Back row, L to R: Wayne A. Pederson, Ronald "Ron" J. Leaf, Linda R. Finley, Dr. Lance R. Wilson, Hon. William J. Garvelink, Michael J. Phillips, James "Jim" W. Burke, Jr., William "Billy" J. Golfus, Priscilla Williams, Wendy Williams Blackshaw

Not pictured, Eileen M. Lach and Raymond J. Tarleton

The CLA Alumni of Notable Achievement (ANA) program was created in 1994 as part of CLA's 125th anniversary to celebrate and honor the significant achievements and contributions of college alumni. All ANA honorees have been nominated by CLA alumni, faculty, and staff.

Of the College's 120,000 living graduates, approximately 1,300 have been selected as recipients. By honoring its alumni, CLA recognizes and celebrates not only their singular accomplishments but also the collective depth and breadth of their interests, talents, career paths and achievements in all sectors of society.

See a list of all CLA Alumni of Notable Achievment.

• Roberta J. Berner (M.A. '77, American studies), dedicated non-profit leader and advocate for senior citizens
• Wendy Williams Blackshaw (B.A. '82, speech communication), esteemed Twin Cities marketing and public relations leader
• James "Jim" W. Burke, Jr. (B.A. '82, speech communication), successful film and television producer

• Robert E. Engstrom (B.A. '55, interdepartmental), nationally recognized leader in sustainable residential development

• Linda R. Finley (B.A. '83, speech communication), skilled expert in organizational leadership and governance

• Hon. William J. Garvelink (M.A. '74, history), career diplomat and U.S. Ambassador
• William "Billy" J. Golfus (A.L.A. '68; B.A. '71, humanities; M.A. '89, speech communication), esteemed journalist, filmmaker, and nationally recognized advocate for disabled individuals

• Ronald "Ron" J. Leaf (B.S. '81, economics), innovative investor and leader in the Midwestern venture capital sector

• Gail E. Marks-Jarvis (B.A. '73, journalism), venerated journalist, author, and nationally recognized expert on economics and personal finance
• Eileen M. Lach (B.A. '77, international relations), respected attorney in the fields of international corporate and commercial law
• Marianne Muellerleile (M.F.A. '79, theatre arts), accomplished character actress of stage, television, and film

• Kimberly L. Olson (B.A., '88, journalism), veteran public relations professional and corporate executive
• Wayne A. Pederson (Bachelor '69, psychology), successful broadcasting leader and media ministry expert
• Michael J. Phillips (B.A. '84, theatre arts and journalism), nationally respected theater, arts, and film journalist
• John Risdall (B.A. '68, speech communication and humanities), exemplar of advertising, public relations, and corporate and community leadership
• 
Judith "Judy" McCartin-Scheide (M.A. '62, English), respected development professional and civic volunteer
• 
Raymond J. Tarleton (B.A. '48, chemistry; M.A. '52, mass communication), outstanding leader in the fields of plant chemistry and communications
• Joe W. Trotter, Jr. (M.A. '78, history; Ph.D. '80, history), distinguished scholar in urban, labor, and African American history and champion of public history
• Priscilla Williams (Bachelor '71, child psychology), successful entrepreneur and Twin Cities child care industry leader
• Lance R. Wilson (M.A. '72, sociology; Ph.D. '74, sociology), respected information technology executive




18316|18054 Wed, 18 May 2011 11:42:51 -0600

History professor Tracey Deutsch traces the evolution of the grocery store, and finds that food shopping is still hard work.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=243386 243386


Even with modern conveniences, history professor Tracey Deutsch's research shows that feeding our families is as challenging today as it was 100 years ago.

by Kelly O'Brien

Like lots of kids, especially girls, Tracey Deutsch spent part of her childhood Saturdays grocery shopping with her mother and grandmother. She didn't know it at the time, but those were formative experiences. Learning how to tell if a melon was ripe, or whether to buy a sugary cereal or take a chance on a healthier version that the kids might not eat, "I was being socialized into adulthood," she says.

Memories of those shopping excursions served Deutsch well as she researched her new book, Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (UNC Press). "Intellectually, I knew I wanted to do a book about women and the economic significance of consumption," says Deutsch, an assistant professor in the Department of History. So she set out to research the emergence of chain stores, and how they began selling their products at such low prices. But as she explored original source material she found a more complicated story.

Working for Food

In the early years of the 20th century, food procurement shifted from the products of one's own garden and farm, supplemented by nearby, often locally produced goods, to a retail/service model where (primarily) women shopped from peddlers, public markets, and stores, and purchased frequently in small quantities. As shoppers, women haggled over price and quantities, sought healthy food, and demanded personal service. They exerted, and were expected to exert, energy and authority in the process of food buying.

What Women Want

The concerns of women shoppers 100 years ago were much the same as they are today: What will my family eat? What am I used to cooking? What will give my family energy? What will keep? What can I afford? With all the demands women juggled to feed their families, it may come as no surprise that grocers routinely referred to their female clientele as, well, demanding.

Deutsch found no shortage of grocers' trade journals describing women customers in this way. And although grocers worried about a variety of factors, Deutsch says, "[they] justified what they did in terms of women's desires. They had changing ideas about what those desires were over time, but they always referenced gender in their language."

As the 20th century progressed, store layouts and display cases, product lines, and even lighting, were adapted to create a "housewife's paradise," according to a board member of the National Tea Company. These changes created a new rhetoric of "women's" desires that obscured women's individual circumstances and efforts. Never mind that women might be mothers or childless, poor or wealthy, working outside or inside the home. "They lumped all kinds of women into one term: women," Deutsch says.

It's Still Not Easy

The basic concerns about feeding ones family remain the same as 100 years ago but the political aspects of food shopping have changed tremendously in the 20th century. Many Americans have easy choices, with some neighborhoods boasting multiple supermarkets, specialty stores focusing only on meat or seafood or baked goods, and local farmers markets. Yet many people complicate their food shopping by embedding multi-layered, political decision-making into it. Attempts to buy sustainable or locally raised food require shopping in multiple locations. Farmers markets are open only certain days of the week. Paying attention to where fish and seafood are sourced requires research outside of the grocery store.

Food shopping is especially difficult for people in poorer neighborhoods who often have a harder time obtaining fresh food now than they did 100 years ago, when Deutsch's story starts. Today's "food deserts" once held countless stores, public markets, and peddlers but are now often bereft of sources of fresh produce or dairy.

And even if you can find a decent source of food in a poor neighborhood, poverty itself—living check to check or on monthly government assistance or the unpredictable and often low wages of service and low-end jobs—creates its own limitations on when or where you can buy. You may end up visiting the food shelf at one point, or even asking friends for food. Poor people are less likely to have the resources (large storage spaces, easy transportation) that allow them to make use of mass retail.

This finding, that grocery shopping has always been and continues to be laborious is one of Deutsch's biggest surprises in researching the book. "People from all walks of life feel that food shopping is an effort, is work, is a challenge," she says. And that, says Deutsch, is at the center of the story of supermarkets.

Lighting, layouts, and displays that encourage consumption cannot alleviate the essential struggle that women—and all people—go through to feed themselves and their families. Supermarkets aren't the "paradises" that have been promised; and yet people often understand consumption and shopping as fun—or at least a break from the sometimes intense power relations of the workplace. Politics—of all kinds—are obscured in mass consumption, but seeing the politics reveals new possibilities for change.

People who care about food and our food system can work to change stores and laws—just as the food system was changed by politics earlier in the century. And the first step, Deutsch argues, is to take seriously the enormous importance of an everyday trip to the grocery store.

18054|17337 Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:30:38 -0600

An Italian Jesuit's Chinese map of the world has captured the imagination of CLA's scholars of Chinese culture and history.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=243272 243272

Ann Waltner (third from right) and the Chinese reading group use facsimiles of different versions of the Ricci map to investigate its intricacies.

by Kelly O'Brien

"I just gasped!"

That was the reaction of history professor Ann Waltner when she first laid eyes on a Chinese map of the world, recently purchased for the benefit of the James Ford Bell Library at the U. Viewing it at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where it is on display before moving to the U, she was overwhelmed. "It was so big and beautiful."

Known as the 1602 Ricci Map, this six-panel, 5.5 foot tall by 12.5 foot long map was created in China in 1602 by Jesuit missionary Mateo Ricci. It's been called The Impossible Black Tulip thanks to its rarity; although about 1,000 official and 1,000 pirated copies were created in the early 17th century, only seven remain (see sidebar). Block-printed on paper, the map was created in panels that were intended to be displayed on screens. Paper is notoriously vulnerable to sunlight and environmental conditions, so the 2,000 or so maps were essentially designed to self-destruct.

Although purchased by the James Ford Bell Trust to benefit the University Libraries, the map is resonating through the College of Liberal Arts. Waltner is a professor of Chinese history and since 1987 has convened a group of grad students and faculty in a Chinese reading group which meets weekly. As a group, they read and translate Classical Chinese (a written language, the equivalent in English, Waltner says, of "somewhere between Beowulf and Shakespeare") in materials they are working on. Last spring, before the map had even arrived in Minneapolis, the group started a careful reading of digital facsimiles.

About those pirated maps

Ricci's diaries of the time described his bemusement as woodblock carvers worked simultaneously to create both official and pirate versions of the map. These rogue woodblocks resulted in those 1,000 unofficial, or pirate, copies of the 1602 Ricci map. (The contemporary practice of the Chinese consuming pirated DVDs perhaps reflects a long and honorable tradition of opportunistically propagating knowledge and culture from abroad.) When Wisconsin artist Gaylord Schanilec, a noted wood engraver and print maker, first viewed the Bell's map, his response was, "This was printed in a hurry." Could Minnesota's map be one of the pirate copies? If so, it would be the only known version in the world.

Learn more about the Ricci Map
See "Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits in China"

In fact, they started their reading with images from a different copy of the Ricci map, which made their discoveries on the Bell map much more interesting. For example, they could compare the text on the Bell map to other versions, finding that references to the name of God and the Christian abbreviation IHS were literally scratched off the paper. Why would that happen? As Waltner explains, the Jesuits were kicked out of China in 1735; after that, "it became complicated to own a Christian map."

What really interested Waltner and the group were the comments the mapmakers made about other countries. Those include direct observations by Jesuits and some Chinese and European folklore. They were particularly uninformed about Central Asia, Africa and parts of the Americas. Hence, while the area of Mexico, the Gulf of Mexico, and Florida are fairly accurate (the Jesuits had already been active there for decades), the area north of Minnesota reads, "No one has ever been there." Tibet is described as a place where "People here, when their parents get old, they kill and eat them as an act of filial loyalty." These myths and stereotypes are a mix of Chinese and European origin, and translating their meanings and origins made the group's work particularly interesting.

The Chinese reading group's work on the map is done for now, so they are back to their regular repertoire of reading each others' work on wide ranging topics such as transformations in the Chinese legal system or gender politics of the early 20th century. The benefits to its members are multiple: they get help translating their work but also are exposed to areas of language that might be new to them. But in their work on the Ricci map, they had the unusual opportunity to provide a service to the public. Some of their translations are on view with the map at the MIA through August 29 and will be featured in an exhibit at the James Ford Bell Library this fall, "Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits in China," which will also feature the 1602 map.

18054|17340 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:08:00 -0600

This summer former CLA art student Miles Mendenhall is a contestant on Bravo's reality show "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist."

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=242759 242759

Miles at work

In this series of video interviews Miles connects his success on the show to his experience as a student at the University of Minnesota and shares advice for others who are thinking about studying art.

Videos

Advice for art students
His University of Minnesota experience
On art history and reality TV
On the scholarship he received
The impact the show has had on his art
On the intersection of science and art
What's next for him

More

Attend a Miles Mendenhall viewing party
Read a Star Tribune article on Mendenhall
Visit the official "Work of Art" website

17336|18054 Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:34:40 -0600

On April 6, 2010, the College honored 21 alumni who have made remarkable contributions or attained significant achievements in their fields.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=233873 233873


Back row, L to R: Timothy M. Larson, Michael N. Ross, Preston J. Miller, Kathleen A. Brekken, Wallace Hilke, Paula M. Bilitz, John Vaughn, Paul Mattessich, William T. Bailey, IV, C. John Baumgartner, Jr., James M. Rosenbaum

Front row, L to R: Gregory M. Bistram, Linda Mealey-Lohmann, Ruth Mickelsen, Meredith Sommers, William C. Bonifield, Susan F. Marrinan, John Dregni, Robert C. Fransen, Burnham J. Philbrook
Not Pictured: Charles K. Porter

The CLA Alumni of Notable Achievement (ANA) program was created in 1994 as part of CLA's 125th anniversary to celebrate and honor the significant achievements and contributions of college alumni. All ANA honorees have been nominated by CLA alumni, faculty, and staff.

Of the College's 118,000 living graduates, approximately 1,300 have been selected as recipients. By honoring its alumni, CLA recognizes and celebrates not only their singular accomplishments but also the collective depth and breadth of their interests, talents, career paths and achievements in all sectors of society.

See a list of all CLA Alumni of Notable Achievment.

• William "Bill" Baily, IV (B.S. '80, economics), accomplished business executive and entrepreneur

• Dr. C. "John" Baumgartner, Jr. (B.A. '59, physiology), practitioner, health advocate, teacher, and researcher

• Paula M. Bilitz (B.A. '75, journalism), respected leader in marketing and communications

• Gregory "Greg" M. Bistram (B.A. '74, political science), accomplished attorney, mediator, and arbitrator

• Dr. William C. Bonifield (Ph.D. '68, economics), distinguished expert in non-profit and higher education leadership and community volunteer

• Kathleen A. Brekken (B.A., '70), respected leader in business and community involvement 

• John "Jay" Dregni (B.A. '57, psychology), veteran human resources consultant and community volunteer 

• Robert "Bob" C. Fransen (B.A. '43, journalism), distinguished pioneer in broadcasting and community volunteer

• Wallace "Wally" Hilke (B.A. '83, political science; J.D. '86), respected legal adviser and dedicated civil libertarian
• Timothy M. Larson (B.A. '01, journalism), innovative business leader

• Susan F. Marrinan (B.A., '69, law; J.D. '73), respected legal and business professional and community volunteer
• Dr. Paul Mattessich (Ph.D. '77, sociology), international leader in human services, social policy, and social research
• Linda Mealey-Lohmann (B.A. '81, East Asian studies; M.A. Chinese, '86; J.D. '90), leader in employment law, alternative dispute resolution, and promoting global understanding
• Ruth A. Mickelsen (B.A. '77, humanities), accomplished health care attorney and community volunteer
• 
Dr. Preston J. Miller (B.A. '66, economics; Ph.D., '72, economics), nationally respected researcher in macro-economics

• The Honorable Burnham "Bud" J. Philbrook (B.A. '69, political science; M.A. '81, public affairs), internationally recognized leader in public policy and engagement and a non-profit entrepreneur
• Charles "Chuck" K. Porter (B.A. '67, journalism), innovative advertising entrepreneur
• The Honorable James "Jim" M. Rosenbaum (B.A. '66; J.D. '69), nationally respected jurist, community volunteer, and beloved mentor
• Michael N. Ross (B.A. '74, philosophy and humanities), respected publishing executive
• Meredith Sommers (B.A. '59), Latin America scholar, University and community volunteer
• John C. Vaughn (B.A. '81, journalism), accomplished executive and leader in legal reform
18316|18054 Wed, 05 May 2010 14:30:41 -0600

Social media is everywhere. Many of you are probably already using it to keep in touch with friends and family, to share opinions, links, photos, and videos. Of course, some of you may also be using it for professional networking and job searches. The College of Liberal Arts has recently launched a LinkedIn site for current students and alumni to connect professionally.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=233602 233602

If you don't know about LinkedIn, it is the world's largest professional network with over 65 million members. You can create your own profile, stay in touch with colleagues, find experts, and explore opportunities. People use LinkedIn to find jobs, explore careers, learn about professional development opportunities, and more.

We invite you to join our LinkedIn group to stay in touch with other CLA alumni and to connect with our current students. Liberal arts graduates are creative, flexible, life-long learners. Share what you've learned and learn some new things yourself!

Do you know fellow CLA alumni who would like to join this group? Share the links below or advise them to search LinkedIn groups for "College of Liberal Arts University of Minnesota."

• Join the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) group
• Learn more about LinkedIn
• Set up your own LinkedIn profile
18316|18054 Tue, 04 May 2010 10:34:10 -0600

This past year many of you cheered and volunteered to support CLA and its students. Thank you! The CLA Alumni Society wants to thank you and to let everyone know about a new way to connect to other CLA alums and students: we've launched a LinkedIn group.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=233399 233399


Letter from CLA Alumni Society President Andy Trecker

Dear fellow CLA alumni,

As the 2009-2010 school year draws to a close, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to you who have stayed informed, shared your pride, and given your time or treasure to advance the efforts of the College of Liberal Arts. Thank you for being valuable ambassadors for CLA, the University of Minnesota, and the U of M Alumni Association.

