Kingfisher 2008

Page 1



There are very few human beings who receive truth complete and staggering by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment on a small scale by successive developments, cellularly like a laborious mosaic. - Anais Nin


1

THE KINGFISHER SYMBOL

2 3

COLLEGE AT A GLANCE

5

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION No Time for Small talk Solon and Thespis

7

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY Moving History

9

DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES & LITERATURE Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies: New Track in Religion and Culture

11

DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS Graduate Projects (???)

13

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY A Center of Philosophy of Biology

15

THE AMERICAN WEST CENTER Building an Archive About – and for – Utah’s Remarkable Pacific Island Community

17

UNIVERSITY WRITING PROGRAM AND CENTER Assumptions on Gender and Writing

19 20

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PROGRAM

21

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

THE MIDDLE EAST CENTER


22

THE ASIA CENTER THE CONFUCIUS INSTITUTE

23 24 25

TANNER HUMANITIES CENTER

27 29

A GIVING LIFE: REMEMBERING LORNA MATHESON

33 37

THE LOST AMAZON: A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY OF RICHARD EVAN SCHULTES

39

POETRY

41 43 44

CONVOCATION 2008

ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES CENTER CAROLYN TANNER IRISH HUMANITIES BUILDING FINDING PEACE WITH NATURE: EXCERPTS FROM THE LYCEUM II LECTURE FEATURING DR. JANE GOODALL COMMUNITY SCHOLARSHIPS FOR DIVERSITY

Supporting Excellence in Education Why is Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Higher Education Important? Raising the Roof – and Awareness 3Map2 Brightness Hiding

PARTNERSHIP BOARD THANK YOU


THE

KINGFISHER I

n the Native American cultures of the northwest coast, the kingfisher symbolizes persistent effort and determination. Known as the Halcyon in Greek myth, it is associated with the Winter Solstice. Its Greek name, Alcedinidae, stems from the story of Alcyone, Daughter of the Wind, who was so distraught when her husband perished in a shipwreck that she threw herself into the sea. Both were then transformed into kingfishers and roamed the waves together. When they nested on the open sea, the winds remained calm and the weather balmy. Pliny reported that the halcyon was rarely seen and then only at the winter and summer solstices and at the setting of the Pleiades. She was therefore, a manifestation of the Moon-Goddess who was worshipped at the two solstices as the Goddess of Life in Death and Death in Life and, when the Pleiades set, she sent the sacred king his summons for death. Still another Alcyone, Queen of Sailing, was the mystical leader of the seven Pleiades. The heliacal rising of the Pleiades in May marked the beginning of the navigational year and their setting marked the end. Alcyone, as Sea Goddess protected sailors from rocks and rough weather. The kingfisher, or halcyon, continued for centuries to be credited with the magical power of allaying storms.

Shakespeare refers to this legend in the following passage from Hamlet: Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow’d and so gracious is the time. Hamlet, I, i 157 We have appropriated the kingfisher, this magnificent blending of opposites, as our symbol for the College of Humanities. Through the Humanities, which simultaneously require and offer the tools for persistence in lifelong learning, we embrace the seasons of life, and experience the power to stir and to calm. The College is grateful for your continued support of our efforts.

Robert Newman Dean

1


DEPARTMENTS

T

he College of Humanities is the second-largest college on campus and is at the core of the University of Utah’s mission and the experience of higher education. The Humanities offer an approach to a conscience in a complex world. Professors study and teach essential skills and tools for thinking and communicating that apply readily to everyday practical situations, emphasizing a commitment to community, and awareness of our integral function in a multifaceted global culture. Through research and pedagogy that illustrate healthy questioning and shifting frontiers, and attempts at inclusion and connection, we offer approaches that are fundamentally democratic. We thereby help to produce better-informed, thoughtful world citizens with a foundation of nuance and flexibility. All undergraduates enroll in Humanities courses at some point in their academic pursuits. Each year, about 2500 of these students choose to focus their studies on Humanities, choosing from the College’s 25 majors and 25 interdisciplinary and disciplinary minors. The College confers one-fifth of the University’s diplomas annually. Graduate students number about 400 and have matriculated into one of 14 Master’s and 13 Ph.D. programs. The College’s 164 tenured and tenure-track faculty have published 60 books and more than 300 articles in the past three years; possess international distinction as scholars; are the most frequent winners of University teaching and research awards, and are the most diverse in terms of ethnicity and gender in the University.

Communication English History Languages & Literature Linguistics Philosophy

CENTERS American West Center Asia Center Center for American Indian Languates Middle East Center Tanner Humanities Center University Writing Program and Center

INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAMS & INITIATIVES Applied Ethics Animation Studies Documentary Studies Environmental Humanities International Studies Latin American Studies Peace and Conflict Studies

COLLEGE AT A GLANCE 2


DEPARTMENT OF

COMMUNICATION HAPPENINGS Professor James Anderson received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Broadcast Education Association. He was also elected as President of the University of Utah Faculty Senate. Professor Sally Planalp is a member of a research team awarded a $350,000 grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration to explore communication training and poison control.

NEW FACULTY Kevin DeLuca joins us most immediately from the University of Georgia where he has

developed an energetic and creative teaching and research agenda related to environmental communication. One of his books, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism, has received much critical acclaim and has recently been re-printed. Kevin earned his PhD at the University of Iowa in 1996. Kevin’s arrival is a much anticipated addition to our environmental communication program and the College’s program in Environmental Humanities.

Sean Lawson earned his BA in History from California State University, Stanislaus and his MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. He has just completed his PhD work at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a dissertation entitled, Info@war.mil: Nonlinear Science, Informatics, and Transformations of U.S. Military Thought in the Post-Vietnam Era. Sean will be teaching courses in the area of communication and new media while continuing to explore a research agenda related to the military use of new media technologies.

INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAMS Animation Studies Documentary Studies Environmental Communication Peace and Conflict Studies

3


“The most essential thing in life is to establish an unafraid, heartfelt communication with others.” - Sogyal Rinpoche

W

e know how most relationships go. You meet someone, and you find that you have something in common – maybe a hobby or a mutual friend. You enjoy the other’s company, and it seems that the other person likes you too. Of course, you’re both trying to be pleasant, and you may avoid uncomfortable topics, but you begin to tell each other about yourselves. You make plans to get together again and talk about more personal issues. Later you invite each other over and perhaps start to help each other out. Maybe you’ll be friends for a long time… What if it doesn’t happen that way? What if one person has only a short time to live and the other is a hospice volunteer? They didn’t choose each other, and they may be very different in age, race, class, culture, religion, or values. One person is probably not at their best and in fact may be in pain, cranky, fatigued, lonely, needy, or concerned with control. It may be awkward because one is a stranger is walking into the other’s house, even the bedroom, and the place may be chaotic and in disarray. One is there

to help the other, but not vice versa; the visitor may accept a cup of coffee, but that’s about it. If they like each other, they look forward to getting together again next week, but that might not happen because one of them may be dead, and they both know it. Can we call this a real relationship? It’s an intriguing question with no simple answer except that many volunteers say it is. Why? It’s all about communication. “Having someone who will listen” is one of the things that dying people want most. They want to be able to talk about things that matter, and this volunteer will not judge, get upset, gossip, argue, or change the topic. She will listen with an open heart. But what’s in it for her? She may hear amazing life stories, feel the satisfaction of helping someone in need, and learn how to be fully present for another person. It may not be a typical friendship, but it is genuine human connection.

No Time

FOR SMALL TALK

BY PROFESSOR SALLY PLANALP

4


DEPARTMENT OF

ENGLISH

ark . selves in d m e h t il e v B y haunng , each a jagged, The ight t rafters br li n o o m y swim ve, from nives. The silken slee k d e h s li o as p

ats

een d air and k e sound the muddie th ic babies, n o s r e p u s like ht make ombs mig w y t p m e up. e ’t fill them we imagin n a c o h w in women sigh. scratch, a a , p s la c A fruit dr y. They drink a rd ght flung h . li h is r e v fe useate l, against les that na c ir A nd w he e c in , s e f ac upon their n e ck , t br e a s t or a ine e n o e in lets of iod ib Imag r d in e m a na patterning s. kin in star s r u o y r e t ics. that spat e like myst k a h s , r e t t They flu

HAPPENINGS In 2008, Professor Maeera Shreiber held the Rabbi Sallie Preisand Visiting Chair in Jewish and Women’s Studies at Hebrew Union College (the Rabbinical College for the Union of Reform Judaism, Los Angeles Campus). In 2007, Professor Steve Tatum was awarded the Don D. Walker Prize by the Western Literature Association for the best article or essay in Western American studies, given for Professor Tatum’s essay Spectral Beauty and Forensic Aesthetics in the West in the Journal Western American Literature. In 2008, Professor Melanie Rae Thon received a Grant for Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007, Professor Kathryn Stockton received the Modern Language Association’s Crompton-Noll Prize for the best essay in gay and lesbian studies. The essay was entitled Feeling Like Killing? Queer Temporalities of Murderous Motives among Queer Children in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

ry e. Revelato und tossed z li ia r e t a gs fo They m underthin ’s r e g n a r t as a s mble ed, you tre p, b l a it r a m slee upon the thought. A even at the mp gh your da u o r h t s r e ur fing y o u te a r y o ight. neck hair sheets all n e h t h c r a e a nd s From The Invention of the Kaleidoscope by Professor Paisley Rekdal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007)

5


I

n the archetypal confrontation from which this volume takes its title, the Athenian lawmaker (Solon) blames the first man of the theater (Thespis) for a professional deceit that threatens to pervade society: Thespis, at this time, beginning to act tragedies, and the thing, because it was new, taking very much with the multitide, though it was not yet made a matter of competition, Solon, being by nature fond of hearing and learning something new, and now, in his old age, living idly, and enjoying himself, indeed, with music and with wine, went to see Thespis himself, as the ancient custom was, act; and after the play was done, he addressed him, and asked him if he was not ashamed to tell so many lies before such a number of people; and Thespis replying that it was no harm to say or do so in a play, Solon vehemently struck his staff against the ground: “Ay,” said he, “if we honor and commend such play as this, we shall find it some day in our business.” By responding anxiously to the hypocrisy of acting (to be a “hypocrite” was originally to be an “actor”), Solon gives voice to what Jonas Barish has termed the “antitheatrical prejudice.”

