COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Fall 2010 VOL #1 ISSUE #1

Nazareth College is the place where you will learn not only ways to make a living, but also ways to make a life. Knowledge is considered valuable for its own sake as well as preparation for future endeavors.

Message from the Dean inspiration anyone might need—and I found an old favorite, Natalie Goldberg whose work I have myself often used in writing classes. Here are her wonderful opening remarks about life, which, of course, are also wonderful opening remarks about writing, especially on the brink of the first day of another semester. “Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce. In summer, we work hard to make a tidy garden, bordered by pansies, with rows or clumps of columbine, petunias, bleeding hearts. Then we find ourselves longing for the forest, where everything has the appearance of disorder, yet we feel peaceful there. What writing practice, like Zen practice, does, is bring you back to the natural state of mind, the wilderness of your mind where there are no refined rows of gladiolas. The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think—well-congenial....Being a writer is a whole way of life, a way of seeing, thinking, being. It’s the passing on of a lineage” (Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life, Bantam, 1990). Goldberg’s book contains many, many of my favorite metaphors and evokes three of my favorite places—the garden, which at my house about this time of year inevitably becomes the forest; the wild place in the mind where thoughts whirl and where every once in awhile a really good idea floats into consciousness just like those book titles leap at me off the shelf; the place of story, where seeing, thinking, and being come together, a place with danger and delight as its inevitable metaphors. I think of the classroom as first and foremost a place of story-- ours, those of our students, the “story” of the materials we handle, of the words that belong to all of the books, the voices, the music, the clay, the paint, the images—the microcosmic and macrocosmic speculations that challenge our days with students and with ourselves. In this new semester, in the new year to come, I challenge us, simply, to live the writer’s life: be of wild mind. And of the journey we can say only: onward. Deborah A. Dooley

During my now thirty-year lifetime as a teacher and a writer, I have had a rather disorderly habit. (Anyone who has seen my office will know that I have many disorderly habits!) When I am stuck, knowing at some deep level that I need to move forward on a piece of writing or a plan for class, but without the rational means to do so, I go to the bookshelves in my house or office, or to the nearest local bookstore, and just stand in front of the shelves. I look at the colors of the jackets and at the different kinds of print-face on the spine. But mostly, I wait for a title to leap out at me. In this way, I have found critical connections through the most unlikely books that have helped me immeasurably in moving forward with my writing, often in the most unplanned, but also remarkably fruitful, and often creative ways. To stand before a crowded bookshelf is a leap of faith, contrary to what most rational people would say is the best way to focus and advance an argument, or to meet a deadline. But I must say that it has always worked for me. It helped me to find Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful book on aboriginal song, and Adrienne Rich’s extraordinary poem from which came a part of the title for my own book, Plain and Ordinary Things: Reading Women in the Writing Classroom. It helped me find Starhawk’s book, Dreaming the Dark, and Ulric Neisser’s study, Memory Observed. And all of these-- and more--helped me to write a book about writing. So this morning, thinking about this opening for the first newsletter of the College of Arts and Sciences at Nazareth, I stood in front of my bookshelf in my 4th floor office—whose view most people would think could provide all of the

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IN THIS ISSUE

♦ Community Partners

♦ Faculty Scholarship

♦ Faculty Out and About

♦ China Recruitment

♦ New and Noteworthy

Layout and design by Pamela Griffin (Executive Assistant to Deborah Dooley)

When David Anderson came from Army service to Rochester in 1956 to study photography at RIT, the Red-Cap in the train station directed him to put his luggage in a locker and walk downtown to the College. Expecting to have a room in a residence hall, he was stunned when the Housing Director dismissed him: “I don’t have a room for you,” and turned his back. It was the elderly housekeeper whose apron reminded him of his mother’s paisley who, overhearing his dismissal, quietly told him that her neighbor, whose husband had retired from the Pullman service, would rent him a room, and sent him to her address. Because money from the GI Bill would not be available to him for the first six months of his stay in Rochester, he worked days in the audiovisual department of RIT, and nights as a porter, cleaning toilets at the old Rochester General Hospital. Most days, his meals were cornflakes and milk. But on Fridays, he ate fried chicken at Sandy and Lola’s, a little restaurant on Clarissa Street not much bigger than David’s office on the third floor of Golisano Academic Center, beginning relationships and connections among the citizens of “Afro-Rochester” that remain vital to him even today. He would go on to earn a degree from RIT, beginning relationships and connections among the citizens of “Afro-Rochester” that remain vital to him even today. He would go on to earn a degree from RIT, master’s and doctoral degrees in Education from Syracuse University and the Union Institute, and to become an inspirational educator, administrator, community activist and performer. His experiences taught him the power of art to change hearts and minds, and the power of history to remind us of the place from which we come, and the people who helped and hindered us on that journey. place from which we come, and the people who helped and hindered us on that journey. A Korean War veteran, Dr. Anderson was the great-grandson of Army veteran Private Samuel Bibb, who fought for the Union Army in the 17th Infantry Regiment, United States Colored Troops, during the Civil War. For the first two years of the war, the United States government waivered, fearful of putting guns in the hands of black men lest they be emboldened to claim equal rights as citizens of that government. President Lincoln had made it clear that freeing enslaved black men was not the moral cause toward which the war was directed. In fact, the Emancipation Proclamation was an act of desperation, opening the doors for as many as 200,000 more men—black men--to fight for the Union cause. David Anderson’s passion is to remember these men (and women) who have come before us, and, in his own way, to remember that day in 1956 when he got off the train in Rochester, to remember what came before--and what was to come--in his own life. As a founding member with his wife, Ruth, of Akwaaba: the Heritage Associates, his resounding baritone echoes in the halls of schools, churches, classrooms and theaters, modeling the lesson that those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it; modeling the lesson that we are not simply the place from which we come, but we are what we make of that place, what we choose to carry of it into our present and our future; modeling the lesson that our history implicates all of us in its potential and its outcomes.

