Month: August 2014

This Weekend: 41 North Film Festival

Particle Fever
Particle Fever

The 41 North Film Festival (formerly Northern Lights Film Festival) celebrates its 10th anniversary with a name change and an outstanding slate of recent award-winning films and special guests. It will be held from October 23-26 in the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts on the Michigan Tech campus.

Mark Levinson
Filmmaker Mark Levinson
10/23, 7:00 p.m.

Kicking off the festival this year will be director Mark Levinson and his documentary Particle Fever. Particle Fever follows six scientists involved in the launch of the Large Hadron Collider — the biggest and most expensive experiment in the history of the planet. The film provides an unprecedented window into this major scientific breakthrough as it happened. Edited by Academy-Award winner Walter Murch, the film celebrates human discovery and raises important questions about the limits of human knowledge.

Mark Levinson, has worked closely with directors such as Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) and on films including Se7en, Cold Mountain, and The Pledge. He also has a PhD in Physics from UC-Berkeley. He will be on hand for a Q&A following the film. Thursday, 10/23, 7 p.m.

Meet the Patels
Meet the Patels

On Friday, 10/24, at 7:30 p.m., director/actor Ravi Patel and his father, Michigan Tech alum Vasant Patel (Mechanical Engineering, class of 70), will present the new documetary, Meet the Patels. When Ravi, the son of Indian immigrants, finds himself at a romantic crossroads in his late 20s, love becomes a family affair and an adventure in cross-cultural understanding. The film recently won the Founders Grand Prize for best film at the Traverse City Film Festival.

Geeta Patel
Filmmaker Geeta Patel
10/24, 7:30 p.m.

As an actor, Ravi is most recognized for his work on SCRUBS, IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA, TRANSFORMERS, POWDER BLUE, and THE NEW NORMAL. In 2013, he co-founded THIS BAR SAVES LIVES – with actors Ryan Devlin, Todd Grinnell, and Kristen Bell – which gives a meal to a starving child for every granola bar they sell. Ravi also co-manages an investment group which focuses primarily on health, wellness, and social enterprise startups. Prior to joining the entertainment industry, Ravi was an investment banker and later founded the popular poker magazine ALL IN. He graduated from The University of North Carolina with double majors in Economics and International Studies.

In addition to these featured events, the festival will offer a great selection of independent films including the critically acclaimed Boyhood (Linklater, 2014), The Overnighters (Moss, 2014), which won the 2014 Sundance Jury Prize for Intuitive Filmmaking, Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity (Gund, 2014), Alive Inside (Michael Rossato-Bennett), and the indie sci-fi film, Coherence (2014). There will also be shorts programs and other great events for festival goers.

The event is sponsored by the Humanities Department, the Visual and Performing Arts Department, the Office of Institutional Equity, the College of Sciences and Arts, CinOptic Enterprise Team, and the Visiting Women & Minority Lecturer/Scholar Series (VWMLS) which is funded by a grant to the Office of Institutional Equity from the State of Michigan’s King-Chavez-Parks Initiative. It is free and open to the community. For the full line-up, visit the festival website at http://41northfilmfest.org. Contact Erin Smith at 906-487-3263 or ersmith@mtu.edu for more information.

The Year of Roxane Gay

untamed-sized“Let this be the year of Roxane Gay,” wrote Time Magazine’s Nolan Feeny in a review last May.

Humanities alumna Roxane Gay (PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication, 2010) is gaining international acclaim as a novelist and cultural critic. This summer her collection of essays entitled Bad Feminist, has been named one of the the 11 “Best New Books” of the year by People Magazine (August 24, 2014), She is also the author of a novel, An Untamed State, and a collection of poems, stories and essays, Ayiti. In addition to these books and many essays in print and on-line, Roxane Gay is a co-editor of the literary/cultural journal PANK, published from Michigan Tech’s Humanities Department. Roxane is an associate professor of English at Purdue University.

Our 100th PhD Graduate

Steve Markve
Steve Markve

Each year in the Department of Humanities we award PhD degrees to five or six graduates who go on to productive careers as scholars and teachers in universities in the United States and abroad. One typical case is that of Steve Markve (PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication, 2014), who successfully defended his doctoral dissertation this July and took a position as assistant professor at the University of Qatar. But there is one thing that sets Steve apart from the other graduating PhD students this summer—he happened to be the 100th PhD graduate since the program began in 1989. Congratulations to Steve, and to the RTC graduate program as well!

Creative Canvas Course Contest Winners Announced

Last spring, the Center for Teaching and Learning’s second annual Creative Canvas Course Contest (C-4) saw students nominate Canvas courses from almost every department that they felt were intuitive and easy to navigate, provided convenient access to course information and materials, and offered resources and activities that helped them succeed.

Nine courses were selected:

  • HU3151, Assistant Professor Lauren M. Bowen (HU)
  • CH1160, Associate Professor Paul Charlesworth (Chem)
  • FA3650, Assistant Professor Kalen Larson (VPA)
  • MEEM3502, Professor of Practice James DeClerck (ME-EM)
  • CS5821, Assistant Professor Timothy Havens (ECE)
  • BUS1100, Lecturer Michele Loughead (SBE)
  • MEEM4700, Professor Gordon Parker (ME-EM)
  • UN5100, Professor Judith Perlinger (CEE)
  • FW4370, Assistant Professor Joseph Wagenbrenner (SFRES)

After the results came in, some of the winners graciously provided short video course tours so that others can learn from the design features of their courses. The CTL Tip of the Week is brought to you by the Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). If you see anything in these course tours that you’d like to emulate, but don’t know how, eLearning walk-in hours are available at the center, and as always, for help with Canvas at Michigan Tech, visit Canvas One Stop.

Humanities in Michigan Tech News

Ten Times Over
May 7, 2014
Humanities Professor Explores the Assumptions, Usefulness of Pregnancy Manuals
April 4, 2014
What do We do Now? Family Members and the Brain Dead
February 25, 2014
Bob Johnson Garners NCTE National Book Award
February 13, 2014
Michigan Tech Helping People Cross the Digital Divide
January 17, 2014
Faculty Take Students Abroad
October 24, 2013
Women at Tech Have Things to Say
September 16, 2013
The Last Class: Beth Flynn, Humanities
April 30, 2013
High-Tech Classrooms Usher in a New Era of Teaching
February 22, 2013