Central to this prejudice is the belief that theater confuses pointless “play” with purposeful and ethically upright “business.” Exchanges between theater and law frequently take shape as an institutional antagonism over the tenuous distinction between theater’s inconsequential fiction and the real world’s socially consequential fact. Consider the following quotation from Alan Dershowitz: “The critical dichotomy between teleological rules of drama and interpretation, on the one hand, and mostly random rules of real life, on the other, has profoundly important implications for our legal system. When we import the narrative form of story telling into our legal system, we confuse fiction with fact and endanger the truth-finding function of the adjudicative process.” Dershowitz clearly sides rather simply with Solon. Historically, the law has needed the theater— not just in the Renaissance but tout court—just as much as the theater has needed the law. Any effort to describe this symbiotic, yet nervously hostile, relation as otherwise (say, as a discrete antagonism, as if there could be such a thing) is the symptom of a mistake that has a long history full of ignorance and bad faith.

Solon and Thespis

BY PROFESSOR DENNIS KEZAR

Exerpt taken from Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance (Notre Dame University Press, 2007)

6


DEPARTMENT OF

HISTORY HAPPENINGS Assistant Professor of History W. Paul Reeve received the Smith-Petit Best First Book Award by the Mormon History Association award for 2008 from the Mormon History Association for his book Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes published in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press. Reeve’s book explores the cultural interactions of different groups in southeastern Utah in the second half of the 19th century.

Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence At the May 2008 University commencement, History Professor Robert A. Goldberg was awarded the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, an award given annually to a member of the faculty of the University of Utah to honor excellence in teaching, research, and administrative efforts in behalf of the University. Professor Goldberg has been a member of the History faculty since 1980, and since 2005 has served as the Director of the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University. He is the author of numerous scholarly works on the history of the United States, including Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado (1981); Back to the soil : the Jewish farmers of Clarion, Utah, and their world (1986); Barry Goldwater (1995); Grassroots Resistance: Social Movements in Twentieth Century America (1991); and Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (2001).

Associate Professor Elizabeth Clement received a sabbatical fellowship from the American Philosophical Association to support research on lesbians, gays, and the American family. She will spend the 2008-9 academic year carrying out research in archival collections in the Bay Area. Professor W. Lindsay Adams was elected President of the Association of Ancient Historians for a three-year term running from 2008 to 2011. The Association of Ancient Historians is the largest professional association of ancient historians in the United States and Canada, with more than 600 members. Recent books published by History faculty include The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture by Ronald M Smelser and Edward J Davies II; Catholics in the Movies by Colleen McDannell; The Melodramatic Thread : Spectacle and Political Culture in Modern France by James R. Lehning; Kingship and Colonialism in India’s Deccan, 1850-1948 by Benjamin B. Cohen; États et Sociétés de l’Orient Arabe en Quête d’Avenir (1945-2005): Volume II : Dynamiques et enjeux, edited by Peter Sluglett with Gérard D. Khoury, Nadine Méouchy, and Henry Laurens; and Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country by Peter Sluglett.

He also received the 2007 Thomas L. Kane Award from the Mormon History Association for his support for and devotion to Mormon history and in 2008 was awarded a Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar mentor award by the Graduate School of the University of Utah.

7


T

he College of Humanities’ History Department has spent the past 37 years in Carlson Hall – a historic building on the west side of campus that once was a women’s dormitory. Ever since the department moved in back in1971, the first question asked by History majors has been “where is Carlson Hall?” Our History students – now our alumni – once trekked across the campus to talk to us about their work. Carlson Hall is a wonderful old building with spacious offices, closets big enough to hold a filing cabinet; with heating that works in August (but not in January) and air conditioners that balance precariously in windows and drip on our office floors. For many History faculty, Carlson Hall has represented home for our entire professional careers. Nearly all of us suffered through our initial job interviews at the university in either the “parlor” on the first floor or the seminar room on the third floor. In the mailroom, we received acceptance or rejections letters for articles and books, news and about grant applications, and letters from chairs,

deans, and vice presidents that marked our steps through the professorate. Here in these halls we met each other’s parents, children, brothers and sisters. Here, too, we often met strangers who would wander our halls, reminiscing about their years in Carlson Hall when it was a women’s dormitory. This is truly a “site of memory.” Now we are moving – leaving behind Carlson Hall for a new home in the Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities building on the east side of campus. In addition to bringing us closer to our colleagues in the College of Humanities, this new space gives us resources to better prepare our students for their futures. In the years to come, we will no doubt embrace the sense of being “at the center” of campus; able to walk across the courtyard to visit friends and colleagues in other departments; able to make a quick run to the Marriott Library. But for now, we leave Carlson Hall with gratitude for her protection, and warm remembrances of all that has occurred within her walls.

MOVING HISTORY PROFESSOR JIM LEHNING CHAIR, ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

8


DEPARTMENT OF

LANGUAGES and LITERATURE HAPPENINGS Stellar Faculty

New Languages

Six books published during 2007-2008 and two in press; • 15 teaching and research awards granted. • Yoko Azuma ( Japanese) was awarded the 2007-2008 ASUU Student Choice Teaching Award.

We have added Pashto, bringing our total number of languages taught to 20, and we ran our first Summer Language Institute for critical languages, which included Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Pashto, Persian, and Hindi/Urdu.

New Team-Taught Courses

Brings together Language and CLCS majors at the culmination of their undergraduate studies to ponder and discuss the question “What is Culture?” Students will analyze, theorize and illuminate significant cultural issues in their own language/national area of study.

• “The Fairytale” comparative exploration of the German, Turkish, Russian French, and Classical traditions (Fall 2008). • “Comparative Drama: Text and Performance” an interdisciplinary examination of plays from the Classical, German, Spanish and Russian traditions (Spring 2009).

New Programmatic Theme The program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies has organized its year around the theme of “Orality, Text, Performance.” Highlights include: • UG courses on folklore, drama, and film • Graduate seminar on world folk and fairy tales • Interdisciplinary conference hosted by Lang & Lit: “Metamorphoses: an International Colloquium on Narrative and Folklore” • New graduate seminar on folk and fairy tales taught in conjunction with “Metamorphoses” colloquium in Fall 08.

Ivan Bilibin - The Red Horseman 1900

New Capstone Course Offering

New MA programs First students enter new MA programs in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies (CLCS) and World Literature with Licensure (WLMA) in 08-09

9


R

eligion is a personal worldview and a quest for meaning. It also represents an essential dimension of history, art, literature, and politics. The study of religion in an academic environment critically demonstrates how religious beliefs have informed and shaped our knowledge, our cultural productions, our traditions, and our institutions. The Department of Languages and Literature seeks to promote such a critical study of religion by offering a new track in Religion and Culture (launched in Fall 07) under the auspices of its Major in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. Our Religion and Culture track offers Utah students a fully interdisciplinary curriculum that encompasses foreign language, theory and methodology in the study of religion, as well as literary, cultural, and historical criticism. This track represents a unique opportunity to make the study of religion visible at the University of Utah and to work on the development of higher degrees in the study of religion. Many of the courses already taught on campus, especially

in the College of Humanities, contain a religious studies component. Our new track represents the first formal program built around these courses. “Our rhetoric about respecting religious diversity rings false if we don’t really understand those other faiths. … Colleges and universities have a major role to play in promoting those conversations among the diverse people on campuses and in communities.” ~Robert Wuthnow, Princeton University The study of religion as an academic discipline has a crucial role to play in our 21st-century social and political context. Anyone interested in working on an international or global level today needs to be familiar with and sensitive to various cultural traditions in order to be able to foster constructive dialogue. In this sense, the study of religion and its formative languages represents an invaluable contribution to tomorrow’s society at large. The Department of Languages and Literature is proud to help forge and participate in this future.

COMPARATIVE LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: NEW TRACK IN RELIGION AND CULTURE PROFESSOR MURIEL SCHMID

10


DEPARTMENT OF

LINGUISTICS HAPPENINGS Graduate education in Linguistics is gathering steam: Our first Ph.D. student completed the program last spring, and others are hot on the heels of the new Dr. Zaba. We are all very proud of the accomplishments of these talented junior scholars, and anticipate great future contributions to our field and to various outside communities as well. The Department of Linguistics is proud of the broad range of research activities that our students pursue:

ALEKSANDRA ZABA Aleksandra Zaba’s 2008 dissertation, entitled ‘Relative frequency of patterns and learnability: The case of phonological harmony’, demonstrated that in some cases, linguistic patterns exemplified more frequently across the world’s languages are in fact easier for humans to learn than are patterns that are relatively rare. This finding suggests that the relative frequency of linguistic patterns may be related to their relative learnability. Dr. Zaba is currently a Postdoctoral research fellow in the Research Center on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg.

