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Five Lawrence University Students Win State Titles at Annual NATS Competition
No full textTory Wood won her third consecutive state title and Ian Koziara won his second straight as Lawrence University claimed five first-place finishers at the 2012 Wisconsin chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) competition held Nov. 2-3 at UW-Whitewater.
Wood, of Escanaba, Mich., shared first-place honors with classmate Anna Valcour, Burr Ridge, Ill., in the senior women’s division. Both are students of Joanne Bozeman. Koziara, Wheaton, Ill., won the junior men’s division. He studies in the voice studio of Steven Spears.
Also earning first-place awards in their respective divisions were Garrett Medlock, Bloomington, Ill., freshman men and Luke Randall, Edina, Minn., senior men. Medlock and Randall are students of Spears and Kenneth Bozeman, respectively.
Forty-seven Lawrence students participated in the competition with 16 of them advancing to the finals. In addition to the five winners, five Lawrence students earned second-place honors and five were awarded third place. The first-place finishers each received 125 and $100, respectively.
The 2012 auditions drew nearly 400 singers from around the state. The competition features 20 separate divisions grouped by gender and level. Depending upon the category, NATS competitors are required to sing two, three or four classical pieces from different time periods with at least one selection sung in a foreign language.
Other Lawrence finalists with their place finish, category and (teacher) include:
Second-Place Honors
• Brian Acker, upper college music theatre (Karen Leigh-Post)
• Alex York, junior men (Steven Spears)
• Graycen Gardner, junior women (Joanne Bozeman)
• Martin Kulstad, sophomore men (Steven Spears)
• Elizabeth Vaughan, sophomore women (Joanne Bozeman)
Third-Place Honors
• John Canfield, junior men (John Gates)
• Zoie Reams, junior women (John Gates)
• Joshua Eidem, sophomore men (Steven Spears)
• Kirsten O’Donnell, sophomore women (Teresa Seidl)
• Paul Gutmann, freshman men (Steven Spears
Author SARK Shares Her Passion for the Positive in Lawrence University Convocation
No full textAuthor, artist and inspirational tour de force Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy — professionally known as SARK — shares her infectious perspective on living life to its fullest Thursday, March 4 in a Lawrence University convocation.
SARK presents “Make Your Creative Dreams Real” at 11:10 a.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. She also will conduct a question-and-answer session at 2 p.m. in Riverview Lounge of the Lawrence Memorial Union.
With more than two million books in print, SARK is the author and illustrator of a dozen personal growth, inspiration and creativity books, including the bestsellers “Succulent Wild Woman” and 2002′s “Prosperity Pie: How to Relax About Money and Everything Else.” She’s also embraced the importance of creativity in her books “Inspiration Sandwich,” The Bodacious Book of Succulence,” “Change Your Life Without Getting Out of Bed” and “Eat Mangoes Naked.”
She has been profiled in the PBS series “Women of Wisdom and Power,” shared her passion for life in the documentary film “The World According to SARK” and is a periodic guest on National Public Radio. For more than 10 years, she has provided positive motivation via her own “Inspiration Line.”
A self-proclaimed recovering procrastinator/perfectionist, SARK grew up in Minneapolis. She studied at the Minneapolis Art Institute, the University of Tampa and the University of Minnesota, where she earned a degree in radio and television production. She makes her home today in San Francisco, where she oversees Camp SARK, a company that produces inspirational cards, posters and calendars
Lawrence University Convocation Features Cartoonist, Author Alison Bechdel
No full textAward-winning cartoonist and author Alison Bechdel discusses her life and career in the Lawrence University convocation “Drawing Lessons: The Comics of Everyday Life” Tuesday, Oct. 15 at 11:10 a.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. She also will conduct a question-and-answer session at 2:30 p.m. in the Warch Campus Center cinema. Both events are free and open to the public.
Bechdel’s work includes the groundbreaking comic “Dykes to Watch Out For” and the graphic novel memoirs “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic“(2006) and “Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama” (2012).
