Anya Peterson Royce, Chancellor's Professor of Anthropology and of Comparative Literature, was an Invited Speaker at the “Understanding Dance” international conference, sponsored by the Ludwik Solski State Theatre School, Krakow, and the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, November 19―21, 2009, Krakow, Poland. The paper she presented, that opened the conference, is "The Pilobolus Dance Theatre: Collaboration, Innovation and the Embodiment of Form." The paper will be included in a collected volume in Polish and English titled “Understanding Dance:  International Perspectives.” Her book, Anthropology of the Performing Arts: Artistry, Virtuosity, and Interpretation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective, in Polish translation, is in press.

Professor of Fine Arts Jawshing Arthur Liou’s video installation work “Current” was recently acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston after a successful exhibition at Poissant Gallery in Houston in October. Two videos from the same series “Improbable Waves” were included in the City of Houston Art Collection for the public installation at the George Brown Convention Center. Liou is named as the artist in residency at AIR Taipei, Taiwan, from which he will receive a $15000 budget to perform a new project and a solo exhibition in summer 2010.

The Borns Jewish Studies program has the following news:

Matthias Lehmann

Alvin Rosenfeld

Stephen Katz

• Matthias Lehmann was awarded a fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation which will allow him to continue work on his book project on "Networks of Beneficence: Rabbinic Emissaries from Palestine and the Making of a Modern Jewish Diaspora." He will be a guest at the University of Munich.
• Alvin Rosenfeld was awarded the Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and appointed Director of the newly established Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, which will promote high-level scholarly research into present-day manifestations of anti-Jewish animosity.
• Stephen Katz recently published an article in the series of American Hebraists’ responses to the Holocaust:  “First Cry:  Moshe Ben-Meir’s Early Holocaust Poetry of the Un-Passover.” (Hebrew Studies L (2009):  277-304.)

The departments of Comparative Literature and Theatre and Drama won a New Frontiers Visiting Visionary Scholars Grant that allowed us to host two African artists in fall semester 2009:

• Drawn to challenging subjects and willing to take risks, Joseph Gaï Ramaka was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal, and studied visual anthropology and cinema in Paris.   His best known work is the feature film Karmen Geï, an adaptation of Bizet’s opera Carmen, set in contemporary Senegal that exemplifies the filmmaker’s penchant for provocative themes, musical scores and cinematography. 
• A prolific playwright, television screenwriter and director, as well as a poet and novelist, scholar, translator and journalist, Femi Osofisan is professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.  Osofisan may be the most performed and warmly received of Nigeria’s playwrights.  He has written over forty plays, including Who’s Afraid of Solarin?; The Midnight Hotel; Tegonni, An African Antigone; and The Oriki of a Grasshopper At IU, Osofisan offered a second eight-weeks workshop on his play, Farewell to a Cannibal Rage, through the Department of Theatre and Drama. 

Awards for contribution to Czech culture and science were given to nine Czech personalities by the Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) Prague on the 26th of May 2009. Professor and poet Bronislava Volková was one of the awardees together with the film director Miloš Forman and seven others. The award ceremony took place in the Senate of Czech Republic in the Valdštejnský Palace, Prague.

Rebecca Spang's "Pulling a Rabbit out of a Cat" appears in the fall 2009 issue of Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture.

Michelle Facos, History of Art, has been invited by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to chair a conference entitled "Interdisciplinary Methodologies: Implications and Reception" that will be held in Trogir, Croatia in June 2010.

English Professor Denise Cruz received a Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship for “Transpacific Femi­ninities;” she also received the 2009 Trustees Teaching Award, a New Frontiers Grant from the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and a College Arts & Humanities Research Grant