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A Passionate Partner

David Anderson, Ph.D. Community Scholar in Residence with the College of Arts and Sciences and School of Education

Liberal arts and sciences are by name and nature the studies that free us to explore who we are and to test out aspects of the person we want to become. –Deborah Dooley

Responding to the electrifying cry of their father Frederick, “Men of Color, to Arms!” the sons of Frederick Douglass joined the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Samuel Bibb helped to form the 17th Infantry Regiment. Rochesterian George Brown, a slave loaned by his owner to be the body-servant of a Confederate officer, was later sold to a Southern store owner. He eventually escaped to join the Union Army in Knoxville, Tennessee, and finally served in Texas with the Buffalo Soldiers. In the words of Douglass in 1894, “colored soldiers . . . at the moment of the national peril, volunteered to go to the front and fight for their country—when assured in advance that neither by their own government nor that of the confederates would they be accorded the equal rights of peace or war. The colored soldier fought with a halter around his neck, but he fought all the same” (cited in “Their Time Has Come” by David Anderson in about . . .time, November, 1988, 16).

White House Initiatives on Advancing Interfaith Cooperation

in Higher Education

Pictured above from left to right: Dan Pawlus of the IFYC, Lynne Boucher Staropoli, Nazareth College Center for Spirituality, Mark Edington of the Harvard Kennedy School, and Dr. Muhammad Shafiq, Center for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue at Nazareth College.

On August 9-10, 2010, Ms. Lynne Boucher and Dr. Muhammad Shafiq attended a follow up conference at the White House on Initiatives on Advancing Interfaith Cooperation in Higher Education organized by Dr. Eboo Patel at the IFYC. Some 60 colleges participated in the conference. Conference participants were very concerned about growing religious bigotry and expressed the fear that this may destroy the social, religious and political foundation of America and pull the country apart. Many viewed it as leading to a second civil rights movement. They agreed that all member campuses will teach interfaith studies under a global studies mandate to educate our next generation in understanding and appreciating religious and cultural diversity.

A Passionate Partner (continued from page 3)

Dr. Anderson and his fellow actors average 40 tours a year. Each year in the Linehan Chapel, a fitting sacred ground, members of Akwaaba, with Rochester’s Buffalo Soldiers Presentation team, commemorate the voices, deeds and events that led to the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of men of color in the Union Army, and to their distinguished service for a country that remained obdurate to their humanity itself. In his hands, through his storyteller’s voice, the dead speak. We can imagine their profound grief, their wild joy. The facts of injustice are laid bare. The challenge--to remember, to correct, to shape a future--is laid down. As Visiting Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Education, and as the Chair of the Monroe County Freedom Trail Commission, Dr. Anderson’s long arms now link the Center for Service Learning and the Center for Public History and Engagement at the College with hundreds of Nazareth College students and a diverse group of schools and community partners. He assists faculty and students in the scholarship of engagement around issues of his expertise, with particular emphasis on the experience of the American slave, the history of black soldiers’ involvement in the American Civil War, and on Afro-Rochester as a concept of organization and remembrance connected to significant contributions of African-American men and women to local history and culture. He has a particular expertise on the life and works of Frederick Douglass, and he has a core interest in the educational experiences of African-American children through their knowledge of and engagement with their rich heritage in Rochester and beyond. With Dr. Anderson comes a life of experience, expertise, and story that no traditional scholar could ever equal. We hope that he will “visit” with us for a very long time. □

