H&SS eNews, October 2005

Greetings from H&SS. The H&SS eNews is a monthly electronic publication of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. The eNews is compiled and edited by Kelli McElhinny, director of media relations for H&SS. She can be reached at 412-268-6094 or kellim@andrew.cmu.edu. Contact Kelli to submit news about yourself and your fellow alumni, and to sign up for our newsletters.

For past eNews publications, please visit the H&SS eNews archive.

For news about the entire university, be sure to check out the university’s home page or the Carnegie Mellon Today website.

Announcement

We interrupt your regularly scheduled newsletter to bring you this important announcement: On Friday, Oct. 28, H&SS will host a Homecoming reception for alumni, students, faculty and staff, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the H&SS Auditorium and the Coffee Lounge in Baker Hall. We will be honoring our student and alumni award winners, including filmmaker Greg Marcks (B.A. Creative Writing, 1998), who will be receiving Carnegie Mellon’s Young Alumni Award. H&SS Dean John Lehoczky will talk about some of the great things going on in the college, and faculty authors including History Professor Scott Sandage (“Born Losers: A History of Failure in America”) and English Professor Hilary Masters (“Last Stands” Notes from Memory”) are tentatively scheduled to be on hand.

H&SS is opening two classes to alumni that day as well: Cognitive Psychology, from 1:30 to 2:20 p.m., and the Nature of Reason, from 2:30 to 3:20 p.m.

Alumni News

--Gillian Brigham (B.A. Professional Writing, 2003) is the public affairs officer aboard the USNS Comfort, one of two U.S. Navy hospital ships and the fifth largest trauma facility in the nation. The Comfort has been providing disaster relief to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Also aboard the ship is Carlos Rodriguez (B.S. Chemical Engineering, 1991), who is the ship’s director of surgery, and Jennifer Seifert (B.S. Chemistry, 1999), a Naval analyst. Until recently, Dawn Nebelkopf (B.S. Political Science, 1994) also was on board as an analyst.

--Carnegie Mellon invites alumni who plan to attend graduate school and have financial need to apply for the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship, a nationally prestigious award that can be used at an approved institution abroad or in the United States. Winners receive a maximum of $50,000 per year for a maximum of six years of study. To receive the award, you must have graduated in the last five years. Non-U.S. citizens are eligible. For more information, guidelines and eligibility requirements, see http://www.jackkentcookefoundation.org. The campus deadline is March 1, 2006. If interested, please contact the campus representative, William Alba.

Student News

--Two H&SS students are using their technical expertise to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina. Junior Information Systems majors Steven Kaplan and Keith Torlumke have created a Web site, http://www.nickelsforkatrina.org, to raise money for hurricane relief efforts. The students are selling advertising space on their Web site, at the rate of five cents per pixel. They have been successful so far, and have raised $1,000 in under a week. All of the proceeds from the site will be donated to the American Red Cross. The students' goal is to raise $50,000, and they hope that the Carnegie Mellon community will continue to support the project. For more information, contact Steven Kaplan at (203) 829-8005 or skaplan@andrew.cmu.edu, or go directly to the Web site to participate in the relief effort.

College/Faculty News

-- Carnegie Mellon and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh are teaming to create the Southwestern Pennsylvania Program for Deliberative Democracy, which aims to overcome citizen apathy by giving local residents an opportunity to discuss and influence major public policy issues that face the Greater Pittsburgh community. Robert Cavalier, director of the Digital Media Lab and an associate teaching professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon, is the co-director of the program. The program will host two “Citizens Forums” each year, and each forum will include a Deliberative Poll, in which a representative sample of the community comes together to discuss and respond to questions on pressing national and local issues. While traditional public opinion polls solicit reflexive responses from people who are not informed on the topic, a Deliberative Poll represents what people think about an issue if they have had time to consider and discuss it with experts and among themselves. Deliberative Polls give elected officials and policymakers a more accurate and dynamic picture of public opinion, and they give participants a sense that they have a stake and voice in their government. For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050921_democracy.html

- Dick Tucker, the Paul Mellon Professor of Applied Linguistics and a world-renowned language researcher, has been re-appointed to a third term as head of the Department of Modern Languages. Tucker joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1992 and has been the head of the Modern Languages Department since 1995. Tucker was president of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C. He is the only person to have been honored by all four major North American language education associations: the American Association for Applied Linguistics; the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages; the National Association for Bilingual Education; and Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. He has received the Elliott Dunlap Smith Award, given by H&SS for excellent undergraduate teaching. Tucker has agreed to serve as department head for two more years despite planning a sabbatical leave during the 2007-08 academic year. For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050919_tucker.html

 Events

--Novelist Kate Christensen will kick off the 2005-06 Adamson Visiting Writers Series at 8 p.m. Oct. 27 in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall. Christensen, a resident of Brooklyn, is the author of “In the Drink,” “Jeremy Thrane” and most recently “The Epicure’s Lament.” The event is free and open to the public. All speakers will appear at 8 p.m. in the Adamson Wing and all writer series events are free and open to the public. For a complete schedule, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050808_adamson.html

-- Thomas McEvilley will speak at 5:30 p.m. Nov 14 in the Philip Chosky Theatre in the Purnell Center for the Arts as part of the “Aesthetics Out of Bounds” arts histories lecture series, sponsored by the Center for the Arts in Society. McEvilley is the Distinguished Lecturer in Art History at Rice University, where he has been on the faculty since 1969. The author holds a Ph.D. in classical philology. McEvilley is the author of numerous books, including “Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism”; “The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies”; and “The Exile's Return : Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-modern Era.” He was the recipient of a Fulbright Grant in 1993 and has been awarded an NEA critic’s grant and the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism by the College Art Association. He lives in New York City. For a complete schedule and more information about the lecture series, go to http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/mwitmore/aesthetics/

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