Please join Faculty Director Deven Patel as he hosts two scholars from Penn and Temple, who will lend their expertise on the use of mythology in Finance and in Gaming.

Michael J. Ernst is currently a M.Phil. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. Student at Temple University's Tyler School of Art & Architecture. He completed his undergraduate work in The College at Penn in 2013 and also holds master's degrees from LPS and GSE. His area of study is the Modern & Contemporary Islamic Visual Culture of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Ernst will be talking about mythologies and world creation in video games. He currently teaches undergraduate courses at Temple University and will be drawing from a course he taught last semester on the Art of Video Games that included guest speakers such as Patrice Désilets, the creator of the Assassins Creed game series. Ernst will be bringing into the discussion topics such as heterotopic spaces and "the active creation of belief."

Robert Dowling is an MA candidate in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Bio here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jOoYA3M8eUuJIzaVWU9ZPspfDu2zhgJ-69mo...

Dowling will speak about Mythology in the modern contexts of finance and cryptocurrency. What does a 1959 talk by a Caltech Physicist have to do with Bitcoin miners? Who were the cypherpunks and why were they so interested in making privacy technologies open source? Did you know that the first Bitcoin block has a reference to an article covering the 2008 financial collapse? Robert will discuss the lore and legend of cryptocurrency, reflecting on the personalities, motiviations, and technological breakthroughs that brought Bitcoin to life and how this influences the goals and culture of the industry.