The CLA Alumni Society enjoyed partnering with you to engage alumni and students in the success of our alma mater. This past year, the CLA Alumni Society sponsored social and campus cultural events such as:




• CLA's many activities during the U's "Ultimate Homecoming Week"


• our annual CLA Dean's List Reception and School of Music Concert;


• assisting CLA students in obtaining career development opportunities like major-related career exploration alumni panel events and workplace visits to area employers such as Target Corporation, the City of St. Paul Department of Safety and Inspection, and Northstar Resource Group (Financial Advisors);


• sponsoring the stipends for CLA students to help produce the Access Minnesota weekly radio program airing on nearly 40 stations across the state that often features CLA and University experts who explore topics relevant to Minnesotans; and


• participating in CLA's annual calling outreach to help the college welcome admitted students to the 2010 fall freshman class

We look forward to expanding our reach to more alumni volunteers and students again in 2010-2011. For example, in this issue of CLA Alma Matters, learn how you can help us build a new LinkedIn group for CLA alumni and students. Also, stay tuned for alumni engagement events later this summer and during the University's Homecoming Week this fall.


It's all possible because of enthusiastic and loyal Gophers like you!

Best Wishes,

Andy Trecker
President, CLA Alumni Society
B.A., Political Science - 1991

18316|18054 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:22:06 -0600

By Kelly O'Brien

The Dead Sea Scrolls, both mysterious and revealing, continue to fascinate Professor Alex Jassen. In an exhibition at the Science Museum of Minnesota, the public can learn more about these ancient documents that connected the dots between the Old Testament and early rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=222318 222318

On March 12 the Science Museum of Minnesota will open the traveling exhibition "The Dead Sea Scrolls." Organized by the Israel Antiquities Authority, the exhibition will give visitors the rare opportunity to view a small selection of the more than 900 scrolls.

Professor Alex P. Jassen

Professor Alex P. Jassen of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies has published widely on the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the 2007 book Mediating the Divine: Prophecy and Revelation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism. He is serving as an academic adviser to the Science Museum. Here he shares some of his thoughts on the significance of the scrolls.




What are the Dead Sea Scrolls?

This scroll fragment from the book of Genesis will appear in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World, which opens on March 12, 2010 at the Science Museum of Minnesota. This fragment depicts Genesis 48: 8-10, which describes the patriarch Jacob and his blessing of Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. Image courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The Dead Sea Scrolls comprise a collection of about 930 texts discovered in 11 caves in the Judean Desert of Israel beginning in 1947. These Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek scrolls represent the library of a schismatic Jewish community that inhabited the nearby ancient settlement of Qumran from the end of the second century B.C.E. until 68 C.E. The community's own writings are represented by sectarian rule books, works of biblical interpretation, and poetical and liturgical texts.

In addition, nearly 200 manuscripts of books that comprise the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) are preserved, representing the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain an additional several hundred texts composed by other Jews of that era; many of these texts were previously unknown or only available in later translations. These documents have rightly been regarded as revolutionizing scholarly understanding of the composition and transmission of the Hebrew Bible, Jewish history and belief in the late Second Temple period (third century B.C.E.--first century C.E.), and the background of later rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

How did you become so interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls?

While I was in graduate school at NYU, I was very interested in both the study of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and rabbinic Judaism.

For a long time researchers didn't have substantial amounts of data to chart the development of Judaism out of the Hebrew Bible and through rabbinic Judaism (as also for Christianity). In other words, we had two points on a chart and we had very few dots to connect them. In many ways, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide those dots. They provide a window to the transformation of Judaism from the world of the Bible and ancient Israel to the principle forms in which later Judaism develops, particularly rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

As such, the scrolls are such a fertile area for charting the changes and adaptations of the biblical world and understanding how these changes shape the developing forms of Judaism in the third century BCE and onward.

In many cases, I had never really even heard of these phases of Jewish history and I found it to be very eye-opening to see that there was a lot going on between the Bible and rabbinic Judaism. Not only was there this very vibrant world of Judaism, but it proved to be the key to understanding the bigger picture.

What else excites you about the scrolls?

The Dead Sea Scrolls are really a puzzle, both physically and conceptually. In reality, there are very few fully intact scrolls. Most of them are fragments, some as small as a fingernail. There were about 15,000 fragment pieces pulled out of the caves. These were not organized in any way.

In many cases, these fragments were part of books from antiquity that modern scholars had never seen before. So, they essentially were trying to put together a bunch of jigsaw puzzles, for which they often did not have the cover picture and almost always were missing most of the pieces. In the end these 15,000 pieces were put together into about 930 distinct manuscripts (i.e., copies of books that were once fully intact in antiquity).

Once you have pieced these things together, then you have to figure out what they even say--both reading the sometimes difficult script on poorly preserved leather or papyrus and understanding the ancient Hebrew or Aramaic (a few Greek texts also).

Then comes thinking about when they may have been written and why they were written. After all that, we can start thinking big picture and how they function as the connecting dots. My own research on the scrolls has been involved with all these different stages.

After all that, I have to admit as well that there is a certain mystique to the scrolls that also attracted me. There is so much intrigue associated with the discovery, publication history, and more that it is hard not to want to learn more.

18054|17338 Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:05:39 -0600

Tostevin will use his Imagine Fund grant to acquire 3-D models of actual flint flakes found in Europe for further studies Continue reading...

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=185427 185427

By Deane Morrison

Did Neanderthals and modern humans meet, and if so, to what extent did Neanderthals contribute to culture or biology? Gilbert Tostevin, an associate professor of anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts, tackles these tough questions by studying stone tools dating between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago, when moderns were replacing Neanderthals in western Eurasia.

"Some scholars say that Neanderthals and modern humans never met. We know that's not right," says Tostevin. "We know they overlapped in time and space, so they must have met." If so, they may well have exchanged techniques of making tools, such as the flint artifacts Tostevin studies.
But there's no way to tell who made a stone tool. Thus, it's hard to trace how the culture of toolmaking might have passed from one group to another.

Tostevin approaches this problem by reconstructing the exact series of blows used to chip a piece of flint into a stone tool. He does it by examining both the finished piece and the sizes and shapes of flakes chipped off the original block of flint. Since the exact method of flake removal varies from one group to another, reconstructing the method gives a valuable clue to patterns of contact.

"If multiple [archaeological] sites have tools made the same way, then probably they were in cultural contact," says Tostevin. "If the groups were culturally intimate, most likely they were biologically intimate."

The video is a 3-D model of the sequence of blows in the reduction of a piece of flint into a hand axe--called a biface, because it's two-sided.

Tostevin will use his Imagine Fund grant to acquire 3-D models of actual flint flakes found in Europe for further studies.

Excerpted from UMN News article.

LEARN MORE:

• Sounds of Silence
• CLA Imagine Fund award winners
• All University Imagine Fund award winners
• Imagine Fund news release
18054|17340 Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:24:00 -0600

Professor Keith Mayes publishes the first scholarly book connecting Kwanzaa and the Black Power movement.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=209386 209386

For most of us, the holidays we celebrate derive from our religious traditions, national history, or a specific connection to our culture or ethnicity. In some cases, it's a combination of two or more of those--think Italian-American devotion to Columbus Day, or the Swedish celebration of Saint Lucia. Rarely do we think of holidays being a response to mainstream culture. Kwanzaa, the seven-day celebration of "First Fruits," is just such a holiday.

Professor Keith Mayes of the Department of African American Studies has been making a name for himself in academic circles for his study of African American holidays. With the publication of his book "Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition," his research is reaching a wider audience. In fact, it's the first scholarly book to look at black holiday traditions as part of a greater cultural movement.

Kwanzaa is the best known and most widely celebrated holiday in a long line of black holidays that started with the slave holidays and freedoms holidays that American slaves celebrated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. January 1, for example, was not celebrated as New Year's Day by 19th century slaves; they were celebrating the anniversary of the ban on the American slave trade that went into effect that day in 1808, and later the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth is still celebrated in honor of the day in 1865, June 19, that slaves in east Texas received word that they had been freed.

The Black Power movement of the 1960s further influenced how black people expressed their experiences, creativity, and aesthetic within the larger national context.

"We see the evidence of Black Power's influence in the ways in which blacks began to reflect styles--they didn't have to conform to inventions of style, or white styles," says Mayes. With the corresponding rise of the Black Arts movement and Pan-Africanism, African Americans decided they had their own culture and didn't need to reflect the tastes and traditions of the white majority any longer.

A holiday of their own

This rise in cultural identity led to another movement Mayes calls "calendar politics."

In taking their protests to calendars, African Americans addressed their grievances by using established holidays to showcase their own culture. And so Ron Karenga, then a Black Nationalist, created Kwanzaa. As with other Black holidays created in the 1960s, Kwanzaa was meant to reflect the values and culture of African American people during a recognized mainstream holiday period, so Karenga determined it should be celebrated starting the day after Christmas. The name Kwanzaa is borrowed from the Swahili phrase for "first fruits," and this use of an African language not only in the name of the holiday but also in the names of its seven principles (umoja or unity, ujima or collective work and responsibility, kuumba or creativity, etc.) is due to the holiday's Pan-Africanism roots.

"This is Black Power in its most lasting form," says Mayes. "It's seen in the culture. People decided 'we'll create Black stuff,' and as part of this cultural thrust people could define what it means to be black, point to who they are. Reclaim their African-ness."

Kwanzaa has outlived the movement, Mayes says, because of its ability to inspire people. In its earliest years, Kwanzaa was a political statement, but by the 1970s non-political blacks were celebrating it too, and it began to spread among people who weren't into the Black Power movement.

Kwanzaa's future

Black holidays in the past survived only if their practitioners kept them going and spread them around. Juneteenth came north with blacks from Texas and is still celebrated to this day throughout the country. Black Solidarity Day, Umojo Karamu ("Unity Feast," an alternative to Thanksgiving), and Black Love Day (Mayes's favorite, observed on February 13) have not enjoyed the same widespread recognition.

The future of Kwanzaa could go either way, according to Mayes. By his estimates, 500,000 to 1 million people in the United States celebrate Kwanzaa each year. "We're in the second and third generations of people sharing and celebrating with their families," he says. The public observances sponsored by schools and museums in larger cities helps establish Kwanzaa in the mainstream--an ironic twist, given Kwanzaa's Black Nationalist roots. Like any celebration, people need to keep sharing it in order for it to grow and survive.

When asked if he's an advocate for Kwanzaa or an impartial social scientist, Mayes laughs as he says, "I would say 75 percent of me is an observer, a student of the movement. And the other 25 percent of me thinks this is a good thing."

Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition is available from Routledge Press.


18054|17340 Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:53:58 -0600

In October three CLA alumni received the prestigious Alumni Service Award from the University of Minnesota for their long-time service and legacy of volunteerism. The awards were presented at a celebration hosted by the University of Minnesota Alumni Association.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=206221 206221

Winners

Paul Meierant (B.A. 1994)
A graduate of the College of Liberal Arts, Paul Meierant has been a dedicated volunteer for both the college's Alumni Society board, and the Alumni Association.

Recognizing how his own liberal arts background taught him to think across disciplines to find innovative solutions, Meierant has become a champion for career services for students. In addition to serving as the president of the CLA Alumni Society, he has participated in many student recruitment and mentoring activities, and has guided several career development initiatives for undergraduates.

For the broader University, Meierant has been a driving force behind the Alumni Association' efforts to engage recent graduates, and its initiatives with Target Corporation to build community among University and other Big 10 alumni, and to recruit them as mentors. In doing so, he has given countless students a broad view of their education and the opportunities available to them for work and service.

Stephen Litton (B.A. 1965; B.S. with Distinction, 1965; D.D.S. 1967; Ph.D. 1972)
An alumnus with four degrees from the College of Liberal Arts, the Graduate School, and the School of Dentistry, Stephen Litton continues to demonstrate why he was the Alumni Association's 2006 Volunteer of the Year.

Despite a busy orthodontic practice and service in his professional community, Litton has served two terms on the Alumni Association's National Board, founded and continues to coordinate the Orthodontic Alumni Association, and is now president of the School of Dentistry Alumni Society.

He has been a driving force on two major campaigns, giving dental students one of the world's premier clinical laboratories; and created the Orthodontic Residents Endowment Fund to give students the opportunity to travel and interact with future colleagues.

Most importantly, Litton has passed along his own generosity and enthusiasm to hundreds of alumni, encouraging them to reconnect with the University for the benefit of the student experience.

Tom LaSalle
A graduate of the College of Liberal Arts, and founder and president of the LaSalle Group, which helped to develop many campus building projects, Thomas LaSalle has long had an impact on the University's physical presence.

Moreover, the care and commitment he exhibited when guiding development of McNamara Alumni Center, the Gateway Plaza, and the Alumni Wall of Honor led him to nurture the University's alumni spirit as well.

Since first being elected as an at-large representative to the Alumni Association; through his service as treasurer, chair of the finance committee, vice president, president-elect, and national president; and beyond in helping to make TCF Bank Stadium a reality, LaSalle has worked tirelessly to encourage fellow alumni to share their talents and join him in being ambassadors for the University of Minnesota, its students, and its mission of education, research, and outreach.


18316|18054 Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:52:27 -0600

Since November 2008, CLA's Career and Community Learning Center (CCLC) and the CLA Alumni Society have partnered on an initiative for CLA students to learn more about networking and work places through company site visits.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=206216 206216

Company site visits provide students a chance to see different work environments, to meet and network with CLA alumni, and to hear from hiring managers and recruiters within an organization.

In the past year, about 100 CLA students participated in company site visits. We have taken groups of CLA students to visit the Minnesota Timberwolves/Lynx, C.H. Robinson Worldwide, ShopNBC, and Target. The students met alumni, managers and executives within these organizations. All of these visits were a huge success and not only gave the students a valuable experience, but also connected employers with potential interns and future employees.

A Typical Site Visit
A typical company site visit usually consists of an office tour, a company overview, a panel discussion with employees, and additional time for networking. Employees might also talk about the value of a liberal arts degree and opportunities for liberal arts students and graduates within their organization.

Hosting a Site Visit for Your Company
We are looking for organizations that would like to hold a site visit for CLA students. If your organization would like to participate or if you would like to suggest an organization, contact Meaghan VanderSanden at 612-626-4482.

Learn more about how companies and organizations can connect with CLA students.

From our company partners
"Over the last several years C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. has built a strong partnership with the College of Liberal Arts that has included several student/staff visits to our corporate and sales offices in Eden Prairie. It appears we peak their interest based on CLA students' enthusiasm and attentiveness during these visits. Most recently, we hosted a freshman class visit and many of these CLA students interacted greatly by asking excellent questions regarding C.H. Robinson's business plan in this economy, our corporate culture and career opportunities--very impressive for first-year students!"
Cathy Anderson at C.H. Robinson

"The CLA Site Visit Program is a great opportunity to introduce liberal arts students to the Target Company. Students are able to gain knowledge not only about our opportunities, but also our company and culture by actually being on site for presentations, meetings, and tours."
Amy Capes, Target Stores


18316|18054 Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:36:23 -0600

Diane Willow opens up the auditory riches of the "seemingly silent."

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=185420 185420

To hear the heartbeat of a snail, to listen as mist condenses on a window. Our aural landscape teems with lost sounds, as far beyond us as the microbial world before the invention of the microscope.

The possibility of introducing us to these sonic landscapes in unexpected ways captivates Diane Willow, an assistant professor of art in the College of Liberal Arts. Her idea of rendering these sounds audible "is a poetic invitation to engage in the process of listening to the everyday in new ways," she says.

Toward that goal, she will use her Imagine Fund grant to buy a high-sensitivity contact microphone. Developed by researchers in Japan, this moving-coil microphone will open up the auditory riches of the "seemingly silent." She plans to use it to create a new series of interactive art works "that re-scale our sensory perceptions and shift our experience as we encounter these sounds while traversing public spaces."

The video from her recent exhibition in Beijing shows the experiential nature of her work. "Serenade," an interactive sound installation, responds to a particular architectural space and the movement of the people within it.

With her new project, Listening to the Silent Landscape of the Everyday, Willow will "continue to explore the interplay between the sonic and the tactile and their capacity to offer us a restorative sense of being in the present."

Excerpt from UMN News article

LEARN MORE:

• Axes of evolution
• CLA Imagine Fund awardees
• All University Imagine Fund award winners
• "Imagine Fund" news release
17336|18054 Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:54:47 -0600

Professor Ann Waltner uncovers the story of Ming-era Tanyangzi: visionary, mystic, immortal.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=184740 184740

By Kelly O'Brien



Shanghai Museum.
Painting of Tanyangzi

Some people read trashy magazines when they are bored. Others read comic books, or mass market fiction. History professor Ann Waltner likes to get out the dictionaries. And it was while browsing through a standard biographical dictionary that she came across a "tantalizing entry," that of Tanyangzi, a Ming Dynasty-era religious figure and leader of her own cult. This brief introduction was destined to send Waltner on a journey from Minneapolis to the deep storage of a Beijing museum.

Tanyangzi was a fascinating figure. Born in 1557 in China, she showed an early affinity for the Taoist religious practice of the day and developed a precocious devotion to the Buddhist bodhisattva Guanyin. As an adolescent, she stopped eating as her wedding day approached; she told her worried parents that deities were bringing her food during the night. After her fiancé died before their wedding, she asked her parents to consider her a widow and allow her to live in her own space in the family compound. Reluctantly, this was granted, and Tanyangzi, barely 17 years old, committed herself to religious study and teaching.

Soon she developed her own group of followers, who believed in precepts she said would lead to immortality: love and respect ruler and parents, prohibit and stop lewdness and killing, pity and cherish orphans and widows, tolerate insult, cherish frugality and be modest in your enjoyment of wealth, honor and respect words, don't discuss people's faults, don't harbor unorthodox books and finally, don't follow unorthodox teachers who are outside the Tao or who advocate certain sexual practices.

Ultimately, on the ninth day of the ninth month in 1580, at the age of 23, Tanyangzi literally ascended heavenward, attaining immortality. Documents from the era state this event was witnessed by some 100,000 people.

