The root of the word sabbatical is “rest,” but Jan Tobochnik, physics and computer science, was in great demand as a lecturer during his sabbatical (June 2012 to March 2013). He gave five invited talks while on sabbatical. Three of the talks were titled “Network Analysis of Patent Citations,” and were based on work he did with fellow Kalamazoo College professor, Peter Erdi, physics and psychology, and others. These talks were given at Clark University, the Boston University Center for Computational Science, and the Northeastern University Center for Complex Networks Research. In addition, Tobochnik gave two talks titled “Physical Insight from Computational Algorithms,” at Universidad de Murcia in Murcia, Spain, and the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth.
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Kalamazoo Poets
If you like poetry and you like Michigan, check out a recent post (Awesome Mitten, Michigan Books Project) that includes a short review of four books of poetry, each with strong Michigan connections. The first of the four reviewed is Writer-in-Residence Di Seuss’s award-winning Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open. Other poets featured are John Rybicki, Laura Kasischke, and Jared Randall. Rybicki and Kasischke have done poetry readings on campus.
And in other news of Kalamazoo poets, Gail Griffin, the Ann V. and Donald R. Parfet Professor of English, won the annual poetry contest sponsored by FOLIO, a literary magazine published by American University (Washington, D.C.) Gail’s submission was her first ever “glosa,” a Spanish form of four 10-line stanzas based on a quatrain from another poem. Gail wrote, “I took some lines from a news story that particularly disturbed me and broke them into four lines of poetry. I’ve been working for a few years on poems and short prose inspired by weird, funny, or otherwise outrageous news stories.”
The contest judge was Martha Collins, a widely published poet who is affiliated with Oberlin College. Collins wrote, “I greatly admire the way [Griffin’s] ’Glosa: Man Held in Burning of Homeless Woman in Los Angeles’ moves through time, going back to Adam and forward to a ’millennium hence’ to elucidate a bit of news. The glosa form and a Genesis-inspired movement through the week are among the poetic strategies the author uses to create a richly-collaged reflection on the (gendered) need ’to love and loathe,’ as well as more generally disturbing aspects of our contemporary society.”
We look forward to sharing Gail’s poem when it is published in FOLIO later this year.
Kalamazoo College Raises Curtain on 50th Anniversary of Festival Playhouse
Kalamazoo College lifts the curtain early for the 50th anniversary season of its celebrated Festival Playhouse theatre arts program. Although the anniversary takes place during the 2013-14 academic year, the celebration begins May 16-19 with the staging of Into the Woods, the groundbreaking musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, produced in collaboration with the K Department of Music.
“Our history is so rich and our celebration events so numerous, we had to start this spring in order to do it justice,” said longtime Professor of Theatre Arts and Festival Playhouse Director Ed Menta, who will stage the show. “And we are thrilled to start the celebration with Sondheim’s masterpiece.”
Into the Woods will be performed in the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse on Thursday May 16 at 7:30 p.m., Friday May 17 and Saturday May 18 at 8:00 p.m., and Sunday May 19 at 2:00 p.m. Tickets are $15/Adults, $10/seniors and $5/students.
Professors of Music Tom Evans and James Turner will serve as musical and vocal directors, respectively.
This Tony, Drama Critics Circle, and Drama Desk Award winning show “helped change the ‘American Musical,’” Evans said. “Sondheim shows are special. They combine in the most masterful way, music, lyrics, and plot. Perhaps what I like most about his work is his ability to create multilevel meanings simultaneously.”
Into the Woods features memorable songs such as “Giants in the Sky,” “Agony,” and “Children Will Listen” sung by iconic characters such as Jack (of Beanstalk fame), Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Cinderella.
“And it puts a contemporary twist on the timeworn fairy tale ending,” Menta said, “What happens the day after they all lived happily ever after?”
Kalamazoo College Professor of Theatre Arts Nelda K. Balch established the first season of Festival Playhouse—with generous support from the Dorothy U. Dalton Foundation—in 1963-64, with a schedule of groundbreaking modern dramas such as Max Frisch’s The Firebugs, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and a revival of Balch’s own 1958 production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (the first time a college in the United States had produced this landmark Absurdist play).
