Published, Performed, Presented

In the spring of 2004, the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, New York City, performed the off-Broadway world premiere of “KWATZ! The Tibetan Project: The Sound of a Hammer Hitting the Head,” a drama by Ernest Abuba (Theatre) at the West End Theatre. In November 2003, Abuba’s poetry was part of “Accade Domani (Butoh, Flamenco & Rituals)” at the La MaMa E.T.C., and he directed “ABC (American Born Chinese),” a play about Asian-American males growing up on the streets of Brooklyn and Chinatown, at New York City’s Double Helix Theatre/Phil Bosakowski Theatre. “ABC,” originally developed in Abuba’s Solo Workshop at Pan Asian Repertory, was also presented at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in January.

In January 2004, Paul Austin (Theatre) founded the Liberty Free Theatre, located in the Catskills. In the same month, Austin’s short prose piece “Dreaming Angel” was published in Newport Review; he also appeared as a guest star on the NBC-TV drama Law and Order in February.

In December 2003 and May 2004, Lynn Book (Theatre) performed “notes on desire,” a performance art concert, at three different New York City venues. In February, Lynn Book/Voicelab produced “Voices from OUT There,” an international performance event featuring emerging artists from Taiwan and Portugal, at the Bowery Poetry Club; they also produced The LOOP Group in association with Dixon Place, in a May performance that featured Erica Newhouse ’03. Book conducted “Vox Risk Holler,” described as “the world’s first performance art chorus,” in February; the composition featured Reo Jones ’07.

“Manhattan Reverie,” an excerpt from a Melvin Jules Bukiet (Writing) work-in-progress, appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of The Paris Review.

Steven Burke ’90 (Music) was awarded the 2004 Rome Prize for Musical Composition, one of the most prestigious in the field, and is currently in residence for a year at the American Academy in Rome, working on commissions that include a concerto for bass clarinet and chamber ensemble and a dramatic work about witchcraft. Burke is a protege of Music Program Director Chester Biscardi, who also won the Rome Prize, in 1976.

Scott Calvin (Physics) attended the March meeting of the American Physical Society in Montreal, Quebec, where he presented results of his research, entitled “Comparison of Methods for Determining Mean Size of Polydispersed Nanoparticles (How Small Is Small?),” to physicists from around the world; Sean X. Luo ’07, was “key to the research effort,” Calvin says. Three other SLC students are currently researching X-ray absorption spectroscopy under Calvin’s supervision; he also is collaborating in ongoing projects with colleagues at Northeastern University, Trinity College, Southern Connecticut State University and the Naval Research Laboratory.

In late spring 2004, Charles Carshon (Theatre Faculty Emeritus) and his wife, former theatre faculty member Gloria Carshon, taught “Return Engagement,” for the Center for Learning & Living; Charles Carshon is a member of the organization’s board of directors.

Kevin Confoy (Theatre) joined the board of directors of the Ensemble Studio Theatre (E.S.T.), New York City, this past summer; he has been a member of E.S.T. for 10 years and was executive producer there for three seasons. Confoy will also serve as artistic director of SLC at E.S.T., a summer playwriting intensive, now in its fifth year in residence at the E.S.T. retreat in Lexington, N.Y.

Isabel De Sena (Spanish) submitted the first essay on Portuguese medieval literature to appear in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, published by the American Council of Learned Societies, for its First Supplement (2004). In April, she was a respondent in a session on captives and literary production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, part of the four-day Renaissance Society of America event in New York.

 Vijay Seshadri (right) and Ernesto Mestre-Reed, two members of the Sarah Lawrence College writing faculty, were honored with Guggenheim Fellowships in 2004. Best American Poetry 2003 (Scribner) and The Fight Is for Democracy (HarperCollins) both included poetry by Seshadri, who directs the creative nonfiction track in the College’s Graduate Program in Writing, and he was awarded the 2003 James Laughlin Award by the Academy of American Poets. In May 2004, Graywolf Press published a collection of his poetry, The Long Meadow. For more about Mestre-Reed, see "Critical Writing."

Annie-Claude Dobbs (French Faculty Emerita) currently lives in France, where she teaches women of various ethnicities to read and write in a program administered by one of several organizations in Paris. Working through similar programs, she also helps children with their homework.

Roland Dollinger (German) is co-editor of Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, published by Camden House in 2004, the first comprehensive study of Döblin’s fiction and essays. Beginning in 2003, Dollinger has given talks before various Jewish organizations on “Jewish Life and Culture in Post-War Germany” through New York Council for the Humanities-sponsored events before various Jewish organizations.

This year, Carolyn Ferrell ’84 (Writing) contributed short stories to the following anthologies: Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood (Doubleday), edited by Cecelie Berry, and Dream Me Home Safely: Writers on Growing Up in America (Mariner Books). She is also the recipient of a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts literature grant.

In November, at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Atlanta, T. Griffith Foulk (Religion) was part of a panel addressing “Lineage Construction in Tibet.” In March, he was a discussant for the panel “Monastic Codes and the Construction of Religious Identity in Tang and Song China,” at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting in San Diego. Foulk’s article “Chanyuan qingui and Other ‘Rules of Purity’ in Chinese Buddhism” was included in The Zen Canon (Oxford University Press, 2004). He will spend 2004-05 as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

While traveling through Southeast Asia this past winter, Philip Gould (Art History Faculty Emeritus) gave a series of lectures, “Architectural Polarities,” in Thailand, at Dulwich International College on the resort island of Phuket off the southwest coast of Thailand, and in Bangkok. He was interviewed in Taipei on radio station ICRT and addressed the Taiwan National University for the Arts in February; he gave the same talk at the American Institute in Taiwan—and this address was published in the April Taiwan ARTS magazine. Since his return to the States this spring, Gould has written a catalog essay for a one-man exhibition of paintings by Korean-American artist Il Lee, at the Art Projects International Gallery.