No wonder Waltner was hooked. Her research led her to a biography of Tanyangzi written by her father and another disciple shortly after her ascension. It was widely distributed and very popular, so much so that local government officials brought charges against the two men for spreading non-Confucian ideas. For hundreds of years, this biography and various letters written by her followers were all that was known about Tanyangzi and her teachings. But then a few years ago a friend of Waltner's was doing research in Beijing's Palace Museum. While researching the painter You Qiu, she came across a catalogue reference to You's painting of a woman with a collection of 51 letters attached to it. The subject of the painting was none other than Tanyangzi, and the letters were her own.

In the late Ming Dynasty it was common practice to collect and publish the letters written by notable men. Collecting women's writings was comparatively rare, and the collection of Tanyangzi's writings is the largest-known collection by a single woman in the 16th century. But what makes the find even more fascinating is that her own writings can be compared against the biography written by her father and disciple.



Palace Museum, Beijing.
One of the letters written by
Tanyangzi.

The unpublished letters have revealed a wealth of information on Tanyangzi's teachings and life. Some of the letters are farewell messages which impart instructions about the attainment of immortality. Others are ordinary and show Tanyangzi's ties to the world of mundane emotions--she consoles her uncle when her aunt is ill, she gives her brother advice when he has bad dreams. The letters, no matter what their subject matter, show her profound connections to her family and disciples even as she is on the verge of attaining immortality.

Waltner says a lot of people are at first surprised that a woman in Ming Dynasty China could be so venerated as a religious leader. In fact, Taoism has a tradition of young women transmitting texts to men, and Tanyangzi had many men of her father's generation as her followers. Westerners need only look to Christianity to see comparisons to female saints, who were not so different than Tanyangzi. "We are comfortable with female saints because we have always known about them," Waltner says.

The significance of the letters may boil down to what they tell us of the world surrounding Tanyangzi. "They show the flexibility of the 16th century Chinese intellectuals--that they were seriously interested in a woman visionary," says Waltner. "And they show us ways in which a young woman commanded authority."

Whether or not Tanyangzi actually did ascend heavenward in front of 100,000 people, she has attained a certain immortality; she lives on through her letters and biography, which today instruct scholars about the life of a Ming Dynasty woman.

18054|17332|17338 Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:36:12 -0600

On March 25, 2009, the College honored 16 alumni who have made remarkable contributions or attained significant achievements in their fields.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=182856 182856


Left to right: Carol D. Connolly, Steven M. Andersen, Evan M. Maurer, Steffen I. Magnell, Frederick “Rick” Stohr, III, Dr. Tim H. Emory, Linda N. Williams, Bruce W. Benidt, Thomas “Tom” L. Holtz, Mary S. Baumgartner, Mark D. Eckerline]

Not Pictured:
Dr. Cynthia “Cindy” R. Busch, Marilyn A. Chelstrom, Christine Fruechte, Jerome “Jerry” J. Meyer, Michael Phillips

The CLA Alumni of Notable Achievement (ANA) program was created in 1994 as part of CLA’s 125th anniversary to celebrate and honor the significant achievements and contributions of college alumni. All ANA honorees have been nominated by CLA alumni, faculty, and staff.

Of the College’s 115,000 living graduates, approximately 1,200 have been selected as recipients. By honoring its alumni, CLA recognizes and celebrates not only their singular accomplishments but also the collective depth and breadth of their interests, talents, career paths and achievements in all sectors of society.

• Steven M. Andersen (B.A. ‘72), internationally accomplished artist and entrepreneur
• Mary S. Baumgartner (B.A. ‘82, studio art), successful internet marketing and design entrepreneur
• Bruce W. Benidt (M.A. ’75, mass communication), prolific writer, teacher, and communications professional
• Dr. Cynthia “Cindy” R. Busch (Ph.D. ’85, communication disorders), dedicated teacher, researcher, and practitioner of speech-language pathology
• Marilyn A. Chelstrom (B.A. ’50, political science), esteemed civics leader and University of Minnesota champion
• Carol D. Connolly (B.A., ’52, architecture) , pioneer of design field and arts advocate
• Mark D. Eckerline (B.S., ’78), successful financial industry leader and advisor
• Dr. Tim H. Emory (B.E.S., ’75; M.D., ’81), distinguished instructor, researcher, and practitioner in the field of medical radiology
• Christine Fruechte (B.I.S., 1989), respected leader in the marketing field and dedicated University volunteer
• Thomas “Tom” L. Holtz (B.A., ’73, economics), national leader in commercial realty
• Steffen I. Magnell (B.A., ’68, economics and history), accomplished business executive and entrepreneur
• Evan M. Maurer (B.A., ’69), internationally respected arts leader and advocate
• Jerome “Jerry” J. Meyer (B.A., ’60, mathematics), early leader in communications technology development and respected business executive
• Michael Phillips (B.A., ’84, journalism & theatre arts), nationally respected theater, arts and film journalist
• Frederick “Rick” Stohr, III (B.A., ’70, economics), successful international marketing professional
• Linda N. Williams (B.A., ’83, speech communication & social welfare), respected financial industry leader and dedicated University volunteer




18316|18054 Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:37:08 -0600

CLA recently celebrated its spring commencement, and many of our graduates are facing an uncertain job market. Even some of us who wore our caps and gowns several (ahem!) years ago may find ourselves also facing this market.

We spoke with Sarah Jackson, Sydneyann Chase, Emily Scholtes, and Jaime Seeley, four CLA alumni with careers in recruiting, to ask their advice for job seekers.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=182850 182850



Sarah Jackson (history, 2006)
director, Client Services at Professional Edge, a CPI company

Three powerful tools can help you in your search.

1. Your Resume
Do not under estimate the power or importance of your resume. Think of your resume as people's first impression of you. It should convey your aptitude, skills and strengths while being honest. Your resume is a chance to detail who you are and why you are a good fit for the position.

Tailor your resume to the position for which you are applying. Give a clear objective and summary that details the skills and experience you have as they relate to that specific position. Be honest on your resume but don't be afraid to sell your skills.

2. Linkedin.com
Linkedin.com is a fabulous resource for a job seeker. With Linkedin you post your profile--essentially an online professional resume--and then invite people you know to be a connection. These connections can view your profile and recommend your work or refer you to open positions.

There are also thousands of user groups you can join, whether professional societies or the company site of your employer. There are a number of groups for University of Minnesota alumni.

• University of Minnesota Alumni Association
• University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• University of Minnesota Alumni Association, Phoenix, AZ
• Minnesota Daily Alumni Group

3. Your Fellow Alumni
As alumni of the University of Minnesota, the most powerful tool we have is each other. With thousands of new graduates every year, our reach as an alumni group is expansive. Not only will you find alumni working all over the world in a variety of industries and companies, but those same alumni may be hiring for positions or are fellow job seekers.

Don't be afraid to reach out to fellow alumni for help in your job search, especially new graduates and alumni in transition.

Here is a challenge for all of you alumni. Head over to Linkedin.com and join the University of Minnesota alumni group. Think about a company or job you are interested in and do a search for a person who works at that company in your target job. If you see a U of M alumnus, invite them to connect. Send a short message that details who you are, that you are a fellow alumni and what year you graduated.

Let them know you are interested in a position similar to theirs and ask them if they would like to have a cup of coffee or a phone call to talk more about how they got into their field and what they like/ dislike about their position.

You can be the most seasoned veteran in your field or a brand new graduate, connecting with fellow alumni is a great way to expand your network and your career options. I make it a point to connect with at least 2 new alumni every month. Challenge yourself to expand your alumni network, and you might be surprised what opportunities open up.

Sydneyann Chase (mass communication, 2007)
recruiting specialist, LSS Data Systems

Don't just tell the interviewer that you are a hard worker; but demonstrate that you are a hard worker by providing examples of specific past experiences where you demonstrated this quality. Providing examples, even when not specifically asked to do so, builds your credibility and helps distinguish you among other candidates.

In a tough economy, it can be easy to take on a mindset of "I'll take whatever job I can get," and then start applying anywhere and everywhere. This approach often results in hastily completed applications that will not get noticed. Instead, take the time to put together applications for the select few positions that you really want. These are the applications that get noticed by employers.

Emily Scholtes (psychology, 2002), recruitment specialist, Fairview Health Services

The best advice I can give for current job seekers in a tight job market or when a job search is taking longer than expected is to network. Networking takes time, but it is crucial in your job search. In times like these, there is definitely a sense of camaraderie--people are much more willing to help.

Jaime Seeley (French, 1999), a recruiter for ShopNBC shared these tips for new graduates:
• Use the career services at your school!
• Build a network - use LinkedIn
• Use your network to do informational interviews
• Get an internship to build your resume and network
• Join professional groups for fields you want to work in

Helping Recent Grads and Future Grads
The CLA Career Services has a number of ways you can get involved and help graduating CLA students.
• Post open jobs and internships on GoldPASS (See CLA Career Services' tips for establishing an effective internship program)
• Be a speaker at a career development course or event
• Assist with practice interviews or informational interviews
• Be a panelist, sharing information about your current line of work
• Let a student job shadow you for a day
Get the details at the CLA Career Services website.

18316|18054 Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:58:17 -0600

Reading 20th-century German cultural history through cinema, Rick McCormick finds that all roads lead to the Weimar Republic.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=169944 169944

Rick McCormick's first winter coat was, improbably, a gift from a gangster, in the 1950s. "I was a little baby sitting on the counter of my Italian grandfather's tailor shop in Cicero, a suburb west of Chicago that had been controlled by mobsters like the infamous Al Capone," says McCormick. "My grandfather wasn't a gangster, but a lot of Capone's gangsters brought their suits there.

"The story is that this gangster came in--Johnny O'Brian, whose real name was Johnny Aiuppa, who went on to become a big Chicago crime boss. He saw this baby, threw a $20 bill down on the counter and said, 'Buy the kid a coat.' Anyway, that's what I was told."

If the story plays like a movie scene, that's only fitting. McCormick, a GSD professor, has rarely been far from a screening room for two decades. In a sense, he's kept stories like these--and the real-life stories of his immigrant mother--playing in the background while he analyzes the work of great German and Austrian filmmakers in Hollywood such as Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, and Ernst Lubitsch.

For McCormick, German film--whether made on German soil or in exile--is an important vehicle for understanding German cultural history across the 20th century. Much of his research probes the connections between the cinema and politics of Weimar-era Berlin (1918-33) and the émigré-made films of classic Hollywood (1930s-40s)--from the film noir classics of Siodmak to the stylish comedies of Lubitsch to the varied films of Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and some 60 others). Other major interests are the films of postwar Germany, especially by 1960s-70s New German Cinema masters such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog; and work by German feminist filmmakers, from the 1970s pioneers Helke Sander and Margarethe von Trotta to the 1990s "lesbian screwball comedy" screenwriter Fatima El-Tayeb (Alles wird gut ["Everything Will Be Fine"]).

McCormick describes his work as "reading films in terms of how they connect to other social, political, literary, and philosophical discourses in Germany." The readings, in one way or another, almost invariably lead back to the culture and politics of the Weimar Republic, which represents a sort of idealized political and cultural home that was destroyed by fascism.

"It was this very bright moment in German history before the darkest moment--the first democracy in Germany, with a flowering of arts and culture and politics that was an incubator for a lot of what came afterward," says McCormick. "Weimar also is a modernist mecca that anticipates the 1960s and seventies in America and Germany, and that anticipates postmodernism in many ways. It's also where much of what interests me comes together--modernism, feminism, politics, film, exile, cultural hybridity--it's all there."

Personal connection
McCormick concedes his scholarship "has a personal anchor." He grew up steeped in the stories of his first-generation immigrant mother, who came to big-city America in 1931 from a rural Italian village "where her family had chickens in the yard and grew their own vegetables.

"That's the movie I would make if I could--my mother's immigrant story," says McCormick, describing how his mother, then a girl, started out from her small Tuscan village by horse and carriage and then-- a train ride and two ship voyages later--arrived in New York, through Ellis Island. "Then finally she ended up in a tailor shop on the West Side of Chicago, where she met her father for the first time--he had left his pregnant wife in 1923 to come to Chicago to make money.

"We don't think of Italy and Germany or Ireland as being very different cultures from America, but they were then," observes McCormick. "Even with my fourth-generation Irish-American father, you felt it. And with my first-generation mother, the sense of cultural hybridity was great. I would hear her going in and out of Italian with her cousins and aunts--she was foreign in many ways."

The issue of "cultural hybridity" goes to the core of McCormick's study of German émigré filmmakers, which aims squarely at the intersection of culture and politics with cinema. "I'm not just looking at the stylistic tricks and techniques Wilder or Lubitsch might have brought with them from Weimar cinema," he emphasizes. "I'm also looking at their attitudes towards politics and social criticism."

Many scholars have weighed the influence of émigrés on American cinema and culture, or "studied these filmmakers as German exiles," McCormick says. His focus is different. "They really have to be understood as between cultures. What you see in their films is that they're embracing and critiquing America at the same time. I'm interested in both how it was they made very successful Hollywood movies, and in how their work reflects their German roots."

From theater to film
McCormick came to film--and to German-- by way of the stage. He majored in theater at Southern Illinois University after first abandoning political science. "I thought I would go into law and politics," recalls McCormick, "but it was the countercultural 1970s, and I had a sort of epiphany--politics seemed corrupt and hopeless, the arts were my salvation."

In high school, he'd acted in productions such as Arsenic and Old Lace; now he tackled the staples of European and American theater. "I was nearly bald before I was 20, and I tended to get cast in stuffy bourgeois roles or else crazy or nerdy types--I was the henpecked nerdy husband in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, and the out-of-control guy in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story." As a budding director, he chose plays, such as Strindberg's The Stronger, that seemed to foreshadow his later interests in German culture and in feminism.

German, however, "was an afterthought," says McCormick. Good at languages, he'd kept up his high school German in college (having chosen German over Spanish and French "because it seemed the most macho choice for an egghead"). On the brink of graduation, anxious about going out into the world with few credentials "besides having been in a Ken Kesey play in summer stock," he was thrown an unexpected lifeline by his German professor--the chance to spend a year at the University of Hamburg.

The year proved pivotal. While studying German language and literature, he formed a theater group in his dorm, staging and playing the lead in Brecht's Der Spitzel (The Spy). He relished it all enough to earn a second B.A. in German and to enter graduate school
in the states to study German drama.

But there was a problem: "I was interested in German drama as performance, not drama as text," says McCormick, who had enrolled at Berkeley for his grad work. "If you're lucky, maybe a troupe in San Francisco will put on a German play, but in translation, and not too often. So where did that leave me as a scholar?"

Fresh in his mind was the "transfixing experience" of seeing Werner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God just before grad school. It was the heyday of the New German Cinema (NGC)--loosely structured films of varying styles concerned with issues of history and politics from racism and feminism to U.S. imperialism and Germany's Nazi past.

When other films by NGC mavericks began showing in the Bay Area, "they were a revelation," says McCormick. "I was struck at how much the films of Fassbinder, for example, were indebted to Brecht."

After he took a NGC course from Anton Kaes, an expert on German cinema, McCormick was entirely won over from theater to film. "In part, it was a way to stay focused on performance," he concedes. "Obviously, cinema is not just filmed performance, but performance is a major component." Video was becoming more accessible, "so we could replay scenes, do sequence analysis in the classroom. You could essentially page back and forth in a film, doing close readings of passages much as you would do with a literary text."

But most important was that McCormick had "fallen head over heels in love with German film, especially with Kaes's approach--film as cultural history." As a teaching assistant in Kaes's course on Weimar film, McCormick marveled at 1920s silents that were "as innovative, as beautiful, and as radical as anything being done by the film renegades of the 1970s."

Cinema and politics
McCormick went on to write a dissertation on 1970s German literature and film in the aftermath of the student movement in Germany. The long list of cinema-meets-politics projects he has tackled since then includes the first-ever anthology on gender and German cinema, which he coedited; an acclaimed book on gender and sexuality in Weimar modernity; and articles on such topics as sex and spectacle in a 1925 film by E. A. Dupont, memory and gender issues posed by West German film of the 1950s, and themes of rape and war in the work of feminist director Helke Sander.

Closest to his heart now is his work on émigré filmmakers, the subject of one of two current book projects (the other is on German feminist directors from the 1970s to the 1990s). In the work of cultural hybrids like Wilder and Lubitsch, "you can see sophisticated and provocative ideas that really are a direct continuity with Weimar," McCormick says.

Known for romantic comedies such as the 1932 Trouble in Paradise or the 1939 Greta Garbo vehicle Ninotchka, Lubitsch (McCormick's favorite director) "got away with sophisticated sexual comedy even after the Hays [movie morality] code became strictly enforced in 1934. He knew how to deal with American puritanism. One thing he would do is set his movies in Europe--Americans would accept that it would be risqué, even though he was clearly critiquing American marital relations."

Wilder set out expressly to make "commercially popular films in all genres," McCormick says. "These were highly successful Hollywood movies--American movies. Yet there's a sexual emancipatory openness in Wilder's films, a fascination with sexual pluralism, and a social critique that is continuing a critical tradition that starts in Weimar. Wilder remains anchored in that Berlin of the 1920s and early thirties that he fell in love with."

Although Wilder "can easily be read as a misogynist," says McCormick "he also has some very honest and real women characters. But the thing you get in Wilder that I think is most emancipatory is his attack on sentimentality-- his unwillingness to take at face value hypocritical American ideals involving traditional notions of family or romance."