Featuring a cast of quirky fictional characters navigating life’s daily struggles, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” is drawn from Bechdel’s own experiences as a politically active lesbian. It has enjoyed nearly three decades of syndication in more than 50 alternative newspapers and magazines. Ms. Magazine deemed it “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.”
Bechdel’s national profile rose with the release of “Fun Home,” a book-length autobiographical work in which she explores her relationship with her closeted, bisexual father and his apparent suicide. It became the first graphic novel named Time magazine’s Best Book of the Year. It also was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, won the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work and has been a required text for students in Lawrence’s Freshman Studies course since 2011.
Her most recent work, “Are You My Mother,” complements “Fun Home,” with reflections on her fraught, complex relationship with her mother.
Beyond her self-syndicated comics and memoirs, Bechdel has drawn for Slate, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review and U.K. literary magazine Granta. She was awarded a 2012-13 Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts and edited “Best American Comics 2011.” Other honors include a seat on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary in 2006, a fellowship at the University of Chicago and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, which honors LGBT writers
Lawrence University Tubist Wins International Music Competition
No full textLawrence University student Trevor Litsey earned first-place honors in the recent International Tuba and Euphonium Association’s “Mock Orchestra Audition Competition” held at the Brucknerhaus in Linz, Austria.
A junior tuba performance major from Birmingham, Ala., Litsey was named the winner from among four finalists, earning a first-place prize of 600 euros. He later performed in concert with the North Austrian Wind Ensemble during the ITEA’s international conference June 23-30.
Litsey was one of 20 musicians invited to Austria from among nearly 60 applicants worldwide who auditioned originally via taped recording. The semifinals and finals were adjudicated by judges representing orchestras in Germany and the United States, including Carol Jantsch, principal tubist with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
A student in the tuba studio of Lawrence lecturer in music Marty Erickson, Litsey is the fourth Lawrence tubist in the past six years to win a prize in a major national or international competition.
On the heels of his winning performance in Austria, Litsey is spending July in Washington, D.C., as the only tuba player selected for the National Symphony Orchestra’s Summer Music Institute. He is participating in chamber music activities at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and receiving private lessons with National Symphony tubist Steven Dumain.
During the month-long program, Litsey is performing in side-by-side concerts with the National Symphony in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. He was chosen for the prestigious program based on a recorded orchestral excerpt presentation
Conservative Author Dinesh D’Souza Celebrates America’s Greatness in Lawrence University Appearance
No full textNoted conservative author Dinesh D’Souza takes on the critics and defends America’s unique standing as the “freest and most decent society in existence” in an address Thursday, May 20 at Lawrence University.
Based on his 2002 book of the same name, D’Souza presents “What’s So Great About America” at 7:30 p.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel.
Written in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, “What’s So Great About America” celebrates the United States, in D’Souza’s view as, “the best life our world has to offer” while taking on those who hate America, including radical Muslims.
Born and raised in India, D’Souza, 43, immigrated to the United States in 1978. After earning a degree from Dartmouth University, he served as the editor of Prospect magazine and spent a year as managing editor of the conservative magazine Policy Review. In 1987, D’Souza joined the Reagan administration as a senior domestic policy analyst.
In addition to “What’s So Great About America,” D’Souza is the author of six other books, including 1991′s bestseller “Illiberal Education,” in which he casts a critical eye on the state of contemporary American higher education. He has also written a biography of Jerry Falwell, “Falwell: Before the Millennium,” provided a controversial view of the role of race in American society in “The End of Racism” and argues the case why Ronald Reagan should be considered among the nation’s greatest presidents in his 1997 book “Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.”
Hailed by Investor’s Business Daily as one of the “top young public-policy makers in the country,” D’Souza’s writing also has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Forbes, Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly.
He currently serves as the Robert and Karen Rishwain Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, specializing in issues of social and individual responsibility, civil rights and affirmative action, economics and society and higher education.
D’Souza is speaking at the invitation of the Lawrence College Republicans, and his appearance is sponsored by the Class of ’65 Student Activity Fund, the Young America’s Foundation, and the Outagamie County Republican Party
Author Lynda Barry Brings Gospel of Creativity to Lawrence University Convocation
No full textAward-winning cartoonist and author Lynda Barry brings her message of tapping into your innate creativity to Lawrence University in the convocation “Crossing the Fox River: From Thought to Action.”