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Faculty Scholarship

Like Rhees, the other subjects of these essays were scholars deeply influenced by Wittgenstein; as readers, our sense is that not only were they “really talking with one another” but also that Edelman’s essayists were doing the same. Lars Hertzberg calls Peter Winch “the most important writer on moral problems in the English language since World War II” (24). Winch’s caution as Hertzberg articulates it becomes a mantra for the conversation among these essayists and how we might read them: sympathy and agreement need not go hand in hand, but “focused disagreement…is only possible where there is an underlying sympathy” (43). Heidi Northwood’s (Professor of Philosophy at Nazareth College) essay on Holland, “Absolute Ethics and the Challenge of Compassion,” addresses a variant of the problem of sympathy claimed as a motive for ethical decision-making, and explores Holland’s notion of “absolute ethics,” in which “some things cannot be done, despite one’s desire to fix, to help” (50). Inevitably, the essays raise the question of what it means to say that “I am an individual person” (89), especially in the face of the “shared public language” that is the means through which we express our reality in the world, and the fact that “Our identity as individuals is determined in a social context... “ (91). “[T]o understand a person,” Edelman writes later, “is to see that person as someone who can ‘bring something’ to the conversation” (143)—thus the triangle of persons, language, and understanding itself. Other essays challenge us to consider the relationship of religion to spirituality and morality and the distinctions among them, as well as what distinguishes the understanding that comes from philosophical contemplation rather than that driven by a moral or religious viewpoint. They also challenge us to confront our passion for ‘doing’ and a concomitant scorn for ‘thinking,’ and thus our inherent resistant to the contemplative nature of philosophy itself. Finally, as was characteristic of the ethos of Swansea, each essayist explores what the essay on Dilman calls “the reality of the human” through the reflective medium of literature, where human particularity resides in characters, and human universality in the situations and moral dilemmas they face. And so one might, as does von dur Ruhr in his closing essay, speak of the “Swansea School” and its philosophical enterprise, whose members “wrote and taught in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s work” (220). But “‘Work on philosophy,’” as Wittgenstein insisted, “‘is really more work on oneself’” (220). These essays reflect the challenge to each of us to contemplate “what we can bring to the conversation,” – an invitation whose opportunity is stunning – both in its brevity, and in the gravity of its demand. John Edelman is a Professor of Philosophy at Nazareth College. This book was completed while he held the Killian Schmidt Chair. He has been a faculty member at the College for twenty-eight years.

Sense and Reality: Essays out of Swansea, ed. by John Edelman (ontos/verlag: Heusenstamm, Germany 2009) There are times in our lives when we have the (accidental) good fortune to become engaged in a conversation whose threads follow us through our lives. Its power and pervasiveness can never be fully replicated for any other audience; indeed, it can never be fully replicated for us. But its presence to us calls us to speak further about it, and about the time and place out of which it comes. To the extent that this is possible, John Edelman’s book, collecting nine essays by nine different authors, takes up the threads of an almost fifty-year conversation engaged in by eight faculty (and their students) at the University of Swansea, Wales. Each of the faculty, Edelman tells us, taught there “for a substantial period” between the fifties and the nineties of the last century, and the work of each is the subject of one of the essays in the book, the ninth essay being a discussion of the entire group. These men are: Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, R.F. Holland, J.R. Jones, H.O. Munce, D.Z. Phillips, Ilham Dilman, and R.W. Beardsmore. What Edelman hoped for was not a celebration of the personalities of these philosophers, but a representation and continuation of work done in the “spirit in which philosophy was…pursued at Swansea” during those years. David Cockburn’s essay on “Rush Rhees: The Reality of Discourse,” opens a key thread of the essays to follow by citing Rhees’ principle: “‘Philosophy is concerned with the intelligibility of language, or the possibility of understanding. And in that way it is concerned with the possibility of discourse’” (5). As the literary executor of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s estate, and his close personal friend, Rhees’ explores a philosophy of language as examined by Cockburn which frames Edelman’s own musings on the experience of Swansea, where Edelman himself studied in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. Cockburn writes: “The sense that I am really talking with another—that we are, in our words, really in contact with each other – involves a sense of the difference that what each of us says makes in our lives: a sense that will…be undermined if, in practice, the other goes on to speak as if this conversation had never taken place” (7).

John Edelman is a Professor of Philosophy

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Faculty Scholarship

Mark Madigan is a Professor of English

Youth and the Bright Medusa, a Willa Cather Scholarly Edition with Historical Essay and Explanatory Notes by Mark J. Madigan (U. Nebraska Press, 2009).

As any faculty member knows, the journey to publication is never a direct one: there are inevitably curves in the road, actual detours, and sometimes a complete washout that can never be repaired. Mark Madigan has worked on Willa Cather’s materials since his days as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Work on this book, published in 2009, was begun by Madigan in 2004, but long-delayed by the illness and eventful death of one of the project collaborators. Madigan’s historical essay includes background on the collection of stories in the volume and also the publishing history of Cather’s changes in various editions. Madigan also discusses her sources, real-life prototypes for some of her characters, and how the stories were received. Along with over three hundred explanatory notes, the essay explores Cather’s career as a writer of fiction generally and of short stories in particular. Madigan notes that this book is published at the midpoint in her career (1920). As the first to be published by Alfred Knopf, it is also the beginning of Cather’s financial independence as a writer and the much sought-freedom that this entailed. Liberated from earlier bread and butter jobs as a journalist (Nebraska State Journal and Lincoln Courier) and a high-school English teacher, Cather would publish with Knopf the rest of her life, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for the novel One of Ours, also a first for her at Knopf. Many of Cather’s early stories had been written in a third floor room of the young Isabelle McClung’s Pittsburgh home; Cather had met the wealthy socialite by chance in the dressing room of a mutual friend in Spring, 1899; she fell passionately in love, counting the five years she lived in the McClung’s home as among the happiest of her life.