One example, he says, is Some Like It Hot (the 1959 farce about musicians crossdressing to elude hoodlums, with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis). "Wilder here is deconstructing and undermining popular cultural ideas about heterosexual romance," McCormick explains. "The ending is this very funny scene in which the Lemmon character rips off his wig to prove to a lovestruck Joe E. Brown that he's a man. To which Brown replies--one of the greatest final lines of a movie ever--"Well, nobody's perfect."

Students in his classes "get the sexual humor and the critique, and they're amazed that a film like this existed in 1959," adds McCormick.

The émigré directors "love America in many ways, not least because it gave them refuge. But they critique it, too. With America's postwar communist witch hunt, many felt that what they ran away from had caught up with them."

Adds McCormick: "I believe that if they were still making film, they'd be critiquing parallels between the reactionary elements that undermined Weimar and things going on in the U.S. today. For example, they might see a cynical willingness among politicians to exploit homophobia and xenophobia today that is reminiscent of German politicians and anti-Semitism."

Devotion to undergraduates
McCormick has had less time for research since assuming the directorship of CLA's Honors Program in 2001. "I'm as passionate about undergraduate education as I am about émigré filmmakers--I'm very student centered," says McCormick, who was GSD's undergraduate studies director for most of the 1990s.

Honors, he says, "offers wonderful opportunities to students--small classes, a supportive community--not unlike GSD, actually." And, he adds, "It serves a populist function. It attempts to give high-ability students some of the same opportunities at a public university that they would have at a private one."

Of all his roles, the one he finds "most invigorating" is that of teacher. He teaches a graduate seminar on Wilder and Lang, and a course called Fleeing Hitler: German and Austrian Filmmakers Between Europe and Hollywood.

"I hope my classes help students become more sensitive to how films are made, to all the things you can do with film ideologically and otherwise," he says.

"Our society is increasingly dominated by electronic visual culture. I want students to be more than just gourmet consumers of it. If they learn to read film, they can learn to be critical readers of culture more generally."

Richard W. McCormick
Focus: Film studies, 20th-century German literature and culture, feminism, gender studies.

Education: Ph.D., U of California, Berkeley (German literature and film).

Recent Publications: German Essays on the Cinema (ed. with GSD grad student Alison Guether-Pal, Continuum, 2004); Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and "New Objectivity" (Palgrave/St. Martins, 2001).

Family: Spouse, Joan Clarkson, a social worker at an adoption agency; daughters Isabel, 15, and Susana, 13; dog, Inca, a 5-year-old yellow Lab/Golden Retriever mix; cats Sunflower, a classic tabby, and Violet, a calico with lots of black.

Home: A 1907 two-story Tudor in the Prospect Park neighborhood of Minneapolis.

Playtime: Running (six marathons in the last six years--"I started as part of a midlife crisis thing; it was better than buying a sports car or changing partners"); bicycling; swimming in Minneapolis lakes. Also, cooking ("Italian food is my specialty; I make a very good pesto and a good marinara sauce and a great chicken picatta").

Favorite films: "I can give you very formative films. One is Cabaret, as you can imagine. Another is The Ruling Class. Anything by Wilder or Lubitsch, or by Buñuel, Fellini, or Fassbinder; or Ottinger or Sander. I'm watching movies constantly--it's hard to know where the fun begins and the work stops. One favorite of the last few years is The Cradle Will Rock--it has revolutionary artists, émigré socialists, filmmakers, feminists, everything I like. Also, Frida.

Two thumbs down: "I can get something out of any movie. I'm not much for action films, though. I'm more melodramas, comedies--frankly, 'chick flicks,' to use a popular but ridiculous term.

17653|17336|18054|17654|17327|22952 Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:08:07 -0600

In France, politeness is staging a comeback.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=133417 133417

On a recent trip to France, a jet-lagged Daniel Brewer walked up to a shuttle bus driver at Charles de Gaulle airport and asked if the bus went to Paris. A perfectly innocuous question, by American standards. But the department chair was quickly jolted out of his jet lag and into the world of French politesse when the driver responded politely but very firmly: “On dit 'bonjour'.” (“We say hello [first].”)

Kicking himself for his forgetfulness, Brewer greeted the driver--and received the response to his question. “It's important to know that code,” Brewer says. “It allows you to establish a social link, an agreement.”

Politesse is a social code steeped in French history. But it's also undergoing a renaissance of sorts in some contemporary arenas. Polly Platt's book, French or Foe, tackled the topic of politesse in France and has remained a bestseller since 1994. People are tolerating incivility less, even as rudeness and brutality seem to be on the rise, Frédéric Rouvillois, author of the 2006 Histoire de la Politesse, told the New York Times. “There's more awareness that courtesy and savoir faire are useful and necessary tools in society,” he remarked.

Indeed, a quick review of recent development reveals that politesse in France has become more than an opportunity to scold tourists. It reveals otherwise hidden truths about a changing French culture. As the idea of Europe grows stronger, long-standing assumptions about national identity are being questioned with increasing urgency. In 2005, violence in the outskirts of Paris, the banlieue, dramatized serious social problems the government faces caused by immigration and the cost of French social policy. At the same time, nostalgia for a refined, civil, and above all polite society is emerging. Consider the following recent developments:

• The Hospital Federation of France began its first national advertising drive for politeness in public hospitals and nursing homes with the motto “Stay polite!”
• The Ministry of Transportation designates an annual “day of steering wheel courtesy.”
• A French reality show recently documented eight women from working-class backgrounds who were sent to a French chateau for a month to prepare themselves for a ball.
• Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë launched the first Paris Tourist Day recently, encouraging cab drivers and waiters to smile and even to speak English--and tourists to try French products.

Deeper meaning

The term politesse comes from the Italian pulitezza, the noun from pulire “to polish, clean up.” “So the idea is you're supposed to be polished,” says associate professor Juliette Cherbuliez. “Refined, shiny. Even today, you can't be born polite; you have to be taught. It's a system of social regulation that tells you what your place is.”

At the University of Minnesota, learning a country's code of conduct is an essential part of learning a language and culture, Brewer says. “Students learn the coding, the logic behind a culture,” he says. “It's what helps groups make sense of their world. Part of what we teach gives students a way to step outside their culture and reflect critically on another.” It's often useful for students to learn, for example, that the French equivalent of spouting last night's baseball scores might be memorizing and reciting poetry.

But faculty members don't simply frame the importance of politesse in utilitarian terms. They use it as a cultural barometer of sorts, a way of measuring cultural change and distinctiveness. Part of the French attraction to politesse, they say, may be its history as a culture steeped in social class distinctions. Indeed, in some French circles people notice whether you cut your salad or fold it into bite-sized packages. And in some families, adult children still address their parents with the formal vous, says assistant professor Mary Brown.

“The impression that I have had after a number of long stays in France is that even today French society is not as integrated as American society,” Brown says. “In most American circles, the preservation of traditions of behavior that set one group apart from others [in France] would be seen as elitism and not welcomed. In France, despite its motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité, the elite are not embarrassed by their position in society.”

Why the sudden surge in interest? Many speculate that with an increasingly homogenous, globally similar culture, clinging to things traditionally and uniquely French is a culture's natural way to protect itself. “Politeness is about civility and social control,” Cherbuliez says. “I'd speculate that [the current interest] has a lot to do with the feeling that people who are normally in control are less in control.”

It's even found its way into an obscure political party, notes associate professor Bruno Chaouat. The Parti de l'Innocence was recently founded by writer Renaud Camus. “It could be named as well the “party of politeness,” Chaouat says. It's a mostly symbolic endeavor; Camus isn't actually interested in launching candidates into public office. He is, rather, trying to raise awareness about the decline of the French language and the need to return to grammar and syntax as self-discipline and respect for the other.

History

“Some form of politesse has been important in France for almost as long as there has been an entity that we could call 'France,'” Brown says. “The cultural flowering during the late 11th and early 12th century that produced the first vernacular poetry was accompanied by the development of a code of behavior at court. Sociologists have suggested that this codification of behavior was an attempt to civilize the boorish warrior class (the nobility), although they disagree about who was the source of these ideas or why 'civilization' in this sense was suddenly seen as something of value.” The new bourgeoisie quickly adopted the system, giving members of the class a way to show that he or she did not belong to a lower class, she adds. In the 18th century, the age of Versailles, French etiquette started getting out of hand, says Cherbuliez. “It becomes insane,” she says. “Every detail is codified.” The 2006 movie Marie Antoinette offered one chilly example. In the film, Kirsten Dunst, playing Marie Antoinette, gets out of bed and is greeted by her ladies in waiting. According to protocol, two women take off her nightgown and wait for the highest ranking woman to hand the queen her clothes. But, while the queen stands naked and shivering, a series of higher ranking women enter the room, forcing the clothes to be passed around while she waits.

The French Revolution set the stage for the more democratic political tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries. The rising middle class looked for ways to distinguish itself through symbols that represented its identity--possessions, leisure, status...and politesse.

Global implications

Politesse, says Brewer, is “what happens when cultures bump up against each other, and you have to find mutually agreed-upon ways to negotiate the encounter.” With increased global migration, along with continued immigration from former French colonies, France is experiencing these cultural bumps more than ever before. Globalization may have triggered French concerns and anxieties over what it means to be French, but it is also responsible for the resurgence of politesse.

17657|18054|21285|17659|17326|17340 Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:14:34 -0600

By Claire Leslie
Global studies students raise funds for an orphanage in Honduras.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=162634 162634

By Claire Leslie

The Global Studies Student Association (GSSA) is a group of students in search of thoughtful discussion and social camaraderie. From the beginning we were connected by our common desire to promote justice on a global scale, to find solutions to current international challenges, and to take an active role in the global community. The outcome of our union was more significant than anyone had imagined it would be.

We focused our enthusiasm on a long-term service project to support Hogar de Niños Tierra Santa, a home for abandoned children in Villa de San Antonio, Honduras. GSSA learned about the orphanage through the administrative director, Jeff Ernst, a global studies alumnus. In a whirlwind of activity played out over the course of only two semesters, our student group raised $26,000 to donate and fund a service trip to the orphanage. We raised funds in a variety of ways, including holding a silent auction and working at nonprofit concession stands in the Target Center. Although we were all fulltime students and most of us were also working part-time jobs, we committed ourselves to countless hours of fund raising and to the organizing, networking, and planning it requires. All of our hard work paid off, and in May 2008 we traveled to Honduras.

During our two weeks in Honduras, we engaged in a variety of projects. Some of us taught English classes at the orphanage’s elementary school, and others helped with the highly energetic preschool class. A few hardworking individuals devoted themselves to organizing, cleaning, and creating a book checkout system for the orphanage’s previously chaotic library. GSSA students also helped out at the soup kitchen, or comedor, serving meals to malnourished children in the town. Finally, about half of the group worked on a deconstruction project that involved demolishing old structures and tearing out tree stumps in order to clear a space for the construction of a water sanitation plant. Currently all drinking water at the orphanage must be purchased; the new sanitation plant will contribute to the independence of the orphanage. It was thrilling to learn that the construction and purchase of the water sanitation plant was funded by the money GSSA had donated.

While all of our projects were rewarding, the most memorable and valuable moments were those we spent with the children. During our free time, we would play games, look at books, and chat with the kids. It soon became obvious that they desperately wanted someone to love them, to hold them, to listen to them, and to help them sound out the words when they read. One-on-one attention from an adult seemed to be a rare and precious gift, and they frequently quarreled over our time. Leaving the home was difficult for everyone, but we hope to maintain the relationships that we established with the children through letters and future visits.

The project was an incredible learning experience for all of us. We gained new insights and skills in the areas of nonprofit management, Honduran culture and society, Spanish language, fund-raising, group organization, communication, and leadership. What struck me the most, however, was the ability and speed with which we were able to accomplish something so significant. The outcome of this entirely student-directed project exceeded all of our expectations, and the impact of our work truly shocked us. We came away from this experience having learned that people with impassioned hearts can effect momentous change.

This year the Global Studies Student Association has re-formed and greatly increased in size. It’s encouraging to see students come together each year motivated to engage in a service project. Given the success of last year’s project, we have decided to spend this school year raising funds for Hogar de Niños Tierra Santa once again, and to travel to the orphanage in May 2009. We now have the advantage of experience and an influx of members who bring new talents, ideas, and skills to the project. Recently we have been discussing collaboration with the University’s agriculture program in order to better support the orphanage’s sustainable-farming initiative. Additionally, in our travels this year we hope to engage with United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and microfinance programs in Honduras to learn more about development in the region.

The Global Studies Student Association is an outlet for the energy and enthusiasm of global studies majors. It is where students who want to make a difference, to engage in international projects, and to experience the joy of bettering someone else’s life congregate. I have always known that my fellow global studies students are exceptional, and that, with all of their sincerity, they have the capacity to create positive change in the world. In working side by side with them in the Global Studies Student Association over the past two years, I have experienced that firsthand.

Claire Leslie (B.A. ‘09) is a global studies major and the global studies peer adviser.

To view the 2007–2008 GSSA blog, go to globalstudiesstudents.blogspot.com

To learn more about Hogar de Niños Tierra Santa, visit hogartierrasanta.org

Photo caption: Abdul, one of the orphans, with Amber Aumiller, a global studies major.

18054|17340|21598|19410 Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:30:18 -0600

“Where could I be in 5 years?" Last fall the Communication Studies Association (CSA) student organization held an alumni panel event to help communication majors explore this question.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=162536 162536




Back row (L-R): CSA students Rachel Brown, Mary Swenson, Erin Kroes, Christine Anderson, Alissa Maier. Front row (L-R): Nancy Peters, communications specialist, Fourth Judicial District in Minneapolis; Barbara Gaynor, corporate trainer, Boston Scientific; Lee Hutton, attorney, Lommen Abdo; Sam Chagani, product developer, Thomson Reuters. Not pictured: Darcy Pohlad, reporter, WCCO-TV News.

“Where could I be in 5 years?" Last fall the Communication Studies Association (CSA) student organization held an alumni panel event to help communication majors explore this question.

The CSA recruited six speakers, professionals in fields ranging from law to news media, with help from CLA’s alumni office. The alumni panelists shared their experiences with graduation, job searching, networking, and winding career paths.

Erin Kroes, a comm studies senior and president of the CSA, led the planning team for this event. “Organizing an event like this was new to me and the other CSA members" she says. “But we worked together as a group and gained real-world experience through the planning process. We had to set dates, find space, recruit speakers, coordinate with their schedules, and be prepared if things went wrong."

The event was a huge success. The alumni urged and inspired the student audience to get involved, be leaders, and network with professionals to stand out from other job seekers. “The experience has opened so many doors and allowed me to utilize everything I have learned in my major classes. This event gave us as a group the opportunity to help other students network and realize its importance in pursuing a career," Erin says.

The value of the event extended to the panelists, also. “Many alumni volunteers visit campus infrequently and don't know what to expect," says Erica Giorgi, CLA director of alumni relations. “These alumni volunteers were so impressed with the organization of the event and were delighted by the interest in their careers. Most of the panelists hung around to answer individual questions and engage with the students even after the event ended."

“The students were tremendous ambassadors to our alumni volunteers and the alumni seemed to walk away with a positive lasting impression—and a strong desire to help out again!"

18316|18054 Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:22:57 -0600

Economics professor Itai Sher links game theory and communication

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=159167 159167

The titles of Itai Sher’s research papers are simple. "Persuasion and Limited Communication," for example. Or his master’s thesis: "Games with Misconceptions."

Don’t be fooled. Though he writes with a clarity that is rare in economics, his work is intimidating in its technical sophistication. In one paper, the phrase "it is easy to see that" is preceded by long equations of numbing complexity. Mathematical abstraction is inherent to his specialty, game theory, which analyzes strategic interaction among players, so it’s a blessing to nonmathematicians that his writing is so lucid.

An example? "Persuasion is important in a wide array of political and economic environments," he writes in a recent paper. "People often argue over the best course of action, or attempt to persuade others that their own personal desires are really best for everyone. But what makes an argument persuasive?" The next 47 pages — including 16 theorems, 11 lemmas and proofs thereof — explore that question.

In his research, Sher looks at communication in which party tries to persuade a decision maker to take a particular action. "For instance, the informed party may be a lobbyist and the decision maker may be a legislator," he explains. "My research addresses the question of how the decision maker should elicit information from the informed party, and in particular the role and value of commitment in such interactions."

Sher is interested in auction theory, too, specifically "combinatorial" auctions where bidders can bid on packages of items. He’s also exploring "boundedly-rational decision making," which is to say, the process that most humans engage in. Unlike most economists, who study math, engineering, or economics as undergraduates, Sher was a philosophy major, and his interests reflect that.

Why is Sher at Minnesota? "Because research is taken so seriously here," he says. "Let me give you an example." In January 2007, his Ph.D. from Northwestern almost in hand, Sher endured job market interviews at the American Economics Association annual meeting — a rite of passage for grad students. "Only at Minnesota’s interview was I asked to rigorously present the assumptions and details of my model," he recalls. "Minnesota was the only school that actually had a whiteboard that would allow one to write down equations and derive conclusions."

His equations were impressive. Minnesota made an offer. "And since I have been here" he says "that seriousness about and enthusiasm for economic research has been constantly in evidence."


