Press Releases

Category: Press Releases

Folk Concert by Greg Brown Highlights Annual Lawrence University Earth Day Festival

Acclaimed folk singer/songwriter Greg Brown, a two-time Grammy Award nominee, will perform Saturday, April 23 as part of Lawrence University’s seventh annual Earth Day Festival.

The day-long celebration of Mother Earth will feature live music, information booths on environmental issues and volunteer work on Lawrence’s new organic garden. Appleton singer/songwriter Susan Howe will open the concert portion of the Earth Day Festival at 2:45 p.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel with Brown scheduled to perform at 3:45 p.m.

Tickets for Brown’s concert are $15 in advance, $18 at the door. For more information, contact the Lawrence box office at 920-832-6749. Doors to the chapel will open at 2:15 p.m.

Known for a distinctive Midwestern sensibility that combines humor with empathy, Brown has penned songs that have been performed by musical legends Willie Nelson and Carlos Santana as well as Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter and others.
An Iowa native who still lives on his grandparents’ farm there, Brown is the offspring of a Pentecostal preacher father and an electric guitar playing mother. He has recorded more than two dozen albums, including 1985’s “In the Dark With You,” which has been hailed as an acoustic classic and “One Big Town,” which earned him the first of his two Indie Awards for Adult Contemporary Album of the Year in 1989.

Brown earned a Grammy nomination in 1993 for “Friend of Mine” with Bill Morrissey and four years later received a second Grammy nomination for “Slant 6 Mind.” Veering from his familiar territory of domestic concerns, Brown has also recorded an album of William Blake poems, “Songs Of Innocence And Experience” in 1986, and a collection of children’s music, “Bath Tub Blues” in 1993. His most recent album, “Honey in the Lion’s Head,” was released last year.

Earth Day Festival activities kick off at 9:30 a.m. with Lawrence students participating in the official ground-breaking of a new organic garden Lawrence will be planting later this spring at the bottom of Union Hill. The first of its kind on-campus garden will be used to grow organic produce that will be served in the dining halls as well as sold during the summer at local farmer’s markets and to area food subscribers.

From 11:30 a.m – 2:45 p.m., Main Hall green will be abuzz with a variety of activities, including live music performed by Lawrence students, a display of environmentally friendly hybrid vehicles and educational booths with information on environmental activism. In addition, the Lawrence geology department will sponsor a rock, mineral and fossil identification booth, along with a free “tour” of Wisconsin through geologic time, free samples from the department’s rock pile and an opportunity to “fish for fossils” from the Silurian seas that once covered the state.

Prior to Brown’s concert, John Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders will deliver the address “Putting the Culture Back into Agriculture: Defending Food Sovereignty From Corporate Globalization” in the chapel.

Based in Madison, Family Farmer Defenders is a national nonprofit grassroots organization that promotes sustainable agriculture, rural justice, workers rights, animal welfare, consumer safety, fair trade and food sovereignty. Founded in 1994, FFD works to empower farmers and consumers toward reclaiming their local food and farm systems from corporate agribusiness control.

Historic Civil Rights Pioneer Discusses Race, Discrimination Issues in Lawrence University Address

Minnijean Brown-Trickey, a key figure in one of the defining moments in the U.S. civil rights movement, draws upon her experiences as a member of the famed “Little Rock Nine” in a Lawrence University address that explores social change, diversity and the continuing battle against discrimination and racism.

Brown-Trickey presents “Return to Little Rock” Tuesday, April 19 at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of the Wriston Art Center on the Lawrence campus. A question-and-answer session and a reception with the speaker will follow her address. The event is free and open to the public.

In September, 1957, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared public school segregation unconstitutional in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, Little Rock teenager Brown-Trickey turned the court’s ruling into action, walking through the front doors of Central High School and into American history books.

Under the watch of 1,200 armed soldiers, Brown-Trickey and eight other students, who collectively became known as the “Little Rock Nine,” helped desegregate previously all-white Central High School, bringing the injustices of segregation to the forefront of the American psyche in the process.