11


NAOMI FOX AND WILSON SILVA Naomi Fox’s and Wilson Silva’s dissertations involve documentation of endangered languages, one of the highest priorities in Linguistics. Fox will write a grammar of Mocho’, a Mayan language (with only c.eight speakers, Mexico). Silva will prepare a comprehensive grammar of Desano, a Tukanoan language (c.3,000 speakers, upper Amazon, Brazil and Colombia). Both of these languages contain highly unusual traits, the analysis of which will contribute to understanding of what is possible and impossible in human languages, a general goal of linguistic theory. These grammars also serve the communities where these languages are spoken, a basis for creating language-learning materials for community efforts to revitalize these threatened languages. Both are exciting projects.

ZUZANA TOMAŠ The impetus for Zuzana Tomaš’s dissertation research stems from the fact that English has become the lingua franca of research in the sciences. This fact translates into a reality for native speakers of languages other than English that there is little alternative but to publish academic research papers in English and to meet rigid and difficult academic norms in doing so. Her research will look at sourcing (i.e., the conventions associated with citing and acknowledging the work of other scholars and researchers in one’s own work) as one particular area of difficulty that non-native academic writers have in writing to these norms.

ELLEN KNELL Ellen Knell’s quasi-experimental study focuses on first (L1) and second (L2) language literacy development of children involved in a Chinese/English immersion program in Xi’an, China. Ms. Knell’s research questions, such as whether the children involved in the Xi’an bilingual immersion program develop skills in writing Chinese characters equivalent to their monolingual counterparts, are of keen interest to second language researchers and scholars in applied linguistics

12


DEPARTMENT OF

PHILOSOPHY

HAPPENINGS Two department members, Peggy Battin and Leslie Francis, along with infectious disease physicians Jay Jacobson and Charles Smith, are publishing The Patient as Victim and Vector: Bioethics and Infectious Disease. It explores how bioethics would have been different as a field had infectious disease been at the center and will be available from Oxford Press in the Fall 2008. Our newest faculty member, James Tabery—a specialist in both bioethics and philosophy of biology—has also published a paper on justice in pandemic planning.

Deen Chatterjee is editing the Encyclopedia of Global Justice Mariam Thalos has been named the Honors Professor for 2008-09. Her project is the politics of science, especially with respect to nutrition, climate change, and education.

Anya Plutynski has been named the Environmental Humanities Professor for 2008-09. Her area of particular interest for the professorship is the ethics and philosophy of science of water policy in the west.

Paul Haanstad has retired from the Department (and assumed emeritus status) after thirtyseven years of service at the University.

Brin Bon was selected to be the College’s student graduation speaker for 2008. She plans to apply to graduate school in a year or two, but is—happily for us—delaying that for a year and has assumed the position of academic coordinator in the Department. Her responsibilities will include alumni outreach—so expect to be hearing from her. AND—most wonderful of all: we are moving to the top floor of the new Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building. Philosophy rises to the top of the humanities! The setting could not be more beautiful, and we hope all will come by to see us.

13


F

or over 200 years taxonomists have used Linnaean codes to name biological taxa. These codes specify particular rules for how unique names are assigned to unique taxa. Unfortunately, they are in conflict with other theoretical commitments held by biologists, namely the organizing principles underlying contemporary evolutionary theory. In response some taxonomists have proposed that Linnaean codes ought to be replaced by a code better reflecting modern evolutionary theory. Enter the ‘PhyloCode’, a code of nomenclature abandoning familiar Linnaean principles such as ranks (e.g., Kingdom, Phylum, Order, etc.). Highly controversial within the biological community, it has generated heated conceptual debates over fundamental naming and organizing principles used in biology and over the very nature of biological taxa. In short, biologists are questioning what kinds of things exist in the natural world, and what we may reliably and justifiably say about those things. These are just the kinds of questions that philosophers are concerned with, and systematists have welcomed philosophers into the debate.

Philosophy of biology demands a capacity to work across disciplinary boundaries. On the one hand, philosophers of biology engage directly in conceptual debates that occur in biology, oftentimes staking out positions that carry consequences for biological practice and theory. On the other hand, particular cases from the biological sciences may serve as illuminating lenses by which to view more general philosophical problems. At its best, philosophy of biology brings these two strands into contact. Our department is poised to become a leader in philosophy of biology, with faculty research interests ranging from population genetics, to the evolution of behavior, to molecular genetics, to taxonomy. This strength is uniquely complemented by another strength of the department: applied ethics. This presents opportunities to explore the impact of biology on society, e.g., from genetic counseling to conservation biology to pandemic flu planning.

A CENTER OF PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY

BY MATT HABER

14


AMERICAN WEST CENTER I

n its first full year back in the College of Humanities, the American West Center has been very active. Highlights for the year include:

- The Center relocated from its longtime quarters

at the Annex to a beautiful new facility at historic Fort Douglas, and establishing the “Floyd A. O’Neil American Indian Archive” at J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections.

- Over $500,000 in grant and contract proposals

Festival, organized by the AWC and made possible through a partnership with the Utah Humanities Council and the Salt Lake Film Society. Over a six week period, this well-attended festival screened western films from Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Thailand, Japan, and India. Each film was followed by a discussion led by an expert on Westerns and a scholar of the film’s country of origin.

were submitted to external funders, and securing nearly $350,000 to date. This included winning a major contract to create 4th, 7th, and 11th grade curriculum materials about Utah’s five American Indian nations.

- The Center also helped organize a number of

research staff to 23. Graduate students who are training as public historians comprise the vast majority of the AWC’s staff. The AWC is now one of the foremost sites on campus for interdisciplinary training, with graduate researchers coming from History, Communications, English, Linguistics, Film, Environmental Humanities, International Studies, Folklore, and Education, Culture, and Society.

- Beginning work on Phase I of the “Utah

- 18 new researchers joined the center, bringing our

- The Center organized a major international

conference on “Pacific Worlds and the American West” that brought leading scholars from the U.S. and the Pacific to consider the relationship between these two regions. Nearly 250 individuals attended the conference, many of them members of local Pacific Island communities. The first “Westerns of the World” Film

other lectures, including “Mormon Environmentalism – a Panel Discussion” and “Native Moderns: American Indian Art, 1940–1960.” The Mormon History Association, the S. J. Quinney College of Law, the Utah State Historical Society, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts were among our cosponsors for these lectures.

American Indian Digital Archive,” a groundbreaking $120,000 project in collaboration with the Utah Division of Indian Affairs and the Special Collections division of the J. Willard Marriott Library.

For more information about upcoming activities visit

http://www.awc.utah.edu

15


BUILDING AN ARCHIVE ABOUT – AND FOR – UTAH’S REMARKABLE PACIFIC ISLAND COMMUNITY

T

he primary aim of the Digital Pacific Archive is to compile primary and secondary source materials about the history of Utah’s Pacific Island population and to package those sources into grade-appropriate curriculum materials for K-12 teachers in Utah and the West. In addition, the construction and dissemination of the Archive and related curriculum materials has as a second and interlocking goal: to foster excitement about education in general and higher education in particular among Pacific Island youth. Behind Latinos and Asians, Pacific Islanders are the third largest community of color in Utah. Recent demographic estimates place the local Pacific Island population at more than 25,000, and growth extrapolations from previous census figures suggest that number could be closer to 50,000. The Pacific Island community is not only large, it has a long, rich, but almost unknown history in the area that begins as early as the 1850s. The size of this community and the interest scholars and a wide-range of locals have shown in the Pacific Island story makes the lack of materials all that much more puzzling. Not only would such material facilitate connecting the local Pacific Island story to the larger American immigrant experience, to the nation’s understudied and ever more important ties to the Pacific World, and to the “international” within our borders, but also they would fill what the head of Social Science at the Utah State Office of Education describes as one of the largest gaps in Utah’s K-12 curriculum. Indeed, research among Pacific Island youth provides more powerful evidence for the urgency of this project. Studies show Pacific Island students who have access to cultural education are significantly more likely to enter higher education institutions and succeed there. Community leaders also point to cultural education as the key to solving growing community problems.

Run by Lilo Tauvao Niu World Art Collective

In order to provide educators, students, scholars, and community members with the materials they need, the Digital Pacific Archive team spend 2008-09 collecting oral histories, manuscript documents, photos, memoirs, and other unique historical items. These will be digitized and used as the basis for online, key-word searchable archive that will also provide ease of access to secondary source interpretive materials. We are confident that at its completion the Archive will be a remarkable resource for all Utahns, as well as others around the U.S. and the world.