17414|18054|17423|17413|17417 Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:34:01 -0600

by Danny Lachance

Singing and smelting, Ray Wakefield has been sharing with students his passion for language, history, and culture for nearly 40 years

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=156800 156800



For many years, Minnesota's Dutch program hosted an annual visitor from the Netherlands, an up-and-coming young author who would spend the year teaching and writing in the Twin Cities. And every year Ray Wakefield, associate professor of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, would give the visitor a quintessentially Minnesota experience by taking the writer up to his cabin on the North Shore in April for the annual smelt run--a massive migration of tiny fish along the streams that run into Lake Superior. Standing in a frigid stream late at night and hoisting a net teeming with fish out of icy water--what could be more Minnesotan than that?

One year, Wakefield ruptured his Achilles tendon in a volleyball game several weeks before the smelt run. He never even considered canceling the trip--or the end-of-the-school-year fish fry that traditionally followed it. So there he was, wading into the icy spring water at midnight in a full leg cast, showing a Dutchman how to position his net to catch the smelt. "One of the graduate students was with us, and every time my crutch would fall out from under me and begin to float away, she would run and grab it and bring it back to me," Wakefield recalls, laughing.

A newcomer to Minnesota in 1969, he founded the Dutch program in 1970, which was, and still is, one of just a handful in the country. Under his stewardship, the program grew into one of the largest and best known in the nation. The Dutch writers he brought to campus put Minnesota on the map for Dutch readers. "The experiences these writers had [in Minnesota] would show up in novels, books, essays. Dutch readers know more about Minnesota than we would think," Wakefield says.

A teacher of language, history, and culture, he has been a force behind significant developments.

A decade into his career here, he headed a task force that overhauled foreign language instruction at the University. Collaborating with both federal initiatives and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Wakefield helped to implement at Minnesota nationwide standards for better assessment of students' proficiency in foreign languages. Proficiency tests, he explains, put everyone--University faculty members, high school teachers, prospective employers--on the same page when it came to evaluating a student.

He also pushed for a shift toward a more communication-based teaching of language. It's a way of teaching languages that seems vKlaas van der Sanden dryly describes it as "thinking that one might actually learn how to use the language in real-life situations, instead of by going through grammar rules in meaningless exercises, like a thousand versions of 'Father's pipe is made of clay.' " Thirty years ago, though, it represented a departure from established methods.

For Wakefield himself, nothing quite compares to the thrill of teaching students about medieval culture. His courses, he says, are aimed at replacing students' romanticized ideas about knights in shining armor and damsels in distress with a complex picture of a radically different way of life.

To understand the period, Wakefield tells his students, you have to see the world through a perspective that is so foreign to us that it's difficult to inhabit. For instance, medieval culture is steeped in communal rather than personal identity--a fact that alters ideas about something as fundamental as justice.

Sexually assaulting a married woman of noble birth, for example, was a criminal act not because it violated the dignity of the victim, but because it incited large-scale acts of violence. "The rights of the women involved aren't mentioned at all," Wakefield says of medieval transcripts of judicial proceedings. "The disturbance of the communal peace of the kingdom is the key. Not the individuals--that's insignificant. It's the fact that the king's knights are killed, that a melee has erupted, that the peace is disturbed."

To get students to understand this and other values of the Middle Ages, Wakefield shows his classes films that capture the period's idiosyncrasies, like the French film Perceval le Gallois, in which characters communicate using stylized gestures and appear taller than trees, as they do in medieval manuscript illuminations.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail makes the cut as well. Buried in its silliness are rich allusions to medieval culture that reflect the scholarly background of the film's creators. "Almost everything in the film that seems too outrageous to be true ties into the studies of the authors at Cambridge and Oxford," Wakefield says.

Once his students have analyzed these intelligent portrayals of the Middle Ages, Wakefield turns the tables on them and asks them to write and produce a scene that could be added to one of the films. They then have to show the scene to the class and write an analysis explaining how their historical knowledge informed the decisions they made, from plot to camera angles.

The assignment, he says, leads to historical research and more sophisticated analysis than a project in which students merely analyze an existing text. Writing and filming a scene requires them to consider the relevance of every detail--every location, prop, line, and gesture has to fit into the analysis of the Middle Ages the students are presenting.

The results, he says, are inspiring--and voluminous. "I have to put limits on the analysis, because some of these students would write a small book," Wakefield says.
But getting carried away by the material is part of the learning process. As his students will attest, he himself is not afraid to go out on a limb at times to capture their attention.

A few years back, he was teaching a class on medieval poetry as part of his German Civilization and Culture course. He wanted the students to hear the distinctive beauty of sounds from a mystic poem of the period: the reduction of every line in the poem to one scintillating, rhyming syllable, the majestic sense of repetition that captured his imagination decades ago when he was a first-semester graduate student. And so, on a whim, he closed his eyes, took a breath, and began to recite aloud.

When he finished, he opened his eyes to a sea of faces with their mouths agape. He was so caught up in the beauty of the poem that he didn't notice how shocked the students were, unaccustomed to seeing their professors burst into sonorous recitation.

He thinks that moment in the class had something to do with the comment he received on his student evaluations at the end of the semester--perhaps the most memorable comment he's received from a student in his 39 years of teaching at Minnesota.

"The student said, 'It was really intense. I thought sometimes his head would explode,' " Wakefield recalls, laughing. "And I thought, 'Maybe I should cut down a little bit.' "

Luckily for his students and his colleagues, that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

20792|18054|17654|17327|17341 Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:08:43 -0600

Graduate student Jonneke Koomen investigates the global politics of human rights.
By Susie Eaton Hopper

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=154596 154596


Would the accused be found guilty or innocent? Her instincts were taking her to more subtle matters. Where was the defendant seated? How was the witness being treated? Those practices, formal and informal, put a thought in her head that wouldn't go away. Those court processes were the perfect way to study power.

Her idea would soon propel the University of Minnesota Ph.D. candidate to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, and to study global governance and gender and women's rights with the Maasai in remote parts of Tanzania.

Born and raised in Oxford, England, Koomen was named top student in her undergraduate program at the University of Warwick, where she graduated with a B.A. in politics and international studies in 2000. Her adviser saw a bigger future for Koomen and recommended graduate schools, including the University of Minnesota.

Koomen laughs that she had to get out a map to locate the state before she researched the renowned Minnesota programs. She took the Graduate Record Exam, her first multiple-choice test, and applied for a scholarship. A late-night call from a man with an American accent let her know she'd been accepted. After a week-long stay on campus, during which she attended both graduate and undergraduate classes, she was knocked out by "how coherent the program here was. Everyone knew one another and they were talking about issues," Koomen says. "The professors were very involved with the graduate students." The land grant institution left an immediate impression. Even the warnings about cruel winters didn't scare her off.

Arrivals & Departures

Soon she was on campus, meeting amazing peers and professors, working as a teaching assistant, and immersing herself in her studies. She was not only studying politics, she was also becoming an activist. Her passion for politics led her to campaign for the access-to-education movement, the Equal Access Coalition, the graduate union, and the campaign to keep General College. She excelled in classes and thrived on research; it paid off handsomely when she won several travel grants and fellowships, starting in 2002.

With the help of several professors, Koomen found funding to go to West Africa for the first time in the summer of 2005; she worked as a visiting researcher at the ICTR. A string of other fellowships from the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and the political science department, including an Efimenco Fellowship, have enabled her to return each year.

To prepare for the war-crimes tribunal research, Koomen had to learn some qualitative practices, quickly. Dan Kelliher, one of her political science professors, told her she'd have to conduct interviews at places where she was very uncomfortable. An emergency room near campus and a local gym provided plenty of practice.

She took basic Swahili at a community college in St. Paul. She read everything she could get her hands on about the tribunal, including many journalistic accounts. U of M workshops on "Gender in International Context" led by Dr. Karen Brown infused Koomen with knowledge about research and collaboration that continues to influence her methods.

Her mother had friends in Tanzania through her Baha'i faith, so Koomen knew she would meet host families with ties to her own. "I didn't know a single person in Tanzania, and now I have a family,'' she says.

Arriving at the ICTR, Koomen focused on a group that was not commonly studied, the translators who prepare witnesses and victims to take the stand and who translate the proceedings. These hearings were conducted to take seriously the sexual violence during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Many victims and witnesses have had to tell their stories countless times over the years.

Koomen detailed one witness's testimony in her paper, "Human Rights and Human Suffering: Retelling Violence at the International Criminal Tribune for Rwanda" (as told through the interpreter): "I'd like to tell you this: during the war I was a witness to things. But I cannot recount what I saw as if I was reciting a poem. I'd like to tell you this: at the cathedral we were attacked twice. . . . Now I'm telling you about the genocide. I am not . . . recounting the story of a wedding."

The translators reported feeling numb, being sickened by accounts of the violence and genocide, and feeling responsible for repeated suffering from the forced retelling. They also were keenly aware of the problems of translating the official court languages, English and French, and the witnesses' language, Kinyarwanda. They told Koomen that officials never helped the survivors left behind in the genocide. Watching the hearings sent her thoughts back to the Hennepin County courtroom where she had watched gestures, nuances, and official behaviors play out in detail. This time she was watching a courtroom scene on an international stage. The witnesses were strangers in a strange land, flown to Arusha, dressed for court, moved from their homeland to an invasive, intense environment that forced them to recall the horrors of the past.

The next summer, Koomen returned to the tribunals and started her research following Aang Serian, an independent, nonprofit non-governmental organization started by Maasai youth that is dedicated to preserving indigenous traditions and knowledge in villages in northern Tanzania. International efforts and grassroots activists collaborated on promoting other rites of passage as alternatives to the genital cutting of Maasai girls. Informal village groups discussed how to be a woman in modern society. Older women who had previously performed the cutting procedures were retrained to be non-circumcision educators in the community.

Between the Global and the Local

"It hit home that global politics doesn't happen somewhere 'up there,'" Koomen says. "It happens in the village meetings--human rights, women's rights--even if they don't use that language." The experience of seeing global politics taking place before her eyes fueled her dissertation, "Between the Global and the Local: Women, Gender and Global Governance."

She ate meals of ugali, rice, goat, and chai with Maasai women. She hung out with children, some of whom were able to translate for her because they were learning English in school.

The Aang Serian activists "face tremendous obstacles, but their achievements are remarkable,'' Koomen says-especially in building schools and educating the villagers on health issues like AIDS. She and the director, Lesikar Ole Ngila, who is also a local leader, became friends. His insistence on eating food "without petrol'' influenced Koomen greatly. Now back in Minnesota, she has planted a garden and shops for food at a co-op. Her relationship with Ole Ngila led him to visit Minnesota last year.

Koomen will get her Ph.D. this fall and has no doubt that she will continue to teach, the thing she loves most, while continuing to research and write. She stresses to students that education is not just about books--it's also about talking to people and interacting with the world. She wants to pass on the support she's gotten from the University. "This was a place where I knew I would learn a lot,'' Koomen says. "I just didn't know how much.'

18054|17340|20862|20525|20527 Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:57:35 -0600

The College of Liberal Arts is expanding its religious studies program beginning fall 2008. Cal Roetzel, co-chair of the Religious Studies Working Group and professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, discusses the revised program. Continue reading…

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=134858 134858

How will the expanded program be different?

We've had a religious studies major for more than a decade. The current major, part of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, focuses on biblical and ancient Mediterranean religions. While these subjects provide an important base for studying religion, we've developed a more comprehensive major program. It emphasizes the breadth and depth of the academic study of religion across traditions and time periods. It draws more deeply on the faculty resources already available across the college.

The expanded program in religious studies recognizes the vital part that religion has played in almost all cultures and civilizations of times past and that it continues to play in the contemporary world.

What was the impetus to expand the religious studies program? Why is it important to students and to the broad community?

Given the reality of the post-9/11 world and the turmoil that a lack of understanding and dialogue among religious groups has brought in various war-torn parts of the globe, understanding different religious perspectives has become necessary for responsible world citizenship.

In addition, by providing courses in a broad range of traditions, the religious studies program can better serve our students, who, of course, are increasingly diverse. Native Americans, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, who have had fewer options for studying these religions, will be better served by the new program. At the same time we will continue provide the study options we have had in Christian/Jewish traditions and history. We hope to eventually have options for the academic study of shamanistic religions like those practiced by some Hmong students and their families.

Students from communities in diaspora are particularly interested in their inherited traditions, precisely because they are not connected to the types of community structures that would naturally pass along information on cultural traditions. Furthermore, courses addressing the historical and contemporary multiformities of Christianity and Judaism can serve students from these backgrounds who are equally curious about their inherited traditions.

What is the mission of the revised Religious Studies Program?

Producing informed, creative leaders and responsible world citizens is at the heart of the program. This major complements the teaching mission of the University and CLA by providing the type of undergraduate education that fosters a deep understanding of our multiracial and multicultural world. The CLA Strategic Plan of February 2007 lists religious studies as a vital part of the Language, Culture, and Texts strategic research initiatives. The program complements the research mission of the University and CLA by bringing together faculty from across the college who investigate religious subjects and by welcoming conversations, research, and collaboration.

Could you describe the specifics of the program?

In addition to the existing major that focuses on biblical and ancient Mediterranean religions, mainly early Christianity and Judaism, the expanded program includes many cultures and traditions from around the globe in a range of historical, cultural, social, anthropological, psychological, and political settings.

The curriculum has been designed in two tracks to provide maximum flexibility.

Track 1 examines religion as a socio-cultural force by

• Using methodologies of humanities, social sciences and the arts
• Exploring questions of expression, psychology, theology, and religious thought
• Examining public and social policy, political contexts, and influences of religion on public sphere

Track 2 is for in-depth study of a chosen religious tradition, including:

• Penetrating analysis and contemplation of untranslated foundational texts
• Preparation for service to diverse communities in public arenas, as well as graduate study in a variety of fields or seminary programs
• Specialized advanced study options such as
  • origins and interpretation of the Bible or the Qur'an
  • pre-modern history of Judaism, Islam, or Christianity
  • traditions and texts of the religions of South or East Asia (countries of origin or diaspora)

Is there student demand for the expanded program?

Yes, programs in religious studies are among the fastest-growing academic fields at many universities, including Indiana University, University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Most Big Ten institutions have large programs with significant enrollments. Faculty in these programs report strong demand, with dozens of majors and heavily, even over-enrolled courses.

Who will teach the courses?

Religious studies is by its very nature interdisciplinary. Faculty from departments across the college will teach. They'll bring methods and materials from literature, history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political science, African American studies, American studies, and Asian studies.

18054|17338 Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:07:53 -0600

In a two-part story, cuneiform expert Eva von Dassow recounts how a forgotten artifact led to the rediscovery of a forgotten Mesopotamian king. Part 1 | Part 2

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=138909 138909

Moving house often entails rediscovering things you forgot you owned. As Andrea Berlin was setting up our archaeology lab after our move to Nicholson Hall, she unboxed a mystery. She was unpacking the contents of the teaching collection assembled by William McDonald, professor of classics and archaeology from 1948 to 1980. This collection was stored in scores of ballet-shoe boxes, of 1950s and 1960s vintage. Among the potsherds, coins, and other artifacts was a clay cone inscribed in cuneiform. Andrea gave me the cone, saying, “Look what I found.” After all, I’m a cuneiformist, so presumably I could read it. (Spin and rotate the cone to see it from different sides.)

But this cone gave me trouble. First, its surface was scratched and gouged, partly obliterating numerous signs. Second, I usually read cuneiform tablets from the mid-2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE, but clay cones like this were used for a type of royal inscriptions on building foundations primarily during earlier periods, in the late 3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE. Handwriting changes over the centuries, and so does the language of writing. For me, then, reading this cone was like the average literate English speaker trying to read something from Christopher Columbus’s time—or even Charlemagne. I couldn’t even know how old the cone was, until I could read it. A label glued on its base said , “Cuneform [sic] document. Mesopotamian. Time of Moses. Bovey Collection. Goldstein.” That was no help—when did the writer of the label think the time of Moses was?

Finally, one afternoon sunlight beaming in my office window revealed the first line: the royal name Naram-Sin. No way, I thought—this couldn’t be Naram-Sin, grandson of Sargon of Akkad (c. 2300 BCE), creator of the world’s first empire! For one thing, his scribes wrote in Akkadian, but the cone was inscribed in Sumerian. (After the fall of Akkad, scribes resumed using Sumerian for royal inscriptions.)

There were two later and less important Naram-Sins: a king of Ashur, and a king of the trans-Tigridian city of Eshnunna, who both ruled in the 19th century BCE. Could it be one of them? No, Naram-Sin of Ashur was excluded, since royal inscriptions from early 2nd millennium Ashur were not written on cones and not in Sumerian. As for his namesake at Eshnunna, I couldn’t find “king of Eshnunna,” or the like, anywhere on the cone; nor could I recognize much else in the text. I put the cone aside for the time being.

In August, I examined the cone again. I compared it to the known inscriptions of the Naram-Sins and their contemporaries, which have been collected and edited by Douglas Frayne and A. Kirk Grayson. Meanwhile, I began to make a copy of the text, sign by sign, scratch by scratch. The cone matched nothing from any of the Naram-Sins, though bits of the text matched bits of other royal inscriptions. For example, halfway around it I could read “He built his royal palace.” Well, of course, that’s what I thought he did! But it was comforting to see this clearly stated on the clay, since I still wasn’t certain how to read the rest.

Indeed, I almost wondered whether this cone was a forgery. “Naram-Sin ... gobbledygook ... built his royal palace ... jabber-jabber-jabber”–the object looked ancient, but the text on it did not quite compute. This Naram-Sin was neither the king of Akkad, the king of Ashur, nor the king of Eshnunna. There was no other known king named Naram-Sin, and no one but kings had cones inscribed for them. I had to consult with an expert in the relevant periods and text genres, so I e-mailed a copy to Douglas Frayne in Toronto.

