Professional Announcements

Matt James, Geology, was invited to give the keynote address at the opening of a new permanent exhibit at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History on the life and work of the renowned bird collector Rollo Beck (1870-1950). The Museum organized "Rollo Beck Days" from April 21-24, 2006, to commemorate the accomplishments of Beck, who participated in numerous natural history collecting expeditions from 1897 to 1929. Beck was the leader of the 1905-06 Galapagos expedition from the California Academy of Sciences.

Jorge E. Porras, Modern Language and Literatures, has just published an article in The Journal of Pan-African Studies (UCLA), titled, "A Time-Based Semantic Analysis of Selected Afro-Iberian Creole Narratives." The article can be seen at www.jpanafrican.com. Also, Porras is a member of the Editorial Board of this journal.

Greta Vollmer, English, was an invited participant on a panel entitled “Genre Study Brings Together the California Writing Project and the California Reading-Literature Project,” presented at the American Educational Research Association’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco in April. The panel reported on the results of a two-year long collaboration with groups of teacher-researchers throughout California who were exploring the use of genre-based pedagogy in their classrooms.