Posted on May 2, 2007

While studying in Rennes, France, during his junior year, Justin Silvestri ’07 was struggling. The nuance of the French mind was escaping him, and he found his work coming up short.

So he turned to familiar territory: the theatre.

“What helped me recognize and incorporate these aspects into my writing was my course in French theater,” he said. “By studying the language and the ideas found in plays, I better grasped how the French write and, more importantly, developed an appreciation for what the French consider worth writing about.”

 So it figures that Silvestri, armed next year with a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in France, plans to introduce his secondary school students to American culture through music, theater and humor.

“I really want to get them to experience American culture through music and theater,” he said, “but one of the things I’m looking forward to is communicating an appreciation of American humor.”

Silvestri, a European history and French major with extensive theater experience, hails from Utica, N.Y. He learned last week he had received a Fulbright. He is waiting to find out where he will be assigned, but he has hopes for Rennes, where he has extensive contacts; Lyon; or Strasbourg.

Silvestri has long been a fixture in Union theater. He has appeared in both College and student productions including Tartuffe and Bérenice. He is writing the script for a group project to create a new musical based on John Faustus. In the summer of 2005, he performed street theater with the Saratoga Shakespeare Company.

His sophomore research project, advised by Prof. Michelle Chilcoat (with whom he studied in Rennes), was titled “The (In)Corruptible History of l’Incorruptible: A Study of the Evolution of the Representations of Maximilian Robespierre." Last summer, he did research with Prof. Cheikh Ndiaye, translating an African oral epic from French into English, which will culminate in a book, Remembrance and/or Oblivion: The Politics of Memory.  

His senior thesis, also with Prof. Ndiaye and Prof. David Baum, is titled “Resurrecting the French Revolution: From the Historian to Popular Culture.” He is presenting his thesis at the Steinmetz Symposium.

A Union Scholar and Dean’s List student, Silvestri also cites the assistance of Professors Charles Batson, Patricia Culbert and Edwige Simon.

Among his honors and awards, he received the Joseph P. Doty Award for Excellence in History; the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in General Education; a Union College Summer Research Fellowship; membership in Phi Alpha Theta, the national honor society in history; and the Herbert O. and Jane M. Fox Scholarship.

Silvestri, who plans a career as a college professor, was accepted in the graduate program of History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is planning to defer his studies while he does the Fulbright.

 A 2003 graduate of Whitesboro High School, he is the son of Jack and Michele Silvestri.

Posted on May 1, 2007

Acclaimed American novelist Walter Mosley, most widely recognized for his crime fiction, comes to campus Wednesday, May 9, as part of the new, parent-sponsored Minerva Dessert and Discussion series.

Mosley had to postpone his scheduled appearance at the College last month after he became ill.

Mosley will give a lecture, "Bearing Witness," at 7 p.m. in the Nott Memorial. A discussion and book signing will follow at 8. The talk is free and open to the public.

Mosley is a featured writer on campus. The Sorum Book Club is reading "The Man in My Basement," a novel about race, power and identity that Mosley has described as "a meeting between evil and innocence," while the English Department is focusing on Mosley’s new book, "This Year You Will Write Your Novel."

Mosley, who is black and Jewish, is the award-winning author of the best-selling mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. He also has written non-mystery fiction, afrofuturist science fiction and non-fiction politics.

The new Minerva discussion series is designed to encourage creative thinking related to events of the day. Future guests will cover topics ranging from arts and athletics to physics, engineering and classical civilizations.