David Grindle’s article “What Happens Backstage in Vegas…” was the cover article for the March 2009 issue of Dramatics Magazine. Dramatics is the national theatre journal for high schools published by the Educational Theatre Association. The article discussed the role and training of stage managers and technical personnel in Las Vegas spectacle shows like Cirque du Soleil, Blue Man Group, and Phantom the Las Vegas Spectacular. Grindle, head of Stage Management and Production Manager in the Department of Theatre and Drama, was also appointed the Vice-Commissioner for Programming for the USITT Management Commission. Also for USITT he was asked to be on the national Transition Advisory Team as the organization moves from a volunteer leadership to an Executive Director model.

Rebecca J. Manring, associate professor in India Studies and Religious Studies, is director of Curricula for the Bangla Summer Institute (BSI), on the campus of Independent University-Bangladesh. BSI is one of the Critical Language Initiative projects funded by the State Department. Manring writes, “We have 15 American students here, grad and undergrad, from across the US and from a range of institutions, all studying the Bengali language at the elementary or intermediate level. The Vice Chancellor of Independent University-Bangladesh (yes, another IUB!), takes a very personal interest in our students and their success. The photo is from the farewell dinner he hosted for our students last night.

Associate Professor of Fine Arts James Nakagawa has exhibited his photographs “The Banta: Stained Memory at the Sakima Art Museum in Okinawa Japan” from June17-July 20, 2009.  The exhibition was reviewed in numerous news papers, featured in TV news/interviews by NHK, Fuji, and TBS.  The exhibition also will be review in the top Korean art magazine, Art in Culture for August 2009 issue.  

Nakagawa¹s work is currently included in the group exhibition The Art of Caring: A Look at Life through Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art from May – October, 2009. The exhibition included over 200 renowned and emerging photographers such as Eugene Smith, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and others as well. Recently, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and Sakima Art Museum in Okinawa, Japan included his work in the permanent collections.  Nakagawa will begin his 2009 Guggenheim project from fall semester.

The IU Global Village’s Books & Beyond project had a successful trip to Rwanda this summer.  The Books & Beyond project is a collaborative project of the Newark Collegiate Academy (Newark, New Jersey), Indiana University’s Global Village Living-Learning Center and  IU School of Education (Bloomington, Indiana) and Kabwende Primary School (Ruhengeri province, Rwanda).  Over the past year, Global Village students mentored Newark Collegiate Academy high school students and together the partners developed short stories that were compiled into a book titled, The World Is Our Home.  In June 2009, 11 teachers and students from IU Global Village and TEAM Schools went to Rwanda to deliver 1900 copies of The World is Our Home and conduct teacher training at Kabwende Primary School in Kinigi. Videos about the project and the trip are posted on YouTube.

Ken Weitzman’s play, Fire In The Garden was one of four winners of the Castillo Theatre The Mario Fratti-Fred Newman Political Playwriting Contest, the only contest in the United States designed to encourage and find new scripts that engage the political/social/cultural questions impacting on the world today. Weitzman’s play Arrangements will be published by Samuel French Inc. in the coming months.

J. Albert Harrill received a returning Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship to carry out research at the Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität Münster, Germany, during the fall semester of 2009.

Lisa Sideris was awarded a fellowship by the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental Studies in Munich, Germany, sponsored by the Ludwig-Maximilians University and the German Museum of Technology and Science.  She will spend the fall semester of 2010 in residence at the center in Munich.

Randy Long, the Head of Metalsmithing and Jewelry Design in the Henry Hope School of Fine Arts, has six pieces of her jewelry included in the Compendium Finale of Contemporary Jewellers 2008, edited by Andy Lim and published by Darling Publications in Cologne and New York.

Oana Panaïté, assistant professor of French, received the "Prix de la Francophonie des Amériques" for the best conference paper at the 23rd conference of the Conseil international d'Études Francophones (CIEF), held this year in New Orleans (June 21-28). The award has been initiated this year jointly by the CIEF and the Centre de la Francophonie des Amériques to support reasearch in Francophone Studies, and includes a $2000 check for the winning scholar as well as the paper's publication in the periodical Nouvelles Études Francophones (NEF). Pictureed: Panaïté (right) with CIEF President Monique Blérald.

Andrei Molotiu, lecturer in History of Art, is co-curator of the "Silent Pictures" exhibition at James Gallery, Graduate Center, City University of New York, September 1-October 8, 2009.  The exhibition is partly based on his book, Abstract Comics:  The Anthology, but also includes pieces from Art Spiegelman's collection of silent German comics of the 1920's, specially commissioned installations by Renee French, Rachel Cattle and Carl Ostendarp, and a  video program of abstract film.  He was chair of the "Future directions in 19th-century art history" session sponsored by AHNCA (Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art) in Los Angeles in February, and will present "Sequential Dynamism" at the International Comics Arts Forum in October.

Bronislava Volkova, professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, director of the Czech Program, adjunct professor of Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies, is one of two official Czech delegates to the 74th World PEN Congress in Bogotá, Columbia, Sept 17-22. Delegates are always limited to two per country. The other one was the President of the Czech PEN Club JiřÌ Dědeček.

International PEN Club was founded in 1921 to promote literature. International PEN has 144 Centres in 102 countries across the globe. It is a non-political organization promoting freedom of expression and it has special consultative status at UNESCO and the United Nations.

Leslie Sharpe, assistant professor of Digital Art in the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, was awarded an artist's residency at the "Almost Perfect" Locative Media residency at the Banff New Media Institute, Banff, Alberta Canada in June 2009. This month, Prof. Sharpe will present her artworks "Fever" and "Northern Crossings" at the  2009 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Belfast, Ireland.