16


UNIVERSITY WRITING PROGRAM AND CENTER HAPPENINGS Minor for Undergraduate Students

Resources for Academic Writing and the ESL Student

The purpose of the UWP’s Minor in Literacy Studies is to prepare students to address the needs of a more

To facilitate the teaching of academic writing to non-native speakers of English, the UWP

globalized world in which writing is becoming increasingly important in both print and online media.

brought two renowned researchers in ESL, John Swales and Diane Belcher, to campus to con-

Courses in the minor focus on the history, social conditions, and technologies of writing, as well as focus

duct a two-day workshop for instructors. The workshop, Navigating the Cultures of Campus:

on the connections between writing and traditions of purposeful communication. The minor benefits stu-

Academic Writing and the ESL Student, introduced instructors to common misperceptions about

dents in any field who are concerned with improving their ability to communicate and who are interested in

non-native writing, informed them of the research that has been conducted on best practices to

how writing and rhetoric play vital parts in the formation of societies, social groups, and disciplines.

assist the non-native English writer, and created instructional modules from which instructors

Writing with New Eyes Study Abroad in Susice, Czech Republic The UWP offered its first study abroad course in collaboration with the Department of Linguistics. The

and tutors on campus can draw ideas and materials when working with international students. The workshop was generously supported by a Dee Grant.

course, was offered in Susice, a city in the southwest of the Czech Republic. Students explore nonfiction genres such as travel, memoir, biography , food and personal history. Writing about studying abroad gave students time to reflect on their experiences and to return home with deepened understandings of not only the Czech culture, but their own culture as well. Writing the 2008 Presidential Election through Alternative Sources The UWP offers courses that provide students the opportunity to write about contemporary issues. Following the 2008 election, The class Presidential Election and Comedy Central, will examine the alternative media outlets that are employed throughout the presidential race. Students will analyze the candidate’s rhetorical strategies through various media outlets and write about the impact of political discourse on the electoral process. Publication Susan Miller’s book, “Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric,” was published by Southern Illinois University Press.In her book, Professor Miller examines the roles of emotion and trust, both integral to the creation and reception of texts.

17


I

magine that every text you encounter reads the same, much like a computer generated message left on an answering machine-- the same style, the same tone, the same evocative force. Thankfully, this is not the case, unless, of course, you are reading a technical manual to help you build something. When we read the texts of others, we often feel the presence of an author, imagining that person into being. We look for cues, anything that might better help us understand who they are and what message they are constructing. We may even guess the gender of the writer. But how? Studies that explore the relationship between gender and communication have shown that males and females have unique conversational patterns and norms. Some tend to interrupt more, while some tend to be quieter. In writing, differences have also been noted between the genders, especially in national testing where females outperform males on open-ended writing prompts. Some literacy researchers have examined the contexts in which young writers are motivated to engage in literacy practices in and outside of the classroom, finding a disconnect between what they have to read and write about in the classroom and what they do on their own time. In our own research we wanted to find out the extent to which issues of gender in writing performance existed when students study something of

interest to them. Do gender differences in writing performance persist once students are engaging in literate activities associated with the majors they choose? We looked at 400 student texts written in and about their major to see if we could detect a male or female author, and if one group might be writing better than the other. It turns out that the gender of an author does matter, but not exactly as we had initially thought. Some of the more interesting findings in our research to date show that all students were fairly similar in the traditional sense of writing ability; that is, putting sentences and paragraphs together grammatically to form a coherent essay. There was a range of quality writing among the students, but no one gender stood out as being stronger or weaker than the other. What we thought more interesting were the writing prompts themselves and how they either helped or hindered students. The prompts themselves elicited gendered responses. In one case, for example, when asked how to evaluate the environmental concerns of producing new products, females were evaluated as lesser writers when they claimed that fashion trends needed to be updated, while males were given credit when they wrote about the necessity of technology being updated. Eventually, we, the evaluators, had to question our own cultural assumptions about gender and writing, because fashion, like technology, is an industry that contributes billions of dollars to the economy.

ASSUMPTIONS ON GENDER AND WRITING MAUREEN MATHISON AND NATALIE STILLMAN-WEBB

18


INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PROGRAM HAPPENINGS The International Studies Program was founded in 2001 and has been supported by an impressive Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Languages (UISFL) grant from the U.S. Department of Education since 2004. Under the outstanding leadership of Professor Jim Lehning, this interdisciplinary program has grown to over 400 students with a 2008 graduating class of about 60 majors and 20 minors. Continuing the tradition of excellence in the lecture series, this year the International Studies program hosted nationally recognized scholar and lecturer David P. Bradley to give the 2007-2008 Sandy and Anne Dolowitz Lecture on Human Rights. Held at the Salt Lake Center, Professor Bradley (Professor of International History at the University of Chicago), delivered a fascinating and timely lecture titled, “The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination.” The International Studies Program has undergone a few significant changes for the 2008-2009 academic year: We congratulate the program’s founding director, Professor Jim Lehning, who was recently appointed Chair of the History Department. Unfortunately this means he is no longer able to continue as director of the International Studies program. The good news is that the directorship has passed to Professor Johanna Watzinger-Tharp.

Professor Watzinger-Tharp (Department of Languages & Literature) is unusually qualified to take the program’s reigns. She has excellent leadership and administrative skills, and impressive experience in the international arena. Her current research interests focus on spoken German, examining the grammatical features of current spoken German and the implications for the teaching of German as a second language. In addition to talking the helm of the International Studies Program, Professor Watzinger-Tharp is also the Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary and International Programs in the College of Humanities. Beginning Fall 2008, the International Studies Program will be housed in the Aziz and Lola Atiya International Center of the beautiful new Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building. This office suite is located on the new building’s second floor, and includes the International Studies, the Asia Center, and Latin American Studies program staff.

19


MODEL ARAB LEAGUE T here is a fine line between peace and war – it is the diplomats of the world that walk that line every day.

So if it were up to you, as a diplomat on the international stage, how would you address the situation outlined in this newsflash? This is exactly the question posed to participants in the Model Arab League National Competition this year in Washington DC.

Competing against the top 23 schools in the country, the University of Utah was awarded two Honorable Mention Delegate awards and one Outstanding Delegate award at Nationals, in addition to the appointment of U student Dylan McDonnell as Secretary General for the 2008-2009 year. Of interest, our U diplomats will represent Libya in next year’s competition.

The Model Arab League (MAL) is student leadership development program sponsored by the National Council on US-Arab Relations (NCUSAR). Teaching the art of diplomacy via simulation, the MAL encourages schools to form student delegations to represent memberstates of the Arab League. These student delegations then study the assigned country, and its policies in depth, in order to assume the role of Arab diplomats in competition. In the 2007-2008 academic year, the University of Utah’s MAL team represented the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. At Regionals, our team won Outstanding Delegate awards in four of the five councils represented, earning the Outstanding Delegation award for the University of Utah.

MIDDLE EAST CENTER

20


LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM STRENGTHENING BRAZILIAN STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

T

he Brazilian Cultural Collection is an exciting new addition to the Marriott Library’s expanding resources on Latin American culture. Originating from the Brazilian-American Institute in Washington, D. C., the Collection spans the twentieth century and comprises Brazilian art, film (both feature and documentary), music, and videos. Many of the sound recordings and films are historical documents that are difficult to find elsewhere. The items from this collection will certainly be of interest not only to students of Brazilian music, film, art and history but also to any who seek exposure to Brazilian culture. Additionally, the collection will facilitate acculturation for students of the Portuguese language by giving them access to a broad range of manifestations from popular culture. Thousands of items are available as part of the Multimedia Center and are searchable in the Marriott Library’s general catalogue. This acquisition will undoubtedly make the Marriott Library and the University of Utah a focal point for scholars and students of Brazilian culture and history.

Among the first to use the Brazilian Cultural Collection is Elena Shtromberg, a new hire in the Department of Art and Art History, whose main areas of research include twentieth-century Brazil-

ian art, Latin American performance art, as well as art from the U.S.-Mexico border region. Professor Shtromberg received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California at Los Angeles. Her dissertation, entitled “Conceptual Encounters: Art and Information in Brazil, 1968-1978,” investigates the turn to performance art, video art, and visual poetry by Brazilian artists during the military dictatorship. The dissertation posits that the politicized variant of conceptualism that emerged in Brazil was influenced by the need for artists to seek out alternative modes of communication. Her scholarship in the field of contemporary Latin American art attends to questions of gender, ethnic, and political identity. During her time working for the Getty Research Institute she organized (with Glenn Phillips) Pioneers of Brazilian Video Art (October 2004), a video art screening covering the first decade of video art production in Brazil (1973-1983) and Surveying the Border: 3 Decades of Video Art about the U.S and Mexico (September 2005), a screening of video art highlighting a number of different perspectives surrounding the United States/Mexico border. This year Professor Shtromberg’s courses include Border Art: Visual Culture along the U.S. Mexico Border.

21


ASIA CENTER

The Asia Center, founded in 2007, continues to expand at an

impressive rate. With the completion of the new Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities building, the Asia Center will have its first office “home” as part of the impressive International Studies Center on the building’s second floor.

NEW FACES Ronald Hrebenar, a professor from the Political Science Depart-

ment and expert in Japanese Politics, is joining us as our new Associate Director. Amanda Biesinger, who has previously been the undergraduate advisor for the Asian Studies Program, has also joined us full-time as the Administrative Program Coordinator. The Asia Center received a $750,000 grant from the Institute for International Education to fund ROTC students in their study of strategic languages. This grant paid for the College of Humanities’ first

ever summer language institute, in which we offered first-year intensive language study for Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Pashto, Arabic, Persian, and Russian. Our Interdisciplinary Masters Program began it’s first admittance cycle, accepting three students for the 2008-2009 academic year. They have interests in China and Japan. During the 2007-2008 academic year the Asian Studies Program sponsored the joint meetings of the Western Conference of the Associa-

tion for Asian Studies and the Southwest Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. In addition to forty seperate panels covering a broad spectrum of Asian Studies. The event also included a keynote address titled Chinese Conceptions of Rights: From Mencius to Maoand Now by Elizabeth Perry, President of the Association for Asian Studies.

