The Leading Edge

Events

Monday, Nov. 23

Cuba Study Abroad Information Session — Please invite your students to the first information session of the year on the Cuba study abroad program, which is sponsored by both the School of Public Policy and School of Language, Culture and Society. At the session, students will  learn about the exciting opportunity to study abroad for two weeks this summer in Cuba. The Cuba Program includes a spring term prerequisite course. Session: 4:00 pm in Strand Ag Building, Room 260. Visit the program website for additional information: http://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/slcs/cuba.

Tuesday, Nov. 24

The Oregon State University Opera Workshop will present “An Evening of Opera,”  in OSU’s new Learning Innovation Center. The performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. in LInC Room 128, 165 S.W. Sackett Place. The program will be Acts I and II of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” sung in English and set in a 1950s “Mad Men” era theme. The storyline involves Figaro, his fiancée, his boss, and a wedding day love triangle that makes his life complicated.

Actress and Director Amanda Bearse (All My Children, Married With Children, Fright Night plus much more) will be doing a one hour Meisner technique acting workshop on at 4 p.m. in the Lab Theatre, Withycombe 173. Bearse will also be speaking to TA 360, Multicultural American Theatre on her work in Hollywood and New York and about her public “coming out” long before Ellen Degeneres. The class meets in the Lab Theatre, Withycombe 173 at 1 p.m. on Wednesday November 25. All are invited.

Upcoming Events

Oregon State University will host a conversation with Joan Didion biographer and OSU Professor emeritus Tracy Daugherty at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 2, at the CH2M HILL Alumni Center. Daugherty’s latest book, “The Last Love Song,” is a biography of American author and journalist Didion. The book, which was published in August by St. Martin’s Press, debuted at No. 11 on the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction. “The Last Love Song,” is the first printed biography about the reclusive Didion’s life and career, a narrative that traces her life from her youth in Sacramento to her marriage and partnership with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and beyond.

Kenneth Runningcrane-Real will be speaking to the TA 360 Multicultural American Theater class on Monday, November 30 at 1 p.m. in Withycombe 173. Real’s talk will include his experience with his mother hiding him from the “black robes” to protect him from the Indian Boarding Schools and Native American traditions. All are welcome.

News

“Contemporary Japanese Prints,” an exhibit exploring the Japanese aesthetic, will be on display Nov. 9 through Dec. 1 in the Fairbanks Gallery at Oregon State University in Corvallis. A reception will be held from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Nov. 19, with a gallery talk by OSU art professor Yuji Hiratsuka at 5 p.m. “Contemporary Japanese Prints” explores the distinctive and influential Japanese aesthetic. A driving force behind this aesthetic is Japan’s appreciation of technical skill and craftsmanship. From fashion to fine art, the physical artifacts of Japanese culture reflect this dedication to creating precious and precise art and design, exhibit organizers say.

Spring Creek Project Internship Applications Due Dec 4 — The Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word is accepting applications for a Winter and Spring Term student internship. The student will work closely with staff to plan and promote events and gain experience creating outreach campaigns, hosting visiting lecturers, and building collaborations with students and student groups. The Intern will have special responsibility for helping to increase student engagement in Spring Creek events including upcoming climate change events in the Winter and Spring Terms.

Current Research, Publications and Creative Activity

Stacey Smith, Associate Professor of History, participated in a panel, “The Boundaries of Reconstruction,” at the Southern Historical Association annual conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Nov. 14. The panel, made up of leading nineteenth-century  U.S. historians, discussed new insights that have emerged from expanding the chronological and geographic boundaries of the Reconstruction Era.

Assistant professor in the School of History, Philosophy and Religion Barbara Muraca recent co-authored (with Panps Petridis and Giorgos Kallis) “Degrowth: Between a Scientific Concept and a Slogan for a Social Movement”, published in Martinez-Alier, J. & Muradian, R.: Handbook of Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 176-200.

Associate Professor of Creative Writing Karen Holmberg recently had a 42-page excerpt from her current book project, entitled “Shadow Self,”published in the online literary journal At Length. The project interweaves poems and lyric prose, and explores her family’s immigrant history and the reasons for the silence that surrounded Holmberg’s Swedish great-grandfather.

Writing instructor John Larison’s “Whiskey When We’re Dry”, a gritty, lyrical American epic set in 1885 that tells the story of a 17-year-old girl orphaned on her family’s homestead who dresses as a boy and sets off to bring home her outlaw brother, only to become an unlikely hero in her own right, was sold to Andrea Schulz, editor-in-chief at Viking, in a pre-empt, by agent David Gernert at the Gernert Company.

Trischa Goodnow, Professor of Speech Communication delivered a plenary lecture entitled, “I Know You Are But What Am I?: The Visual (non)Culture of the Selfie at the 6^th Annual Visual Learning Conference at the University of Technology, Budapest, Hungary November 13-14.

Associate Professor of Speech Communication Elizabeth Root presented her research titled “The Opposing Energies of an Interculturalist Identity” at the National Communication Association conference in Las Vegas on November 21.