Beginning this spring and running through the 2013-14 season, the College will celebrate and renew the original goals and spirit of Festival Playhouse with events that include: the grand re-opening of the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse; the return of internationally known performance artist and K alumna Holly Hughes ’77; “An Evening of Kalamazoo College Theatre Alumni Scenes;” a season of three classics of Modern Drama, including Strindberg, Ibsen, and a restaging of a rarely produced early Absurdist comedy from the original Festival Playhouse season staged by professional director and K alumna Nora Hauk ’04; a special “Talkback” series led by K theatre alumni; and much more.
“From the beginning, Festival Playhouse sought to produce provocative and thoughtful theatre by combining the talents of K students, members of the greater Kalamazoo community, and professional artists,” said Ed Menta.
“The 50th anniversary season will live up to that standard.”
Dates, locations, and more details about the 50th anniversary season of Festival Playhouse at Kalamazoo College can be found by visiting www.kzoo.edu/theatre.
Kalamazoo College (www.kzoo.edu), founded in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1833, is a nationally recognized liberal arts college and the creator of the K-Plan that emphasizes rigorous scholarship, experiential learning, leadership development, and international and intercultural engagement. Kalamazoo College does more in four years so students can do more in a lifetime.
Mill Art Features K Professor
Associate Professor of Art Sarah Lindley has an exhibition with her husband, Norwood Viviano, opening this month at Western Michigan University’s Richmond Center for Visual Arts. The show, set for April 25 to May 23, will explore the way industry affects communities and the environment.
Lindley’s sculptures, made from clay and handmade paper, deal with abandoned paper mills in Allegan County and their impact on the Kalamazoo River. She and Viviano became interested in the mills after moving to Plainwell, where they have a home studio. Viviano commutes from there to his job as an associate professor of art and design at Grand Valley State University, in the Grand Rapids area.
Viviano will display glass sculptures modeled after abandoned Detroit factories and their surrounding landscapes and may exhibit drawings from a piece in last year’s Art Prize competition in Grand Rapids. The two artists also plan to exhibit at least one collaborative piece that was in the 2011 Art Prize contest.
Richmond Center gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and noon to 6 p.m. Saturday in April and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday in May.
Works for the exhibition were created with support from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo KADI grant, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Directions Grant, the John Michael Kohler Center Arts-Industry program and/or the Peter S. Reed Foundation.
Lamprey Research Unlocks Secrets of Vertebrate Evolution
The work of biology professor James Langeland, as part of a large international consortium, was published in the journal Nature Genetics, one of the top 10 science journals worldwide.
Langeland has been part of the consortium working on sequencing and elucidating the genome of the sea lamprey (the simplest of living vertebrates and a species on which Langeland has worked for 16 years).
The title of the article is “Sequencing of the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) genome provides insights into vertebrate evolution.” The paper is the first presentation of lamprey whole-genome sequence and assembly. Lampreys represent an ancient vertebrate lineage that diverged from our own some 500 millions year ago. Scientists have studied the sea lamprey genome to gain insights into the ancestry of vertebrate genomes, the underlying principles of vertebrate biology, and evolutionary events that have shaped the genomes of existing organisms.
Langeland is the Upjohn Professor of Life Sciences at Kalamazoo College.
K Professor Wins Routledge Prize
Dennis J. Frost’s article, “Tokyo’s Other Games: The Origins and Impact of the 1964 Paralympics,” has been chosen the winner of the Routledge Prize for the best article published in the International Journal of the History of Sport in 2012. The article appeared in the March issue of the Journal that year.
Frost is the Wen Chao Chen Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Kalamazoo College and the author of the book, Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan.
K Undergraduate Poet is Up and Going
Winter term 2013 finds sophomore Kate Belew working as an intern at the Poet’s House in lower Manhattan. Another stop on the creative journey of this English major. As a first-year student Kate received the Nature in Words Fellowship at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute for Environmental Education (Hastings, Mich.).