CONFUCIUS INSTITUTE

At a grand opening celebration in October 2007, The University of Utah became one of only 13 institutions in the nation to host a Confucius Insti Institute. The People’s Republic of China’s National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language aims to establish Confucius Institutes all over the world, with the goal of creating 100 of them by 2010. The purpose of the institutes is to promote Chinese language study and knowledge of Chinese culture. Each institute is set up with a partner university in China.

In addition to a generous gift from Jon M. Huntsman, Sr., activities of the Institute are funded by China’s National Office of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, which provided an initial $100,000 start-up fund in the first year, after which time the Chinese government will continue to support the programs of the institute upon request.

Housed within the Asia Center, the Confucius Institute offers China-related cultural activities such as films, Opera and music performances, art exhibits and public lectures on Chinese language, society, culture and history, all of which are be open to the campus and the wider community. The institute will promote the study of Chinese language and culture in schools at the K-12 level, offering teacher workshops and developing educational resources. For companies engaging in business ventures in China, the institute will offer seminars for the business community on useful topics.

ing from a lecture by Professor Li Xiaotao, Deputy Director of Sichuan University Museum, on an exhibit of the famous Sanxingdui archeological find, to a Traditional Chinese Music and Dance Performance by the Student Art Troupe of Sichuan University. A traditional Chinese music concert was also very well received, and Chinese speech contest generated great enthusiasm among students.

University of Utah President Michael K. Young says he expects the Confucius Institute will make significant contributions to the internationalization of campus and preparing students for an increasingly globalized world.

Highlights of this first year include:

Chinese Cultural Week, held in March 2008 – this included events rang-

In June 2008 the Institute co-sponsored a Chinese culture for K-12 teachers

week-long workshop on

Sichuan Earthquake Benefit Concert – held in August 2008. All proceeds went to Sichuan University’s scholarship fund. In return for this support, Sichuan University granted The University of Utah three scholarships to support our students studying in Sichuan.

22


Internal Fellows This year marks the Tanner Humanities Center’s 20th Anniversary. We continue to build upon the rich history of programs and services the Center has been offering since 1988. This past year we welcomed scholars from Utah, the United States, and the world to present their ideas to the campus and community.

2008 Tanner Lecture on Human Values. Dr. Gardner

presented his Good Work Project which looks at professional fields such as journalism, law, science, and medicine and seeks to determine what is good as opposed to ethically compromised work.

The second annual World Leaders Lecture Forum welcomed Iranian attorney and human rights acThe Sterling M. McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture was presented by Dr. Eboo Patel, Founder tivist, Dr. Shirin Ebadi who was awarded the Nobel and Executive Director of Interfaith Youth Core. Peace Prize in 2003. Dr. Ebadi’s message of peace His talk was titled, “The Faith Line: The Role of and in support of basic human rights reached Young People in the 21st Century,” and explored nearly 1,000 individuals. It touched many our times - when the century of the Faith Line no deeply and brought together Utah’s mosaic of longer divides Muslims and Christians or Hindus communities. and Jews, but religious pluralists from religious This summer marked the eighth year of the totalitarians. Gateway to Learning Educators’ Workshops. The The Center hosted a conference on body image Center offered eight workshops for local educain modern America titled, Mirror, Mirror: Body in tors which included topics such as conflict resothe Mind’s Eye. This conference featured current lution in the classroom, documentary techniques and former athletes, filmmakers, scholars and in the curriculum, China, and Latin American authors from around the U.S. who discussed the Studies. multi-faceted role of the human body in society and culture.

Helene A. Shugart, Dept. of Communication Bodies of Work: The Cultural Production of Obesity Melanie Rae Thon, Dept. of English The Voice of the River, a novel in progress Emily Michelson, Dept. of History The Pulpit and the Press in Catholic Italy, 1520-1600 Suhi Choi, Dept. of Communication The Book of ‘Counter Memory and the Korean War’ Halina Duraj, Dept. of English Fatherland Mary Rachel Gould, Dept. of Communication The Rock, The Plantation, and Emerald City: Visibility and the Representational Politics of the Prison System in the United States

Visiting Fellows Ellen M. Litwicki, University of Virginia Between Commerce and Affection: A Cultural History of Domestic Gift Giving in America Katy Ryan, West Virginia University The Death Penalty: A Performance of the TwentiethCentury

Wallace Stegner Fellows Will Bagley Stephen Trimble

Renowned education theorist Howard Gardner, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of Multiple Intelligences, presented the

TANNER HUMANITIES CENTER 23


ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES PROGRAM Now entering its fifith year, the Environmental Humanities program continues to garner national attention, with several universities around the country now looking to us as they model their own programs. The program continues to define courses, recruit faculty and recently graduated the first class of students. Environmental Humanites represents an interdisciplinary approach that includes both academic studies and community outreach. Students within the program explore ethical, health and policy concerns through historical, cultural and creative perspectives. It is our deeply held belief that environmental issues cannot be fully comprehended and communicated without a deep knowledge of culture, beliefs, language, history, and ethics. One of the fundamental goals of the Environmental Humanities graduate program is to create a leadership core of passionate, well educated and environmentally literate graduates who will go on to effect policy and community involvement. In short, we want to change the world, and hope to do that through the efforts of our students. This requires that we compete for the most talented, passionate and competent graduate students. We accomplish this by providing attractive fellowships, stimulating and unique internship opportunities and the highest quality of faculty and instruction. Thanks to a general endowment lead gift from the Kendeda Foundation, these prestigious fellowships provide incoming students with $27,000 over two years. Scholars are selected through a rigorous screening process, to include academic achievement, career goals and aspirations, personal interviews and recommendations of peers and faculty.

Students in the Environmental Humanities graduate program also benefit from unprecedented access to some of the leading voices in environmental humanities. Visiting scholars for the program include experts such as Wade Davis, Explorer in Residence for the National Geographic; Subhankar Banerjee, internationally recognized environmental photographer; environmental writers such as Terry Tempest Williams, David Abrams, Jack Turner and others. Each year the program also sponsors the Lyceum II Lecture Series, hosting speakers of international reputation. The 2007 event, presented to an audience of over 2000 people at Abravanel Hall in downtown Salt Lake City, featured Jane Goodall, Terry Tempest Williams and the music of Red Rock Rondo. Because of the program’s success in achieving its objectives over the past three years, it now enjoys an impressive endowment that funds critical programmatic elements including a directorship, the Ecology of Residency summer course, a competitive professorship, and eight graduate fellowships. Work is now under way to complete the endowment, ensuring an additional four fellowships as well as to fund international internship opportunities for our best students.

24


CAROLYN TANNER IRISH HUMANITIES BUILDING W

e are delighted to announce the completion of the Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building. Named for the Right Rev. Carolyn Tanner Irish in honor of her passion for the Humanities at the University of Utah, this new humanities building is infused with her spirit of kindness, intellectual curiosity, and service. “Though leaves are many, the root is one,” writes the poet W. B. Yeats in The Coming Wisdom with Time. In important ways, the new Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building will be the essential root for the students that enter its doors. Here they will be nourished by perspectives on truth, ethics, and beautify so they may prosper in their seasons of life. The desire to confer this benefit to future generations of University of Utah students has guided every aspect of this building’s design. The collaborative spirit and good will shown by faculty, friends, and alumni of the College of Humanities will resonate continually in the learning that occurs within the building and the knowledge that emanates from it.

CAROLYN TANNER IRISH A native of Salt Lake City, Carolyn Tanner Irish became bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah in 1996, only the fourth woman bishop to head a diocese in the Episcopal Church USA and one of only 12 female bishops in the worldwide Anglican communion. She is spiritual leader of nearly 6000 Episcopalians in 22 Utah congregations and one northern Arizona parish.

Prior to her ordination as a deacon (1983) and priest (1984) in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., Bishop Irish taught ethics, history, and literature at the Edmund Burke School in Washington. Bishop Irish is the daughter of Obert and Grace Tanner, long time friends and benefactors of The University of Utah who endowed the University’s prestigious “Tanner Lecture on Human Values,” among other worthy programs. She was married in 2001 to the Rev. Dr. Freder ick Quinn, a retired foreign service officer and author of several books. She has four adult children.

Bishop Irish began her higher education at Stanford University in 1958, transferred to the University of Michigan, where she graduated in 1962 with High Honors in Philosophy as a member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honorary Society. She received a Master of Letters degree in Moral Philosophy from Oxford University in 1968, and a Master of Divinity degree, cum laude, from the Virginia Theological Seminary in 1983.

25


THE BUILDING One of the most beautiful academic spaces on campus, this new 50,000 sq.ft. building is a dynamic hub of departments, programs and centers. It houses the departments of Philosophy and History, the Tanner Humanities Center, as well as many of the College of Humanities international programs (including International Studies, Latin American Studies, and The Asia Center,). Within this new building, academic instructional facilities join with administrative suites, faculty and fellows offices, a café, and a large lobby. A 170–seat lecture hall, along with a 84–person case–study style classroom enhances the College’s ability to accommodate prospective students, faculty, and prominent guest lecturers. The new building, establishes the College of Humanities as the hub, heart and soul of the University of Utah and its burgeoning north campus. The building’s amazing design induces lively collaboration and discussion among faculty, students and community members, while still allowing space for contemplative distance. In addition to two state-of-the-art lecture halls, the building is also home to several seminar rooms, conference and group study rooms. For more reflective moments, fac-

ulty, students and visitors can relax in reading rooms and secluded courtyards, enjoy the Lorna Matheson Memorial Garden, have coffee at Tony Caputo’s Humanities Happy Hour Café, or meditate while walking the outdoor labyrinth.

