News and Events
Spring 2013 Semester
Congratulations to Kerry Rourke
Kerry Rourke was honored with the Professor of the Year Award by the undergraduate class of 2013 at graduation ceremonies on May 18, 2013
2013 Carpenter Prize Recipient - Mary Pinard
Every year since 1982, Babson College has awarded The Carpenter Prize for Exceptional Contributions to Babson College to a staff or faculty member who has demonstrated 1) a commitment to high standards in his or her professional and personal life, 2) outstanding service to the College over a period of years, and 3) sensitivity and concern for students and colleagues. This award was named for Walter Carpenter and it is considered one of Babson's most prestigious awards for a faculty or staff member. The 2013 winner is
Mary Pinard, Professor of English and Chair of the Arts and Humanities Division - and a Babson faculty member for over 20 years.
WATERLINE READING SERIES
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Glavin Chapel 5:30pm
Mary O'Donoghue, Fiction Writer
Mary Pinard, Poet
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Glavin Chapel 5:30pm
Melissa Leonard, Creative Non-fiction Writer
Elizabeth Young, Fiction Writer
Admission is free. Refreshments will be served.
GLOBAL FILM SERIES - TROUBLE THE WATER
Tuesday, March 26th
Carling-Sorenson Theater 7:00pm
The second documentary film in this semester's Global Film Series will be screened. TROUBLE THE WATER (Directors, Carol Deal, Tia Lessin, 2008) examines the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans from the inside-out, challenging much of the media coverage of this disaster.
Hollister Gallery Shows
David Akiba "Sightlines" David Akiba
March 26 to May 25 Hollister Gallery
Opening: March 28, 5pm-7pm
Talk: April 5, 5pm
During "the fraction of a second that the shutter is open" David Akiba's telephone lens captures solitary figures as they travel through a nearly unpopulated urban landscape. The aerial viewpoint creates a layered space in the photographs that echoes the experience of moving through a city.
The Tenth Annual
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. LEGACY DAY CELEBRATION
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2013 - 5:00 pm
CARLING-SORENSON THEATER
Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of The Beautiful Struggle, will speak at Babson College's annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Day event.
Events include a keynote address, an awards presentation, and creative and speech contests. This year's theme is "Race and the Persistence of Social Inequality in Contemporary America."
Ta-Nehisi Coates also covers culture, politics, and social issues for The Atlantic magazine and its website, TheAtlantic.com. Coates's blog for The Atlantic was named one of the best blogs in 2011 by Time Magazine. His memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, is a poignant story about the hardships of growing up in Baltimore with a father who was a former Vietnam Vet and Black Panther who started his own underground black press and dedicated his life to carrying his sons across the shoals of inner city adolescence. Currently, Coates is working on his next project, a book about the Civil War.
The Charles D. and Marjorie J. Thompson Visiting Poet 2013
Louis de Paor
Wednesday February 13th, 2013 7:30pm
Sorenson Center, Babson College
Born in Cork, Louis de Paor has been involved with the contemporary renaissance of poetry in Irish since 1980. He taught at University College Cork before moving to Australia in 1987, where he taught at Melbourne University and worked in local and ethnic radio. He was Vising Professor of Celtic Studies at Sydney University in 1993 and Visiting Fellow in 1992. He returned to Ireland in 1996 and became Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at National University of Ireland Galway in 2000. He was the Jefferson Smurfit Distinguished Fellow at the University of St. Louis-Missouri in 2002, and he received the Charles Fanning Medal for Excellence in Irish Studies from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2009. He is four-time winner of the Oireachtas Award, the premier award for a collection of poems in Irish. He is also the recipient of the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award from the University of St. Thomas, the first poet writing in Irish to receive that distinction.
De Paor's reading on February 13th will be bilingual. This event is free and open to the public.
2013 Arts & Humanities Foundation Speaker
Temple Grandin
THINKING DIFFERENTLY: HOW AUTISM AND A VISUAL MIND HAVE SHAPED TEMPLE GRANDIN'S LIFE AND WORK
February 6, 2013
Knight Auditorium 5:00 pm
The Arts and Humanities Division, in partnership with the Dean's Office, Disability Services and the John D. White Lecture Series, hosted a talk by this year's Arts & Humanities Foundation Speaker, Temple Grandin, world renowned animal welfare researcher and leading autism advocate, to a capacity audience at Knight Auditorium.
This year's Arts & Foundation theme is "Nature, Culture, and Progress." Central to Dr. Grandin's talk was the question "What counts as 'normal?'". Dr. Grandin argues that, as a person with autism, her brain and her perspective on the world are not normal. Her different way of looking at things has resulted in groundbreaking research in the area of livestock handling because, Dr. Grandin claims, she sees things that people with "normal" brains overlook.
Dr. Grandin is currently a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. Her books include the current best seller The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Aspergers, and Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships, Animals Make Us Human, Animals in Translation, Thinking in Pictures; and Emergence: Labeled Autistic.
The event was followed by a Q&A and book signing.
Video of Dr. Grandin's talk
Fall 2012 Semester
The Empty Space Theater
presents
WORKING
Directed by Professor Beth Wynstra
Musical Direction by Professor Sandra Graham
October 25, 26 & 27 at 8:00 pm
Carling-Sorenson Theater
Tickets can be bought at the door for $5.00
According to Mary Pinard, Chair of the Arts and Humanities Division, "through its very particular attention to people's (work) lives--from the receptionist to the domestic, from the gas meter reader to the copy boy, from the public school teacher to the money manager--and how the nature of work informs how they live, Working: The Musical offers a rich thematic source for our fall Arts and Humanities and History and Society foundation courses. Some faculty are including in their course materials excerpts from Studs Terkel's seminal 1972 text, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, on which the musical is based. Many students from these foundation liberal arts courses will be attending the play later this week and engaging in class discussions about its relevant themes in the weeks to come."
