Archives—April 2019

Spring Celebration

Modern Languages held their annual Spring Celebration on April 3rd. The French-Canadian group, Maple Sugar Folk, performed and helped teach songs in French, German and Spanish. There was also a guest performer, Sue Ellen Kingsley and Friends. Food and refreshments were served.

Growing Up In East Germany

Dr. Thomas Werner, Associate Professor, Biological Sciences, presented his story to about growing up in East Germany and living a political double life in a socialist country at an event hosted by Modern Languages on April 10th. Werner talked about what it was like for him to have a personal spy who tried to send his parents to prison, and how his home country dropped out of existence overnight.

After the Berlin wall fell, Thomas studied Biology in Jena, Germany, and then moved to Umeå, Sweden, where he did his PhD in cell and molecular biology. He moved to Madison, Wisconsin as a postdoctoral fellow studying the evolution and development of color patterns in fruit flies. Thomas is now a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Michigan Tech. He lives in Houghton with his wife Megan, daughter Natalia, and sons Oliver and Oscar

Van Kooy Selected to Receive Fulbright Award

Dana Van Kooy (HU) has been selected to receive the 2019-20 Fulbright National Library of Scotland Award. She will spend six months at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh researching topics relevant to her current book project, “Atlantic Configurations of Modernity and the Aesthetics of Disappearance.”

Van Kooy will also contribute to the library’s public lecture program, and reach out to several universities in Scotland to facilitate conversations about her research.

New work from Dana Van Kooy

Dana Van Kooy‘s (HU) review essay, “Re-printing, Re-citing, and Re-circulating Romanticisms and the Question of Commitment” has been published in European Romantic Review, Vol. 30, Issue 1. Dr. Van Kooy also recently attended the 50th annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Study (ASECS) in Denver, Colorado where she presented her paper, “The Plantation as Modern Configuration, Infrastructure, and Literary Form,” on the panel, “Ghost Acres: Climates and Ecologies of the Georgic.”

Savage Vision: Of Maroons, Black Men, and Violence

Paul Youngquist, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, will deliver the talk, “Savage Vision: Of Maroons, Black Men and Violence” from 4:30 – 6 p.m. Thursday (April 4) in ChemSci 102.

This talk will focus on how Maroons were depicted by white colonial settlers in Jamaica in the aftermath of the Second Maroon War (1795-96) and connect these portraits to how young black men are represented in the news media today.

This talk is sponsored by the English program in the Humanities department.