Expelled from Central High six months later for retaliating to the physical and verbal abuse she was subjected to, Brown-Trickey moved to New York, eventually graduating from New Lincoln High School. In the early 1960s, she moved to Canada and later armed with a master’s degree in social work, focused her career on working to combat the plight of Canada’s native communities.

She returned to the United States in 1999 to serve in the Clinton administration as deputy assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior where she oversaw diversity issues.

Her work as a champion for civil rights has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, the Wolf Award and the Spingarn Medal, the highest award given by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in recognition of outstanding achievement by a black American.

Now living back in Arkansas again, Brown-Trickey is still active in civil rights and social equality issues and is completing her autobiography, tentatively entitled “Mixed Blessing: Living Black in North America.”

Brown-Trickey’s appearance is sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Multicultural Affairs Committee, the Alyssa Paul Maria Fund and the Lawrence history department.

Lawrence University Cellist Wins State Music Competition

Lawrence University cellist Steve Girard earned first-place honors in the 2005 Wisconsin edition of the American String Teachers Association (ASTA) competition held Saturday, April 2 on the campus of UW-Superior.

Girard, a senior from Fairfax Station, Va., majoring in cello performance and chemistry, played Johan Sebastian Bach’s “6th Suite” and “Suite for Solo Cello” by Gaspar Cassado in the competition. He was awarded $100 for his
winning performance.

The ASTA competition is open to all string instrument players up to 26 years of age who are studying in or are residents of Wisconsin. Competition participants are required to perform 20 minutes of music from at least two different time periods.

Albanian Excavations Focus of Lawrence University Archaeological Lecture

University of Cincinnati archaeologist Jack Davis discusses some of the recent significant fieldwork developments occurring in Albania in an Archaeological Institute of America lecture at Lawrence University.

Davis presents the slide-illustrated lecture “Archaeology in Albania: A 21st Century Perspective” Tuesday, April 12 at 7:30 p.m. in Lawrence’s Wriston Art Center auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. An informal reception will follow the address.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism in the early 1990s opened the borders in Eastern Europe, facilitating numerous collaborative research projects between Albanian scholars and foreign archaeologists into the history of that country.

A specialist in Aegean prehistory, Davis will outline some of the current field work projects in progress in Albania, with a special emphasis on research he personally has directed around ancient Dyrrachium and Apollonia, two major Greek colonies established in the 7th- and 6th-centuries B.C.

Davis is currently the co-director of the Durres Regional Archaeological project in Albania and formerly served as the
co-director of the Keos Archaeological Project in Greece. He also has done extensive fieldwork in Crete. Davis spent 16 years as a faculty member of the classics department at the University of Chicago and has held the title of Carl W. Blegen Chaired Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati since 1993.

Lawrence University Sponsors Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Civil War

Three distinguished scholars will share their perspectives on the power of images to shape our understanding of war through analyses of photographs, monuments, literary texts and historical documents in a special Lawrence University program that examines the Civil War.

Lawrence presents “New Approaches to the Civil War: An Interdisciplinary Symposium” Saturday, April 16 in the auditorium of the Wriston Art Center. The half-day program begins at 1 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Yale University historian and award-winning author David Blight opens the symposium with the address “Has Civil War Memory United or Divided America?” Following Blight’s presentation, Franny Nudelman, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, presents “’This Guilty Land’: Black Soldiers, Military Discipline and the Wartime State.” At 3:15 p.m., Kirk Savage, associate professor and chair in the history of art and architecture department at the University of Pittsburgh, delivers the talk “Civil War Photography and the Vilification of the Male Body.” An audience question-and-answer session with each speaker will follow their individual talks.

The symposium concludes with a 45-minute round-table discussion beginning at 4:15 p.m. in which the three guest speakers will entertain questions from Lawrence University faculty members Faith Barrett, assistant professor of English, Alexis Boylan, assistant professor of art history and Jerald Podair, associate professor of history.

