Appleton

APPLETON, WIS. — Award-winning drummer Matt Wilson and his quartet Arts and Crafts bring their imaginative, quirky brand of jazz to the stage of the Lawrence Memorial Chapel, 510 E. College Ave., Appleton, Friday, May 23 at 8 p.m. The concert is the finale of the 2007-08 Lawrence Jazz Series.

Tickets, at $20-22 for adults, $17-19 for seniors and $15-17 for students, are available through the Lawrence Box Office, 920-832-6749.

Wilson also will conduct a master class Saturday, May 24 from 10 a.m. to 12 noon in Shattuck Hall, Room 46. The master class is free and open to the public.

Lauded by the New York Times as “one of the best drummers of his generation,” Wilson began his career with some cookware, a five-gallon bucket and a pair of drumsticks. From those humble beginnings he has emerged as one of the most sought-after drummers in New York City and worldwide.

The winner of four consecutive “Rising Star Drummer” awards this decade in Downbeat magazine’s International Critics Poll, Wilson also garnered prominent mentions in Downbeat’s Jazz Artist and Composer categories. He earned nominations in 2004 and 2006 for the Jazz Journalists Association “Jazz Drummer of the Year” award.

“Not only is Matt Wilson an extraordinarily gifted drummer, he is an all-around percussion guru,” said Dane Richeson, professor of music and director of percussion studies at Lawrence, who toured with Wilson in Portugal in the mid-1990s. “He plays the drums like he’s conducting an orchestra.”

Wilson can be heard as leader and sideman on more than 160 records with performers such as Dewey Redman, Lee Konitz, Wynton Marsalis, Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau, among others. His recordings include the acclaimed 2004 album “Wake Up!” and 2007’s “Scenic Route,” his most recent recording with Arts and Crafts.

Formed in 2000, the Arts and Crafts group features the creative talents of Terell Stafford, trumpet; Larry Goldings, piano; and Dennis Irwin, bass. The quartet has performed at Carnegie Hall, Chicago’s Symphony Center and the Newport and San Francisco jazz festivals. They conducted a European tour in 2006.

APPLETON — Mixing humor and danger, the Lawrence University Theatre Arts Department presents five performances of “The Knight from Olmedo,” a tragicomedy by the great Spanish playwright Lope de Vega. The production culminates the theatre department’s year-long celebration of Spanish playwrights.

The play will be performed May 14-17 at 8 p.m. and May 18 at 3 p.m. in Stansbury Theatre of the Lawrence Music-Drama Center, 420 E. College Ave., Appleton. Tickets, at $10 for adults, $5 for students and senior citizens, are available through the Lawrence University Box Office, 920-832-6749.

Following the romantic quests of two men pursuing the same woman, the play explores themes of family honor, the power of attraction, the supernatural and respect for authority. The turbulent love affairs and lighthearted comedy are entwined with more dangerous, sinister and supernatural elements throughout the story.

“DeVega gives us a wide-open theatricality that is different from the English language tradition we get from Shakespeare,” said director Timothy X. Troy, associate professor of theatre arts and J. Thomas and Julie Esch Hurvis Professor of Theatre and Drama. “There is a palpable sense of celebration and discovery as each character discovers the limits of his or her own desire.”

Regarded as the greatest playwright of Spain’s Golden Age, the prolific de Vega is known to have penned more than 700 plays during his lifetime. He influenced the tradition of Spanish playwriting by mixing humor and tragedy with a strong commitment to tradition.

APPLETON, WIS. — A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian explores the stories behind a well-known 18th-century Puritan embroidery in a Lawrence University Phi Beta Kappa lecture.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University, presents “The First, Second and Last Scenes of Mortality: A Textile Mystery,” Thursday, May 1 at 7 p.m. in Youngchild Hall 121. Ulrich also will conduct a question-and-answer session Friday, May 2 at 10 a.m. in Main Hall Strange Commons. Both events are free and open to the public.

A specialist in early American social history, women’s history and material culture, Ulrich will discuss a needlework stitched in 1783 by Prudence Punderson of Connecticut before her marriage that depicts three scenes of mortality: infancy, womanhood and death. Ulrich will challenge the conventional thinking that Punderson’s work merely reflected typical New England Puritan obsession with death, arguing the work is “a dynamic portrayal of political and personal conflict in an age of revolution.”