2012 Faculty Teaching Awards
On September 5, 2012, Kerry Rourke, Director of the Writing Center and Lecturer, was awarded a 2012 Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence.
2012 Awards for Excellence in Scholarship
Associate Professor English Elizabeth Goldberg was awarded a Babson Faculty Scholarship Award in recognition of important scholarly work on September 5, 2012.
Spring 2012 Semester
A MASQUE OF CHARACTERS: An early 17th-century English entertainment
April 4, 2012 7:00 - 8:30 pm Glavin Chapel
Performed by Heart's Ease
Pamela Dellal, mezzo-soprano
Carol Lewis, viola de gamba
Olav Chris Henriksen, Renaissance lute
At the Stuart courts, the nobles not only enjoyed characters and revelry, but also appreciated music of depth and sophistication, timeless qualities that make this music as attractive today as it was four hundred years ago.
Professor Janice Yellin Named Director of the Babson-Olin-Wellesley Three-College Collaboration
Janice Yellin, Professor of Art History, has been named director of the Three-College Collaboration among Babson College, Olin College and Wellesley College.
The collaboration was launched in 2009 by the three college presidents—Babson President Len Schlesinger, Olin President Richard K. Miller, and Wellesley President H. Kim Bottomly—in an effort to expand educational opportunities for students and promote interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and research. Even this early in existence, the Babson-Olin-Wellesley collaboration serves as a model for integrating the liberal arts and sciences with business and engineering.
Professor Yellin joined the Babson faculty in 1985, and her major interest is in Egyptology and Meroitic Studies. She is currently director of the Royal Pyramids of Kush Project. She has published numerous articles on ancient Sudanese art and religion and recently completed her term as a member of the board of the International Society for Nubian Studies.
She will begin her new role on July 1, 2012.
Hollister Gallery Show
"Weathered Waters" Site-specific wall sculpture by Nathalie Miebach
March 28 - May 15
Opening Reception: March 28, 5-7:00 pm
Artist Talk: April 11, 5:00 pm
Nathalie Miebach brings together rigorous craft, science, and art to create her intricate yet playful sculptures. The artist utilizes scientific data related to astronomy, ecology, and meteorology into woven sculptures whose forms evoke baskets, nets, and models for planetary systems. The forms appropriately parallel the real life counterparts that both affect and are affected by the data that informs their structure. At Babson, she will create a site-specific wall sculpture in the Hollister Gallery. Ms Miebach received her MFA from MASS College of Art. She is a recipient of the MASS Cultural Council Fellowship in Sculpture and the Blanche Colman and is a 2011 recipient of a Pollack Frasner Grant and a TED Global Fellowship.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. LEADERSHIP AWARD
Elizabeth Goldberg, Associate Professor of English, was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award at the 9th MLK Legacy Day Celebration (see below). The citation reads-- "In recognition of: Courage and conviction in valuing differences; Commitment to 'seeing beyond borders' by building inclusion; Acceptance of challenge & risk in achieving goals for the great good; Compassion for humanity."
The Ninth Annual
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. LEGACY DAY CELEBRATION
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - 5:00 pm
Carling-Sorenson Theater
Featuring KEYNOTE SPEAKER, Rinku Sen
The Quest for Equality: Empathy and Global Justice
in a Divided World
Come together to reflect on the work and teachings of Dr. King, and the efforts that continue in his name today.
Winner(s) of the Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award, The Martin Luther King Jr. Speech Contest, and The Martin Luther King Jr. Creativity Contest will be announced.
A leading figure in the racial justice movement, Rinku Sen is the president and executive director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and publisher of Colorlines.com. She has positioned ARC as the home for media and activism on racial justice, drawing on her extensive practical experience on the ground, with expertise in race, feminism, immigration, and economic justice.
She has woven together journalism and organizing to further social change. She has written extensively about immigration, community organizing, and women’s lives for a wide variety of publications.
This year's Arts & Humanities Foundation Speaker:
Junot Díaz
Reading from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - 5:00 pm
Carling-Sorenson Theater
Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), in Pushcart Prize XXII and in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2009.
He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Admission is free, and the public is welcome.
The Charles D. and Marjorie J. Thompson
Visiting Poet Series for 2012 presents the renowned poet, translator, essayist, and human rights activist,
Carolyn Forché
Reading from her poems
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 7:30 pm
Richard W. Sorenson Center for the Arts
Admission is free and open to all
Reception and book signing following the reading
"Carolyn Forché is creating poems in which there is no seam between personal and political. And she's doing it magnificently, with intelligence and musicality, with passion and precision." --- DENISE LEVERTOV
Hollister Gallery Show
"Constellations" Ceramic Sculpture and Installation by Josephine Burr
February 2 - March 14
Opening Reception: February 2, 5-7:00 pm
Artist Talk: February 7, 5:00 pm
Ceramic Sculptor and designer Josephine Burr will be showing an installation and sculpture created during a 2011 summer residency in Babson's Ceramic Studio. Burr explores the dimensional quality of line across the surfaces of elliptical wall pieces and freestanding "knot" sculpture. Ms. Burr focuses on layering imagery and texture to create a dimensional sense of memory and time in her pieces. Ms. Burr received her MFA from UMASS Dartmouth, and was a Manager of Education and Studio Operations and Artist in Residence at Greenwich House Pottery in New York City from 2002-2007. She has taught at Harvard University, UMASS Dartmouth, and Babson College.