“The purpose of the symposium is not only to showcase the excellence of these individual scholars’ achievements, but also to provide opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversation and exchange,” said Barrett. “All three of these scholars write lucid, engaging prose and all three re-examine the ideologies and events of the war in ways that transcend the disciplinary boundaries of history, literary studies and art history.”

Blight, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading experts on the U.S. Civil War and its legacy, will discuss how whites and blacks struggled to determine the meaning and memory of the Civil War in America during the following 50 years and more and how that memory reunified the country, but at a great cost in terms of race relations. He also will explore the role “race” and “reunion” and the challenges of “healing” and “justice” between the North and South and among whites and blacks played in shaping Civil War memory.

Blight has written three books on the Civil War, including 2001’s “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” which was recognized with the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Bancroft Prize and three awards from the Organization of American Historians. He also is the author of “Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War,” published in 2002 and “Frederick Douglas’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee.” In addition, he co-wrote the American history textbook “A People and a Nation.”

A one-time high school history in his hometown of Flint, Mich., Blight taught at North Central College, Harvard University and Amherst College before joining the history department faculty at Yale in 2003. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin.

Nudelman, whose research interests include Civil War culture, will explore the concept of punishment and its use as a historic mechanism for barring black advancement. The emancipation of slaves brought new freedoms for African Americans, but with it came new kinds of coercion by the federal government, including drafting newly freed men into the army, refusing to pay them equal wages and sentencing an inordinate number of them to death. She will argue that the treatment of black soldiers in the Union army during the Civil War is a largely untold chapter in the evolving history of punishment as an instrument of racial oppression in the United States.

Nudelman, who earned her bachelor’s and doctorate degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, joined the English department at Virginia in 1997.

Savage, whose scholarship includes issues of traumatic memory in historical terms, will discuss battlefield photographs that began to appear in late 1862 that overturned the heroic conventions for representing death in battle by showing
male bodies as little more than carcasses without any signs of moral or spiritual redemption.

Focusing on a particularly gruesome photograph by Alexander Gardner entitled “War, Effects of a Shell on a Confederate Soldier at Battle of Gettysburg,” Savage will contrast Gardner’s Confederate photograph with that of a photograph of dead Union soldiers he also took, drawing parallels between the desecrated Confederate body and images of tortured male slaves and explaining why images of Union soldiers held a privileged status in photographic representations.

In the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Savage’s research interests in public monuments and art in the public sphere have focused on the “therapeutic memorial,” with special attention given to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the World Trade Center competition.

Savage earned his Ph.D in art history at the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of the 1997 book “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America.”

“This symposium is an extraordinary opportunity to hear three leading Civil War scholars speak about their current projects, as well discuss the larger issue of Civil War memory in American society,” said Barrett. “The issue of the representation of war is particularly timely in our current historical moment. The United States is conducting multiple wars on foreign soil as the American media and scholarly community grapple with the most effective ways of representing and understanding these conflicts.”

The Civil War symposium is sponsored by the Marguerite Schumann Memorial Lectureship, Main Hall Forum, Fine Arts Colloquium and the departments of art history, English, gender studies and history.

Noted Feminist Author, Literay Scholar Discusses her Work in Lawrence University Program

Noted author, activist, literary scholar and nationally recognized feminist theorist Jane Gallop will participate in a discussion of her work Monday, April 11 in a Gender Studies/Main Hall Forum presentation at Lawrence University.

The program, at 4:10 p.m. in Riverview Lounge of the Lawrence Memorial Union, will focus on Gallop’s 1997 controversial book, “Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment.” The event is free and open to the public.

A distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Gallop has been hailed as “one of the most prominent voices in the younger generation of feminist theorists” and credited with influencing the work of other post-modernist scholars worldwide. She is the author of nine books, including “Thinking Through the Body,” “The Daughter’s Seduction,” “Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory” and most recently, “Anecdotal Theory.”