The following day Doug called me back, pretty excited. The cone turns out to bear an inscription of Naram-Sin, king of Uruk, previously unknown! Together on the phone we worked out most of the text by comparing it with other royal inscriptions from the same time. We decided that our newly discovered Naram-Sin probably reigned just before Sin-kashid, a minor but well-attested king who ruled Uruk about when Hammurabi’s great-grandfather ruled Babylon (early to mid-19th century BCE). In fact, three inscriptions of Sin-kashid are in local collections, one at the Science Museum of Minnesota and two in the University Library’s Special Collections and Rare Books in the Elmer L. Andersen Library.

Our Naram-Sin can hardly have ruled Uruk very long, or surely more than one record would have survived from his reign. Perhaps he got as far as laying the foundations of the palace and having this one single cone inscription drafted to record the construction, before Sin-kashid usurped the throne as well as the palace. Or perhaps–just possibly–a scribe made it all up, while practicing at his job writing royal inscriptions. We may never know, unless another text attesting Naram-Sin, king of Uruk, turns up, maybe in another shoebox no one has opened since it was packed away back in the 20th century CE... Read Part 2

18054|21285|17695|17701|17341|18308 Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:40:09 -0600

By Eva von Dassow (edited from CNES, fall 2007)

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=138905 138905

Readers of last year’s newsletter will remember the story of an inscribed clay cone discovered in a shoebox, and how the cuneiform text of the cone commemorated a previously unknown Mesopotamian king: Naram-Sin of Uruk, who probably reigned sometime in the 19th century BCE. It turns out the story has a sequel.

A fragment of an artifact bearing the very same text as our cone was excavated at Uruk almost a century ago. This fragment, found during the German archaeological expedition to Uruk in 1912-1913, had been photographed in the field and taken to the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, but it had never been published because it doesn’t preserve enough of the text to be understood without a duplicate or another inscription mentioning the same king.

The discovery that the text of the Uruk fragment matches that of the CNES cone was made possible by Jack Sasson of Vanderbilt University, who circulated my newsletter article about the CNES cone on his e-mail list, where it was seen by Eckart Frahm of Yale University, who remembered having been shown a photo of the unpublished fragment by Margarete van Ess, who leads the Uruk excavation project of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (Orient-Abteilung) in Berlin.

The artifact that was found at Uruk is a fragment of the round head of a clay “nail.” Ours is an intact, though battered, headless clay cone. Whereas the inscription on the CNES cone is written carelessly, the inscription on the Uruk fragment is written in a neat, calligraphic hand.

In ancient Mesopotamia, when kings sponsored buildings, they normally had their construction work recorded in inscriptions, which could take various forms, including clay tablets, nails, cones, and so forth. Clay nails (or “cones”) were inscribed on the head and the shaft, while headless cones were inscribed only on the shaft.

Typically, headless cones as well as clay tablets were made by the dozen. Each was inscribed with the same text and buried in the foundations of the building they commemorated–rather like a time capsule—so that when new construction took place on the same site, the old inscriptions would be found and the ruler would be remembered. Clay nails appear instead to have been placed in the building’s walls, with their heads sticking out where they would be visible and their inscriptions could be read–like cornerstones on modern buildings. The illustrations show, in a schematic way, how these two different types of inscriptions might have been placed in the structure of a building.

What does our cone, and its fragmentary duplicate, say? Some text is missing or illegible in both exemplars, but here is how the 20-line inscription goes:

“Naram-Sin, shepherd who makes abundance for Uruk, king ... good ... for his land:
When (the gods) An and Inanna granted me the kingship of Uruk, at that time, by my mighty weapon, ... ... (thus-and-such a place) I captured ... ... (and) I built my royal palace.

During my reign, 3 kor of barley, 12 minas of wool, 10 minas of copper, (or) 3 seah of sesame oil cost 1 shekel of silver, at the going rate in my land.

The sons and daughters of Uruk returned home(?) and the “word” (= case?) of the orphan and the widow was glad.”

The content of this short text is fairly standard and it adds little to our knowledge of Mesopotamian history. It doesn’t even tell us very much about this Naram-Sin who became king of Uruk by the grace of the gods, though it is interesting that he touts the good economy that supposedly prevailed under his rule. And too little of the Uruk fragment is preserved to restore more than a few signs in the damaged text of the CNES cone.

Nevertheless it is significant that a duplicate of the CNES cone inscription is extant, that it was found at Uruk, and that it was inscribed in a different hand. The existence of two exemplars, in different forms and written in different handwriting, and the fact that one of the two was actually excavated at the site of Uruk, confirms that there really was a king named Naram-Sin who ruled Uruk, if ever so briefly, and that he really did start construction of his palace there.

How did Naram-Sin acquire the throne of Uruk, how did he lose it, and how did he disappear almost completely from history? None of his contemporaries or successors mentions him in any known text. But he shared an illustrious name (that of the renowned grandson of Sargon of Akkad, who ruled four centuries earlier) with two near-contemporary kings, the long-ruling Naram-Sin of Ashur and the ambitious Naram-Sin of Eshnunna.

And his statement about low prices reappears in the inscriptions of the king who may have bumped him from the throne, Sin-kashid. The latter identified himself not only as king of Uruk but as king of the Amnanum, a prominent Amorite lineage group, and he affiliated himself through marriage with the royal house of Babylon. If we are right to place our Naram-Sin on the throne of Uruk immediately before the better-known Sin-kashid, perhaps we get a glimpse into the equivalent of “party politics” in southern Mesopotamia during the century preceding Hammurabi.


18054|17695|17701|17341 Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:13:32 -0600

Ask the average American what Scandinavians look like, and you're bound to get an answer like this: "Tall, blond, blue eyes." But ask associate professor Monika Žagar that question, and she'll tell you a more complicated story. Continue Reading...

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=133392 133392



Ask the average American what Scandinavians look like, and you're bound to get an answer like this: "Tall, blond, blue eyes." But ask associate professor Monika Žagar that question, and she'll tell you a more complicated story.

Žagar's latest research focuses on an aspect of Scandinavian culture that doesn't fit our stereotypes: the growing population of Scandinavian adoptees from non-European countries. With few children available for domestic adoption in Scandinavia, couples looking to adopt are turning to Asia or Central and South America. Over time, this trend has created a new generation of Nordic citizens who don't look anything like their peers.

It's a phenomenon that would hardly be news in the United States, given our long history of, and struggles with, multiculturalism. But despite Scandinavian countries' long-standing reputation as model societies--with their brag-worthy comprehensive welfare system, universal health care, and women's rights--when it comes to multiculturalism, they're less adept. As a value, Scandinavian countries embrace equality, but in reality, they've had very little exposure to diversity.

It's for that reason that life as a foreign-born adoptee in a Scandinavian family can be tricky. For instance, explains Žagar, "because of their looks, many adoptees experience an extreme discrepancy between their feeling of being Danish or Norwegian and how their environment sees them, as being Guatemalan, Korean, Indian, or otherwise foreign." So, Žagar wonders, what does that mean for the adoptees' sense of Scandinavian identity? And what does it mean for Scandinavia's cultural identity?

While some scholars might look to historical documents or sociological surveys to answer those questions, Žagar is drawn to a different vessel for cultural interpretation: literature. In a class she taught in fall 2006 called Adoption Imagined and Experienced, as well as in her research, Žagar says she focuses "first on how adoption has been represented in literature historically, and second, what is being published right now by adoptive parents and adoptees." In fall 2007, she is teaching an honors course on the topic. The texts she chooses, as she explains in the class syllabus, "offer a portrait of a complex and ambiguous experience."

While Žagar's academic career has not always focused on adoption issues, it has always been driven by this question of ambiguity within the Scandinavian experience. So it's no wonder that her other research passion is a Scandinavian author whose work and personality have blurred the boldest of boundaries.

Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, the subject of Žagar's book Knut Hamsun: Imagining Race and Gender in Modernity, which is slated to be published in 2008, owes his fame to two primary aspects of his life and career. The first is his literary prowess, based on the remarkable success of novels such as Hunger, published in 1890, and The Growth of the Soil (1917); the latter won him the Nobel Prize. He was, not surprisingly, one of the most admired living novelists of his time-- until he became a well-documented supporter of the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II. Expressions of this support included writing a series of pro-Fascist articles, praising Hitler, and giving his Nobel Prize medal to notorious Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

This contradiction--between the Hamsun worthy of admiration and the Hamsun who would eventually be tried for treason--fascinates Žagar. Her work examines the variety of ways that modern readers choose to either excuse Hamsun's behavior or condemn his work because of it. Some of Hamsun's apologists claim that he was old and unaware of what he was doing; others say he was a literary genius whose politics were immaterial. Still others refuse to teach his literary works at all. As a researcher and a teacher, though, Žagar isn't out to canonize Hamsun's accomplishments or decry his political fouls. She wants, instead, to use his work to understand the complex array of ideas and forces circulating in early and mid 20th century Scandinavia.

"I don't believe that art can be isolated from our social, political, economic, and cultural values," she says. "The relationship between literature and social experiences is complex and intricate, and one can easily slide into simplifications. So when I teach I try to emphasize precisely the process of how an author translates an everyday experience into a unique artistic expression."

The thread linking foreign-born adoptees and Nazi novelists may seem tenuous to the untrained eye but for Žagar, they both present opportunities for appreciating the complexity and ambiguity in Scandinavian culture. "Let's not forget that one of the goals of the Third Reich was racial purity, to get rid of diversity," she says. As a scholar, Žagar is driven to go beyond the surface of a given topic to discover the nuances that make it both complicated and uniquely human.

In the case of Hamsun, that means she's not willing to generate a tidy answer about whether we should or should not let him off the hook. As for the literature of adoptees in Scandinavia, it means she strives to discover what the Scandinavian experience means for citizens whose sense of cultural belonging isn't a taken-for-granted part of the package.

Reflecting upon how the debate about Hamsun's work has played out over the years, Žagar comments, "It's a fact of life that history gets rewritten." It's up to scholars like her to turn a statement like that into questions.

About Monika Žagar

Hometown: Ljubljana, Slovenia (former Yugoslavia). She spends her summers on an old farm half an hour out of town.

Education: Ph.D., M.A., University of California, Berkeley (Scandinavian studies)

Recent project: Co-organized a conference titled "Norway, World War II and the Holocaust" in April 2007 with the U of M's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

What initially drew her to Scandinavia: The linguistic challenge and the region's distinct literary tradition. Also, it shares a lot of good qualities--such as "equal access to social, medical, and cultural institutions"--with Yugoslavia.

Where the field of Scandinavian studies is headed: More integration of multicultural perspectives--along with more focus on literature, she hopes!

What's on her nightstand: "Lots of books around me right now; which one I read depends on the time of day and my mood.

"In Slovenian, The Triumph of the Rats (my translation) by Dekleva, a novel about the Slovenian doctor and playwright Slavko Grum, who studied medicine in Vienna around the turn of the last century. I've also reread The Turks Are Already Here! (my approximate translation), a book about Turkish raids into the western part of the Balkans during the 15th and 16th centuries, by Simoniti. These are just for fun.

"Also for fun but more work-related: I am reading a collection of feminist and philosophical essays on adoption, Adoption Matters, a collection of short stories by adoptees and adoptive parents.

"And because I, at the moment, live in a truly green and ecologically clean and balanced region [in Slovenia], The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan also offers lots of food for thought."

17652|18054|21285|17654|17327|17340 Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:39:21 -0600

By Mary Schafer

Alumna Mary Finn Shapiro’s Path Winds around her Humanities Background Continue reading…

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=132285 132285

Mary Finn Shapiro (humanities ’78) stands in the Wells Fargo building in downtown Minneapolis amidst the bustling lunchtime crowd of people carrying deli take-out, cell phones, and shopping bags. In front of the huge red stagecoach that dominates the building’s lobby, Shapiro is talking to a photographer about cameras: the incomparable quality of the single-lens reflex; the camera stores Shapiro’s father owned; the Hasselblad’s superior image quality and durability.

These two have never met before—the photographer is here to take a picture to accompany this story—but their serendipitous conversation provides a clue to how Shapiro has steered her life: she makes a connection here, unearths a link there, follows an interesting lead that way, and life unfolds as a surprise rather than according to a strategic plan.

Take, for example, that stagecoach in the foyer. As a Wells Fargo symbol, it has no doubt generated plenty of conversations. But as Shapiro considers it, its Wild West connections remind her of her father and a family vacation in the Tetons. Shapiro was in sixth grade and so immersed in Archie and Veronica comic books in the back seat of the car that she didn’t want to be bothered with the view. After her father died in 1992, she went back west to run in Montana’s Beartooth Pass race in her father’s honor. She placed third in her age group.

Shapiro is an intellectual property paralegal for Wells Fargo & Company, a job that’s not even a distant cousin to the humanities degree she got 30 years ago. “But part of the person I am—the interests, the values, the stuff I don’t normally give voice to—these were nurtured and fostered during my years at the University," she says. “My experience in the humanities is something I would put high on the list of what has formed my life."

She took her first humanities class, an Enlightenment course taught by the relatively new faculty member Richard Leppert, in January 1974. “I thought, ‘Here is something I could really care about,'" she says of the class, adding that Leppert gave her both the affirmation and the "comeuppance" she needed to expand her interests and set her standards high.

Eventually, Leppert became her undergraduate adviser. “Without him, I would have been a humanities major," she says, “but not such an avid one. That’s why I tell my kids, 'Get a mentor.'"

A Well-Lived Life

If Shapiro’s life has a serendipitous quality to it, it may be, she says, because "my personal life has always driven my professional life." Two marriages, three kids, the challenge of single motherhood, and avocations that have ranged from running to writing have all shaped her professional choices. Early on, she thought about graduate school and was for a time a graduate assistant for Leppert, spending months digging through dusty archives in London libraries doing research for his book. Since then, her winding path has taken her to positions with the University of Minnesota Foundation and a paralegal certificate, which led to her current position at Wells Fargo.

She’s serious about her work but is still likely to see that, if you’re reflective about the kinks in the road, they will steer you toward the well-lived life.

"I strongly believe in regrets," she says, "not to wallow in them, but to learn by looking back on your decisions."

And then she looks back, pulling up a memory of the summer she was 12, when her parents took her sister and her to see their first opera. "We had to leave because the two of us couldn’t stop laughing," she says. "We just howled. On the other hand, I went to a Monkees concert a few weeks later, sat in the front row, and screamed my head off."

Over the years, Shapiro has come to love opera. But you get the impression she still might go see the Monkees.

17402|18316|17408|18054|17331 Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:20:58 -0600

Physical geographers like Susy Ziegler are helping Minnesotans make wise decisions

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=136762 136762

For physical geographers like Susy Ziegler, there’s no such thing as being unable to see the forest for the trees. Indeed, it’s only by immersing yourself in those details, Ziegler says—in lake sediments, pollen, charcoal, macrofossils, tree rings— that you can really understand what an environment was, is, and can be.

If you know how to read them, she says, those details will tell you stories about a landscape’s past: tales of blazing fires and the regeneration that followed, of decades of gradual climate change and its lasting effects.

These are stories we need to hear, says Ziegler, an assistant professor. “Understanding vegetation response to past climate and disturbance regimes helps predict the impact of environmental change on future vegetation patterns. If we can understand the past, we can manage land, forest, and water resources better; we can understand the influence people have had on vegetation and better think about what kind of environment we want—and what we want our protected land to look like."

Take, for instance, the region in southeastern Minnesota where the Zumbro River and Weaver Dunes abut the Upper Mississippi River Valley—a complex landscape made up of wetlands, tributaries to the Mississippi River, terraces, and upland sand dunes. Rare, threatened, and endangered species make their homes there. And sundry groups of people have vested interests in the region and its future for agriculture, recreation, conservation, water management, transportation, and utilities.

With the help of a grant from the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs Faculty Interactive Research Program, Ziegler is examining the physical characteristics and dynamics of this Minnesota landscape. She’s finding out about its past and learning how humans have already affected the area. Based on her findings, Ziegler and her research assistant, Mary Williams, will propose changes in land-use planning and policy that best support the landscape’s role as wildlife corridor, hunting and fishing ground, food source, and wastewater treatment area.

In conducting her research, Ziegler is carrying on the department’s tradition of studying the connection between vegetation and its larger environment—factors such as climate, landforms, soils, nutrient cycles, and historical events.

Other physical geographers in the department are engaged in similar work. Kurt Kipfmueller conducts research on climate change in Itasca State Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and its effect on patterns of vegetation there. Bryan Shuman studies the effects of fire and climate change on the vegetation history of the Big Woods of southern Minnesota. Kathy Klink examines variations in wind speeds over space and through time in Minnesota.

Together, these scholars are constructing the knowledge that Minnesota residents need to make sound decisions about how to preserve and maximize the quality of open space and undeveloped land in the state.

Sharing their findings with Minnesota students in the classroom, Ziegler says, is an important part of that process. In a course called Biogeography of the Global Garden, Ziegler teaches students to understand in historical perspective the relationship of plants and animals with their larger habitat, including climate, soils, landforms, glaciers, and long-term environmental change.

“It’s a challenging and fun class to teach," Ziegler says. “We take an evolutionary perspective, looking at change over a range of time scales from millions of years to seasonal cycles. We discuss current events such as the spread of bird flu and the SARS epidemic from a geographic perspective. And we cover a range of topics to help students become better informed global citizens who think about how their choices affect the environment."