Of equal inspiration to her creative life were relationships with two members of the Nevin family, pianists, singers and composers whose descriptions, and in the case of the elder, whose untimely death emerge numerous times in her short stories. Even a young thief caught after a robbery becomes the basis for a description of one of her characters. Madigan tells one story of Cather’s decision to change from Houghton-Mifflin publishers to Knopf that any writer who has dickered with a publisher on the quality and design of a book will truly appreciate. Cather records that on her first visit to Knopf’s office, he was closely examining “samples of Chinese blue binding cloth” for a book of poems translated from the Chinese that he was about to publish. In fact, she remembers, he had gone to the Metropolitan Museum of Arts to be certain that he would get “exactly the right shade of blue.” That careful attention to detail was the deciding moment for Cather to come to Knopf. In between Madigan’s historical essay and his illuminating notes, there are, of course, Cather’s luminous short stories. Madigan cites a review from the Freeman that distills the anonymous critic’s perception of her theme: “the adventures of the Medusa of art in the wilderness of successful Americanism.” Madigan’s essays and notes are well worth the reader’s effort to explore as a complement to the wonderful stories it brings to press for a new generation of scholars and readers. Mark Madigan has been a faculty member in English at the College for fifteen years.

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Faculty Scholarship

Timothy Thibodeau is a professor of History

William Durand On the Clergy and Their Vestments A New Translation of Books 2-3 of the Rationale divinorum officiorum by Timothy M. Thibodeau. University of Scranton Press, 2010.

Thibodeau’s remarks on the relationship between the garments of (imperial) Greco-Roman government officials and the nearly universalized priestly vesture remind readers the truth of the saying that “clothing makes the man,” and suggests the shrewd rationale of the powerbrokers in the early Church. There is an intense effort to spiritualize the secular through the elaboration of the symbolism of these vestments and at the same time to connect the priest of Durand’s day to the priesthood of the Jewish temple tradition, and to Christian knighthood--in part through the comparison of their respective garments and armor. Thibodeau makes the point that, “For students of medieval imperial-papal politics, Durand’s systematic discussion of the bishop’s miter should draw special attention” (38). His exegesis on this topic is particularly fascinating, drawing as it does on the history of the relationship between the weightier “priestly authority” as it resides in the papacy and the lesser but obviously significant “royal power” as it resided in the monarchy of emperor’s and kings (39-40). At the close of his introduction, Thibodeau tells us that “By the end of the fifteenth century, Durand’s book was one of the most widely copied books of its kind in Western Europe” (46), and that it was second after the Bible to be reproduced by Gutenberg’s press in 1459. Thibodeau’s own translation is exhaustive in its study of sources and in its careful history of the manuscripts and translations that precede this book. It is a scholarly tour de force, of as much interest for its display of what pristine editorial effort is put forth to produce such a fine volume, as for the way it supports a contemporary reading of a thirteenth century man and the very specific milieu in which he lived. Timothy Thibodeau, Ph.D. is a Professor of History with interests that span the gamut of the medieval world and World War II as represented in its cinematic history. He has been a faculty member at the College for twenty-two years.

Timothy Thibodeau’s faculty office is on the fourth floor of the Golisano Academic center, but he has lived a good portion of his scholarly life in the medieval (Latin-speaking) world of William Durand of Mende (c.1230-1296), whose work is “the most comprehensive exposition of the Latin Christian liturgy produced by a medieval author” (vii). The first volume of this series, on the symbolism of the church building, was published by Columbia University Press in 2007. Thibodeau’s translation of Book 2 is the first in English, and Book 3 the first in English in over a century. Participation in an international colloquium in 1990 on Durand in Mende launched Thibodeau on a ten-year project that culminates in this book. Durand’s exegetical model, as Thibodeau writes of it, turns on the allegorical understanding that “what is said literally has another meaning spiritually” (3). In light of this interpretive method, an object, a behavior or a part of a whole, no matter how insignificant, can always be taken as a referent to a reality that must be more deeply explored and understood. Even the bishop’s sandal with its individual parts detailed is worthy of a lengthy paragraph of interpretation. Thibodeau’s deeply annotated text is a model for the type of scholarship that painstakingly follows the record of an individual’s biographical and intellectual life from document to document, in this case marking Durand’s evolution as a cleric, canon lawyer, liturgical historian, chaplain to Pope Gregory X, and finally, bishop of Mende. His life included the (failed) effort to raise an army in defense of Boniface VIII against one of many anti-papal factions aroused during the thirteenth century by the imperialist enterprises of the popes of Rome. For those whose interests do not reside with Durand (or Thibodeau) in ecclesiology (the study of church architecture and decoration) or the hierarchy of clerical orders, Durand’s accounting of the latter’s establishment over the centuries offers insight into the remarkably long-lived and tenaciously hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church.

COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

VOL # ISSUE #

Thus, Nazareth college students learn that even in a lesson plan for fourth graders, the teacher is ultimately relying on research and interpretation. Kneeland has also taken some constructivist assignments originally created in the TAH institutes back into the classroom at Nazareth. In Constitutional History (His 308), students have worked through arranging the Bill of Rights based on aspects of human rights as recognized by the United Nations, and sought patterns of change in American history by looking at the twenty-seven Amendments to the Constitution. In African American Experience (His 310), students benefited from a mini-workshop on the Niagara Movement first utilized in the TAH. “The beauty of the partnership has been its affirmation of the benefits of using many different techniques to teach American History, as well as the importance of visiting our nation's historical sites and cultural centers to awaken our sense of place and history. Linking scholarly research, public history, and a wide spectrum of teaching tools, we know that tomorrow's Americans will have an ability to reflect on the lessons and meaning of our past. We hope that our work assuages some of Senator Byrd's fears about our future”.

The teachers have also participated in institutes at the Susan B. Anthony House, Ganondagan State Historic Site, The George Eastman House, The Memorial Art Gallery, The Strong Museum of Play, and several other local institutions. In 2008-2009, teachers participated in field experiences at Fort Stanwix, in Rome, NY, General Nicholas Herkimer's Home in Little Falls, NY, and the Home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Hyde Park. The teachers themselves are divided into elementary, middle school, and high school cohorts, and workshops respond to the content needs and pedagogical preferences of the cohorts themselves. “Although the task has been to teach content to teachers, from their interactions with different groups,” Kneeland and Lappas “have learned a host of pedagogical devices that have not only enriched our work with the teachers, but have also influenced our work at Nazareth. Critical examinations of films, document analysis, discussion, kinesthetic learning, and traditional lectures have all become part of our pedagogical quiver for our work.” The experience has also made a difference in the way they approach their college classrooms, where many of their history majors (and other majors) are pursuing education certification and going on to teach in K-12 environments. In some of Lappas's history classes, education certification students are even given the option of developing K -12 lesson plans that are based on independent, primary source research (often conducted in local archives), and informed by the most recent historical scholarship.

Timothy Kneeland

Thomas Lappas

MONTH, YEAR

Teaching Teachers, Future Teachers (and Learning from Them Both)

By the late-1990’s Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was deeply dismayed by the poor state of knowledge about US history among Americans. To remedy the problem, he spearheaded the legislation that created the Teaching American History Grant program. The grants, first awarded in 2001, provide financial support for partnerships between content-specialists and schools districts. They are explicitly intended to reinvigorate the historical content knowledge of K-12 teachers throughout the United States. In 2004, Nazareth Professors Timothy Kneeland and Thomas Lappas partnered with the Greece Central School District and several other cultural and historical institutions in the Rochester area and successfully applied for a three-year TAH Grant. Now, in 2010, Drs. Kneeland and Lappas are in the second year of their second TAH grant. They have conducted almost forty full-day "institutes" for hundreds of teachers, not only from Greece but also from Hilton, Webster, Spencerport, and several other area districts. These institutes cover topics requested by the schools and have included subjects such as "Early Life in the Americas" which dealt with Native American/European relations as well as political and social life in the colonies, "Rights of Americans,” and "U.S. Foreign Policy."

In July 2010, Adrielle Mitchell (Associate Professor of English) spent one week at Aspen Institute Faculty Seminar discussing global citizenship and theories of the good with faculty members from many disciplines and institutions. As Aspen Institute Wye Fellows, they read (political and philosophical texts), discussed (nationalism, leadership, citizenship), argued (with some temperance) and sweat (temperatures hovered around 100 each day), pausing occasionally to contemplate the beauty of the Chesapeake Bay.

Quintin E. Primo III, co-founder and CEO of Capri Capital Partners, a real estate investment and development firm in Chicago, says that to flourish in business, young people need to see the world—speak more than one language.

On May 12-13, 2010, Marjorie Roth (Associate Professor of Music and Honors Program Director) presented a paper at an interdisciplinary conference on "Early Modern Rome: 1341-1667", held in Rome, Italy and sponsored by the Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo and the American Association of College and University Programs in Italy. Her paper was part of a session on "Gender, Magic, and Esotericism", and focused on questions of religious reform and musical patronage in mid-sixteenth century Rome ("Opportunity Lost: Christian Prophecy, Musical Magic, and the Road Not Taken in Counter-Reformation Rome")."

“It is no longer acceptable to speak only English if you are 25 and younger. You have little chance of being successful if you speak only one language. You will have a much broader understanding of the world’s cultures, and you will have a much clearer idea of how the world perceives our culture. I don’t care where you went to business school. I don’t care whether your grades were good or bad. You have to leave the country.”

