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Hannah Wiesolek
Dawn Graham
Joe Perez
Anna Barton
Jeff Carter
Sean Bigness
Amina Maameri
India Gurley
Michael Vang
Aunyeja Flippin
Yun-han Chu
Earl Lewis
Maria BamfordMaria Bamford, B.A. '93, English, is a stand-up comedian and voice-actress. She has appeared on The Tonight Show, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and Jimmy Kimmel Live. Amazon.com named her CD one of the best comedy albums of the year. Watch her at z.umn.edu/bamford.
Tomáš Klvaa, Ph.D. '97, speech communication, is executive director of the Zdenk Bakala Global Non-Profit Programs, where he oversaw the establishment of the Aspen Institute in the Czech Republic. He previously worked as the press secretary and policy adviser for the president of the Czech Republic, and as a special government communications envoy for its missile defense program. He has been deputy editor-in-chief of Hospodáské noviny, a leading Czech daily newspaper, and last year published his first novel. Nicole Druckrey, B.A. '99, sociology, has been elected to the board of directors of Adoption Resources Wisconsin. She is a partner in the Milwaukee office of the national law firm, Quarles & Brady LLP, focusing on unfair trade practices.
Cristi Rinklin's installation "Diluvial"
Cristi Rinklin, M.F.A. '99, art, is an associate professor of drawing and painting at College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass. Last summer her immersive installation, "Diluvial," was on display at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. Inspired by the biblical Great Flood, Rinklin says the work "evokes the beauty and terror of a world undergoing the forces of creation and destruction." Watch a time-lapse video showing the installation of this complex piece: z.umn.edu/rinklin
Dessa, B.A. '03, philosophy, singer and rap artist, has had a shade of lipstick named after her by The Elixery, a Northeast Minneapolis cosmetics house. She will donate her share of the profits to CARE's Power Within program, which educates girls in poor developing countries. Dessa says she became aware of the powerful effects of educating girls by writing her final philosophy thesis.
Spencer Martin, Ph.D. '03, music, is the violist on Gems Rediscovered, an album of sonatas for viola and piano by four lesser known, late-romantic-era composers, on the Delos label. Martin has been principal violist in the Tuscaloosa Symphony, and performed frequently with the Minnesota Orchestra, Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Wichita Symphony Orchestra and Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra. Watch him at z.umn.edu/spencermartin. Molly Hauge, B.A. '06, individualized studies, was featured in a photography exhibition at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif. Her work focuses on dance and its relationship to spiritual practices.
Wanjiru Kamau-RutenbergWanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg, M.A. '05, Ph.D. '08, philosophy, was named a Champion of Democracy by the Ford Foundation for her work with Akili Dada, a leadership incubator she founded and leads that invests in the next generation of African women leaders.
Allison Cimpl-Wiemer, B.A. '06, history, was appointed to the board of directors of the Milwaukee Association for Women Lawyers. She is an associate in the Quarles & Brady law firm, working in commercial litigation. She has done pro bono work for the Wisconsin State Public Defender and the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee.
Peter J. Kaiser
Peter J. Kaiser, B.A. '07, English, cultural studies and comparative literature, has joined the Milwaukee office of the national law firm of Quarles & Brady, focusing on securities.
Svetha Janumpalli, B.A. '08, economics and global studies, founded and is CEO of New Incentives, a non-profit based on an economic model she developed: invest directly in poor individuals -- conditional upon improvement, to help them make better decisions and lift themselves out of poverty. She is interviewed at z.umn.edu/janumpalli. Anna Dikareva, B.F.A. '10, art, has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarship to the Slovak Republic. A painter and printmaker, she lives in San Francisco.]]>
Self-published, 2012 / Former Minnesota Daily sports editor David Butwin creates a vivid word picture of growing up in St. Paul in the late 1940s and '50s. His memoir is a trip through a series of vignettes that will evoke memories for anyone who grew up during those years. Here's a sample: The St. Paul Saints and Lexington Park; Mel Hime of the Saints and hated Sal Yvars of the Minneapolis Millers; the polio scare that shut down the Minnesota State Fair; Geraldine Mingo's unsolved murder and Carol Thompson's solved murder; the death of Twin Cities streetcars; Dick Nesbitt; Marty O'Neill; Red Mottlow; Ray Christensen; Bob Blakeley; Judge Dickson; Bill Diehl, and Ed Gein. Not only does Butwin present a well-researched picture of what life was life, he uses the reporting skills he learned in Murphy Hall and honed as one of the top travel writers in the nation to track down the characters and tell us how everything turned out. These fascinating stories are sure to reignite additional memories of some of the characters that dominated dinner conversations some 50-60 years ago.