Members of the University Community, friends, donors, and local dignitaries joined together to celebrate the building’s completion at a ribbon cutting ceremony October 3, 2008.

26


A Giving Life: Remembering Lorna Matheson Lorna Higgs Matheson, a great friend of the University and the College of Humanities, passed away last December at the age of 73. Her formal involvement with the U spanned more than half a century. Throughout her adult life she dedicated herself to the cause of public education, and she worked tirelessly to improve learning from elementary schools to postgraduate programs at the State’s flagship University. At the time of Lorna’s death, Dean Robert Newman announced that the garden at the new Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building will be named for Lorna—a formal recognition of her lifetime commitment to the humanities and the University of Utah. Lorna enrolled as a student at the U in 1952. She was tremendously active on campus, and she remained deeply attached to the U for the rest of her life. As an alumna in the 1960s and 70s, she continued to be very involved with her sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and with the University’s athletic programs. Lorna often had student athletes into her home for Sunday dinner, where she provided them with both a hearty meal and sense of how the University community cared about them as individuals with a post-athletic future. In the late 1970s Lorna became more engaged with the political and institutional aspects of public learning. She was elected three times to the Salt Lake City Board of Education, on which she served from 1978 to 1990. For much of this time she was President of the Board. Lorna went on to serve the University of Utah in a wide variety of roles. She became a member of the National Advisory Council, President of the Alumni Association (the first woman to hold this position), and a member of the University’s Board of Trustees. She also contributed her time and judgment to innumerable University committees, including those charged with selecting the University President. In all of this work Lorna manifested unfailing enthusiasm and great confidence in the value of the University’s mission.

27


Lorna especially enjoyed her involvement with the College of Humanities. She was the inaugural director of the Renaissance Guild, the College’s book group that brings together members of the community and faculty for lively discussions, and she contributed significantly to the College’s development effort. She worked extensively to build the Gordon B. Hinckley Endowment for British Studies, which has substantially enriched the intellectual life of the College and University. The success of the Hinckley Endowment and the opportunity to work with the Hinckley family were especially important to Lorna. She rejoiced in the achievements of students, staff, and faculty throughout the College. Among the many initiatives she supported was Prof. Meg Brady’s “YourStory” project, which gathers oral histories from individuals across the social spectrum. Prof. Brady herself interviewed Lorna in the last months of her life and collected a personal history of great value to Lorna’s family and friends. In those difficult last months it was, fittingly, on the University of Utah campus where Lorna received help and treatment. She was grateful for the extraordinary care by the staff, nurses, and doctors at the U’s Huntsman Cancer Institute. Lorna’s integral association with the Univerisity continued to the end of her life. Upon Lorna’s death an endowment in her name was established here in the College. The Lorna H. Matheson Fund for the Humanities will provide scholarship support for students, particularly for study abroad, and resources for the garden bearing her name at the new Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building. Lorna’s Garden is envisioned as a place for both quiet contemplation and convivial exchange among members of the academic community. Perhaps Lorna’s richest legacy will be found in her abundant good will and optimism, her belief in the dignity of every human being, and her faith in education as a means of enriching individual lives and building a more just and generous society.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

28


FINDING PEACE WITH NATURE Excerpts from 2008 Lyceum Lecture featuring Dr. Jane Goodall March 2008, Abravanel Hall, Salt Lake City UT Let me share an experience with you from my very early days in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, east Africa working with the chimpanzees. Initially, the chimps ran away from me. They had never seen a “white ape” before and would vanish in the undergrowth when I approached. But one chimpanzee, David Greybeard, for some reason began to lose his fear before the others. He came to my camp one night and stole some bananas. So I asked my cook to leave bananas for whoever this was, and I stayed down to see who this male was who came to camp to eat palm nuts and bananas. It was David Greybeard, with his white beard, whom I had come to know the best out in the forest. The day came when David Greybeard actually accepted a banana from my hand. Soon after this, David Greybeard was wandering through the forest and I was following him because by this time he would actually permit me to follow him. He suddenly turned off the trail and went through a tangle of vegetation all full of thorny vines. I tried to keep up with him. But chimps, with their nice smooth hair, just slide through the vines while we have hair that catches on thorns, stupid clothes, sandals with buckles. Finally, I thought, “Oh well, I’ve lost David Graybeard.” I was sweating and exhausted by the time I got through the tangle. But there was David, sitting almost as though waiting for me (Maybe he was, how do we know?). So I sat down near him. Lying there on the ground was a piece of ripe fruit. So I picked it up and held it out to him in my hand. He turned his face away. So I put my hand closer. He turned around and looked directly into my eyes. He reached out and took the fruit. He didn’t want it so he dropped it. But in the same movement, he very gently squeezed my fingers, which is the way chimpanzee reassure each other. And in that one moment, there was communication that went back probably to a time before words where a part of human history, a pre-verbal period in our evolution. David understood and I understood. He understood that I was making a gesture and that my intentions were good. I understood that he didn’t want it, but that he accepted my motivation.

29


That was a very, very critical moment for me. It really put me in a different space when I was with the chimpanzees. It really made me think. If we look back now at what is almost a 50-year study, the thing that is most amazing is how like us chimpanzees actually are. In their biology they are more like us than any other living creature. They have all these gestures like ours – kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting one another on the back. They observe each other. They can imitate and young ones learn in that way. We can describe them as having primitive cultures because behavior is passed from one generation to the next through observation, imitation and practice. For example, young chimps observe tool-using behavior. They practice, they imitate and then eventually incorporate the behavior into their repertoire. In different parts of Africa, chimpanzees have different tool-using repertoires. The chimpanzees tragically have a dark side to their nature, just like us. They’re capable of violence and brutality and even a kind of primitive war. But they’re also capable of compassion, love and true altruism. So perhaps more than any other creature, they help us to realize there isn’t this sharp line dividing us from the rest of the animal kingdom – it’s a very blurry line. And it shows that we are not separated from the rest of the animal kingdom, we’re part of it. That should make us feel really excited because what an amazing animal kingdom it is! As we learn more and more about the nature of these other animals with whom we share the planet, we understand more we’re not the only beings with personalities and minds and above all feelings. This gives us a new kind of respect for these other animals. Sometimes it can raise a lot of ethical issues when we think about how we use and abuse them. We imagine how they feel in those situations because they’re more like us than anything else. But that leads us to ask another question: If we’re so alike, then how can we also be so different? There aren’t chimpanzees coming to concerts and lectures in beautiful buildings like this. They haven’t sent little robots to Mars and they never will. Nor can they create weapons of mass destruction. Nor can they commit genocide. I think that what has really caused an explosive growth in the human intellect is that at some point we developed a spoken language. David Greybeard and I communicated and understood each other. But if we had been able to speak about that communication, who knows where that might have led and what other feelings

30


I might have left that situation. With these words, we can teach about things that aren’t present. Terry (Tempest Williams) and I have both used words tonight to paint pictures and to take you on a journey of exploration using your intellect stimulated by our words. We can teach children in this way. We can think about the distant past learn lessons from it. We can hand down an oral tradition. We can plan the distant future. We can have a discussion. We can draw into the discussion people with all kinds of different knowledge. It is this that has enabled our intellect to grow in this extraordinary way. The chimpanzee brain is almost identical in anatomy to ours although it’s smaller. Chimpanzees do have the cognitive ability to learn more than 400 American Sign Language signs using them in the correct context. And they do have the ability to master complex languages on computers. So here we are with this amazing sophisticated spoken language, which neither the chimpanzees nor any other animal (as far as we know) has developed, even though they may be capable of it. This puts us in a position of responsibility for the rest of the planet. So here we are – intelligent human beings that we are. Yes, we’ve gone to the moon. Yes, we’ve developed writing and electronic communication. We could have this talk tonight beamed in real time to China or some other part of the world. Why then, are we destroying our planet? How come we are destroying the forests and prairies? How come the streams are drying up? How come the soil is eroding and turning into desert in more and more parts of the world? How is it that we’re polluting the land? Why are we growing our foods with poison? Why is it that we’re allowing this poison to run off from the agriculture fields down into the streams, the rivers, the lakes and the sea and polluting the bodies of the fish that some people still eat? How is it that we can even think about eating the flesh of animals that are kept in such tiny little crates, little prisons, that they have to be given antibiotics to keep them alive. And they’re pumped full of hormones to make them grow quicker so that more and more can be raised more and more quickly so we can get more and more profit? I find it extraordinary that we, these intelligent beings, are creating a world where in so many places our own children are getting sick from the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.

