Forbes.com recently named Lawrence University President Jill Beck to its list of “barrier breakers” in a report about female college presidents. According to the American Council on Education (ACE), 23 percent of college presidents are women, a significant increase over 1986’s 10 percent. Forbes says the future holds even more promise as women continue to break down gender barriers in higher education. Fifteen of Forbes’ 50 Best Colleges are led by women. Eight presidents, including Beck, are the first female president in their school’s history. Read the full story and learn more about Forbes’ 15 “barrier breakers.”
Year: 2009
Wriston Art Center Lecture Features Photographer Sama Alshaibi
APPLETON, WIS. — Photographer Sama Alshaibi discusses her current art exhibit — “SUMOUD” — featured in Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center Thursday, Oct. 15 at 6 p.m. in the art center auditorium.
Born of Palestinian-Iraqi descent, Alshaibi moved to America with her parents during the Iran-Iraq war and was unable to return until three years ago. Her photographs reveal feelings of her conflicting heritage between her two homelands and explores notions of war, forced migration and female identity. Often using her own body to represent other women’s trials and suffering, Alshaibi’s pieces are influenced both by current events and her background.
“SUMOUD,” which translates to “steadfastness,” is a term from post-Nekba Palestinian art where women are “iconic signifiers of a people’s tenacity.” Featuring photographs of women overlapped with text, Alshaibi’s work shows her struggle to identify with a history she feels disconnected with as well as to honor and extend a legacy she has been denied.
An assistant professor of art at the University of Arizona, Alshaibi also is the co-founder of the 6+ women’s art collective. Her photography and videos are widely exhibited internationally.
Alshaibi’s exhibit is featured in the Wriston Art Center Hoffmaster Gallery through Oct. 20. Wriston Art Center hours are Tuesday-Friday from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. and Saturday-Sunday from noon – 4 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays. For more information, call 920-832-6621.
Imani Winds Opens the 2009-10 Lawrence University Artist Series
APPLETON, WIS. — The Grammy-nominated quintet Imani Winds brings its eclectic repertoire to the Lawrence Memorial Chapel Friday, Oct. 17 at 8 p.m. in the opening concert of the 2009-10 Lawrence University Artist Series.
Tickets, at $22-20 for adults, $19-17 for seniors and $15-17 for students, are available through the Lawrence Box Office in the Music-Drama Center, 420 E. College Ave., Appleton or by calling 920-832-6749.
Founded in New York in 1997, Imani Winds has carved out a distinct presence in the classical music world with its dynamic playing, culturally poignant programming and genre-blurring collaborations. The Washington Post praised the ensemble as representing “nothing less than the future of the once-quaint notion of the wind quintet.”
With two member composers and a commitment to commissioning new work, the group is enriching the traditional wind quintet repertoire while bridging American, African, European and Latin American traditions. The name Imani means “faith” in Swahili.
Oboist Howard Niblock, professor of music at Lawrence, said the Imani Winds concert should provide “an unusual and exciting chamber music experience.”
“Their repertoire is varied, fascinating and perhaps as likely to include influences from ethnic, jazz or popular styles as from the classical tradition,” said Niblock. “They perform it all with extraordinary skill and musicianship and they have the knack of creating a special rapport with their audiences.”
Their concert program at Lawrence will include works by Eugene Bozza, Julio Medaglia and Paquito D’Rivera, among others.
Currently in the midst of its five-year Legacy Commissioning Project, the ensemble is commissioning, premiering and touring 10 new works for woodwind quintet. Playing music by composers of various musical backgrounds, the quintet prides itself on bringing new music and new voices into the classical idiom. They collaborate frequently with a variety of other artists, including Rene Marie, Yo-Yo Ma and Wayne Shorter to expand the wind repertoire and diversify sources of new music.
Their discography includes their debut and self-released CD “Umoja,” which received the Chamber Music America/WQXR Award, “The Classical Underground,” a 2006 Grammy Award nominee in the Best Classical Crossover Album category, 2007’s “Josephine Baker: A Life of Le Jazz Hot!” and last year’s “This Christmas CD,” a 14-track disc of holiday classics.
They have been recipients of the 2007 ASCAP Award and the 2002 CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming. At the 2001 Concert Artists Guild International Competition, they were selected as the first Educational Residency Ensemble in recognition of their musical abilities and innovative programming.
