Title:	Hurwitz spaces and string topology
Speaker:	Craig Westerland
Abstract:	Continuing in the theme begun in the previous two weeks with talks by Paul Norbury and Arun Ram, I will talk about moduli spaces of curves, and moduli of branched covers of curves (Hurwitz spaces). The goals are twofold: to study these moduli themselves (with an eye towards computing their homology in some sort of limit), as well as elucidating a little-explored connection with string topology. It is unclear whether we will achieve both goals in the time alotted.