Faculty News
On October 1st and 2nd, David Davies hosted the 2010 Annual Conference for Region V of the Society of Composers, Inc. on the Augustana campus. The conference brought over 70 composers, most from university and college faculties from Ohio to the Dakotas, for two days of concerts and paper presentations. Most of the performing faculty in the Department of Music contributed to the performances and on Friday night hundreds of Augustana students contributed to the conference through performing in a major ensemble concert.
On October 15th and 16th David Davies presented two composition at the 2010 National Conference of the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers at Indiana Wesleyan University. "Remembrance" (2005) was performed by Augustana College Instructor of Bassoon, Susan Bawden, and one of Augustana's staff accompanists, Carrie Davies. "Of the Father's Love Begotten" (2008), which was composed for the first "Christmas at Auguatana" concert, was performed by the IWU University Singers and Orchestra for nearly 4,000 students in attendance. David has served on the Executive Advisory Committee for the CFAMC since 2007 and also serves as Director of Regional Events for the national organization.
Laura Hartman has written a chapter in the newly published textbook, Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology, edited by Whitney Bauman, Richard Bohannon, and Kevin O'Brien, published by Routledge (October, 2010). Laura's chapter is Chapter 11, on the topic of economics as it relates to various religions and their environmental concerns.
Molly Todd's first book, Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees, and Citizen Action in the Salvadoran Civil War, is now available from the University of Wisconsin Press, as part of the new Critical Human Rights series. For more information, see the UW Press website or Googlebooks.
Molly Todd was an invited participant at the Empires and Solidarities conference at the University of New Orleans on October 15-16. Seven participants shared work in progress on "Legacies of Central American Solidarities" and engaged in discussions and debates with top scholars in the field. Molly's contribution examined U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities from the Cold War to the present. Information about the conference as well as contributors and their essays can be accessed via the conference website. Molly also continues her work with the Sawyer Seminar series in Rethinking Human Rights at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Doug Tschopp served as Program Chair and presented a workshop at the recent 2010 HighEdWeb conference (2010.highedweb.org). This is his eighth year to serve as program for this conference of over 500 web professionals including international attendees. His workshop, "Developing and Maintaining Web Content: An Idea Generating Workshop", continues to be top rated by attendees. The workshop focuses on usability, inexpensive website research techniques, and content strategy.
Attending with Doug was Joe Santucci ('12 Physics major) who presented "ENTREPRENEURIAL STUDENT WEB DEVELOPERS = INCREASED COMMUNITY OUTREACH" in the poster track. There was a lot of interest in the Web Guild model and how this model provided a basis for an Entrepreneurial Center at Augustana.
Cathy Goebel presented an invited lecture at the Art Institute of Chicago: Framing Critical Dialogues: James McNeill Whistler and the Gentle Art of Imaging. In it, she discussed her ongoing research on Whistler and his critics, leading to her current lifetime criticism project in collaboration with international universities, museums and libraries through Augustana's Centre for Whistler Criticism. The talk was part of an October 23rd symposium honoring her PhD advisor, Hollis Clayson, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Art History, and Director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. Click here to see the program for the symposium.
Michael Leja, Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania and noted authority on critical reception, is especially interested in examining the interactions between works of art and particular audiences. He responded: "I admire Catherine's ambition to collect and process the entire Whistler criticism. This is already a great resource for all of us and will become a greater one as it grows. Catherine's decision to treat reception materials as in dialogue with artistic production is certainly wise. Whistler's era is the moment when the dealer/critic system is in formation....New structures for the evaluation and support of art were emerging and at this time, dealers were acquiring much greater power, and Whistler was staunchly resisting the new power of critics even as he borrowed from them [as Catherine has demonstrated]. I was particularly intrigued by Catherine's discussion of musical metaphors that appear in critical writings even before Whistler begins to use them for his work. She wonders whether Whistler got this idea from his critics. It is a provocative suggestion, and it raises interesting questions...at some point in the 19thcentury, a convenient, non-theoretical musical metaphor for color relations becomes integrated into an avant-garde theory about artistic formalism and abstraction. The idea that we should distinguish between levels of theoretical investment in metaphorical language adds a valuable complication to reception analysis."
Professor Clayson has accepted Cathy's invitation to speak at Augustana on December 1st for the opening of Liberal Arts through the AGES: A Sesquicentennial Celebration, a project she heartily endorses. Her talk is titled: Episodes of Parisian Visual Culture in the Era of Thomas Edison: Printmaking and Illumination Discourse. In it, she will argue that the widely-discussed new technologies of artificial light that emerged ca. 1880-81 in Paris (including Edison's breakthroughs in electricity-powered illumination) shaped the experimental prints made at the time by Impressionists Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. Works of art by both Cassatt and Degas will be represented in the Liberal Arts through the AGES winter-term exhibition.