Last November, Eva Kollisch (German/Literature Faculty Emerita) participated in a symposium on the subject of “Shared Memory and Identity” at schools at the Literaturhaus in Vienna. A German translation of her memoir, Girl in Movement, was published by Picus Verlag, Vienna, in 2003.

Last year, the journal Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec included an article written by Arnold Krupat (Literature), “Représenter la dépossession des Cherokees” (“Representing Cherokee Dispossession”). In December, Krupat gave a presentation, “John Eakin and Native American Autobiography,” as part of the panel “Autobiographical Worlds: In Celebration of Paul John Eakin” in San Diego during the Modern Language Association Convention. Krupat presented the keynote address for the Johan Turi Conference at the University of Umea, Sweden, entitled “Perspectives on Native American Literature,” in March 2004, and attended the Native American Literary Symposium in April at Mystic Lake, Minnesota, speaking on “William Apess as Public Intellectual.”

A play by Joe Lauinger (Literature), “A Wedding Album,” was produced at Gallery Players in Brooklyn, New York, in June. The production was sponsored by a grant to the theatre from the Park Slope Foundation for the Arts.

Linwood Lewis (Psychology) recently completed a three-year study of adolescent male sexuality in relation to HIV risk for the NIH NRSA Behavioral Science Research Fellowship in HIV Research program at the Columbia University HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies. Last November, Lewis published “Toward Improved Interpretation and Theory Building of African-American Male Sexualities” in the Journal of Sex Research. In June 2004, his article “Examining Sexual Health Discourses in a Racial/Ethnic Context” appeared in Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The fall 2003 issue of Pleiades published an essay by Jeffrey McDaniel ’90 (Writing), “Projective Verse: The Portrayal of Poets in Motion Pictures” and four of his poems were translated into Portuguese for the fall 2003 Brazilian journal Babel. Other poems by McDaniel have recently appeared in Mid-American Review, POOL, Fourteen Hills Review and Canary River. During February, McDaniel held readings at Bowling Green State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Two anthologies published in summer 2004 included his poetry Poetry 30: Thirty-Something Thirty-Something American Poets, which focuses on 39 American poets in their thirties (Mammoth Books), and Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets (Verse Press).

Nicolaus Mills (Literature) has published two new books this year. His account of the political and architectural struggle to build “what in all likelihood will be the last memorial on the central axis of the National Mall,” Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial, was brought out by Basic Books in May. Mills also co-edited an anthology of Dissent magazine’s first half century, 50 Years of Dissent, published by Yale University Press in September.

Joshua Muldavin (Geography) has co-authored several papers, including two for the Honolulu-based East-West Center: “Policy as Warrant: Environment and Development in the Himalayan Region” and “The Politics of Environmental Policy—With a Himalayan Example.” He also co-wrote “Upstream, Downstream, China, India: The Politics of Environment in the Himalayan Region,” in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and “Blaming the Symptoms, Not the Disease: Population Action International on Violent Conflict,” for Counterpunch.org.

Last December, El testigo lúcido, a book of essays on poet Alejandra Pizarnik by María Negroni (Spanish/Literature), was published by Beatriz Viterbo Editora. Negroni released a collection of poems, Arte y Fuga, in March, published by Pre-Textos of Spain.  

Eddye Pierce Young (Music) became a national panelist for the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts in Miami, Florida, in January 2004. In March, she held a concert at Christ Chapel of the Riverside Church in New York City, entitled “Afternoon of Classical Song.”

From the Greenwich Library in February, the Westchester Community College and Westchester Council on the Arts in March, to the Grolier Poetry Series at Harvard in April, Kevin Pilkington (Writing) gave poetry readings and craft talks throughout the spring. His poem, “Street Music,” was included in Permafrost in June, and his own poetry collection, Ready to Eat the Sky, was published by River City in April.

Judith Rodenbeck (Art History) was a guest lecturer in April for the Art History Master’s Colloquium at SUNY Purchase. At Columbia University this summer, she taught “Before Digital,” a seminar that emerged from an SLC Mellon Release Time grant.

Last November, Kristin Sands (Religion) presented “Muslims Taking It to the Internet: Suffering, Interpretation and Activism” during the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. The journal Iranian Studies published Sands’s article “On the Popularity of Husayn Va’iz-i Kashifi’s Mavahib-i ’aliyya: A Persian Commentary on the Qu’ran” in December. Sands held “A Conversation with Filmmaker Ilan Ziv on the Documentary Human Weapon” in February and another interview, “Jihadi and Muslim Activist Videos on the Web,” in April. These interviews have subsequently been made into articles on the Web site http://www.therevealer.org.

Sara Wilford ’72 (Psychology/ Director of the Art of Teaching graduate program) gave a talk, “From Pictures to Words,” at the New York State Association for the Education of Young Children Annual Conference in April, and again at the Child Care Council of Westchester Annual Consortium Day in May.

In November 2003, Joseph Woolfson (Mathematics) received his third U.S. patent, this one for the creation of an original innovative device or process. He has invented a sound muffling device for an air conditioning unit.

In February, Carol Zoref ’76, MFA ’77 (Writing) was a panelist in a discussion of “Humanity, Healing and the Arts” sponsored by the Bellevue Literary Review, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New York City Council for the Humanities. Zoref was also awarded a writing fellowship at the Hall Farm Center for the Arts for the month of July.