Posted on Oct 18, 2006

Award-winning poet and novelist Elizabeth Rosner, born in Schenectady to Holocaust survivors, will speak on “Healing the Wounds of History: One Writer's Journey,” Tuesday, Oct. 24, 7 p.m., at the Reamer Campus Center Auditorium.

The talk, sponsored by Women's and Gender Studies, the Political Science, Psychology, English and History departments, and the Jewish Chaplaincy Fund, is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a reception and book signing in Hale House.

The daughter of Carl H. and the late Frieda Rosner, Rosner is a graduate of Stanford University, the University of California at Irvine and the University of Queensland in Australia. She attempts, through her writing, to come to terms with the impact of her parents' experiences during the Holocaust on her own life – “the indelible imprints” of her history on her language, identity and imagination.

Her first novel, “The Speed of Light” (2001), tells the story of a brother and sister whose father survived the Nazi death camps. Her new novel, “Blue Nude” (2006), was a by-product of her involvement with Acts of Reconciliation, a project that brought together second generation Germans and Jews to confront their shared legacy from World War II. The book depicts an encounter between a post-war German painter and an Israeli artist's model living in Northern California.

Posted on Oct 18, 2006

Audrey Sartiaux, director of the Language Center, successfully defended her dissertation, titled “Shameful, Shameless and Abject Bodies in the Works of Annie Ernaux, Christine Angot and Régine Detambel,” Sept. 27 at the University of Connecticut, thus completing all requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy in French Literature.

Posted on Oct 18, 2006

An article based on presentations by Judith Lewin, assistant professor of English and member of the programs in Women's and Gender Studies and Religious Studies, has been accepted for publication in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, to appear in summer 2008. 

Lewin presented papers last year at the Association for Jewish Studies and the Modern Languages Association conferences on contemporary Jewish American women writers, in particular Dara Horn and Ruchama King. Lewin's journal article is titled “Diving into the Wreck: Binding Oneself to Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Women's Fiction.”

In addition, Lewin's paper for the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium in fall 2005 is the basis for her chapter, “The Sublimity of the Jewish Type: Balzac's Belle Juive as Virgin Magdalene aux Camélias,” to appear in the collection, Jewish Cultural Studies: Expression, Identity and Representation, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Oxford, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008).

Posted on Oct 18, 2006

Kristin Peterson-Bidoshi, assistant professor of Russian, and David Galloway of Hobart & William Smith Colleges, recently received a $250,000 grant from the Department of Education for their project, “A Dynamic Grammar Trainer for Russian Verbs,” to help develop a Web-based module for training students on Russian verb conjugation and verbal aspect.

Verbal aspect is considered a particularly difficult concept for native speakers of English who are learning Russian, Peterson-Bidoshi says. “Most Russian verbs exist in two forms, an imperfective and perfective. When used in the past or future tenses, each form has a slightly different shade of meaning. What we propose is an innovative way to test Russian verbs in general and verbal aspect in specific.

“Our dynamic system will generate paragraphs containing multiple sentences, which will allow students and instructors to view the verbs in context, an option both more authentic in terms of how language is used and more useful to the students, who must learn to recognize contextual nuances which will lead them to the correct verb choice.”

The grant will also allow for the creation of a structured feedback system based on user response.

Posted on Oct 18, 2006

One of the world's leading piano trios, Britain's Florestan Piano Trio comes to Memorial Chapel Sunday, Oct. 22, at 7 p.m. The group, with Susan Tomes on piano, Anthony Marwood on violin and Richard Lester on cello, will perform Mozart's K. 496 in G; Saint-Saens' No.2 in e, Op. 92; and Schubert's D. 898 in B flat (Op. 99).

Florestan's recordings on the Hyperion label have received outstanding reviews, with all their discs nominated for Gramophone Awards. In 2000, the group received Britain's Royal Philharmonic Society Award for chamber music, the first time the prize was given to a piano trio.

This is Florestan's third appearance as part of the College's acclaimed Chamber Concert Series. Concert tickets are free for the Union community, $25 for the general public and $12 for area students. They may be picked up at Facilities. For more information, call 388-6080 or 372-3651; or visit www.union.edu/concertseries.