Posted on May 10, 2002

Jeffrey Newhouse `03, believed to be the first Union student to win a Beinecke Scholarship, says he still can't believe that someone would pay him to do what he loves.

What the history major loves is investigating factors that may be at the root of racial violence in northern U.S. cities.

Newhouse is one of 20 winners nationally of a Beinecke Scholarship, which supports outstanding undergraduates in the humanities and social sciences in their pursuit of a Ph.D. and a career in higher education.

The scholarship carries an award of $32,000, $2,000 of which is available in the senior year to help defray the costs of applying to graduate schools, and $15,000 for each of the first two years of graduate school. Beinecke winners traditionally leverage their award for admission to the top graduate schools. Newhouse is considering 20th-century American history programs at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia and others.

Intrigued by Newhouse's knack for historical research, Prof. Andrew Feffer approached him during his sophomore year to see if he would like to assist him in research of incidents of racial violence in 20th-century Philadelphia. “He is a fantastic researcher who absorbs this stuff like a vacuum cleaner,” said Feffer. “You ask him to do one thing and he does that plus two others.”

Using issues of the Philadelphia Tribune, Feffer and Newhouse have analyzed patterns of racial violence along the borders of white and black neighborhoods.

Newhouse, a native of Merrimac, Mass., is to present a paper on his research at the Steinmetz Symposium on Friday. In it, he argues that there is no correlation between the percentage of owner-occupied homes and the level of white-on-black violence. The violent white resistance to desegregation (often supported by mostly white police departments) is related not to the protection of property values but to the preservation of white identity and access to better schools, parks and neighborhoods.

Newhouse plans to continue his study in graduate school, earn a Ph.D. and teach at the college level. “I want to influence my students as they become decision-makers later in life,” he says. “The only way people will overcome the tremendous racial division in the U.S. is by discussing it, analyzing it and interpreting it.”

Posted on May 10, 2002

Go ask Alice

OK, so it's not the New York Times.

But thanks to the Weekly World News, some
380,000 readers know a little something about Union
College: we're haunted by a ghost.

The story's not new. Alice Van der Meer and her
father were supposedly burned at the stake after a love tryst
went bad some 250 years ago in the area of what would
become Jackson's Garden. Even today, the story goes,
her spirit makes an occasional appearance.

The tabloid, perhaps best known for accounts of
alien abductions, ran the story along with headlines
that screamed, “Slain Beauty's Ghost Haunts College
in Search of Lover,” and “Students shocked when spirit
of gal burned at stake appears.” There was even an
illustration of the unfortunate woman burning at the stake. And
next to it, the words “Scary Stuff.”

It seems that a local psychic, Ann Fisher (whom the article implies teaches
a class in psychic phenomena at the College), led a
recent séance in the garden, calling out, “Alice do you hear
me? We have come to help you.”

Not only did the group see the specter of Alice,
according to the tabloid. They also got a look at her father and
the angry mob that kindled the flames.

Posted on May 8, 2002

Schenectady, N.Y. (May 8, 2002) – Poet Yusef Komunyakaa will give a lecture and read from his works on Thursday, May 30, at 7 p.m. in the Nott Memorial at Union College.

Sponsored by Union's English department, his talk is free and open to the public.

Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems dealing with his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Komunyakaa's 12 books of poetry and three CD's have made him one of
America's most compelling poets.

A native of Bogalusa, La., Komunyakaa's work moves between the bruised tones of the blues and the jubilant rhythms of jazz. Among other things, listening to him read confirms and deepens poetry's raison d'etre as a musical experience.

Komunyakaa is professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University and was recently elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

He has won many awards for poetic achievement besides the Pulitzer: creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Kinglsey Tufts Poetry Award, the William Faulkner Prize from the University
of Rennes, the Levinson Prize from Poetry Magazine, the Hanes Poetry Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy
of Arts and Letters and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Award for lifetime achievement.

For calendar listings:

Speaker: Poet Yusef
Komunyakaa

Topic: Lecture and reading from works

Date: Thursday, May 30

Time: 7 p.m.

Place:  Nott Memorial, Union College

Cost: free and open to public

Information: 388-6131

Posted on May 8, 2002

Schenectady, N.Y. (May 8, 2002) – Poet Kevin Young will give a talk and read from his works on Thursday, May 16, at 7 p.m. in Arts 215 at Union College.

Sponsored by the English Department as part of Prof. Ed Pavlic's poetry seminar, Young's talk is free and open to the public.

Young is a “younger” black poet whose books have won numerous awards. His new book of “blues love poems” is forthcoming with Knopf this year.

Lucille Clifton selected his first book, Most Way Home, for the National Poetry Series in 1995. His second, To Repel Ghosts, is a “double-album set” devoted to the life and works of painter Jean Michael Basquiat.

Young studied at Harvard and held a Wallace Stenger Fellowship at Stanford. Since then, he has taught at the University of Georgia and Indiana University. He is a fellow in the DuBois Institute at Harvard.

Posted on May 8, 2002

Schenectady, N.Y. (May 8, 2002) – Artist Mary Ann Strandell will talk on “Painterly Transitions from New Mexico Landscapes to Pop Baroque” on Tuesday, May 14, at 7 p.m. in the Nott Memorial at Union College.

Her talk, the inaugural Katharine Van Meter Sadock Lecture sponsored by the College's Women's Studies program, is free and open to the public.

After teaching painting and graduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis since 1999, Mary Ann Strandell has set up a studio in New York City to continue full-time art making. She is exhibiting in San Francisco at the Minna Gallery.

In October of 2001 she completed a large solo exhibit at the Elliot Smith Gallery in St. Louis. Along with her life-long interest in painting and printmaking, she bridges the traditional languages of visual media with technical and creative research. This research includes using 3-D lenticular printing, archival editions of digital prints, and traditional printmaking.

Her academic appointments include the Kansas City Art Institute, Notre Dame University New Mexico Program, the University of South Dakota and the University of New Mexico.

Her work has been covered in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, River Front Times and Kansas City Star. Her work has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha.

The Sadock Lecture Series has been initiated by the Women's Studies Program through a grant of $50,000 from Theodore Sadock M.D. '33 of Albuquerque, N.M., in honor of his wife, Kitty. The Women's Studies Lounge, Room 302 of Union's Reamer Campus Center, has been renamed in honor of Sadock.