Butwin, B.A. '61, journalism, has written widely on travel, sports, lifestyle and humor for Esquire, Gourmet, and Sports Illustrated. Reviewer Dave Mona, B.A. '65, journalism, is chairman of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul office of Weber Shandwick public relations agency.
Viking, 2012 / In this concise, readable history, Brenda Child tells the story of the Ojibwe in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan from the women's perspective. She details their physical and spiritual identification with the earth and its seasons -- from giving birth to harvesting maple syrup and life-sustaining wild rice -- and how it followed that the confiscation of Indian lands by whites shattered the women's lives, families, and communities. She describes how Ojibwe women adapted as circumstances changed: they engaged in the fur trade, they made and sold food and clothing to settlers. When they lost their men, they hunted and fished. In recent decades they have labored in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis to promote the well-being of one of the nation's largest urban Indian communities. Most striking is Child's portrait of the traditional independence of Ojibwe women, who retained personal and legal rights upon marriage. And, giving rise to the book's title, she pointedly notes that the term for older Ojibwe women denotes status, strength, wisdom and authority: "mindimooyehn" -- "one who holds things together."
Child, chair of the Department of American Indian Studies, is a member of the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation. Reviewer Mary Pattock is the editor of Reach.
Stanford University Press, 2012 / While working as a paralegal in a corporate in-house legal department in 1989, Jennifer Pierce witnessed the backlash against affirmative action firsthand. A policy intended to even the playing field in higher education and employment for women and minorities was turned on its head, as claims of reverse discrimination against white men (nearly all later proven specious) were given center stage in national newspapers. The issues are still relevant today, as seen in the October 2012 Supreme Court hearings on affirmative action related to Fisher v. University of Texas. Racing for Innocence revisits affirmative action battles of the 1980s and '90s through interviews with attorneys from her legal department, analysis of news coverage, and reviews of the most popular films of the time. You'll never look at Mississippi Burning or Ghosts of Mississippi the same way again.
Pierce is a professor of American Studies in CLA. Reviewer Kelly O'Brien is staff for CLA's Office of Media and Public Relations.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2012 / What would you do if your left hiking boot fell off the side of a mountain 38 days into a solo 1,100-mile sojourn along the Pacific Crest Trail? If you're Cheryl Strayed, you'd throw the right boot off the mountain, too. After all, she writes, "What is one boot without the other?" So begins Wild -- and her story is, indeed, wild: from the reasons that pushed her into the woods alone at 26, to events that transpired there. Her true achievement is that she never lets the reader forget how difficult the journey was. Her steady and quotidian narration of this most extreme physical and emotional adventure begs empathy. It's impossible not to put yourself into her boots. Would you, could you, have finished the journey under similar circumstances? Would you have been as brave? Strayed hiked to repair brokenness, to make a safe place for her young woman-self in the world. There's a lesson in that for all of us.
Strayed, B.A. '97, English and women's studies, lives in Portland, Oregon. Wild topped The New York Times Best Seller list, and was an Oprah's Book Club selection. Reviewer Clare Beer works for CLA's Office of Undergraduate Programs.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012 / You may not think you have much in common with Hildegard of Bingen. She was one of the 12th century's foremost European intellectuals, a mystic and politically savvy Benedictine abbess; she spent most of her youth bricked up with a masochistic "holy woman" in a monastery annex in Germany. But in this deeply researched and lyrically written historical novel, only the trappings are exotic. Hildegard meets with love and abandonment, torn loyalties, dim-witted superiors and jealous coworkers, even the anorexia of a friend -- situations not unfamiliar to us in the 21st-century. Eventually escaping her confinement, Hildegard founded a Benedictine community based on humane values, and wrote books on natural science and mysticism. She composed the West's first signed music -- ecstatic, soaring chants (hear a sample at z.umn.edu/hildegard) and its first musical drama. None of this was "normal" female behavior, so along the way she had to outwit numerous powerful men, including two popes and Frederick Barbarosa, the Holy Roman Emperor. Some things never change.