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“Water, Water, Where is the Water?” Dr. Sharon Murphy August, 2010 I am grateful to Nazareth College for sending me on a CIEE Faculty Study trip entitled “Middle East Conflict and Cooperation” which took ten faculty from around the United States to Jordan and the West Bank this June. We had many excellent speakers on contemporary politics, which I expected. However I learned quite a bit about a different topic: water scarcity in Jordan. Jordan is the fourth poorest country in the world in water resource and it affects every aspect of life. Tap water is trucked in once a week to Jordan’s cities. Stored in tanks on the roofs of buildings, its use must be carefully monitored so that water is available until the next week’s delivery. It is also a prime cause of for the lack of industrial development. On our trip we visited the Good Water Neighbors Project near Jericho run under the auspices of the group, Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME). The Project brings Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians together to work on water scarcity in specific locations. The focus is on the physical problem, not the political conflict, and thereby fosters cooperation that may at some point lay the groundwork for cooperation on other levels. FoEME is now succeeding in creating eco-tourism in Jordan and the West Bank, which was one of the opportunities our CIEE group took advantage of on our trip to the Middle East. I hope some of you will be intrigued by it and visit this area too. Sharon Murphy is a professor in the History and Political Science.

Dr. Marjory Payne spent ten days in Germany and Paris this July-August. First she trekked around Cologne, Germany’s most liberal city, with its massive cathedral, gay sports tournament, quaint Fisch Markt, and El DE Haus and Museum. The latter was Gestapo headquarters for the Nazis and traces how Hitler subdued such a liberal city. Its basement shows the original cells which housed captive Jews and gypsies, all of whose messages of grief and hope are still inscribed on the walls. Dr. Payne next travelled up and down the vineyard-covered Mosel Valley seeking and finding long-lost relatives, who are, yes, vinters. She toured Trier, the oldest city in Germany and site of the most massive witch-hunt in European history. And finally she reveled in the art of the Louvre and took a Fat Tire Bike Tour around Paris one evening. Marjory Payne is a lecturer in the English department.

Pictured above from left to right: Dr. Thomas Lappas (Associate Professor of History), Dr. Monica Weis (Professor of English), Dr. Doot Bokelman (Associate Professor of Art), and Dr. Scott Campbell (Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy).

Hungarian Adventures of the Four Musketeers

THE PLAN: Four Nazareth professors, Tom Lappas (History), Scott Campbell (Philosophy,) Doot Bokelman (Art History), and Monica Weis, English) left for Budapest on Friday, April 9 to be speakers at America Week at the University of Pannonia, Veszprem, Hungary, about an hour and a half southwest of Budapest. After two days of sightseeing in that fabled city, on Monday, April 11, the University sent a mini-bus to drive them to Veszprem. Opening remarks by the Charge d'affairs from the Embassy were followed by the first set of lecture/papers, and each day during America Week, there were 3 or 4 papers/talks scheduled, many of them by American Fulbright professors in Hungary for the semester--open to English speakers, students, townsfolk, etc. Monica Weis gave a presentation on Rachel Carson and the American Environmental Movement. Scott Campbell spoke on Doot Bokelman and Tom Lappas A MAGIC MOMENT: CAS faculty from Nazareth College and colleagues from our partner school, the University of Pannonia in Hungary, have spent months planning a joint master's degree in American Studies--one year in Hungary, one year at Nazareth, with a thesis vetted by both universities and the MA degree awarded by Nazareth College. The College had been waiting for the official okay from the NYS Department of Education, and sadly had to tell our Hungarian colleagues--who are all ready to begin advertising this opportunity--that we had not yet received NYS approval. During the stand up break on the last day of the America Week lectures, Professor Szilard Szentgyorgyi, the Hungarian Director of this new program, received a phone call from Dean Deb Dooley that New York State approval had been given. There was great cheering, toasting, and high-fives all around. The timing could not have been better planned or more festive! Despite the raw rain and cold, in the true tradition of Hungarian hospitality, graciousness reigned. While they had been told that they were "on point" for about 4 hours a day, the faculty reflected that when they left the hotel at 8:30 am (or earlier some days), they never got back until 10:30 or 11 pm. Everyone wanted to see them, to have them sit in on a class or faculty meeting, to host a lunch, or make a formal gift presentation on behalf of the university. They were on the go for 14 - 17 hours every day and it was exhilarating.--no one had jet lag--because there was no time for it. There were dinners with British profs who are permanent fixtures at the University, an evening with a family who spoke no English--but 2 bi-lingual university profs joined them-- and a final day in the Lake Balaton region which resembles our Finger Lakes. (continued next page)

A title or caption about the photograph.