The third presentation in the college’s 2012-13 convocation series, Barry’s address on Thursday, Jan. 24 at 11:10 a.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel, is free and open to the public.
Barry has enjoyed a 35-year career as a cartoonist that began as an undergraduate at Washington State’s Evergreen State College, where she shared her comic strips with Evergreen classmate Matt Groening, the future creator of the TV hit show “The Simpsons,” who secretly slipped them into the school newspaper.
Along the way, she forged a unique path in the art world. Her weekly comic strip “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” which ran in alternative newspapers from 1979-2008, is widely credited with expanding the literary, thematic and emotional range of American comics.
A truly multidisciplinary artist, Barry is the author of 18 books, has worked as a commentator for NPR and written monthly features for a numerous magazines, among them Esquire, Mother Jones, Mademoiselle and Salon. She recorded a spoken word album called “The Lynda Barry Experience,” adapted her first novel, “The Good Times are Killing Me,” into an off-Broadway play and has been a guest of David Letterman on his television show numerous times.
A Wisconsin native who makes her home today in rural Rock County, Barry conducts more than a dozen writing workshops a year, including some specifically for non-writers in which she coaxes her students to find that part of the brain where the story-telling talent resides.
Barry has been honored with numerous awards for her work, including two Eisner Awards, which honor creative achievement in American comic books. Her illustrated novel “Cruddy” has been translated into French, Italian, German, Catalan and Hebrew and her book “One! Hundred! Demons!” was required reading in 2008 for all incoming Stanford University freshmen
Lawrence University Awarding Honorary Degree to Renowned Scholar, Author Martha Nussbaum
No full textLawrence University will recognize Martha Nussbaum, one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars, public intellectuals and an award-winning author, with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree Sunday, June 9 at the college’s 164th commencement.
Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, also will serve as the principal commencement speaker. This will be Nussbaum’s second speaking engagement at Lawrence. She delivered the university convocation “Global Duties: Cicero’s Problematic Legacy” in May, 2001.
Before joining the University of Chicago in 1995, Nussbaum taught at Harvard and Brown universities. At the same time, she served seven years as a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki, which is part of the United Nations University. .
As the holder of the Freund chair at Chicago, Nussbaum has full appointments in the philosophy department and the law school, as well as associate appointments in the political science and classics departments and the divinity school. She is also a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies and a board member of the Human Rights Program.
“Martha Nussbaum is a great defender of the liberal arts and exemplary role model for our students,” said Lawrence President Jill Beck. “She demonstrates how to bridge effectively scholarly interests with issues of the day and with the need for taking informed positions in our lives and societies. In Dr. Nussbaum’s case, she uses her knowledge of classics to generate contemporary political critique. I’m sure the graduating students will enjoy meeting her and hearing her perspectives.”
Among the country’s most celebrated philosophers and celebrated thinkers, Nussbaum believes philosophers should act as “lawyers for humanity” to address questions of justice, basing her work on a political philosophy of human capability and functioning that has both Aristotelian and Kantian roots. Her scholarship also has focused on the transformative aspects of the connections between literature and philosophy.
“As we tell stories about the lives of others,” Nussbaum has said, “we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.”
Award-winning scholar, author
A prolific writer with more than 350 published scholarly articles, Nussbaum is the author of nearly three dozen books, including 2010’s “Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities,” in which she argues that the humanities are an essential element for the quality of democracy. Her book “Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education,” was recognized with the Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Grawemeyer Award in Education.
She has been recognized nationally and internationally with numerous awards, including 50 honorary degrees. She was the recipient of the 2012 Phi Beta Kappa’s Sidney Hook Memorial Award, which honors national distinction by a scholar in the areas of scholarship, undergraduate teaching and leadership in the cause of liberal arts education. Last year she became just the second woman to receive Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Social Science. The award recognizes a person whose work “constitutes a significant contribution to the benefit of mankind.”