Her book, “Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment,” chronicles accusations of sexual harassment filed against her in the early 1990s by two female graduate students and explores Gallop’s own theories on sexual harassment, including its evolving definition and how a prominent feminist theorist can wind up being accused of it. A university investigation of the charges determined Gallop and the students had engaged in sexual banter and flirtation but the behavior had not reached the level of harassment.

Former Ambassador Discusses Eastern Europe’s “Unfinished Business” in Lawrence University International Relations Series Lecture

David Swartz, who served as the United States’ first ambassador to the then-newly independent Republic of Belarus, reviews the political strides that have been made and the work that remains in Eastern Europe in the second address of Lawrence University’s four-part international studies lecture series “U.S. and European Security: Challenges and Choices.”

Swartz, who spent the 1997-98 academic year on the Lawrence faculty as the Stephen Edward Scarff Memorial Visiting Professor, presents “Unfinished Business in Eastern Europe: The Role of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)” Wednesday, April 13 at 7 p.m. in Science Hall, Room 102 on the Lawrence campus. The event is free and open to the public.

In 1975, representatives of 35 nations gathered in Helsinki as members of a unique forum created to promote political, economic and scientific cooperation and reduce tensions across the then-Iron Curtain. That “conference” eventually evolved into the 55-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Since its founding, the OSCE has been actively engaged in all of the sweeping geopolitical transformations that have occurred in the Eurasian region during the past 30 years. In his address, Swartz will outline the role the OSCE is still playing today in trying to resolve some of the issues — both structural and issue/region specific — that remain in Eastern Europe.

Among the issues he will discuss are the severe economic disparities that exist between the eastern countries and the West and which is fueling significant migrations of people from east to west in search of jobs and prosperity, as well as drug trafficking and illicit and destabilizing arms trafficking.

Other topics Swartz will examine involve “hot spots” throughout the area where unresolved conflicts remain, including Bosnia and Kosovo in the Balkans, Moldova/Transnistria in the Black Sea region, Nagorno-Karabakh and Georgia/Abkhazia in the Caucasus and Chechnya.

Swartz served nearly 29 years in the U. S. Foreign Service before retiring in 1995. A specialist in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, he served in a variety of positions at U.S. missions in Moscow, Kiev and Warsaw. In 1992, President Bush nominated him to become the first U.S. ambassador to the newly independent Republic of Belarus, where he served until 1994.
Swartz’s Washington assignments included service as the first staff director of the U.S. Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, senior inspector in the State Department Office of Inspector General and dean of the School of Language Studies, Foreign Service Institute.

In 1996, Swartz established and still directs the European Humanities University Foundation, which promotes private higher education in Belarus. At the request of the State Department, he spent two years (2001-03) as Head of the Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to Moldova, the poorest nation in Europe and the first former Soviet state to elect a Communist as its president (2001).

A native of Chicago, Swartz earned his bachelor’s degree in history and political science at Southwestern College and his master’s degree in Soviet and East European Area Studies from Florida State University.

The “U.S. and European Security: Challenges and Choices” lecture series is sponsored by the Mojmir Povolny Lectureship in International Studies. Named in honor of long-time Lawrence government professor Mojmir Povolny, the lectureship promotes interest and discussion on issues of moral significance and ethical dimensions.

Lawrence University Saxophonist Jesse Dochnahl Wins National Music Competition

Lawrence University saxophonist Jesse Dochnahl proved to be a musical gem in the Emerald City Monday (4/4), earning first-prize honors in the national finals of the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) Woodwind Young Artists competition held in Seattle, Wash.

A senior music education and performance major from Ennis, Mont., Dochnahl topped the seven-person field of regional winners in the woodwind division, earning a first-place prize of $3,000. The national title culminates a musical sweep for Dochnahl, 21, who won the MTNA Wisconsin state title last November and qualified for the national competition by winning the five-state regional title in January.

A student in the saxophone studio of Lawrence professor of music Steven Jordheim, Dochnahl and the other competition division winners are invited to perform in a special “winners concert” at the end of the event.