Ectogenesis Focus of Lawrence University Biomedical Ethics Series Address
APPLETON, WIS. — One of the nation’s leading scholars in reproductive and genetic technology discusses the possibilities and dangers of ectogenesis — the idea of growing a human fetus entirely outside a woman’s womb — in the opening address of Lawrence University’s 2009-2010 Edward F. Mielke Lecture Series in Biomedical Ethics.
Rosemarie Tong, distinguished professor of health care ethics and director of the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, presents “Out of Body Gestation: In Whose Best Interests?” Monday, Oct.12 at 7 p.m. in Lawrence’s Wriston Art Center auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.
The debate on ectogenesis traces its roots to the 1920s, when some saw possibilities for replacing human bodies and their sensory, motor and biological constraints with magnificent machine bodies. The ectogenesis debate resurfaced in the 1970s, primarily in feminist circles. In the 1987 book, “Making Babies: The New Science and Ethics of Conception,” authors Peter Singer and Deane Wells argued ectogenesis was on the fast track for development because of advances in vitro fertilization technologies.
Today, with advancements in the development of reproductive and genetic technologies, ectogenesis, according to Tong, has become more probable than possible. Her presentation will examine various perspectives on the issue, from viewing a woman’s natural womb as “deficient” to the risk of losing emotional continuity between generations by using an artificial womb.
Tong has written extensively on feminism and ethics and is the author of more than a dozen books, including “Controlling Our Reproductive Destiny: A Technological and Philosophical Perspective,” “Feminist Approaches to Bioethics” and 2007’s “New Perspectives in Health Care Ethics: An Interdisciplinary and Crosscultural Approach.”
Along with serving on the board of directors of the International Association of Bioethics and the Women’s Bioethics Project, Tong is a frequent panelist and judge for the National Institutes of Health. In 1986, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) recognized her with its National Professor of the Year Award. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Temple University.
Tong’s appearance is supported by the Edward F. Mielke Lectureship in Ethics in Medicine, Science and Society. The lectureship was established in 1985 by the Mielke Family Foundation in memory of Dr. Edward F. Mielke, a leading member of the Appleton medical community and the founder of the Appleton Medical Center.
Abraham Lincoln’s Role in Personal Freedom Focus of Lawrence University Address
APPLETON, WIS. — Orville Vernon Burton, noted scholar of the Civil War and the American South, discusses Abraham Lincoln’s most profound accomplishment in the second address of Lawrence University’s two-part Robert S. French Lectures on the Civil War Era.
Burton presents “The Age of Lincoln” Monday, Oct. 12 at 4:30 p.m. in the Warch Campus Center cinema. The event is free and open to the public.
While Abraham Lincoln is narrowly identified as the “Civil War president,” Burton argues Lincoln actually defined the entire second half of 19th-century American history by setting in motion the forces that made individual freedom America’s preeminent value. Burton will examine the role Lincoln’s Southern roots played in conducting a civil war that turned freedom into a personal right protected by the rule of law and placed that concept at the center of American identity.
Burton, the Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University and Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Illinois, is author or editor of 14 books, including the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-nominated “The Age of Lincoln.” His 1985 book, “In My Father’s House are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina,” also was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Burton’s scholarship includes race relations, politics, religion and the intersection of humanities and social science. He teaching and scholarship has been widely honored, including the 2004 American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Prize and the 1999 U.S. Research and Doctoral University Professor of the Year Award, presented by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
The French Lectures on the Civil War Era are supported by the Wisconsin Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, the Lawrence University Excellence in History Fund and the Lawrence history department.
Lawrence University Hosts British Musicians for Visiting Artist Residency
APPLETON, WIS. — Lawrence University welcomes internationally acclaimed British keyboardist Terence Charlston and recorder/flautist Ashley Solomon for a three-day, visiting artist residency Oct. 11-13 that will include a concert and master class.
In addition to visiting studio classes, Charlston and Solomon will perform works by J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach and Telemann in a public performance of pieces for flute/recorder and harpsichord Sunday, Oct. 11 at 8 p.m. They also will conduct a master class on baroque performance practice Monday, Oct. 12 at 8 p.m. Both events, in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel, are free and open to the public.
Charlston has recorded more than 40 commercial CDs on harpsichord, organ, virginals, clavichord and fortepiano. He is a faculty member at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he founded the department of historical performance. He also has taught for a number of years at the Lawrence London Centre.
His interest in 17th-century English music has produced a number of pioneering concerts and recording projects, including a recording of all Matthew Locke’s organ and harpsichord music. He is currently preparing the first recording of the manuscript of Padre Antoine Selosse.
