Campus Notes for The Point

Events and Honors

The Confucius Institute hosted the Zhejiang University Wenqin Arts Troupe on February 1 as part of the university's Chinese New Year celebration (photo left).

Issue 6 of the Breakwater Review, the flagship literary magazine of the MFA Program of the University of Massachusetts Boston, has been released. The magazine offers a wide selection of astonishing and delightful art, poetry, and prose.

The Institute for Community Inclusion's National Service to Inclusion Project (NSIP) and National Service to Employment Project (NextSTEP) cohosted the 2011 Symposium on Service and Inclusion for promotion with the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). This conference brought together more than 200 leaders in the disability and service communities to develop strategies to support the full inclusion of people with disabilities in national service. More information is available at:
http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/newsroom/releases_detail.asp?tbl_pr_id=2052

Rajini Srikanth, director of the University Honors Program and a professor of English, and Professor of English Louise Penner took 10 members of the International Epidemics Senior Honors Colloquium to Cape Town, South Africa for two weeks where they participated in an HIV/AIDS peer educator retreat with students and faculty from the University of the Western Cape and met with many HIV/AIDS and social justice community activists and medical personnel.

Mary M. Aruda, clinical assistant professor of nursing, chaired, a test development meeting for Pediatric Nurse Practitioners (PNP) Content Expert Panel (CEP) for the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) in Silver Springs, Maryland in January 2012. The content expert panel, a select group of nurse experts from across the country, is responsible for developing the specialty's ANCC national certification examination.

Philip DiSalvio, dean of University College, has been selected to speak at the upcoming annual UPCEA (University Professional & Continuing Education Association) conference to be held in Portland, Oregon in March 2012. Using University College as a case study, Dean DiSalvio’s talk, “Reconstituting a Continuing Education Division to a Degree-Granting Academic Unit:  Opportunities & Challenges,” will take conference participants through the recent transition of University College from a division of continuing education, to a degree-granting academic unit. Dean DiSalvio will explore how the new designation of University College represents a natural evolution for a unit with an already considerable reputation and an expanding portfolio of interdisciplinary, professional and technology-mediated, education learning offerings.  Joining in the presentation with Dean DiSalvio will be University College Associate Dean, Dennis Maxey, who will provide participants with an historical perspective on the origins of the transition.

Presentations, Conferences, Lectures

Center for Social Policy Research Director Françoise Carré presented a paper “Facilitating Labor Market Transitions for Workers Facing Barriers:  the Role of Alternative Staffing Organizations” (co-authored with Brandynn Holgate and Helen Levine) at the Labor and Employment Relations Association Annual Meeting in Chicago on January 6. Brandynn Holgate, CSP research associate and doctoral student in the Public Policy PhD program also attended the conference session.

Aleksander Lust, lecturer in Management, gave a talk on "Europe Undivided?  Explaining East European Euroskepticism" at Swarthmore College on February 6.

Assistant Professor of Economics Kade Finnoff presented a working paper titled "Mapping the Contours of Debate: Internal Migration in India" at the Azim Premji University in Bangalore India on January 10.

Professor of Psychology Jean Rhodes gave the Midlands Mentoring Program Keynote on January 27 and chaired the Symposium at the National Mentoring Partnership Summit on Youth Mentoring on January 24, entitled  “What the research says.”

Professors of Psychology Zsuzsa Kaldy and Erik Blasér presented a poster at the 2012 Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development, Jan 12-14, in Budapest, Hungary, entitled “Red to green or fast to slow: Infants' use of equally salient static (color) versus dynamic (rotation speed) features in object identification.”

Assistant Professor of Sociology Cinzia Solari gave an invited talk at a conference at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.  The conference was a special gathering of experts, on “Transofrming Gender Orders: Intersections of Care, Family and Migration.” Her talk was titled, “State Constructions of Migrant Careworkers in Ukraine: A Comparative Analysis.”

Publications

Dennis A. Gilbert, lecturer in French, has published the introduction and notes to "Existentialist Theater, in 'The Useless Mouths' and Other Literary Writings," by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, University of Illinois Press, 2011.

Rajini Srikanth, director of the University Honors Program and a professor of English, published Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and Law, with the Temple University Press.

Professor of English Thomas O'Grady published an essay on Elizabeth Bishop in The Worcester Review, a short story in The Nashwaak Review, and two poems in The Fiddlehead.  He also gave the keynote address on a program titled "They Came from Ireland" at the National Archives in Waltham.

Professor of Hispanic Studies Esther Torrego spent the first part of the January break preparing the publication of her forthcoming book Of Grammar, Word and Verses, which will be published this spring by Blackwell, in the collection Language Faculty and Beyond. She also spent two weeks in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, studying Alhamiado manuscripts, as part of her project on the Spanish of the sixteenth century.

Assistant Professor of American Studies Bonnie Miller published a book, From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures from the Spanish-American War of 1898 (University of Massachusetts Press).

Associate Professor of Sociology Phil Kretsedemas had his new book published by Columbia University Press, The Immigration Crucible: Transforming Race, Nation and the Limits of the Law (2012).