“Jesse’s success in the MTNA Young Artist Competition is an affirmation of his fine talent, dedication and hard work,” said Jordheim. “The finalists in the MTNA competition often are graduate students, so winning this competition as an undergraduate is certainly an impressive achievement for Jesse. His performance also represents the excellence in undergraduate education at the Lawrence Conservatory.”

An alto saxophonist, Dochnahl performed four works at the national competition: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “In Friendship”; “Flute Sonata in A minor” by C.P.E. Bach; “Scaramouche” by Darius Milhaud; and “The Nature of this Whirling Wheel,” a 1997 composition by former Lawrence music professor Rodney Rogers.

The MTNA Young Artist competition is open to students 19-26 years of age. Participants in both the regional and national competition are required to play 40 minutes of music featuring contrasting pieces from two different time periods.

Beloit College Vice President Named Dean of the Faculty at Lawrence University

Lawrence University President Jill Beck has announced the appointment of David Burrows as provost and dean of the faculty at the college.

Burrows, currently the dean of the college and vice president for academic affairs at Beloit College, will begin his duties at Lawrence July 1, 2005. He replaces Kathleen Murray, who has served as dean since June, 2003. Murray, former dean of the Lawrence Conservatory of Music and professor of piano, has been named provost of Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama.

“Dr. Burrows will work with the faculty and with me on all matters relating to the continued advancement of Lawrence,” said Beck in announcing the appointment. “He possesses a depth of experience in liberal arts administration that equips him to succeed with distinction in the coming years.”

A cognitive psychologist, Burrows has served as dean at Beloit since 1997. A native of New York City, he spent eight years on the faculty at the State University of New York at Brockport and 17 years at Skidmore College, including three as associate dean of the faculty there. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Columbia University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Toronto.

Lawrence University Receives Grant to Support of ArtsBridge America Program

Lawrence University will share in a $75,000 grant awarded by the New York-based Dana Foundation as part of a five-campus consortium working with the ArtsBridge America program.

Joining Lawrence as grant recipients were the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Utah, the University of California, San Diego and Purchase College, State University of New York.

Founded in 1996 at the University of California, Irvine by current Lawrence president Jill Beck, ArtsBridge America is an arts education and outreach program that works with schools throughout the country. The program partners university arts students with a K-12 teacher to introduce interdisciplinary arts instruction through a variety of collaborative projects to create and implement lessons that integrate the arts with the core curriculum.

Nationally headquartered at Lawrence, the ArtsBridge America program currently supports arts curriculum initiatives with more than 300,000 students nationwide through 21 universities in 13 states.

Earlier this year, Lawrence launched its first local ArtsBridge program with 13 Lawrence “ArtsBridge Scholars” working with more than 300 Fox Valley students from kindergarteners to high school seniors on nine different projects.

“As the number of university partner institutions joining the ArtsBridge America network continues to grow, we need to recognize the importance of assessing scholar preparation for students working in and with schools to bring more arts education to our nation’s children,” said Jasmine Yep, national coordinator of ArtsBridge America. “With the generous support from the Dana Foundation, we will be able to collect data and analyze scholar preparation and project planning at a number of ArtsBridge campuses. By developing methods for scholar training, ArtsBridge America continues to look at ways in which we can better prepare our scholars as teaching artists.

“This grant will enable Lawrence to better support its ArtsBridge scholars in project planning and teaching methods throughout their individual projects,” Yep added. “Lawrence ArtsBridge scholars are working hard to promote creativity not only through music, theatre and visual arts, but also through critical thinking skills in science and language arts.

“Not all children are able to experience the arts as an audience member of a professional performance or exhibition, but through ArtsBridge projects here in the Fox Valley as well as in communities across the country, students are able to take pride in the art that they are creating and performing.”

Founded in 1950, the Dana Foundation is a private philanthropic organization that supports initiatives in education, science and health. Its interests in education focus on innovative development programs that facilitate improved teaching of the performing arts in public schools.