The Leading Edge

Events

April 28

The Holocaust and the Shaping of Israel: 7:30 p.m., Austin Auditorium, The LaSells Stewart Center. The best-known chronicler of Israel’s history, and early exponent of the “New History” in Israel,  is the celebrated Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev.   He is the author of many books including The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust as well as the award-winning history of the British Mandate period entitled One Palestine, Complete. Corvallis Mayor Julie Manning will read an official city proclamation to open the proceedings.

April 29

“Forty” (Scenes from a play on the Armenian Genocide): 7:30 p.m., Withycombe Lab Theater. Among the genocides of the twentieth century, the one most often likened to the Holocaust is the Armenian Genocide of 1915-16. While the Holocaust is the subject of a vast literature, including many films and plays, the fate of the Armenians has seldom been dramatized. Now, Leonora Rianda, a fixture at OSU for many years, is nearing completion of a play on the Armenian Genocide and we are pleased to provide a sneak preview as part of this year’s memorial.

April 30

Shared Suffering and Empathy: Incorporating the Holocaust into Sub-Saharan Africa Thought and Commemoration: 7:30 p.m., C&E Auditorium, The LaSells Stewart Center. In the same year that apartheid ended in South Africa, 1994, Rwanda suffered a major campaign of genocide. How have these and other African nations which have endured such mass murder coped in the aftermath? How has such extraordinary trauma sensitized African attitudes towards the Holocaust? Dr. William Miles, a professor of political science and the former Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies at Northeastern University will examine these topics.

Ableton (maker of Live, a unique music creation and performance software, and Push, a hardware instrument for playing and composing with Live) is proud to partner with Oregon State University for the Ableton University Tour, featuring student workshops and public presentations held on the main campus. Ableton software and hardware is widely used in contemporary music performance, and incorporated into the curriculum of music technology courses taught at OSU by Shawn Trail and Mike Gamble. Students are invited to join Ableton representatives and certified trainers for an afternoon of break-out sessions exploring composition, sound design, production techniques and performance utilizing Ableton Live and Push. Daytime activities will be followed by a free evening presentation, open to the public, featuring performances, tips and tricks, and unique approaches for music-making from artist/trainers Jeremy Highhouse and Nate Asman. Schedule: 11 a.m.:  Meet with OSU Faculty; 2 p.m.: Breakout sessions for students Benton 305A; 6:30 p.m.: Public presentation and performance, Benton 303. Free.

May 1

Remembering Anne Frank: 7:30 p.m., Austin Auditorium, The LaSells Stewart Center. Almost seven decades after her death at Bergen-Belsen, Anne Frank remains the best known of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, this owing to the diary that she kept while hiding in Amsterdam. On May 1, we will have an opportunity to hear from a Laureen Nussbaum (referred to in the diary as Hansje) who knew Anne in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, and is one of Franks’ last contacts still alive. She will tell her own story of survival, share her unique memories of Anne and Margot, and appraise the extraordinary legacy that is Anne’s Diary.

On the Trail of the First People: A Journey into the American Ice Age: 7 p.m., C&E Auditorium, The LaSells Stewart Center. Writer and world-traveler Craig Childs will share stories and images from his recent travels into the American Ice Age. Through spectacular images and storytelling, Childs will take us through Paleolithic landscapes from Alaska to Chile to Florida. For more information, check out the Spring Creek Project’s page.

Inequality for All (Film Screening): 7 p.m., Milam 318. A passionate argument on behalf of the middle class, this film features Robert Reich-professor, best-selling author, and Clinton cabinet member-as he demonstrates how the widening income gap has a devastating impact on the American economy

May 2

The Wilderness Act at 50: 3 p.m., Hallie Ford Center, Room 115. The Wilderness Act, passed in 1964, created the legal definition of “wilderness” in the United States and set aside 9.1 million acres of federal land to be forever protected from development. But the world is changing quickly, and so is the value of wilderness. How will wild places survive the next fifty years? Join Craig Childs, Jacob Hamblin, Lisa Machnik, and Michael Nelson for an open discussion. For more information, check out the Spring Creek Project’s page.

Upcoming Events

The OSU Socratic Club will sponsor a debate on the topic “Is Christianity a Help or a Hindrance to Sound Environmental Stewardship?” on Tuesday, May 6, at 7 p.m. in Milam Auditorium on the OSU campus.  The speakers will be Professors Loren Wilkinson of Regent College in Vancouver, Canada, and Allen Thompson of Oregon State University.

Current Research, Publications and Creative Activity

Literature faculty members Rebecca Olson and Tara Williams published “Reimagining the Literature Survey through Team Teaching” in the journal Pedagogy.  This essay, based on their experience team-teaching a Bacc Core literature survey, explores how an intensely collaborative format can make introductory courses more engaging and meaningful for students.

Associate professor of English Evan Gottlieb recently published the book Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750-1830, with The Ohio State University Press. Additionally, his latest column on literature has been published in The Huffington Post.

Associate Professor of art history Kirsi Peltomaki’s article, “Outside the Walls: Navigating the Sensory in Michael Asher’s Situations,” was just published (in French and English) in Tacet: Experimental Music Review, no. 3, in the special issue “De l’espace sonore/From Sound Space.”

General Music Education Specialist Julie Beauregard recently completed a term with the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Global Learning Community, for which she was selected as a participant. Participation led to substantial revision of an existing course to contribute to students’ global learning competencies through engagement with a cultural “other,” immersion in an unfamiliar musical culture, and other practices that broaden familiar pedagogies and repertoires that strongly represent western traditions. The enhanced course will be offered for the first time during fall term, 2014.

This past weekend, Dana Reason, director of popular music studies, was a guest performer in “Sweet Thunder“: San Francisco Contemporary Music Players Electro-Acoustic Festival. The festival featuree works by various contemporary classical and electronic music composers.

Shawn Trail, director of music technology, recently published his paper “El Lamellophone – A Low-cost, DIY, Open Framework for Acoustic Lemellophone Based Hyperinstruments” in the Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). (Goldsmiths, University of London, London England.) The paper follows up an artist residency he did at STEIM in Amsterdam, where he recorded an album that will soon be released. Trail will present at the 2014 NIME conference and has been invited to perform in the Princetop Laptop Orchestra on his instrument.