Communication and Culture Professor Jennifer Robinson has won a $150,000 Teagle Grant over three years for Robinson to develop a new way to support better teaching by graduate students. During 2008-2009, Robinson and CMCL AIs Sarah Florini, Jonathan Rossing, and Julie Johnson participated in The Teagle Collegium on Inquiry in Action.  The Collegium builds on the social nature of learning by assembling small teams of graduate students and faculty from four departments.  Together, they ask questions about what students are really learning in class, generate new teaching practices to address any gaps, and share what works.  The graduate students shared their progress in several on-campus presentations, and in the fall they will present their work at the annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with Collegium faculty members Mimi Zolan (Biology), April Sievert (Anthropology), Katherine Kearns (Campus Instructional Consulting), Melissa Gresalfi (Learning Science), and Robinson.

Jane Goodman, Communication and Culture, has spent the year in Algeria working on a new ethnographic and historical project on Algerian theater.  She has been following closely the work of four amateur theater troupes, including attending rehearsals and performances and in one case touring with the troupe to regional and national theater festivals. The study will result in a book on theater as a space for developing both artistic visions and civic practices. While maintaining a home base in the western Mediterranean port city of Oran, Goodman has traveled to Algiers, Constantine, and other cities in  northern Algeria. In addition, she has spent five weeks in the colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence, France, researching Algerian theater from the 1930s-1950s. The project is funded by Fulbright-Hayes, ACLS/NEH/SSRC, the American Institute of Maghribi Studies, and the Indiana University New Frontiers program.  Jane arrives back in Bloomington later this month.

During the academic year 2008-09, Asma Afsaruddin, incoming Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, gave talks on various aspects of Islamic religious and political thought at Boston College, Mount Holyoke College, George Washington University, Michigan State University, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Gottingen University, among others.  She gave a keynote address on “Islam: A Gift or Threat to Christianity?” at Merrimack College on the occasion of their inauguration of a new center on Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations.  Professor Afsaruddin is also serving on the Goldziher Prize Committee set up by this center.   She continued her work as co-editor of the Islam section of Religion Compass, an on-line encyclopedia being published by Wiley-InterScience (formerly Blackwell Publishing), and as chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington, D.C.  In June, she taught the a week-long course on “Islam and the West: Friends or Foes?” at the Alumni College, University of Notre Dame, and a workshop on contemporary issues in Islam at the Cenacle Retreat Center in Chicago, organized by the Council on Spiritual and Ethical Education.

Anya Peterson Royce was an invited speaker at the International Symposium, Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, “Festive Arts,” Limerick, Ireland, May 2009.  She will also speak at “Understanding Dance,” sponsored by the Ludwik Solski State Theatre School, Krakow, and the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, November 19―21, 2009, Krakow, Poland.  She has received various grants: College Arts & Humanities Institute (CAHI) travel and research grant, “Pilobolus and the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange: The Embodied Evolution of a Philosophy and a Choreography.” 2009; Grant-in-aid of research, “Collaborative Choreography: Evolution of a Philosophy and a Style in American Contemporary Dance—The Pilobolus Dance Theatre.”  2009; Arts Weekend grant, “Darwin, the Arts, and the Aesthetic of the Ordinary.” February 2009. Her publication Becoming an Ancestor: The Isthmus Zapotec Way of death.  Albany: State University of New York Press, is forthcoming.

Johannes Türk, Germanic Studies, I traveled to give talks at the University of Lisbon, the GSA, Cornell University, and the MLA, allowing me to continue and share my work on emotional memory, empathy, and Carl Schmitt’s reading of the Renaissance.

Diane J. Reilly, associate professor of Medieval Art, will be spending the fall in Paris, assisted in part by a grant from the College Arts and Humanities Institute.  She will be investigating literacy and pedagogy in the early Cistercian order, one of the most famous religious reform movements of the Middle Ages.  She will also serve as commentator for the symposium “Ecclesia in medio nationis,” organized by Conventus/Recherche du Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – Flandre (FWO), of which she is a member.

Denise Cruz, English, was awarded the Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2009-2010, for work on her book manuscript, Transpacific Femininities: Literature and the Making of the Modern Filipina.

During spring 2009, Christiane Gruber, assistant professor of Islamic Art, opened an exhibition on Islamic book arts at the Indiana University Art Museum. A permanent web exhibition of the show is available.

Associate Professor Steve Raymer of the School of Journalism and adjunct in the Indian Studies Program has received a Summer Faculty Fellowship from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research to continue work on his latest photographic book called "Redeeming Calcutta."  Raymer is the author and photographer of "Images of a Journey" India in Diaspora," published in 2008 by Indiana University Press. Associate professor Steve Raymer gave a behind-the-scenes, journalist’s view of reporting the global Indian Diaspora at the recent Seventh Reunion and Conference of the John S. Knight Fellowships at Stanford University. Raymer, a 1985 Knight fellow who studied Russian history and Soviet affairs for an academic year, was one of more than 400 former fellows, spouses and partners who returned to Stanford’s Palo Alto campus for a series of discussions and workshops on the future of news.  A former National Geographic Magazine staff photographer before coming to India University, Raymer is on leave this year to research a new book called from "Calcutta to Kolkata" about India's second largest city.

Andrea Ciccarelli, professor of Italian and director of the College Arts and Humanities Institute, has been invited to teach a 10-hour seminar on the effects of the French Revolution on Nineteenth-century Italian culture in the doctoral program of the University of Florence (May).  He has been reappointed, until 2013, as Editor of "Italica," the oldest (founded in 1923) and most prestigious journal of Italian studies in North America, and one of the most important international refereed journals of Italian studies in the world.  And he has been asked to serve, by the Cultural section of the Italian Foreign Affairs Office, as a member of the Italian Research Committee for Humanities.