THE FINAL CHAPTER: On Wednesday morning the four discovered their flight from Budapest had once again been canceled with rebooking available only for the following Wednesday--into the month of May! After some consultation, they determined they would have to risk going to the Frankfurt airport (a ten hour train ride)—despite CNN horror pictures of lines and sleeping bodies everywhere--to try getting out of Europe on standby. “Mirabile dictu!” says Monica Weis, “NO LINE!” In Frankfurt it was a successful standby experience, with the four Musketeers making it on one flight. In Atlanta, another miracle: the intrepid quartet were four of the five standbys put on the plane, arriving in Rochester just before midnight to flowers, balloons, and champagne from loved ones--almost two weeks after leaving Rochester and 5 days later than planned. “And guess what,” says Weis, “each of us wants to go back to Hungary if not for the food (wonderful meats stuffed with hot sausage and bacon, as well as great pastries), certainly for the hospitality of these good people who are only 30 years into democracy and soaking up all the intellectual stimulus of the West”. Behind the sightseeing and the scholarship are “the subplots and subtexts” says Weis. “Wonderful moments of fallible humanity, the kindness of strangers, and open hearts of fellow human beings. We are already one, as Thomas Merton says, we just have to discover and reclaim our original unity.” The College of Arts and Sciences is excited about its new and unique Master’s Program in American Studies, http://grad.naz.edu/cas/programs/american-studies and more than pleased that our partners are the intellectually fine and gracious faculty at the Institute for American Studies at the University of Pannonia in Vezprem, Hungary. □ Monica Weis with some editorial assistance from Deborah Dooley.

Pictured above from left to right: Dr. Scott Campbell (Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy), Dr. Doot Bokelman (Associate Professor of Art), Dr. Monica Weis (Professor of English and Director of the MALS Program), and Dr. Thomas Lappas (Associate Professor of History).

The skies, however, were not so gracious. An ash plume from a volcano in Iceland led to the cancellation of their Sunday flight; they rebooked for Wednesday and relaxed by enjoying several days of sight-seeing in beautiful Budapest: the Art Museum, Parliament, a boat ride on the Danube, shopping at the huge covered market; an afternoon in an outdoor mineral springs/spa, a day at a nearby artist colony--and always afternoon coffee/tea and Hungarian pastries. “Every morning we spent an hour at a nearby Internet cafe communicating with Nazareth, answering student queries, negotiating with colleagues to cover our classes, --and checking on our flight.”

New Efforts to Expand our Partnerships in China and Enhance Recruiting for CAS and SOE Programs

Yuanting Zhao is a Professor in Theatre Arts

Rui Cheng is an Assistant Professor in the School of

Education

Cindy McPhail is a Professor and chairperson, Language Literacy and Technology in

the School of Education

Qiang Lou is a lecturer in the Biology department

Mitch Messina is Professor and chairperson in the Art

department

Qiang Lou was born in China in 1962, and received his MD degree in 1988 at Shandong Medical University. In 1991, he came to the US to earn a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from the University of Arizona. He has worked at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD, at the University of Rochester Cancer Center as a postdoctoral fellow, and at SUNY Brockport and the University of Buffalo as an assistant professor. However, health concerns no longer allow him to work in cancer research labs, where researchers are exposed to viruses and other environmental hazards.

academically strong high schools and students making college decisions who want to think about studying in the US. This past year, when faculty member Yuanting Zhao made her annual pilgrimage to our partner, Shandong Arts University, she not only took a faculty member (Mitch Messina, Chair of Art), she was also armed with the address of our newly translated web site in the Fine and Performing Arts, and with instructions from the Chairs of Theatre and Music on how to prepare students to apply to Nazareth College. While Mitch gave master classes and talked with other student and faculty artists, Ting helped students prepare audition tapes, answered parents’ questions, and guided them through the process of applying to Nazareth College. Undergraduate students who come to Nazareth will complete a five year degree program, with a first year to eighteen months spent in intensive English classes through the Center for International Education’s American Language Institute and classes in their major as they are able. If they pass an English language equivalency examination offered by the Center, they will stay on at the college and earn a degree in their chosen area of Fine and Performing Arts. This same model will apply to students recruited by Qiang Lou.

Graduate students will enter the TESOL programs directly, and their studies will be guided by Professors Rui Cheng and Cindy McPhail. Professor Zhao’s initial successes have been small, but encouraging. One Chinese student will study trombone in the Music Department this Fall. He studied English language proficiency in the American Language Institute this summer. Another is hoping to get a visa to study Graphic Arts and Design. Professor Zhao puts it succinctly: “People in the US do not understand that many Chinese parents and children have been taken advantage of by unscrupulous recruiters who take their money but really do not represent any college in the US. Now, it is important for them to know a recruiter over a period of years, and even better, to know the other families and children who have gone to US colleges this recruiter represents. This builds trust, and makes them more willing to consider a college like Nazareth, that is largely unknown in China. We can recruit effectively in China, but we need to build our reputation a little at a time until a critical mass of students is reached.” More reporting will come on the relative success of these new ventures, but we are confident that in Qiang Lou and Yuanting Zhao we are in very good hands, indeed.

