Professional Announcements

Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, History, was invited by the University of Arizona's History Department and Center for Middle Eastern Studies to give a lecture entitled, "Arab Smugglers and Settlers in Revolutionary Mexico." She gave her talk on March 3 in Tucson, Arizona. A paper by Alfaro-Velcamp and Robert H. McLaughlin, Ph.D., on a new project, entitled "Bending Borders and Bodies: Immigrants Becoming Subjects and Citizens in the Americas," was presented at the annual Latin American Studies Association meetings in San Juan, Puerto Rico on March 17.

Anne Goldman, English, has been granted a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to continue work on a book project, "Glass Half Full: Jewish American Culture in the Twentieth Century." The award, for work to be undertaken in July-August of this year, has additionally been designated an NEH "We the People" project and is being supported in part by funds the agency has set aside for this purpose. The goal of the initiative is to encourage and strengthen the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture through the support of projects that explore significant events and themes in the nation's history and culture and that advance knowledge of the principles that define America. The book project argues that academics de-center Holocaust Studies from its central position in Jewish Cultural Studies in order to consider the stunning achievements of American Jewish scientists, painters, novelists, and musicians in the post-WWII United States.

Elizabeth Carothers Herron, Arts & Humanities, spoke and conducted a workshop on Ecological Writing at the Skyline College Women on Writing Conference in early March. Her series of winter readings culminated in joining with San Francisco poet, Robert Thomas, at the Center Literary Café in Healdsburg, where they read persona poems from lost voices of the past and present. On Sunday, March 19, Herron joined Sara Peyton, Susan Swartz, and other Sonoma County writers in a reading at the new Center for the Arts in Occidental.

Matt James, Geology, gave two invited lectures recently. On March 7, he spoke at the weekly Fossil Coffee at the University of California Museum of Paleontology on the U.C. Berkeley campus, and on March 14 he was the after-dinner speaker at the monthly Bay Area Biosystematists meeting held at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Both talks were titled: "Collecting Evolution: The Unintended Vindication of Darwin by the 1905-06 Galapagos Expedition of the California Academy of Sciences."