“It is an extraordinarily competitive fellowship,” says Kate’s mentor and Kalamazoo College’s Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss. “And Kate made the most of the opportunity with her project, ’Voicing the Natural.’” According to Kate, the project sought to speak through the plants and animals she encountered during summer at the institute. “I planned to create the project using persona poems, inspired by Conrad Hilberry’s collection of poems, The Fingernail of Luck,” says Kate. “As I wrote, the project shaped itself into sections, and finally into a collection of poems that I named But That Was In A Different Life.” The poems are threaded together by Wild Woman, a voice of nature within a female human. Explains Kate: “I walked the trails, read books of poems, took notes, worked with Di, and took the time to witness what was happening in the natural world.”
Kate has also published poems in national magazines: “Prairie” in Outrageous Fortune; “Spoon Out Indigo” in Cliterature (on online magazine founded and edited by K graduate Lynn Brewer ’05); and “Yarrow” in the print magazine Straylight.
Cultivating Community
Cultivating Community is a first-year seminar taught by Associate Professor of English Amelia Katanski ’92. It’s a service-learning course that combines academic inquiry with a project rooted in a local issue or organization.
This fall, Cultivating Community students broke into groups to interview and photograph people active in the area food community for the purpose of creating a 2013 calendar titled “A Year of Food in Kalamazoo.”
Subjects ranged from farmers and farm worker advocates, to organic food vendors such as Bridgett Blough ’08, who operates her own food truck business called The Organic Gypsy.
Teacher’s Assistant Shoshana Schultz ’13 worked as a go-between for the students, Katanski, and the People’s Food Co-Op, the class’s community partner.
“The seminar engages students in a critical examination of national food justice issues and introduces them to local food vendors who face these issues daily,” said Schultz. “The calendar is a meaningful and active way to address food justice and for others in the Kalamazoo community to be part of the discussion.
Now a senior, Schultz took Cultivating Community her first year at K. “My first year completely framed the way that I got to know the Kalamazoo community,” she said. “I’m proud of the work the students did this year.”
The calendars are on sale now at the People’s Food Co-Op in Kalamazoo for $15.
K Professor Honored at International Conductors’ Competition
Andrew Koehler, associate professor of music at Kalamazoo College and music director of the Kalamazoo Philharmonia and the Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra, was recently honored at the 9th Grzegorz Fitelberg International Competition for Conductors, one of the more prestigious international competitions for conductors of all nationalities born after 1976.
The competition, held in Katowice, Poland, every five years, took place in three stages during November 17 to November 23, 2012. A selection committee, consisting of eminent Polish and international conductors and musicians, chose 50 participants from an initial pool of approximately 180 applicants. These 50 were invited to the first round of competition, from that 12 semifinalists were chosen for a second round, and from that, 6 finalists.
“I was the only American in the final round,” said Koehler. “We were judged on technical skill, our interpretative decisions, and our ability to work with the orchestra. It was a great honor.”
Koehler was awarded First Distinction, or fourth place, in the competition, with a monetary award of 10,000 Euros. The Krzysztof Penderecki European Music Centre also invited Koehler to perform sometime in the second half of 2013.
Yet a third award came in the form of Karol Szymanowski State General School of Music of the 2nd Degree in Katowice – the “YOUNG BATON MASTER” award granted by a Young Jury jointly to Koehler and Russian semi-finalist Stanslav Kochanowskiy.
K Students Will Benefit from Chemistry Grant Renewal
Professor of Chemistry Laura Furge has received a renewal of her National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to support continued research in the area of drug-drug interactions. She will conduct this research with undergraduate science students at Kalamazoo College. Adverse drug-drug interactions are common among individuals who take multiple drugs (both over the counter and prescribed), particularly among older persons and among individuals whose bodies express variants of drug metabolizing (drug processing) enzymes. The research in the Furge lab will benefit human health by adding to the understanding of how certain classes of drugs may interact in individuals and cause drug-drug induced unfavorable medical events. Furge currently has five research students working in her lab and has mentored two dozen in her lab and many more in her classes over the past 13 years at K. Funding from the NIH will help ensure continued research opportunities for future generations of scientists. The grant will provide $225,000 over three years.