Faculty News
On April 5, Randall Hall performed an improvisation concert with the band "Inward Becomes an Anthem" at Bowling Green State University. He also presented a saxophone master-class with BGSU students.
Bill Hammer, Jeff Strasser and Mike Wolf traveled with seven geology majors to the Geological Society of America, North-Central section conference in Rockford, Illinois April 2-3. Four senior geology majors presented posters on their senior inquiry research. Seniors presenting include: Stephanie Jiles, Andrew Olivi, Kristopher Orton and Annette Zapolis. You can read their abstracts by clicking on http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2009NC/finalprogram/session_24152.htm
Dora Malech is currently one of the English Department's Iowa Writers' Workshop/Augustana College Teaching Fellows. Waywiser Press recently accepted her first full collection of poems, Shore Ordered Ocean, for publication in the Spring 2010. Here's her "statement of intent": "My intention is for the individual poems of the collection to explore place, politics, the body, love, art, and more, but I hope that the collection as a whole is bound together by an urgent and physical relationship with language itself. By turns playful and dire, my intention in these poems is to revel in the inherent tensions and pleasures of sense, sound and syntax; reveal the resonance in the offhand utterance; seek the unexpected in aphorism and cliché; and tap into the paradoxical freedom of formality." Dora will be giving a reading on campus Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 6:00 PM in the Wilson Center.
Dr. Marsha Smith has had a paper accepted for presentation at the 16th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) conference in Kunming, China, July 27- Aug. 1, 2009. This session, sponsored by the Commission on Aging and the Aged, is titled "Perspectives of Aging in Diverse Cultures."
The title of the paper is titled "Intergenerational Tensions and Exchanges between Older Wuhan Women and Their Children." Marsha also was the first recipient of the William A. Freistat Center for Peace Studies Faculty Travel Award to help support her travel to this conference.
Ritva Williams' (Religion) book The Bible's Importance for the Church Today (2009) is now available through Augsburg Fortress. The book represents itself as an exercise of recovering our memory of the Bible's origins and how it has been read and interpreted in the church in the past in order to suggest how it might best serve the believers today. Chapters include "Reading the Bible as Social Memory," "Reading the Bible with our Faith Forebears," "Reading Galatians with Luther," "Reading the Bible in Lutheran History," "Reading the Bible for Faith Formation." Materials for single- or multi-session study of this book are also available from Augsburg Fortress.