A native of New York City, Nussbaum earned a bachelor’s degree in 1969 from New York University, where she studied theatre and classics. She went on to earn master’s and doctorate degrees in classical philology from Harvard University
Lawrence Welcomes Author and Cultural Critic William Deresiewicz for University Convocation
No full textProvocative essayist, cultural critic and author William Deresiewicz presents “Through the Vale of Soul-Making: The Journey of the Liberal Arts” Thursday, April 19 at 11:10 a.m. in a Lawrence University convocation. The presentation, in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel, will be followed by a question-and-answer session at 2:30 p.m. in the Warch Campus Center cinema. Both events are free and open to the public.
Focusing on higher education, social media and other culture issues, Deresiewicz is a contributing writer for The Nation and a contributing editor for The New Republic. His weekly “All Points” blog on culture and society appears in The American Scholar.
A three-time National Magazine Award nominee (2008, ’09, ’11), his essays include “Generation Sell” (the business plan as art form of our age), “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” (what the Ivy League won’t teach you) and “Faux Friendship” (about Facebook).
“Solitude and Leadership,” an essay that encourages the practice of introspection, concentration and nonconformity he delivered as an address to the plebe class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2009, has been used as a teaching tool across the U.S. military, the corporate world, schools of business and at the Aspen Institute.
Deresiewicz spent 10 years (1998-2008) as an English professor at Yale University before embarking on a full-time writing career. He chronicled the transformative effect literature has had on his life in the 2011 novel “A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter.
Lawrence University Saxophonist Qualifies for National Music Competition
No full textLawrence University saxophonist Jesse Dochnahl earned a trip to the national finals of the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) Young Artist competition with a winning performance Saturday, Jan. 15 in the collegiate woodwind division of the five-state East Central regional competition.
A senior music education and performance major from Ennis, Mont., Dochnahl was one of five state champions competing in the regional audition held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He qualified for the regional competition after winning the state title last November.
Dochnahl, 21, who studies in the saxophone studio of professor of music Steven Jordheim, will join six other regional winners in Seattle, Wash., on April 4 for the national competition, where music division winners receive a 1,500.
“Jesse’s success in the MTNA competition is an important achievement, both for Jesse and for Lawrence,” said Jordheim. “The East Central Region includes many strong university and conservatory programs in music performance and since students from graduate and artist diploma programs participate in this competition, the level of performance is very high. Jesse’s strong showing in the competition is an affirmation of his fine talent and dedication to developing his skills to the highest level.”
The MTNA Young Artist competition is open to students 19-26 years of age. Participants in both the regional and national competition are required to play 40 minutes of music featuring contrasting pieces from two different time periods.
Playing alto saxophone, Dochnahl performed four works: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “In Friendship”; “Flute Sonata in A minor” by C.P.E. Bach; “Scaramouche” by Darius Milhaud; and “The Nature of this Whirling Wheel,” a 1997 composition by former Lawrence music professor Rodney Rogers
Lawrence University Historian Examines Paradoxes of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
No full textWas President Abraham Lincoln acting on purely moral grounds when he issued his famous proclamation that ended slavery in the United States? Lawrence University historian Jerald Podair argues Lincoln’s motivation was driven by more than repugnancy for the institution of slavery.
Podair presents “Back Door to Freedom: The Paradoxes of the Emancipation Proclamation,” Tuesday, Feb. 3 at 7:30 p.m.in the Wriston Art Center auditorium on the Lawrence campus.
Podair’s address is in conjunction with the traveling national exhibition, “Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation,” which is on display in the Lawrence library until March 5.
Podair will explore the pragmatic reasons behind Lincoln’s decision, examining the Emancipation Proclamation not merely as a moral gesture of idealism but as a war measure to preserve the Union by destroying the Confederacy’s capacity to make war through its most important asset — slave labor. Podair argues part of the United States’ peculiar genius lies in its ability to produce leaders like Lincoln, who understood that pragmatism and self-interest may not be paradoxes after all.
A specialist on 20th-century American history, urban history and race relations and the author of the 2003 book “The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hall-Brownsville Crisis,” Podair joined the Lawrence history department in 1998. Promoted to associate professor in 2003, he earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University
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