Jane Harris, English major/Theater minor, has had her 10-minute play from Anna Dolan’s Fall Playwriting class (Eng 377) accepted by the American College Regional Theater Festival. It will receive a production, directed by a Bard College faculty member, with actors who qualified to reach this level of the competition. Her play went up against graduate student playwrights' work. One play from this festival will go on to have a performance in the Kennedy Center later on this year.

Shannon Howard, Journalism minor, who last summer won the very competitive Business Press Education Foundation internship and ended up working for one of McGraw-Hill's trade magazines in NYC, has won another honor: Intern of the Year, a competition involving top interns across the many participating magazines.

Student Vanessa Stacy coauthored a paper with Dr. Guy Crundwell which was accepted in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Stacy and Crundwell started collaborating about two years ago with Dr. Phillip Potter of the Dept. of Molecular Pharmacology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and their efforts led to a peer-reviewed publication in this ACS journal. These studies with Dr. Potter are aimed at understanding and alleviating negative drug side effects (such as severe diarrhea) for those who need to undergo drug treatments for cancer or other medical situations like opiate withdrawl.

This will be Stacy's third publication. Two others were in crystallography journals concerning the structures of thienyl aldehydes and quinoxalines and were published last year (in Acta Crystallographica).

The Eastern Colleges Science Conference was held at CCSU on April 9, with platform and poster presentations from numerous CCSU students in Biology, BMS, Chemistry, and Computer Science. There were about 300 students and faculty attending, from 19 colleges and universities in the Northeast. BMS faculty took the lead in hosting. Chemistry department faculty supplied website and information technology logistics in addition to moderating sessions and judging talks and posters. Many Biology faculty also had considerable host duties, from setting up poster stations to judging talks.
 

Student Jennifer Healy and Professor Sylvia Halkin (Biology) have just had a paper accepted for publication by the Connecticut Warbler, the state ornithological journal. Jennifer's the first author; she's a graduating senior majoring in Biology. Jennifer also presented a poster on this research at the annual meeting of the Connecticut Ornithological Association on March 26, and she was a recipient of the CSU Henry Barnard Award. Healy, Jennifer, and Halkin, Sylvia L. Sources of disturbance at the Sandy Point Least Tern colony in summer 2004.
 

Arts Together:  Steps Toward  Transformative Education was recently released (February 26, 2005) by the National Art Education Association. This book was  co-written by Carlotta Parr with colleagues Cindy Borgmann and Beth Berghoff,  both of whom teach at Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI). This book explores how the arts, with their focus on aesthetic ways of knowing, impact the learning of college students. It includes arts-infused curriculum units, the interpretive and creating process as carried out in each of four disciplines—visual art, music, language, and dance, planning units, describes strategies used in teaching, and resources. It provides curriculum models that offer a fairly simple way to think about the organization of daily instruction and units of study. The models involve individual meaning making and group thinking and communicating, making them  models that support a democratic classroom community with bridges to the world  outside of school.
 

Ken Feder's book "Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology" was recently translated into Italian. It is also out in a Spanish edition.

Cappella, David (with Baron Wormser).  A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004.

Jack Heitner. Songs of the Spirit. Newington: Connecticut River Press, 2004.

Shankar, Ravi. Instrumentality. Cincinnati: Cherry Grove Collections, 2004.

Dr. Maria Pastore Passaro, professor of modern languages at Central Connecticut State University, is one of three recipients of the Modern Language Association of America’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.

A cash award of $8,000 was presented to Yale University Press in New Haven, which is scheduled to publish the book “The Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola: Religion and Politics 1490-1498.” Passaro and Anne Borelli, who translated and edited the book, and editor Donald Beebe received a total of $2,000 and a certificate honoring their scholarly achievement.

The awards were presented recently during the MLA’s annual convention in Philadelphia. The citation for the winning manuscript reads:

“This collaborative work is the first comprehensive anthology of writings by and about the enigmatic Dominican friar, who played a key role in the religious, political, and aesthetic history of the late 15th century. The judicious selection of texts is broadly representative and includes pastoral writings, prophetic texts, political writings, moral reformist writings, contemporary accounts of the ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ of February 1497, and an array of contemporary sources concerning the silencing, excommunication, and execution of the friar. The book promises to be of great value to scholars of the period and readers of early modern history and culture who can now make up their own minds about this controversial figure on the basis of these unique primary texts set in their contemporary context.”

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance have been the focus of Dr. Passaro’s studies since her doctoral dissertation in comparative literature at City University of New York. She is the author of critical essays on Dante, Boccaccio, Tasso, the Romantic writers and poets Manzoni, Alfieri, and Leopardi, and contemporary authors De Luca, Sinisgalli, and Tusiani.

©The Herald 2005