Solomon, winner of the 1991 Moeck International Recorder Competition, is the director and co-founder of Florilegium, an early music ensemble based in London that has performed at major international festivals and concert series throughout Europe as well as the Americas.
As a soloist, Solomon has performed worldwide, including as a frequent guest principal flautist with the Sydney-based Australian Chamber Orchestra. Through Florilegium, he became involved in Bolivian Baroque music, creating the Arakaendar Bolivia Choir in 2005. His efforts to promote and preserve music of the Bolivian native Indians were recognized with the Hans Roth Prize in 2008, becoming the first European to receive the award.
Paul Nesheim Makes Debut as Conductor of Lawrence University Choirs in Friday Concert
APPLETON, WIS. — Paul Nesheim makes his debut as the new director of the Lawrence University Concert Choir and Viking Chorale Friday, Oct. 9 at 8 p.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. The concert also will feature Cantala women’s choir under the direction of Phillip Swan.
Nesheim previously spent 10 years on the faculty of Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., where he directed three choirs and a led a voice studio. He replaced long-time choir director Rick Bjella, who left at the end of the last academic year to join the music program at Texas Tech University.
The season-opening concert for the Lawrence choir program will highlight works by Felix Mendelssohn in honor of the 200th anniversary of his birth, including the sacred motet “Heilig,” “There Shall a Star from Jacob Come Forth” and “Lift Thine Eyes.”
As a newcomer to the program, Nesheim said the idea of conducting a concert just three weeks into the rehearsal schedule appeared initially daunting, but excitement has since replaced anxiety.
“I am thrilled and honored to be teaching at Lawrence this year and to be working side by side with a wonderful musician and good friend, Phillip Swan,” said Nesheim. “Lawrence has such an outstanding reputation and after just the brief time I’ve had so far with these exceptionally bright, talented, determined and enthusiastic students, I have no trouble seeing why. I am confident our audience will be inspired by the work of these impressive student musicians.”
The concert also will feature the spiritual, “Ain’t Got Time to Die” by the Viking Chorale and Ben Allaway’s “Freedom Come,” a concert-closing piece performed by the Concert Choir written in the style of a South African freedom song. Works by J.S. Bach, Claude Debussy, Gwyneth Walker and Ramona Luengen also will be performed.
The concert will be webcast beginning with a pre-concert program at 7:30 p.m. at www.lawrence.edu/conservatory/webcasts/.
Lawrence University Graduate Awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry
APPLETON, WIS. — Thomas Steitz, a 1962 graduate of Lawrence University, has been named one of three recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today.
Steitz, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Yale University, is the first Lawrence graduate ever to win a Nobel Prize.
Steitz, along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science, were recognized for their research on the structure and function of the ribosome.
In announcing this year’s Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy cited the three scientists for their work that shows what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have employed x-ray crystallography, a method that maps the position for each of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.
Steitz, who earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Lawrence, uses the methods of x-ray crystallography and molecular biology to establish the structures and mechanisms of the proteins and nucleic acids involved in gene expression, replication, and recombination. In x-ray crystallography, protein crystals are bombarded with intense x-ray beams. As the x-rays pass through and bounce off of atoms in the crystal, they leave a diffraction pattern, which can then be analyzed to determine the three-dimensional shape of the protein.
According to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Web site, an understanding of the ribosome’s innermost workings is important for a scientific understanding of life. Many of today’s antibiotics cure various diseases by blocking the function of bacterial ribosomes. Without functional ribosomes, bacteria cannot survive. A better understanding of ribosomes is crucial for the development of new antibiotics.
While research on ribosome function has been conducted for 50 years, generating massive amounts of information, no group has succeeded in creating an accurate three-dimensional map until now.
“Our previous maps of the 50S subunit at nine- and five-Ångström resolution gave us some hints at the structure, but not until we achieved the 2.5-Ångström resolution could we resolve the atomic structure of all 100,000 atoms that are well ordered in the crystal,” said Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. “This structure is about four times larger than any other such structure that has ever been determined, and the 3,000 nucleotides of RNA increased the amount of known RNA structure by about 4 to 5 fold.”
According to Steitz, the process of achieving such high resolution meant painstakingly improving the process of growing larger, more complete ribosome crystals, and solving structures of those crystals at progressively higher resolution. Each lower-resolution map provided information that could help the scientists understand the ultimate high-resolution map, he said. The high-resolution structure offered a pathway to far deeper understanding of the protein-assembling machinery.