Ulrich, whose research focuses on the hidden lives of ordinary women who have enjoyed extraordinary lives, is the author of four books, including “Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650-1750” and “A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard,” which earned her the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for history and became the basis of a PBS documentary. Her most recent work, “Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History,” was published in 2007.

APPLETON — Five choirs comprising nearly 250 voices will join three guest soloists and the Lawrence Symphony Orchestra under the direction of David E. Becker in a performance of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” Sunday, May 4 at 8 p.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel, 510 E. College Ave., Appleton.

Tickets, at $10 for adults and $5 for senior citizens and students, are available at the Lawrence Box Office, 920-832-6749.

Headlining the concert are guest artists Stephen King, baritione, Steven Paul Spears, tenor and Tamara Wilson, soprano. The chorus will include Lawrence’s Concert Choir, Cantala women’s choir and Viking Chorale, as well as 35 members of the Lawrence Academy of Music Girl Choir chosen by audition and the 75-member, community-based White Heron Chorale.

A scenic cantata in five movements, “Carmina Burana” is based on 24 secular medieval poems written in Latin and old forms of German and French. The poems discuss topics ranging from drinking and gambling to the joys of spring. Orff’s musical setting is a popular work on orchestral programs and is often heard in films and commercials.

King, an award-winning singer, has performed engagements from China to Italy and throughout the United States. Highly regarded as a vocal teacher, he holds positions at the Shepherd School of Music of Rice University, the Houston Grand Opera Studio and the Aspen Music Festival.

Spears, assistant professor of music in Lawrence’s voice department since 2004, has sung roles in concerts, opera companies and festivals across the United States including the Aspen Music Festival, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Julliard Opera Theater.

Wilson, hailed for her voice of “steely beauty and great power” by the Houston Chronicle, won the 2005 Houston Grand Opera Eleanor McCollum Competition and was a finalist in the 2004 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. She currently performs with the Houston Grand Opera.

The White Heron Chorale, Lawrence Concert Choir and Viking Chorale are all led by Richard Bjella, director of choral studies at Lawrence. Phillip Swan, associate director of choral studies at Lawrence, conducts Cantala. Karen Bruno is the coordinator of the Academy of Music Girl Choir program.

APPLETON, WIS. — Lawrence University senior Katie Peacock had barely returned from a recent 10-day field study trip to Germany when she found out she will be heading back there, this time for a 10-month stay.

Peacock became the second Lawrence student this spring, and the eighth since 2001, to be named a 2008-09 Fulbright Scholar. She was awarded a $11,250 fellowship plus round-trip air fair that will send her to Germany in early September, where she will spend 10 months as a secondary school English teaching assistant. Peacock’s specific destination is yet to be determined.

A German and linguistics major at Lawrence, Peacock spent 10 days in Berlin during last month’s spring break as part of a class on the German city. The field study explored Berlin’s rich history and architecture through extensive daily walking tours. Shortly after returning to campus, she was notified she had been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship.

“I was estastic,” said Peacock of Bennington, Vt., after learning she had been named a Fulbright Scholar. “I love languages and wanted to teach and this seemed like a great opportunity to do that. Plus, it was a chance for me to go back to Germany.”

For Peacock, the difference between ecstasy and agony was literally only a matter of hours. When she first explored the Fulbright last October, she discovered the on-campus application deadline was the next day. With the help of some gentle pleading, she received a short extension, but still had to write essays, collect faculty recommendations and track down transcripts in the span of a weekend.

“It was wild and I was freaking out a little bit, but everything worked out in the end,” said Peacock, who was inspired to apply for the fellowship by two Lawrence classmates who earned Fulbright fellowships to Germany in 2006 and 2007.

Her teaching assistantship will be Peacock’s fourth trip to Germany since 2004. In addition to the recent spring break visit, Peacock participated in a 16-week study-abroad program in Berlin in the fall of 2006 and spent a month at a language institute in Tubingen in southern Germany the summer following her high school graduation. Following her fellowship, Peacock hopes to pursue additional language study in graduate school.

“I eventually want to teach middle school or high school and help young people learn to love language as much as I do,” said Peacock, who is currently tutoring an Appleton seventh-grade student in German twice a week. “I want to see that transformation that takes place when someone learns a new language.”