Sharratt, B.A. '88, German, lived in Germany for 12 years and now lives in Lancashire, England. This is her fifth novel. Reviewer Mary Pattock is the editor of Reach.
Harper/Harper Collins, 2012 / In Coplin's debut novel, a turn-of-the-century orchardist, William Talmadge, lives alone, tending apricots and apples through the seasons with meditative zeal. Then two runaway pregnant teenagers stumble onto his land, and Eden goes to heck -- in wondrously detailed slow motion. Talmadge's care of his ripening fruit is mirrored in the rare attention Coplin pays to the characters' shifting moods, the pace of change in early 1900s Washington State, and the interplay between childhood pain and adult behavior. Violence unfolds matter-of-factly. But the evil in this garden is more particular: it stems from men's attempts -- out of lust but also love -- to control women's bodies and minds. The choices women make in response are tragic too, yet in the end the story feels less depressing than searching: how can we truly nurture the world and each other?
Coplin is a 2006 MFA alumna in creative writing. Reviewer Terri Sutton is staff for the English department.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011 / In World Tree David Wojahn seems able to inhabit any and every style. He writes his own versions of sonnets and villanelles, and a quicksilver free verse. He builds novelistic narratives and modernist montages. He employs a sophisticated, even baroque range of diction that accommodates the King James Bible as well as rock lyrics. And he can speak with the disarming directness of the plain style. To read a poem by David Wojahn is to feel how consciousness itself can hold and shape various and often contradictory experiences, perspectives, and feeling tones. I love, for example, the sonnet, "August, 1953," which describes the poet's own birth in Saint Paul, even as, in the manner of a film montage, the focus pans out to show various events occurring at that very moment, all around the world. This collection is filled with such wonders. Wojahn, who grew up in Mahtomedi, Minnesota, has won many honors; World Tree has garnered the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He's a world-class poet, and this is his best book.
Wojahn, B.A. '76, English, directs the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Reviewer Peter Campion, assistant professor of English, has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize for his poetry.
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Vera Schletzer, CLA professor of psychology and alumna -- Ph.D. '63, psychology -- died September 12 in Edina, Minn. She was 92. In addition to teaching, for which she was recognized with CLA's Horace T. Morse Award, she served the University as director of counseling for Continuing Education and Extension. The Minnesota Career Development Association honored her lifetime work with its Jules Kerlan Outstanding Achievement Award. A proponent of women's rights in the early days of "second wave feminism," she served as a charter member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and as a member of the Minnesota Governor's Commission on the Status of Women.
Herbert Mohring, professor of economics, died June 4 in Northfield, Minn., at age 83. He taught at the U of M from 1961 to 1994, and created the theory of "congestion pricing"-- a market-based solution to highway gridlock, which came to be known as "The Mohring Effect." It influenced policy-makers around the world, from the Twin Cities to Singapore, and materialized in the form of highway pay lanes and in the transit requirements included in the Americans with Disabilities Act. In 2009 the fourth International Transport Economics Conference honored him with a special tribute; the Economics of Transportation, an international journal, plans to devote an entire issue to him. He earned his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Norman Fruman, professor emeritus of English, died of cancer April 19 in Laguna Beach, Calif. He was 88. He taught at the U of M from 1978 to his retirement in 1994, and previously at California State University- Los Angeles. His book, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel, which exposed a pattern of plagiarism in the famous English poet's later works, was a shock to the literary world and beyond -- it sold in the mainstream market and was a finalist for the National Book Award, prompting Fruman to joke that it made him both famous and infamous. He served in World War II as a second lieutenant, the youngest combat platoon leader in the famed Rainbow Division. He was captured by the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge, escaped, was recaptured, and liberated in April 1945. He earned his Ph.D. in English from New York University, writing his dissertation on Coleridge. In retirement he was a Fulbright professor at the University of Tel Aviv, and helped found the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers, an organization that opposes intellectual partisanship in favor of free and lively exchange.
Margery Durham, professor emeritus of English, died September 23 in Polson, Mont., at 79, having suffered from a rare form of palsy related to Parkinson's disease. She taught English literature at the U of M for 30 years, specializing in Dickens, Arnold, Tennyson, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters, and mentored many students. Before earning her Ph.D. at Indiana University, she worked as a copy editor for The National Geographic and other publications. She moved with her husband Lonnie to Montana after retiring in 1996, took up the violin, drawing and painting, as well as hiking and camping in nearby Glacier Park.