31


I can never forget something I learned at the Millennium Peace Summit of Spiritual and Religious Leaders in New York at the United Nations. It was the most amazing visual feast. There were 1,000 delegates from about 100 countries there for four days to talk about peace. They talked about the problems of poverty, which they should. They talked about how to alleviate poverty and hunger, which is exactly what they should be talking about. And they talked about many other things, like conflict resolution, genocide, and domestic violence, and all the other things you would expect religious and spiritual leaders to talk about. But why weren’t they all talking about the harm we are inflicting to the environment? What’s the point? If we could stop all fighting tomorrow, if everybody laid down their weapons tomorrow, and yet we didn’t learn to live in harmony with nature, very soon people would pick up those weapons because they would be fighting for the rapidly diminishing natural resources. The one group in that gathering that did consistently address the environment head on was the indigenous people. They came from nine nations and stood together in that great General Assembly room of the United Nations. The head of the Eskimo nation from Greenland stood, and with a powerful voice said, “My brothers and sisters. I bring you a message from your brothers and sisters in the north. Up in the north we know every day what you do in the south. Up in the north the ice is melting. What will it take to melt the ice in the human heart?” That has stayed with me: What will it take to melt the ice in the human heart? E.O. Wilson worked out four or five years ago that if every human being on this planet had the standard of living that we do here today in this room, we would need three new planets. The calculation has now been revised. We’d need five new planets. But it doesn’t really matter whether it’s three or five, because we only have this one. What’s going to happen if we carry on business as usual? How is it that this intelligent being is thus destroying its only home? Do you think that in spite of our intelligence we have lost wisdom? Is there some kind of disconnect between this extraordinary brain and this heart, the seat of love and compassion? Something has to change. We cannot go on with business as usual. Jane Goodall, Ph.D,, DBE Founder – the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace www.janegoodall.org www.rootsandshoots.org

32


THE LOST AMAZON

A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY OF RICHARD EVAN SCHULTES Excerpts from lecture given by Wade Davis, Visiting Scholar to the Environmental Humanities Program February 20, 2008, City Library, Salt Lake City, UT In the early 1970s, a time of few heroes, one man loomed large over the Harvard campus; Richard Evans Schultes, a kindly professor who shot blowguns in class and at one time kept outside his office door a bucket of peyote buttons, available to his students as an optional laboratory experiment. In time, mountains in South America would bear his name, as would national parks. HRH Prince Philip would call him “the father of ethnobotany.” Students like myself knew him as the world’s authority on medicinal and hallucinogenic plants, the botanical explorer who had sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery in Mexico in 1938 of teonanacatl, the psilocybin mushrooms known to the Aztecs as the Flesh of the Gods. Three years later, after identifying oloiuqui, the serpent vine, another long-lost Aztec sacred hallucinogen, Schultes took a semester’s leave of absence and disappeared into the Northwest Amazon of Colombia. Engaged in a mission vital to the war effort, with the facet of civilization itself in the balance, he endured unimaginable hardships, including beriberi and twenty-one bouts of malaria, as he pursued one of the most elusive botanical mysteries of the Amazon. Twelve years later he returned, having gone places no outsider had ever been, mapping uncharted rivers and living among previously unknown Indian tribes while collecting some thirty thousand botanical specimens, including three hundred species new to science. The greatest Amazonian explorer of the twentieth century, he was a living link to the great naturalists of the Victorian age and a distant era when the tropical rain forests stood immense, inviolable, a mantle of green stretching across entire continents. ………..

33


For all his achievements, Schultes was an odd choice to become a ‘60s icon. True, in 1953 he had led William Burroughs into the forests of the Colombian Putumayo and introduced the writer to ayahuasca, the vision vine, the most potent of all Amazonian hallucinogenic preparations. But he also had dismissed Timothy Leary for bastardizing the Greek language by insisting on the term psychedelic, when any scholar loyal to the classics knew that the proper orthography was psychodelic. [use as call out] His politics were exceedingly conservative. Neither a Democrat nor a Republican, he professed not believe in the American Revolution and always voted for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. As an anthropological colleague once remarked, the only way for Schultes to go native would be for him to go to London. A proud Bostonian, he would not use a Kennedy stamp, insisted on calling New York City’s Kennedy Airport by its original name, Idlewild, and refused to walk on Boylston Avenue in Cambridge after its name had been officially changed to John F. Kennedy Boulevard. These stubborn political convictions, however rigidly held, belied the fundamental decency and generosity of the man. On all issues of personal choice and freedom – sexual orientation, abortion, use of drugs, religion – he was a complete libertarian. His devotion to struggling students was legendary. For years he traveled around the country using an obscure taxonomic argument to obtain the release of dozens of young people charged with marijuana possession.

34


The argument went something like this: Marijuana was illegal, but until the law was changed to defeat Schultes’s crusade, the actual legal statute prohibited by name only Cannabis sativa. Schultes maintained that there were three species of marijuana, including Cannabis indica and Cannabis ruderalis. As an expert witness, he would testify that there was no way to distinguish the species with forensic material alone. That left the burden on the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a bag of round up flower buds was Cannabis sativa and not one of its botanical relatives. Since even botanists could not agree on how many species there were, it was by definition an impossible task. It made for great theater, of course, with Schultes and his longhaired entourage on one side and arrayed against him on the other a team of indignant botanists, often envious of his fame, infuriated by his stand on drugs, and openly contemptuous of his taxonomic position. In truth, the botanical evidence of Schultes’s argument was somewhat dubious. In the heated passions of the times, however, when young students were being jailed for smoking an innocuous herb, none of the academic details were important. What did matter was Schultes’s uncanny ability to break open courtrooms and set students free. This, as much as anything else he did, contributed to his mythic reputation on the Harvard campus. Between the extremes of his personality, in the space created by what superficially appeared to be the immense contractions in his character, there was room for any student to flourish…

35


…By the time I met him in the fall of 1973, it has been some years since he had been capable of active fieldwork. I found him at his desk in his fourth-floor aerie at the Botanical Museum. I was twenty at the time. We had never met, and he knew nothing of my past. I introduced myself as an undergraduate student from British Columbia. The adjective British caught his attention. I said that I wanted to go to the Amazon and collect plants, just he had some so many years before. At the time I knew little of South America and less about plants. Asking nothing about my credentials, he peered across a stack of dried herbarium specimens and, as calmly as if I had asked for directions to the local library, said, “Well, when would you like to go?” A fortnight later I left for South American, where I remained during that first sojourn for fifteen months. Just before leaving Cambridge on that trip, I stopped by his office, hoping to pick up a few tips or at least some guidance that might allow me to placate my parents. [call out] He had three vital pieces of advice. First, I was to avoid high leather boots, as all the snakes strike at the neck. Second, he recommended that I bring a pith helmet, because in twelve years he had worn one and never lost his bifocals. Third, he insisted that I not come back from the forest without having tried ayahuasca, the vision vine. Then he handed me two letters of introduction that, as it turned out, might as well have come from God, such was his reputation throughout Colombia and beyond. And so I went, as others had, and did what I could to honor his trust. And, of course, I did try ayahuasca, not to mention several other curious preparations, but that is an other story. Excerpt and photographs published with permission from the author Wade Davis, currently a Visiting Scholar for the College of Humanities Environmental Humanities graduate program, holds degrees in anthropology and biology, as well as a Ph.D. in ethnobotony from Harvard University, where he met and studied under Richard Evans Schultes. He spent more than three years in the Amazon and in the Andes, exploring plants and living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight countries. Currently he is Explore in Residence at the National Geographic Society. Davis is a critically acclaimed writer, whose books include the international best seller The Serpent and the Rainbow; The Clouded Leopard; Travels to Landscapes of Travel and Desire; Light at the Edge of the World; A Journey through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures, and One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest. In 2002 he was awarded a Lannan Foundation Literary Award.

36


COMMUNITY SCHOLARSHIPS FOR DIVERSITY:

SUPPORTING EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION

LIZ LECKIE, ASSISTANT DEAN FOR UNDERGRADUATE ADVISING

Learning to go to school can be a tough process, especially if you are the first person in your family to try it. It’s nice to know that others are supporting my goals and dreams. It is like the whole community is looking out for me. Community for Diversity Scholarship Recipient

As a first-generation college student, this scholarship has given me an opportunity to fulfill a lifetime goal. My degree will allow me to be a role model for others and eventually it will provide me the ability to provide opportunities for others. Community for Diversity Scholarship Recipient Studying in the College of Humanities I was able to learn another language in a structured environment. In addition, I was enabled to learn about the history of another culture. Since my Humanities classes were smaller in class size in comparison to my other courses during my undergraduate career, I appreciated the interaction of getting to know my classmates and professors better. Community for Diversity Scholarship Recipient

Our studies in the humanities have opened doors for us to learn about a host of disciplines which daily shape our existence. We have often met with ideas that conflicted with our own convictions; this has not only forced us to understand ourselves better but to understand others as well. We have learned how to communicate with each other, not just with those like us, but also with those different from us. Community for Diversity Scholarship Recipient

I

n the 2004 edition of The Kingfisher, we introduced the Community Scholarships for Diversity initiative. This important scholarship fund was created to support undergraduate students who are the first in their families to receive a Bachelor’s Degree. The fund is designed to provide students with the full cost of in-state tuition and fees and is supported entirely by gifts from individuals, local corporations and foundations. To date these scholarship funds have supported to 27 students, with unprecedented success as all have graduated or on track to graduate from the University. For first-generation college students, most of whom bring the kind of rich and needed diversity to the University of Utah campus that the American Council on Education addresses, a scholarship, like the Community Scholarship for Diversity, represents needed economic support to attend and complete their college degree. This economic support not only assists individual students but it also represents economic opportunity for the students’ families and their communities. Providing scholarships is an expensive ven-

ture – one that we continually struggle to fund. However, enhancing diversity in the college, and providing opportunities for first-generation students, remains one of the College’s top academic priorities. We are delighted to report that, to date, we have been successful in raising more than $150,000 in scholarship funds. It is notable that members of the College of Humanities faculty and the College of Humanities Partnership Board have been among the most generous contributors of the fund, underscoring the importance of diversity in the College. We share with many other colleges and universities a common belief that diversity in our student body, faculties and staff is critical to our primary mission: to provide a quality education. There are numerous definitions to diversity. Within the College, however, we focus on racial and ethnic diversity as one of many factors that we seek in order to excel in the teaching of our students.