“We’re certainly not done with the scientific challenges presented by the ribosome,” said Steitz. “Although I must say I do feel as if we’re standing on Mount Everest at the moment and I’m now looking to find K2.”
– excerpted from Howard Hughes Medical Institute Web site
Robert Rosenberg, professor emeritus of chemistry at Lawrence was Steitz’ academic advisor. He remembered him as a student with an unusually high-degree of curiosity.
“He was very inquiring, more so than most students,” said Rosenberg, who said he was “thrilled” at Steitz’ latest recognition.
“I’ve been hoping for this for years,” said Rosenberg, who has remained close to Steitz over the past four decades. “For a while I thought it wouldn’t happen, because they had awarded Nobel Prizes to several x-ray crystallographers over the years and I thought they may have exhausted the list.
The Nobel Prize is the latest in a long list of awards Steitz has received during his distinguished career. Among his many other honors are the Pfizer Prize from the American Chemical Society, the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for distinguished work in basic medical sciences, the 2001 Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the 2006 Keio Medical Science Prize and the prestigious 2007 Gairdner International Award.
Lawrence awarded Steitz an honorary doctorate of science degree in 1981 and recognized him with its Lucia R. Briggs Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002. Steitz served as the keynote speaker at dedication ceremonies in 2000 of Lawrence’s Science Hall.
After earning his bachelor’s degree at Lawrence, Steitz earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry at Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology.
Dr. Steitz was the commencement speaker at Lawrence University on June 13, 2010. That same weekend, Science Hall was renamed the Thomas A Steitz hall of Science.
Lawrence University Welcomes Musician, Educator Stuart Dempster as Artist-in-Residence
APPLETON, WIS. — Acclaimed trombonist, composer and teacher Stuart Dempster presents a pair of talks and a recital during a three-day, visiting artist residency at Lawrence University.
Dempster discusses his diverse musical life, from his role as a founding member of the Deep Listening Band to the publication of his landmark book “The Modern Trombone: A Definition of Its Idioms,” Wednesday, Oct. 7 at 5 p.m. in the address “Dempster Diving: You Never Know What You’ll Find” in the Music-Drama Center 259.
Professor emeritus of music at the University of Washington and a leading figure in the development of contemporary trombone technique and performance, Dempster joins musical forces with Dean of the Conservatory Brian Pertl, Lawrence faculty and students Thursday, Oct. 8 at 8 p.m. in Harper Hall in a recital performance featuring trombone, conch shells, didjeridu and harmonic singing.
He closes his residency Friday, Oct. 9 with the presentation “Didjeri-dialogue with Stuart Dempster” at 11:10 a.m. in Harper Hall. In the talk, Dempster will discuss his experiences collaborating with many of the leading figures of 20th-century music, among them Terry Riley, John Cage, Luciano Berio and Pauline Oliverso.
All events are free and open to the public.
Acclaimed Civil War Historian Discusses Lincoln’s Legacy in Lawrence University Address
APPLETON, WIS. — Pulitzer Prize-winning author and renowned Civil War historian James McPherson delivers the opening address in Lawrence University’s two-part Robert S. French Lectures on the Civil War Era.
McPherson, the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History Emeritus at Princeton University, presents “Lincoln’s Legacy for our Time” Wednesday, Oct. 7 at 4:30 p.m. in the Warch Campus Center cinema. The event is free and open to the public.
When President Lincoln transformed the Civil War into a “Second American Revolution,” he launched a national debate over the nature of American equality and freedom that still rages today. McPherson will discuss how the unfulfilled promise of that revolution represents Lincoln’s legacy – and challenge – for modern Americans.
One of the country’s most honored historians, McPherson spent 42 years on the history department faculty at Princeton before retiring in 2004.
He has written extensively about the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, abolition and Reconstruction and is the author of 15 books, including the national best seller “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era,” which earned the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in history. In 1998, he received the Lincoln Prize, which is awarded annually for the finest scholarly English work on Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or a subject relating to their era for his book “For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War.”
Most recently he wrote 2007’s “This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War” and 2008’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.”
McPherson has served as a consultant on the 1993 film “Gettysburg,” and two PBS television documentaries, Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” and “Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided.”
The French Lectures on the Civil War Era are supported by the Wisconsin Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, the Lawrence University Excellence in History Fund and the Lawrence history department.