Ultimately, Ziegler hopes, the course will prepare a generation to think intelligently and responsibly about how to use untapped land. That’s an ambitious goal, but the class is a good beginning—more than 500 students, global citizens all, enroll annually in the course.

“We hope the class will inspire students to be excited about geography, explore the world around them, and embark on projects that will help them understand science and make the world better," Ziegler says. “That’s what geography education is all about."

18008|18054|21285|17339|17996|17328 Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:31:07 -0600

For her French studies research thesis, undergraduate Nina Peterson-Perlman explored the nature of French journalism.
Continue reading…

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=134974 134974

When the time came to choose the topic for my French studies major research thesis, I knew I wanted somehow to incorporate my other lifelong passion: journalism. Inspired by my media law courses, I chose do a comparative analysis on French and American press law.

It is an interesting time for the latter, as members of the U.S. press fight for a federal shield law to protect journalists from having to name their sources in open court. Not all journalists are in favor of such a law, however, because it would require defining who a journalist is, introducing an additional and potentially undemocratic degree of government control over the journalism profession.

My initial research surprised me. I discovered that France already affords its journalists a degree of immunity from revealing their sources. But as I dug deeper and learned more about the nature of French journalism, I found a real lack of investigative reporting in the French press, especially when compared to what is found in American newspapers. It seemed paradoxical that French journalists were allowed more protection than their American counterparts. If French journalists didn’t do the kind of reporting that requires the use of anonymous sources, why would they go to great lengths to have secured their right to use them without government interference?

This question drove me to explore the historical, economic, political, literary, and linguistic reasons why investigative reporting never gained footing in France, and I attempted to explain why the French have nonetheless given their reporters more protection. I discovered that French journalists have an extremely close relationship with their sources—so much so that they are more likely to get information off the record than on, even on run-of-the-mill budget stories. Therefore, it’s really in those officials’ best interest that reporters be allowed to keep their sources secret.

18054|17326|17914 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:15:14 -0600

With the aid of technological advances and expanding resources, language study at the University is advancing by leaps and megabytes. Continue Reading…

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=133394 133394

With the aid of technological advances and expanding resources, language study at the University is advancing by leaps and megabytes. The state-of-the-art language labs and classrooms in Jones Hall, completed in 2005, allow students and educators to chat informally with native speakers and gain access to a broad range of language and culture via the Internet. As a result, learning a language has become more interactive—and a lot more stimulating for both students and educators.

According to Beth Kautz, the most radical change in language instruction is the shift from using the computer as a tutor to using it as a tool that facilitates interactions with native speakers and access to “authentic” materials (e.g., books written for native speakers, Web interfaces these speakers would use to conduct real-life experiences such as booking a hotel, even chat rooms). Instead of learning a language strictly by the traditional kill-and-drill method, students may exchange e-mails with a “key pal,” or post notes on a message board.

As director of language instruction and associate education specialist, Kautz brings technological savvy and intellectual depth to the job of overseeing the GSD language program in general and German language instruction and curriculum development in particular. And she has her work cut out for her. “She mediates everything from running the language program to constructing an undergraduate German language curriculum that consists of up-to-date, intellectually challenging, affordable materials,” says Charlotte Melin, GSD chair.

Kautz credits two Web revolutions with making direct interactions accessible to students and educators: Wimba and voice over IP (internet telephone). Wimba allows groups of students to have a voice-threaded discussion and type a written message at the same time. It also enables them to post images from a Web site along with voice commentaries. In training sessions for educators, Kautz might have half of a class leave voice messages asking the other half to a party and describing the event. They in turn listen and respond to several invitations. Kautz says that Wimba has also been used for class-to-class exchanges with native speakers in French and Spanish classes.

Voice over IP services (for example, Skype or Vonage) allow users to speak over the Internet to people in other countries (like long-distance calls) and set up a webcam so that the speakers can see one another. Faculty members have used such programs to interview prospective graduate students from abroad, and students use it to talk to Internet pals, “just like on the old Jetsons television show.”

Polycam video recorders and teleconferencing capabilities have also facilitated international communication, such as German professor emeritus Gerhard Weiss’s recent conversation with a Canadian class about growing up in Berlin during World War II.

But Kautz cautions that sophisticated technology is of little value unless there is an infrastructure to support it. “We don’t just offer a roomful of computers. There is also ongoing training by an extensive staff and pedagogical support that sets the University apart from many schools,” she says.

With a Ph.D. in literature from the department, Kautz says her scholarly work has enriched her work as director and liaison—she knows the literature and culture, not just the language. That big picture context “shapes the character of what we’re doing, changes the way we teach language,” she notes.

Kautz has never stopped expanding her portfolio of skills. While she was working to develop an intermediate German textbook with an integrated Web site, she learned desktop publishing and Web development. She also has created video interviews with native speakers, edited them, and incorporated them into the Web site for listening comprehension exercises.

“The most satisfying aspect of my job is that I’m always learning something new,” says Kautz. “I’m a professional development junkie soaking it all up.”

About the CLA Language Center:

The CLA Language Center offers a range of courses and workshops including forums for on-campus language departments; weekend workshops for K-12 teachers in conjunction with the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA); week-long summer initiatives for training in technology; and a course titled Language Teaching and Technology, which is required for ESL and world language teachers who are getting their teaching licenses and is open to all University instructional staff. 17652|18054|21285|17327|17341|17655 Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:42:46 -0600

By Douglas Clement

The Minneapolis Fed and the
University of Minnesota: A partnership
This is precisely how government, business, and education ought to work together.

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=132425 132425


Developing good economic policy is a subtle art. It necessitates pulling together the right minds with the proper training, and providing an environment that focuses effort but allows freedom to innovate. At its best, the environment will be a nexus between theorists and policymakers where the flow of ideas sharpens both. In Minneapolis, that creative process is at work in a partnership between the Department of Economics at the U and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

For over a quarter of a century, economists and economics graduate students have shuttled back and forth between the Federal Reserve bank in downtown Minneapolis and the economics department on the West Bank. The physical commute is hardly a mile, but over the years these economists have spanned conceptual ground from early papers on rational expectations to current debates over international trade.

The Minneapolis partnership has been remarkably fertile, both in the development of economic theory and in moving that theory into the public arena. While it might be viewed as a simple exchange of expertise, at a deeper level the relationship is one of mutual transformation, a partial merging of interests and identity that has led, fundamentally, to a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Seeds of collaboration

The parts, from the U's standpoint, are faculty and students who devote a portion of their time to work at the Minneapolis Fed. Well over half the active U of M economics professors are (or recently were) staff, consultants, or long-term visitors to the Fed's research department. And at any given time, a dozen or so graduate students populate cubicles on the Fed's seventh floor.

The bank provides modest stipends and assistance to students and professors, as well as the invaluable research commodities of time, space, and silence. "It's the kind of place," recalls Lee Ohanian, a former U of M associate professor and Fed visitor, now at UCLA, "where you can walk in the door at 8 o'clock on a Monday morning, decide you want to spend the next eight hours on uninterrupted research, and be able to do it. That makes all the difference in the world."

In return, University scholars collaborate with staff economists at the Fed, focus on current policy questions, discuss macro theory with bank officials, and contribute to ongoing debates over the future direction of monetary and fiscal policy. The substantial overlap has borne fruit in the form of research focusing directly and indirectly on Fed policy questions.

Seeds of revolution

Ironically, the first joint effort between the U and the Fed succeeded only after it failed. The seed of the Minneapolis partnership was a "special studies group" formed in 1970 by John Kareken, then a professor of economics at the U and adviser to the Minneapolis Fed. The group's purpose: to build a better model for predicting an economy's behavior.

Kareken brought in Neil Wallace, Thomas Muench, and Thomas Sargent, all University economists at the time. A year into the work, the group received a draft of a paper from a colleague, economist (and future Nobel laureate) Robert Lucas. "It was a difficult paper," Wallace recalls, "very different from things I was used to reading. ... [And] I knew that it cut away the underpinnings of what we'd been doing."

Indeed it did. Lucas' work was a fundamental critique of economic modeling. The effects of changes in economic policy couldn't be accurately predicted on the basis of past behavior, Lucas argued, because changing the rules of the economic game alters the behavior of players in the game.

This theory of "rational expectations" was a powerful criticism of conventional macroeconomics, and in the spring of 1973, the U/Fed research team scrapped its model-building. "We were stunned into terminating our long-standing Minneapolis Fed research project," Sargent later wrote. And the researchers immersed themselves in rational expectations, generating a flurry of academic papers that would later be termed a theoretical "revolution."


But without the University's link to the Federal Reserve, theory might not have informed practice for decades. "The literature on rational expectations began well before our partnership did," notes Arthur Rolnick (Right), senior vice president and director of research at the Minneapolis Fed, and himself a U of M Ph.D. ('73). "But it likely would not have gotten into the policy arena as quickly as it did if this research weren't going on here, if it had been left in the universities." Minneapolis Fed officers brought the idea to Federal Reserve meetings and it slowly began to influence Fed policymaking.

Beyond expectations

Other joint efforts between the U's Department of Economics and the Federal Reserve have followed a similiar path. Work by Kareken and Wallace on deposit insurance, for instance, has provided a basis for banking policy. In the 1980s, University and Fed economists jointly developed vector autoregression (VAR) models now used for economic forecasting by the Fed and others.

The celaboration of real business cycle analysis by former University Regents professor and Fed adviser Edward Prescott provided the dynamic general equilibrium model that is now standard macro methodology. Tim Kehoe, a University economist and Fed scholar, also played a major role in developing these models. And time inconsistency theory developed by Prescott, V.V. Chari, Finn Kydland, and Patrick Kehoe--all current or former professors at the University and advisers to the Fed--helps guide current central bank commitments to low inflation. In 2004, Prescott and Kydland shared the Nobel prize in economics for their work on time inconsistency policy and real business cycles.

U/Fed economists continue to develop cutting edge theory. For example, Sam Kortum, a U professor and Fed visitor, is developing pioneering models of international trade; his research won a prestigious Frisch Medal last year for its innovative econometric work. U faculty members Michele Boldrin, Larry Jones, and Mariacristina De Nardi, all visitors at the Fed, have just issued a paper examining the links between fertility and social security, suggesting that government pension programs may reduce childbearing by decreasing the need for support from one's children in old age.

Theories like these are honed each summer in Minneapolis at the annual macroeconomic workshop jointly sponsored by the Fed and the U--yet another facet of the partnership--which draws economists from around the world to try out new ideas or continue old debates. At this year's workshop, Fed senior economist Ellen McGrattan (yes, she teaches at the U as well) will revisit VARs, along with collaborators V.V. Chari and Pat Kehoe, arguing that while they may be valuable for economic forecasting, they have severe drawbacks when used for making monetary policy or for understanding the actual structural relationships of an economy.

Indeed, economists who have been part of the partnership stress that the Fed's real world problems provide focus for University theoretical work. "Economics lives on applied problems," notes Thomas Sargent, now at New York University. "In terms of infusing the macro part of the department with interesting policy questions, [the bank] is just a gold mine."

And it clearly isn't a one-way street. "There have been immense benefits to the management of the bank," says Sargent, whose own paper on VARs was also presented at the U/Fed macro workshop. "The bank president gains access to worldclass macroeconomists that he can talk to on a day-to-day basis, just by walking down the hall."

Of course, it's not only economists and policymakers who benefit. The graduate students who share in the collaboration are also exposed not only to the the research facilities of the Fed but also to the thorny realities of Fed policymaking and the rigor of frequent "bag lunch seminars," at which working papers-- including some by students--are critiqued in a process that, to the uninitiated, looks like a gauntlet with equations.

"A lot of what the students get from being at the Fed, aside from good food and a nice view of the Mississippi," jokes Rolnick, "is exposure to applying economics. Economic theory and research come alive here because we use them every day on policy questions. Moreover, students get to interact regularly with some of the world's best economists here at the Fed. When students sit elbowto- elbow in the cafeteria with Nobel laureates and future laureates, it inevitably stimulates ideas, inspires work, and builds relationships that last a lifetime."

The future

The Minneapolis partnership has helped to generate path-breaking theory and cogent policy. Academics have moved beyond the walls of the academy, and policymakers have had the benefit of their insight. It's probably fair to say that neither institution would have been as innovative or influential had it not sustained the relationship over the last three decades.

As Rolnick comments, "The key to the Minneapolis Fed's influence on national policy issues is our longstanding partnership with the U of M economics department. For over 30 years, [this partnership has] resulted in major breakthroughs in macroeconomic and monetary theories that have had important implications for how a central bank should pursue its objectives."

Where will this partnership stand in a decade? From the University's perspective, the collaboration should endure. "If the Fed weren't in Minneapolis," says David Metzen, U of M Regent, "if this relationship didn't exist, the University would be all the poorer for it. This is precisely how government, business, and education ought to work together."

The Fed remains committed as well, and Rolnick is optimistic: "Five years ago I thought it couldn't get better, and it has."

17593|18054|17413|17416 Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:24:50 -0600

By Thomas Lee

What exactly is the public good? Art Rolnick has spent a career using economics to answer that question Continue reading…

http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=132309 132309

Art Rolnick didn’t set out to be a maverick. He didn’t even set out to be an economist.

But after nearly 40 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, this 62-year-old senior vice-president and director of research and University of Minnesota alumnus has become both — an economist who has challenged “common sense” government policies (like public funding for sports stadiums) and has become a vocal advocate for innovative programs to increase access to early childhood education.

Interested in mathematics early on, Rolnick decided the field was too theoretical.

“I started out in math at Wayne State University but ended up in economics,” he says. “When I entered the Ph.D. economics program at the U of M in 1967, I was told that it was a very rigorous program. I didn’t know if I was going to make it or not. It was hard and demanding but it paid off. It made me a much better economist.

“The Minnesota model is that your arguments have to be very rigorous before you come out with a policy statement,” he explains. “The program pushes you to use theory to its ultimate end. It isn’t simply looking at data and making up stories. You have to be much more careful in the questions that you ask.”

Rolnick, who arrived at the Fed in 1970, says he was heavily influenced by economic giants in the department like Neil Wallace, Tom Sargent, and Chris Sims. But it was Walter Heller who convinced him that economists could play a powerful role in shaping public policy. (Heller was a top economic adviser to Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and helped LBJ develop the Great Society and the War on Poverty.)

“At the time, it started me thinking,” Rolnick says. “I realized then that economists may be able to make a significant contribution. That was an eye-opener for me. I could apply economics to real world situations.”

Rolnick first came to both local and national attention in the early 1990s with a paper that criticized states for spending billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies competing with each other to attract and retain businesses.

At the time, Northwest Airlines was asking the state for millions of dollars in subsidies to build a new maintenance facility in Duluth. Absent that commitment, the company implied, it would move operations to Detroit. Rolnick felt such competition was a “zero sum game”; such competitive maneuvers didn’t create new jobs so much as move them from one city to another. The public earned no return on their investment, he says.

Minnesota eventually issued nearly $50 million in state bonds to finance construction of the maintenance facility. But the carrier closed it down when its mechanics went on strike in August 2005. The airline filed for bankruptcy a month later.

“This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me,” says Rolnick, who has since become a strong opponent of using public money to build new stadiums for the Vikings and the Twins. “You are a private company. If this was such a good investment, go out and get some private funding. Why are you coming to the public?”

The idea of a “public return” has guided Rolnick’s thinking throughout his career. How could the state spend its money in a way that would produce the greatest good for all of its citizens? To attract businesses and create jobs, he’s argued, the state is better off investing in roads, education, and health care, because such quality-of-life investments yield a well-trained and productive workforce.

“Build the human capital and they will come,” Rolnick says. “If you want sustainable economic growth, that’s the way to do it. If you build a sports stadium, it sure looks like economic development. But stadiums are quiet most of the time. Who’s got the best school systems? The most productive workforce? That’s what attracts the businesses.”

Rolnick has put those views to work again with his high-profile effort to promote early childhood education. In the past, getting kids ready for kindergarten was seen mostly as a moral issue, not an economic one. But Rolnick prepared a paper demonstrating that a $20,000, two-year investment in early childhood education per at-risk child produced an inflationadjusted 16 percent return for the public, easily beating the stock market and sports stadiums, he says. That’s because those kids go on to become better students, get better jobs with good pay, and, more importantly, stay out of trouble. That, in turn, means less crime and less drain on public resources.

The paper became a sensation. At the invitation of Jeb Bush, then governor of Florida, Rolnick was the keynote speaker at the National Governors Association in 2003. He has given speeches on the subject to the prime minister of Turkey, the Saudi royal family, and the queen of Jordan.

“I think the economic argument did it,” Rolnick says. “Nobody quite put it that way before. Let’s look at it as an economic return and compare investing in at-risk kids, scholarships, and job training to building sports stadiums and auto factories. It convinced a lot of business people. Companies have to worry about the quality of the workforce, crime in their communities, the quality of life when they recruit employees from their base.”

These days, Rolnick is working on a $30 million pilot program in St. Paul that will provide pregnant mothers with a nurse to advise them on everything from nutrition to parenting skills. Once the child turns three, he or she receives an annual $10,000 scholarship to get ready for kindergarten. Early childhood programs will have to compete for the money and students.

“You can argue that all of the training I got from the U, thinking long and hard how this is going to work, made all of this possible,” Rolnick says. “You have to constantly test ideas in the field. It’s the Minnesota school of thought. You’ve got to be rigorous, vet ideas through best academic theory and practice, and make sure ideas are well thought through.”

