malatino’s presentation was co-sponsored by the Department of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, the College of Health and Human Development and the Bioethics Program.

Marks’ presentation was co-sponsored by the Bioethics Program, the Department of Philosophy, the School of Public Policy, the College of the Liberal Arts, the College of Health and Human Development, Penn State Law and School of International Affairs and the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.