Created by Congress in 1946 to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges, the Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s premier scholarship program. Since its founding, it has supported opportunities for nearly 280,000 American students, scholars and other professionals in more than 155 countries. Fulbright alumni have become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, CEOs, university presidents, professors and teachers. Thirty-six Fulbright alumni have earned Nobel Prizes.

APPLETON, WIS. — For the third year in a row, a Lawrence University student has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English abroad.

Nicki Dabney, a senior from Silver Spring, Md., has been named a 2008-09 Fulbright Scholar and awarded a $15,500 fellowship. Beginning August 1, Dabney will spend 11 months in Taiwan, teaching English and serving as a cultural advisor at either an elementary or middle school in Gaoxiong, a port city of 1.5 million people in southwest Taiwan.

She is the seventh Lawrence student named a Fulbright Scholar since 2001 by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Dabney, who will graduate in June with a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies, government and Chinese language and literature, spent a semester in Beijing in the fall of 2006 while on the Associated Colleges in China study-abroad program. Her experiences with daily Chinese life on that program prompted her to look for an opportunity to return to the Far East.

“I wanted to go back to either mainland China or a Chinese-speaking region to improve my language skills,” said Dabney, who is fluent in Mandarin. “I applied for the Fulbright Fellowship thinking it would be a great way to combine my language and teaching skills. It worked out perfect. It’s going to be a good challenge, but I’m excited and looking forward to it.”

For the past four months, Dabney has been teaching Chinese to students at Green Bay’s Aldo Leopold Elementary School. She also serves as an English as a Second Language tutor for Japanese students participating in the Waseda program, a study-abroad partnership between Lawrence and Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan that brings 15-20 Waseda students to Lawrence for a year of thematic and language study. She spent last summer as an intern for the China Program at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Ga., translating Chinese articles, writing media reports and analyzing Chinese news articles.

When her Fulbright appointment ends, Dabney hopes to pursue graduate studies in Asian languages and cultures.

“I eventually want to put my language skills to use in anything that improves cooperation between the United States and China and promotes cross-cultural exchange and understanding,” Dabney said.

Created by Congress in 1946 to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges, the Fulbright Program has become the U.S. government’s premier scholarship program. Since its founding, the Fulbright Program has supported study, research and teaching opportunities for nearly 280,000 American students, scholars and other professionals in more than 155 countries. Fulbright alumni have become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, CEOs, university presidents, professors and teachers. Thirty-six Fulbright alumni have earned Nobel Prizes.

APPLETON, WIS. — The evidence for male circumcision as an effective health promotion and the questions raised by implementing a circumcision policy will be examined in Lawrence University’s Edward F. Mielke Lecture Series in Biomedical Ethics.

Robert Bailey, professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, presents “Male Circumcision: Genital Mutilation or Sound Public Health” Wednesday, April 23 at 7 p.m. in Lawrence’s Wriston Art Center auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

According to Bailey, approximately 4,000 men and 4,500 women are infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa every day. While an effective vaccine against new infections is years away, male circumcision has been likened to a vaccine, proving about 60% effective in preventing new HIV infections in adult heterosexual men. Circumcision also has been found to protect against urinary tract infections, some sexually transmitted diseases, penile cancer and cervical cancer in female partners of circumcised men.

Three clinical trials have produced compelling results and the World Health Organization and several UN agencies have recommended male circumcision be made widely available in regions it is not widely practiced and HIV prevalence is high.

Bailey will discuss several important questions raised by moving from research findings to policy implementation, including: will circumcision be acceptable to people in communities where it is not commonly practiced or will those who do get circumcised be stigmatized or discriminated against?; if circumcision is promoted as an effective HIV prevention measure, will men engage in higher risk sexual behaviors than they did before they were circumcised?; and will men use circumcision as an excuse not to use condoms, making it more difficult for women to negotiate safe sex?

The author or co-author of six books, Bailey serves as a consultant on matters relating to national and international health and disease prevention for the World Health Organization, UNAIDS and UNICEF, among others. A specialist on issues of peoples’ health in Africa, he is leading efforts with the Kenya Ministry of Health funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to provide circumcision and counseling services for HIV prevention in western Kenya.

Bailey’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.