37


WHY IS RACIAL AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION IMPORTANT? According to the American Council on Education, diversity enriches the educational experience on a number of different levels: Diversity promotes personal growth and a healthy society. An education in a rich and diverse environment, challenges stereotyped preconceptions; it encourages critical thinking, and it helps students learn to communicate effectively with people of varied backgrounds and cultures. Diversity strengthens communities and workplaces. Education within a diverse setting prepares students to become good citizens in an increasingly complex and pluralistic society; it fosters mutual respect and teamwork; and it helps to build communities who look to the character and quality of their members’ contributions. Diversity enhances our economic competitiveness. In order for the United States to sustain our nation’s prosperity in the 21st century will require us to make effective

use of the talents and abilities of all of our citizens. During the past decade, Utah has seen an increase in the racial and ethnic diversity of our citizens. According to the 2002 census, African-Americans, Latinos, AsianAmericans, American Indians, and Pacific Islanders, made up 12 percent of our state’s population and this number is expected to continue to grow in the coming years. However, the student population of University of Utah does not reflect this representation. This means that historically the largest underrepresented populations of students at the University of Utah are in these ethnic and racial populations. Although strides have been made to increase the numbers of students who are likely to be the first in their families to attend college, we at the University and in the College know we can do better. The community and economic vitality of the State of Utah depends on us to find ways to educate all of Utah’s citizens, for the betterment of everyone who lives in Utah.

RAISING THE ROOF – AND AWARENESS This past year the College sponsored Raise the Roof ! An Evening of Conscience, held at Capitol Theatre. The first half of the evening featured the inspiring words of Reverend France Davis and the music of the Calvary Baptist Choir. The second half brought the house down with an acoustical performance by Michael Franti, who concluded the evening by joining the Calvary choir in singing “We Will Overcome.” Ticket proceeds from the event went to support the scholarship fund. In the next coming year, we hope to enhance the success of this program by supporting even more first-generation college students. We are making a difference – we invite you to be part of this amazing opportunity. For more information about the Community Scholarship for Diversity Fund, contact us directly at 801.581.6214, or visit the website at www.hum.utah.edu.

38


POETRY

Contributed By Graduate Students In The Nationally Ranked Creative Writing Program

Map

enter through the magnetic gate requires pushing path lined stones upside-down trees on the left there is a door here there is always a door

Map

³Map² ELY SHIPLEY

spiral staircase leads drunk to the rooftop careful Geoff hold the white rail I love stars blurred out city but not by us lights by everyone but us

Map

The sea is such that I can see the white dot dot dot the islands float above it. I can see four islands. I can be on one.

39


Brightness Hiding Mitchell Loe

This is the color of November. Bleakness soon covered by the pure or is it only chilling? Wait, you say, why do we speak of winter on the dawning of summer when the blooms of recesses and cheeks are as hot as a heart? Wait. We grieve for losses we do not understand, I grieve and see the color of November its ashes and embers and desolate fireplaces where drafts pull sashes on the window; but wait. Let us look, out there, at the unconventional beauty of the color of November. Let’s linger. I was born you see in a time and a place where this happens, pure covering cinders of rhymes and meters abandoned in summer... repetitive taps of wait and tell me that turn their backs on November. Where this happens the air thickens and this place that is gone must be loved if any love can slip in at all. A scrawled blackness on yellow, that’s the color of November, I revel in it, give vent to winter at the advent of summer...no, no, wait. Let that fall too. That soft petal falls and fills a small whole, but not enough, for ‘there will never be enough’ is the color of November. It’s a cold month when thoughts turn to hiding inside, it’s a grey month without roses basking under suns, it’s a small month in the scheme of the wheel which must be taken as whole, it’s the month of my birth—so for this day let us wait and import some days of November and rain rain rain.

40


CONVOCATION 2008 Remarks by Brin Bon, B.A. in Philosophy, 2008, Convocation Speaker

So, you might be asking yourself, as I have, “What am I supposed to do now?” The philosopher Kierkegaard captured the essence of this self-inquiry when he wrote, “What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what am I to do.” He continues by asking, “what would be the good of discovering so-called objective truth…if it had no deeper significance for me and for my life?” Kierkegaard’s thoughts prompt me to ask a further question, “What am I to do for my family, for my community, for humanity?” I have learned many things here at the University of Utah—how to factor a polynomial; what logos, pathos, and ethos are; what melting wax revealed to Descartes; the three branches of the US government; and how to sit through 7 hours of classes, on 4 hours of sleep, after writing a 12 page paper, in 1 night. I have also learned that even after 4 years of college I am just beginning to learn how to learn, and I am realizing that of the vast riches of knowledge to be gained in the world, I have only brushed the surface. Nevertheless, the most important thing I have learned, is that what gives your life the most meaning is not what you do for yourself, but what you do for other people. I came to the University so that I could learn philosophy…so that I could better myself…so that I could get a good job. But what I have actually learned is that philosophy, as with any discipline, is a practice not merely a subject. While I studied philosophy I learned how to think analytically and systematically; while you studied Spanish, Japanese, or Arabic, you learned how to interact and converse with speakers of these languages; while you studied journalism you learned how to communicate information and ideas to people across the globe. What we have all done during our studies, especially here in the College of Humanities, is develop a richer, more sensitive, and more creative way of seeing and responding to our world.

41


Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. William Butler Yeats

You and I are part of the relatively few people in this world who have had the privilege of receiving this foundation, and now the next step is up to you. But like Kierkegaard, and perhaps like several of you here today, I do not have an answer to the question: “What am I to do?” What I do have is an emerging awareness and understanding of why what I have done for the last 4 years is important, and why whatever I do with my life is significant. It has to do with the common thread that brings us all here today—our study of the Humanities.

it helps us recognize “in people what is especially fundamental about them…their aspirations to justice and goodness, and their capacities of reasoning in this connection.” Most importantly, the Humanities teach us what it means to be human. It is with this hope of self-awareness, ability, and recognition that we join here not at the end of our journey, but at the mile-marker of a much greater adventure. Let us go forward from this day as students and citizens of the world, who dare to confront the future and its many challenges with skill, intelligence, and compassion.

Stoic philosophy emphasized the importance of what we would now call a liberal education. The student of such a training is above all a citizen of the world, and as such realizes the value of self-knowledge, possesses the skills of critical thinking and problem solving, and as the political philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes,

THE COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES WAS HONORED TO RECOGNIZE THE FOLLIWNG INDIVIDUALS AT THIS YEAR’S CONVOCATION Brenda A. Robles Chrisoula Andreou Young Alumni Association Outstanding Senior Award Kathryn Lindquist Distinguished Alumna

John H. Tempest

Honorary Distinguished Alumnus

Ramona W. Cannon Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence

Jennifer A. Cummings

Ramona W. Cannon Award for Graduate Student Teaching Excellence

42


PARTNERSHIP BOARD Ross C. “Rocky� Anderson High Road for Human Rights Former Mayor, Salt Lake City

Grant Bennett

President CPS Technologies Corporation

Cynthia Buckingham Executive Director Utah Humanities Council

Cate Burns

Human Resources Director Gastronomy, Inc.

Anthon S. Cannon, Jr.

Geralyn Dreyfus

Salt Lake City Film Center

Gladys Gonzalez

Retired The Ramsey Group

Publisher and Editor Mundo Hispano

Klaus Rathke

Richard H. Keller, M.D.

David Simmons

Bruce Larson

Joan Smith

Former Chief of Radiology Cottonwood and Alta View Hospitals

Managing Director Goldman, Sachs & Co.

Kathryn Lindquist

Attorney Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro

Doug Matsumori

Keith Cannon

Leslie Miller

Cole Capener

Rhoda Ramsey

Ray Quinney & Nebeker

Former Secretary of Standard Optical

President and CEO Simmons Media Group

Former Executive Director The National Conference for Community and Justice

Mary Tull

Executive Director The Leonardo

President PrintWorks

Partner, Backer & McKenzie

Robert E. Clark

Attorney and Senior Partner, Clark Greene & Associates

Reverend France A. Davis Pastor, Calvary Baptist Church

Martin Frey

Joel Momberger

Managing Director Informatica S.E.A. Pte. Ltd.

Kent H. Murdock President O. C. Tanner Company

Gary J. Neeleman

CEO PowerCode

President Neeleman International Consulting, Inc.

George L. Denton, Jr.

Gerald Nichols

Yvette Diaz

Virginia Hinckley Pearce

Former Executive Vice President First Security Corporation

President NJRA Architects

Author and Lecturer

43


THANK YOU The students and faculty of the College of Humanities wish to express thier profound gratitude to the many friends and alumni who have offered thier support this past year. We appreciate them for recognizing that, ultimately, a “Research One� university is only as good as its liberal arts core. The enduring strength of The University of Utah is tied directly to the strength of the College of Humanities, and we draw our strength from the resources our generous donors help provide.

44



Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.