17415|18316|17420|18054|17413 Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:58:59 -0600

Mary Kennedy is taking research on traumatic brain injury to the next level by studying how we think about how we think.
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http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=131227 131227

by Danny Lachance
Most people know the unwritten rule. When you sit down next to a stranger on a bus, you might say hello and, if you are feeling particularly bold, make light conversation--an inncous comment or two about the weather or the recent performance of a local sports team.

But for someone recovering from a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, interactions with strangers can be different. "People with TBI might start with the light chit-chat and then suddenly find themselves telling a stranger about their injury and about the personal problems they're having," says associate professor Mary Kennedy.

Whereas a normally functioning adult would size up the situation on the spot and say, "Gee, this isn't appropriate," Kennedy says, a person with a TBI will sometimes self disclose past the point of her discussion partner's comfort.

Or the opposite can happen. Following a TBI, those who used to recount their days to loved ones in intricate detail over dinner start giving one-word answers to questions. Just as details, elaboration, and extended reflections--the stuff of intimacy--can inappropriately appear in some injured people's conversations with strangers, for others they can evaporate from interactions with loved ones.

The importance of self-regulation

While they are quite different, both problems reveal an impairment in a person's ability to self-regulate. When we speak, learn, study, and interact, Kennedy says, we typically operate at two levels. At one level, our brains are attending to the obvious: selecting words and forming sentences, recognizing a pattern, storing a fact in memory, deciding what we want to say.

But at another level that has only recently gained much attention from those who study brain injuries, our brains are engaged in the act of self-regulating. We're not just selecting words; we're thinking about whether the words are the most accurate and whether they've been understood by our listener. We're not just storing a fact in memory; we're thinking about how good our memory is and what strategies we need to use to make sure the memory sticks. We're not just deciding what we want to say; we're thinking about whether what we're saying is appropriate for the social context.

To emphasize the element of self-awareness involved, researchers refer to these as "meta" processes. So, for instance, we each have a memory that stores and retrieves our experiences. But we each also have a metamemory, an awareness of the act of storing and retrieving experiences.

These "meta" abilities are attributed to activity in the frontal lobes, the part of the brain most typically injured in a TBI. The consequences of injury to this self-regulating part of the brain are serious. If you don't remember how you remember, you're likely to keep forgetting; likewise, if you don't think about how you're speaking, you're likely to remain incomprehensible, Kennedy says. It's like driving a car without a dashboard. Without a speedometer or warning lights, you're likely to go too fast or too slow or to drive when smoke is coming out of your engine.

Jogging your metamemory

By zeroing in on our meta-abilities, Kennedy has developed strategies that clinicians can use with the injured to help get them back on track.

Peer feedback can be invaluable, she says. "Group therapy is really helpful for people with TBI because they get feedback from their peers about how they did in a particular situation, and the feedback is sometimes more effective when they hear it from someone who isn't their therapist, someone they see in a different role," she explains. In therapy sessions, then, peers take over the role once played by metamemory or metalanguage, helping clients with TBI to evaluate their own faculties on a moment-by-moment basis.

"Errorless environments" are also beneficial, Kennedy says. For people struggling to monitor the clarity of their speech, coaching that is immediate is likely to improve self-awareness. "Rather than having clients do a trial-and-error approach," in which the clients might stumble while reading an entire passage aloud before getting feedback from the clinician, "we set up a situation in which they can be error-free or nearly error-free by giving them prompts, cues, written support, whatever it takes to make sure that they're completing the task error-free," she says.

Kennedy points to a client who had been taught by numerous therapists in the past how to speak loudly and slowly. Both her speech and her short-term memory were severely impaired. She was aware of her speech and memory problems but did not know when or how to use compensatory strategies for either problem. Her problem wasn't with her ability to speak loudly and slowly, but with her meta-ability, her ability to keep in mind the imperatives to speak slowly and loudly and to use these strategies at the right times.

"She was reading sentences." Kenndy says. "We wrote 'Talk slower and louder' on a card that we placed in front of her. And then, as she indeed talked louder and slower, as she remained errorless, we removed the card and substituted more subtle forms of feedback."

An emotional future

Looking to the future, Kennedy hopes to find out more about the role that emotion plays in self-regulation and self-awareness. Indeed, the significant percentage of clients with TBI who suffer from anger management problems may indicate that brain injuries inhibit self-regulation by upsetting the equilibrium in the brain between reason and emotion.

An imbalance of emotion may work against self-regulation. "It's almost like our mind gets hijacked by our emotion." Kennedy says. "There's lots of evidence in the neuroscience literature that shows that when the emotional component of the frontal lobes is being activated, the cognitive part of the brain is not activated."

It's still an untested theory, but Kennedy is hoping to design studies that will help clinicians and researchers better understand just how emotion affects self-regulation in tasks like remembering and speaking and what clinicians can do to maximize its benefits and minimize its liabilities.

A former clinician herself, Kennedy knows how important effective research can be for clients. "When I was a clinician, I was struck by an absence of research findings that I could apply in therapy for individuals with brain injury. Now as a researcher, I understand the challenges of designing a sound study that also answers clinically relevant questions. It's when those two goals are met that we can really figure out what kinds of strategies and feedback will enhance the cognitive, memory, and communication abilities of those with brain injury."

17372|18054|21285|17363|17330 Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:41:53 -0600

As one of the newest faculty members in SLHS, Yang Zhang is rethinking classic theories about how we learn languages.
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http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=131226 131226

by Danny Lachance
Yang Zhang's mother was probably committing a crime when she taught him, at the age of five, some basic English phrases--"My name is Yang" and "The pot is under the table." China, where he grew up, was closed then, and instructing children in a language as emblematic of the West as English was forbidden.

But Zhang doesn't remember a sense of trepidation in learning English so furtively. He remembers, instead, feeling immense curiosity.

"I grew up in the countryside," he says. "We didn't have television. English was like a different world.” He felt a sense of awe, he says, when he realized that these foreign sounds were, for others, as natural as breathing. He marveled at the way that English speakers could add phrases to the ends of their sentences ad infinitum and still remain grammatically correct--a linguistic feature that was very different in his native language.

That sense of wonderment has endured. Almost 30 years later, Zhang continues to ponder the mysteries of human language acquisition and production. These days, however, he's doing so with state-of-the-art lab equipment, research assistants, and sophisticated experiments designed to reveal the way language functions in the brains of everyone from Japanese infants to Finnish adults.

Warped sensibilities

Zhang's questions aren't new. How humans acquire language has occupied the minds of linguists, neuroscientists, and psychologists for years. But his approach to answering those questions is new: he and other scholars are revisiting older theories about how language is acquired.

No theory has been more compelling and controversial in explaining how language develops in the brain than Noam Chomsky's.

Language, Chomsky theorized, is seeded in our genes. Thanks to our DNA, the structures of our brains already contain a universal grammar and phonetics-- certain rules about what sounds can combine to form words or how words can combine to form sentences--to which all languages, despite their immense variation, must conform.

When we are infants, Chomsky has argued, the sounds of our native language, swirling around in the atmosphere, trigger a particular pattern from the range of possible patterns allowed for by the universal grammar and phonetics. As our language faculties grow, a kind of specialization takes place. The pattern, or language, that has been selected by our environment grows and flourishes.

But for Zhang and his former adviser Patricia Kuhl (Ph.D., '73), a luminary in the field, Chomsky's theory seemed to be missing something important. They sensed that Chomsky's theory was underestimating the effect of the environment on language acquisition. "We don't dispute that there's a genetic predisposition for language. But what exactly is being picked up by the infants from the environment is the question," Zhang explains.

Take, for instance, our ability to distinguish and produce sounds. Spoken Japanese, for instance, doesn't contain the sounds /r/ and /l/ as spoken English does. As a result, by the time they are adults, untrained Japanese speakers cannot distinguish between the two sounds when they hear them. That's why nonnative English speakers whose first language is Japanese often mispronounce and misspell a word like lollypop.

In a now-famous study, Kuhl demonstrated that the ability to distinguish between native language sounds is gained as early as the first year of life. Japanese and American infants were exposed to sounds both indigenous to and absent from their native language. At seven months, American and Japanese babies were equally good at recognizing the distinction between the English sounds /r/ and /l/. But at 11 months, American infants were significantly more likely to recognize the distinction between these sounds than Japanese infants were; American infants' ability to tell /r/ from /l/ increased over time, while Japanese infants' ability to distinguish those sounds decreased.

Ambient language, Kuhl and Zhang agree, plays a much larger role than simply selecting one pattern among many that are latent in our brains. Sounds unique to a language appear to be mapped onto the brain over time, and mapping, in turn, makes the sounds easier to recognize and, eventually, produce. In a way, language warps our brains, reshaping them in ways that go beyond simply calling on what is already there.

Babbling may be part of this warping process. "Babies can't avoid babbling," Zhang notes. "They can't avoid imitating whatever is given to them in the environment if it sounds like their native language or whatever their mother or father is trying to speak to them. They're trying to imitate."

And by imitating, babies are rehearsing, listening to, and then encoding the distinction between sounds, a distinction they will eventually need in order to distinguish words from one another. "More or less, children are teaching themselves in this way. Their mind is actively involved," Zhang says.

Muddled Multitasking?

The development of our native language, then, is contingent on its climate--the quality of the social environment in which it grows. That's good to know, especially for the millions of children who suffer from autism, dyslexia, and other language- related disorders.

Zhang's current work is dedicated to understanding more precisely how the brain processes ambient language. With this information, he hopes, researchers will be able to identify exactly why the language-related symptoms of autism and dyslexia occur. That knowledge, in turn, may become the basis for successful treatments or cures.

Zhang hopes to contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the brain's processing of nonlinguistic (or paralinguistic) qualities of language sounds, like the timbre and pitch of a voice, and its processing of those same sounds' linguistic qualities, like syllables and sentences. In a recent study, he tested the relation between our ability to identify the (paralinguistic) gender of a speaker and our ability to distinguish between different syllables. He connected subjects to noninvasive electrophysiological equipment that could measure the frequency and location of their brainwaves, and then exposed them to linguistic sounds.

He found that when he asked the subjects to identify the gender of the speaker, gamma waves appeared in a specific region of the brain in ways particular to the gender of the voice the subjects were hearing. When he asked subjects to focus on the kinds of native language syllables being spoken to them, though, their brain activity shifted: waves of a different frequency appeared in a different region of the brain. Zhang also found that we are much more accurate at recognizing gender than syllables, suggesting that gender recognition is a more primitive, primary process.

By mapping these differences, Zhang hopes to bring us one step closer to understanding how and where the brain processes the large amount of information that is thrown at it all at once. Since these processes occur separately, each requires the allocation of resources in the brain. And they have the potential to interact with one another.

"The brain has a very sophisticated way of dealing with different types of linguistic and paralinguistic information," Zhang says. That sophistication and complexity enables us to do what other animals cannot do. But it may also become a liability; greater complexity taxes the brain more and introduces more points in the process where things can potentially go awry. For those with language disabilities, Zhang hypothesizes, the more primitive ability to recognize gender differences may siphon resources from or interfere with the more advanced ability to recognize syllables.

"For children with autism, voice and gender recognition may interfere with their ability to recognize words," he says.

It's only a hypothesis at this point--one that needs to be tested by extensive comparative studies of normal and language- disordered populations. But Zhang is convinced that researchers aren't paying enough attention to the way that the processing of paralinguistic sounds may affect children's acquisition and production of language.

"It's not just about the message itself," he says. "It's about the speaker, too."

A History of Innovation

Patricia Kuhl is Yang Zhang's Ph.D. adviser and postdoctoral mentor. Pat Kuhl holds a special place in SLHS: she received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the department, and her Ph.D. adviser was Professor Emeritus Charles Speaks. Her research on infant language acquisition has changed the way scholars view language processing in the brain and has strongly influenced both research on and broader public understanding children's development. She currently is co-director with Dr. Andrew Meltzoff of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.

Dr. Kuhl presented the keynote address to honor Shevlin Hall's 101st year in April 2007. During her visit Dr. Kuhl received the Outstanding Achievement award in recognition of her exceptional career and profound contributions. This is the most distinguished award given to alumni of the University of Minnesota.

17372|18054|17363|17341|17330 Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:39:20 -0600

For Peggy Nelson, the sound of silence is the sound of children learning.
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http://cla.umn.edu/discoveries/alldiscoveries.php?entry=131225 131225

by Emily Sohn
In an ideal world, classrooms are peaceful places where all students pay attention to the teacher, raise their hands to ask questions, and listen to each other's comments.

Few classrooms are like that, however, and it's not because rambunctious students are goofing off. Often, the room's construction is to blame. Or nearby traffic, outdated heating and air-conditioning units, the scraping of chairs on hard floors. Add to that thin walls and ceilings, and you've got echo-filled classrooms that spell trouble for young learners, says Peggy Nelson, an associate professor who specializes in audiology. "In noisy rooms, kids make more noise," Nelson explains. "It's kind of a snowball," one that is especially problematic because hearing is an essential part of learning.

Nelson has spent her career studying the effects of both external and internal impairments to hearing on classroom learning. As she started diagnosing children with sensorineural hearing loss at the beginning of her career at Kansas State University about 25 years ago, she quickly realized that children who have difficulty hearing face unique learning challenges. "Hearing loss cuts you off from people and from incidental kinds of conversations," Nelson says. As a result, children with hearing loss don't pick up new vocabulary just by overhearing adults talk. And because they don't know what they are missing, they don't know what questions to ask--another kind of snowball effect.

What's more, children with hearing loss often have trouble behaving in social situations. And studies show that they're not as good at reading as other children. "It's a huge problem," Nelson says. On any given day, as many as 15 percent of school-age children, or more than a million U.S. elementary students, have trouble hearing, mostly from middle ear problems or ear infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The link between troubled hearing and troubled learning is so strong that Nelson started to suspect that too many students were missing out at school. "In watching these kids even with slight amounts of hearing loss struggle with communication," Nelson says, "I wondered what happens in schools where communication isn't perfect."

In 1998, then at the University of Maryland, Nelson began measuring sound levels in empty urban, rural, and suburban classrooms around the country as part of a task force for the Acoustical Society of America. Some classrooms registered at a peaceful 30 decibels (dB), but others reached levels of more than 65 dB, about as loud as a roaring highway. "A teacher has to shout to be heard above that," Nelson says.

Children with hearing loss aren't the only ones suffering from noisy classrooms, Nelson says. Even when their ears are fine, tests show that young children in particular have difficulty separating important sounds--like a teacher's voice--from background noise, such as a nearby highway. The human brain doesn't develop adult-like hearing skills, which enable more refined differentiation of sounds, until the mid-teenage years. Selecting and focusing on the right stimulus--the teacher's voice, for instance--just doesn't happen naturally for many children. Children with learning disabilities and speech difficulties especially have trouble learning in noisy situations, as do children with attention deficit disorders. "They're in this swamp of sound and sight and tactile stimuli," says Daniel Shaw (M.A., '96), a speech language pathologist at Jefferson Community School, a K-8 school in Minneapolis.

In 2001 Shaw called Nelson to see if she would help him gauge the impact of background noise on Jefferson's students. Many of the school's classrooms overlook a playground and busy Hennepin Avenue. As part of a series of experiments, the researchers presented second graders with lists of words that differed by just one sound, such as "ball" and "call," or "hot" and "heat." With no background noise, the young students performed well, Shaw says. Scores dropped when background noise was added, and students who spoke English as a second language took the biggest hit. More than half of Jefferson's students are native Spanish speakers, Shaw says, which means that a majority of children are struggling simply because they can't hear well enough.

Nelson's award-winning research has contributed to a growing body of evidence suggesting that quieter rooms may lead to better performance. When a major airport changed locations in Germany, Nelson says, students in schools near the new airport starting scoring worse on vocabulary and reading tests. Students at schools near the old airport, on the other hand, starting doing better when the airplane noise was gone.

Teachers also stand to benefit from acoustic adjustments. "Teachers are so used to vocal strain," says Shaw, that they're not even cued into the pain until it's gone. Three second-grade teachers who tested microphones realized quickly how much they'd been straining their voices, shouting to be heard above the din. Said one, "I don't believe how much better I feel after only one day."

Acoustic standards for tomorrow's classrooms

Among other projects, Nelson has worked on professional committees that create acoustical guidelines for newly constructed schools. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Acoustical Society of America. The latest standards, approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 2002, recommend that the background noise in classrooms not exceed 35 dB, about as loud as a voice whispering from 15 feet away. While there are no laws yet to enforce these guidelines, a small but growing number of schools around the country, including some in the Twin Cities, are taking quiet seriously.

A perfect example is Burroughs Community school in South Minneapolis. As part of a major renovation in 2003, the elementary school added extra-quiet climate control systems, sloping ceilings that carry sound but not echoes, and angled walls that avoid the sound-bouncing effects of hard, parallel surfaces. Sound-absorbing ceiling tiles, well-insulated windows and doors, and thicker walls next to extra-loud spaces all dampen the carrying capacity of exuberant young voices in the building, which was also moved further away from a busy neighboring street.

With the ANSI guidelines in place, future schools can be made hearing-friendly at the blueprint stage, Nelson hopes. "I hope to achieve much better awareness of these issues so that schools are naturally built with good acoustical design," she says. "Builders, planners, and architects have not thought of acoustics near the top of the list in the past. I hope it will become more of a priority."

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