And so, a new partnership has been forged between the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Education at Nazareth and Qiang Lou. “Even though I have been in the US for almost twenty years, I still have deep roots in China. I know both American culture and Chinese culture, and I have a unique background and knowledge for teaching and recruiting as well as [for] dealing with Chinese affairs.” So this year, in a pilot project, Qiang Lou will study the Nazareth website, translate appropriate sections (with special emphasis on math and the sciences, TESOL and International TESOL), activate old contacts and forge new ones in his home province. During the ’10-’11 year, he will go to China to expand our recruiting efforts in Shandong Province, with special emphasis on

The last five have been banner years for the Departments of Chemistry and Biology for acquiring new instruments. The College has been able to provide more capital money and has had federal support in the form of a significant earmark that has included the department of Mathematics as well. As the College prepares to build a new Math/Science facility, planning for new instrumentation is equally important; support for this goal has been significant. Two new acquisitions are a Bomb Calorimeter, to be jointly used by the Biology and Chemistry Departments, and an Optical Sectioning Microscope for the Cell Biology Laboratory. “I am often asked by other staff or by interested donors to explain the types of needs we have in the physical sciences and how we prioritize the ways we spend the money that we receive. It is important to them (and to the other divisions of the College) that limited resources are used for well-justified purposes,” said CAS Dean Dooley. Professor Matt Temple’s explanation of the newly-acquired microscope to the Dean (a Ph.D. in Victorian Literature) was so compelling, she felt that she should share. So here goes. . . “An optical sectioning microscope treats a microscopic object—such as a cell—as a three-dimensional object that can be photographically ‘sliced’ into as many as fifty separate layers. The pictures of the layers are then reassembled into a dynamic three-dimensional image by a computer so that one can rotate the image, explore its surface or navigate inside. In some ways, it is like looking at a hard-boiled egg. One can take a picture of a hard-boiled egg from outside, or slice it in half and then take a picture of the inside. But if one puts the hard-boiled egg in an egg slicer, takes a separate picture of each slice, and then stacks up the pictures to reconstruct the original egg, the entire three-dimensional space occupied by the egg would be accessible to the observer.”

New and Noteworthy

At last: A Bomb Calorimeter, an Optical Sectioning Microscope—and a New Research Project for Biology Faculty and Students

Carol Roote explains: “I could imagine testing different foods for their caloric content and then feeding them to animals to measure various parameters, such as metabolic rate, weight gain, and even the types of bacteria in their gut.” Dr. Roote is engaged in a new, collaborative project with a colleague at St. John Fisher College and some of her students—a project that will make use of this new instrumentation. “My own research builds on what Matt Temple was talking about. I have begun a collaboration with Professor Sheila Brady Root of Nazareth, one of our seniors, Meagan Rivera, and Dr. Daryl Hurd, of St. John Fisher College. The purpose of our research is to look at the function of the cytoskeleton in the formation of the intestine of the millimeter long worm, Caenorhabditis elegans--a very good model system routinely used to study developmental biology. They have a finite number of cells and the lineage of each cell is known. There are a variety of powerful techniques that can be used to see what goes wrong in the absence of a particular gene and thereby determine what the gene is doing during normal development. “Ultimately, when we learn more about development in various animal model systems, we learn more about our own development and more about human disease. For example, microtubules are thought to be involved in a variety of human mental disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, as well as liver disease. My colleague, Sheila Root, is interested in the deposition of fat in the intestine of the worm, which is related to obesity. We hope to involve more students in this research for their senior research projects next spring”.

Temple expects to make immediate use of this instrument in the Cell Biology Laboratory to explore the interiors of animal and plant cells in three dimensions. Other applications include determining how cell shape and organization change in response to environmental conditions like temperature, salinity and chemical contaminants—a valuable educational opportunity for students in Ecology, Developmental and Plant Biology, and for students of Environmental Toxicology. Temple expects the instrument to further faculty and student research in areas of structure and function of cell nuclei and chromosomes (a research area of his), and chemical factors which alter the three-dimensional shape and organization of the cytoskeleton (an interior framework often found in animal cells). Because this instrument is standard in most graduate programs and in major research laboratories, Temple believes it will advance opportunities for students to go on to advanced study in Biology and Biochemistry, and enhance both faculty and undergraduate student research and interest at the College—in other words, it can also be a valuable recruiting tool. _________________________ Despite its ominous name, Dr. Brian Witz explains that the Bomb Calorimeter “simply” measures the heat of chemical reactions or physical changes. A bomb calorimeter involves the controlled combustion of a measured quantity of any material in a pure oxygen environment to measure the caloric content of that material. The material is combusted in a (pressurized) sealed, thick-walled metal chamber, which is surrounded by a jacket of water. Our new device is computer-controlled. The heat released from combusting the material is transferred to the surrounding water, and because one calorie of heat raises the temperature of water 1oC, the increased temperature of the water allows the computer to calculate the caloric value of the material combusted. In biology and in the health sciences, the calorimeter is particularly useful in nutritional analyses.

Carol Root

Sheila Brady Root Matt Temple Brian Witz