Kent Bales, professor emeritus of English, died October 8 in Minneapolis, at 76. He taught American literature, specializing in Hawthorne, for 41 years before retiring in 2008. As department chair he supported controversial initiatives on creative writing and feminist studies. He directed graduate and undergraduate studies, and chaired important university senate committees -- on faculty affairs and on faculty appointments. He twice won Fulbright Scholar awards, and later served on the National Fulbright Committee. Bales attended Yale University on an athletic scholarship, played football there, and graduated in American studies. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley.
Mary Hicks
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Joyce Lyon's Approaches to the Garden III, will be part of the exhibition, "The House We Built."
Maybe the best way to describe the debut of feminist art in the 1970s is to say that it hit like a shockwave -- one that ricocheted sharply off the marble walls of mainstream galleries and museums.
Like the Impressionists, abstract expressionists, and surrealists before them, feminist artists introduced content that was revolutionary and often controversial. Shaped by the iconoclasm and egalitarianism of the time, they took on topics like women's identity, violence against women, and female perspectives on women's bodies, colonial oppression, and war. The long-term effect was profound. In 2002, The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote, "Most of the interesting American artists of the last 30 years are as interesting as they are in part because of the feminist art movement of the early 1970s. It changed everything"-- from content to materials to entire genres. But in the 1970s, rebuffed by the male establishment, what was there for the women to do but to create their own venues? So they did. Feminist art galleries, educational programs, publications, and studios sprang up across the country, some of which continue to the present day, including WARM -- the Women's Art Resources of Minnesota (formerly Women's Art Registry of Minnesota). An exhibition this winter at CLA's Nash Gallery features the work of a veritable pantheon of feminist artists from Minnesota and around the nation, all of whom were involved in founding those institutions -- hence the title, "The House We Built: Feminist Art Then and Now." The show is both historical and contemporary, and locates the story of Minnesota artists in a national context. Associate Professor Joyce Lyon, herself a founder of WARM, and Nash Gallery director Howard Oransky curate the main exhibition. Related exhibitions are cocurated by Christina Michelon, a master's student in art history, and Deborah Boudewyns, Arts, Architecture & Landscape Architecture Librarian. "The House We Built" runs from January 22 to February 23; several related events are offered, including a panel on the founding of WARM and the future of feminist art networks, featuring Lyon, WARM founders Elizabeth Erickson and Carole Fisher, and Joanna Inglot, art history chair at Macalester College. - MP For more information, including a list of artists in the exhibition, go to: z.umn.edu/housewebuilt]]>
Joe Dowling and his wife Siobhan Cleary
Dominick Argento receives award from Professor David Myers, School of Music director (back to camera)
"Freedom from Want" by Norman Rockwell
There's no denying the benefits of the family dinner; dozens of studies have pointed them out. But parents don't have to feel guilty, either, when soccer practice and late nights at the office make it impossible, says sociologist Ann Meier.
That's because there are other ways to connect with children -- for example, while driving in the car, helping with homework, or going to movies together.
Meier and her colleague Kelly Musick, associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, delved deeply into the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, a project in which 18,000 adolescents were interviewed at intervals between the ages 18 and 26 about their lives and well-being, while their parents answered questions about topics like income and living arrangements.
The researchers did initially find a correlation between family dinners and the welfare of children (as measured by mental health status, delinquency, and drug and alcohol use). But further analysis showed that the positive effect of dinner together actually depends on whether parents use the time to engage with their children and learn about their day-to-day lives. It's part of a total package that includes time spent together in other ways, good family relationships, parental monitoring (for example, of curfew and clothing), and the presence of both parents in the household.
They concluded that "the ability to manage a regular family dinner is in part facilitated by family resources such as time and money, and in part a proxy for other family characteristics, including time together, closeness, and communication."
The study was published in the June issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Marriage and Family.
Writing about their findings for The New York Times (z.umn.edu/familydinner), Meier and Musick had encouraging advice for parents: "If you aren't able to make the family meal happen on a regular basis, don't beat yourself up: just find another way to connect with your kids." - MP]]>
Glossary
"At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut [author of Slaughterhouse-Five] informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, 'Yes, but I have something he will never have ... Enough.'"