April 13, 2006

Apollo 13 team member among 'Day with Northwestern' highlights

Richard B. Stolley, senior editorial adviser for Time Inc. and founding editor of People magazine, and Joseph Kerwin, M.D., former NASA astronaut and member of the Mission Control team for the famed Apollo 13 flight, are the highly anticipated keynote speakers for the Northwest-ern Alumni Association’s “A Day with Northwestern in Evanston.”

The 37th Annual Seminar Day, which takes place Saturday, April 22, also features the writer and director of the HALO video-game series, Joseph Staten.

The annual daylong event is open to the public and will be held from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Norris University Center.

A variety of seminars and thought-provoking discussions about a host of compelling topics —from space exploration and medical breakthroughs to succeeding in the video game industry — will be presented by Northwestern faculty and alumni.

In addition, other sessions will explore the cutthroat competition of vocal performance; the story behind the nation’s economy; Islamic thought through the ages; the world of cancer survival; America’s unique perspective of redemption; and many other important topics, including the partnership between Northwestern and the Art Institute of Chicago to enhance the field of conservation science.

For complete list of speakers and their biographies, or to register online, go to www.alumni.northwestern.edu/education.

 Registration deadline is April 14.

For more information, contact the Northwestern Alumni Association at (847) 491-7975 or go to www.alumni.northwestern.edu/education.

April 17: ‘Geisha’ author to read from own work

Blockbuster novelist Arthur Golden, author of “Memoirs of a Geisha,” will read from his own works Monday, April 17, and lecture about the making of his best-selling novel Tuesday, May 2. Golden, writer-in-residence at the Univer-sity’s Center for the Writing Arts, begins teaching creative writing to a select group of Northwestern undergraduates later this month.

Golden’s first novel, “Memoirs of a Geisha,” became a literary sensation upon publication in 1998 and was released as a motion picture last year. His April 17 reading will take place at 5:30 p.m.; his May 2 lecture will take place at 4 p.m. Both events, which are free and open to the public, will take place in Room 108 of Harris Hall.

At Northwestern, he will teach a course titled “The Art of Fiction: Weaving Together the Elements of a Story.” For further information, call the Center for Writing Arts at (847) 467-4099.

April 20: Complexity is focus of conference

The U.S. health care system, ant colonies and human speech — even the 2005 World Series champion Chicago White Sox — are all examples of complex systems, in which outcomes cannot be predicted because each system’s performance is more than the sum of its parts.

Prominent experts will discuss important issues facing researchers in the emerging science of complexity April 20-21 at Northwestern as part of the first Complexity Conference held by the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems.

The free conference will be from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Thursday, April 20, and from 8:30 a.m. to noon Friday, April 21, in the James L. Allen Center. Designed to stimulate discussion and collaboration across traditional boundaries, the event is open to the Northwestern and Chicago-area research communities.

Three keynote speakers from different disciplines — medicine, engineering and linguistics — will use plain English to deliver an overview of a complexity problem. After each talk, two other speakers will respond by discussing how they are tackling some of the problem’s challenges. Audience discussion will conclude each session.

Registration is required and can be completed at www.northwestern.edu/nico/complexity-conference/. For more information, send e-mail to complexity-conference@northwestern.edu.

April 21: Symposium explores black Europe, African diaspora

A two-day symposium titled “Black Europe and the African Diaspora” will bring some of the best-known scholars in African American Studies, history, the African Diaspora, political science, literature, art and other disciplines to North-western April 21and April 22. Scholars from across the nation and Europe will participate in the conference.

The free and public symposium will take place Friday, April 21, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. on the first floor of Harris Hall. From 4 to 7 p.m. Friday, the symposium will be held in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum. Saturday, April 22, events will begin at 9 a.m. and will take place solely at McCormick Tribune Center Forum.

The study of the African Diaspora characteristically involves an examination of the relationship between “the West” and “Africa,” with the New World seen as the terrain on which that relationship plays out. Instead of looking at the New World, however, the Northwestern symposium will focus on black Europe as a conceptual, cultural and political phenomenon. It will explore the ways in which “Europe” has figured, and been reconfigured — geographically and symbolically — as a presence and space in the African Diaspora.

Symposium conveners are Board of Trustees Professor Darlene Clark Hine, a leading historian of the African-American experience who helped establish the field of black women’s history, and Indiana University Assistant Professor Trica Keaton.

For more information, go to www.afam.northwestern.edu/blkeurope/ or call (847) 467-0269.

April 24: Turkish writer Pamuk to give reading

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk — whose books have been translated into more than 20 languages and who recently was on trial for “insulting Turkish identity” — will read from his works Monday, April 24, at Northwestern. The free, public event will take place at 6 p.m. at McCormick Tribune Center Forum.

Pamuk, author of “My Name is Red,” “Snow” and “Istanbul: Memories and the City,” will be visiting the United States to participate in an international literature festival sponsored by the literary and human rights organization International PEN. Pamuk’s visit will be his first to this country since being charged of “insulting Turkish identity.”

The charges resulted from a comment Pamuk made about Turkey’s refusal to discuss the assassination of a million Armenians that took place in the early 20th century and of 30,000 Kurds in the last two decades.  Though it is generally believed that the Turks killed a million Armenians during the First World War, the topic of genocide still remains off-limits and responsibility for the deaths denied by Turkish officials. The criminal charges against Pamuk were dropped this year.

For more information, call (847) 467-1152.

April 26: Symposium honors Irving Klotz

A scientific symposium honoring the late Irving M. Klotz, Emma H. Morrison Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology, will be held April 26 and 27 at the James L. Allen Center.

Klotz, who died April 27, 2005, was a noted expert on chemical thermodynamics and physical biochemistry and served the University for 64 years.

The Irving M. Klotz Memorial Symposium will feature tours of the Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly and the Arthur and  Gladys Pancoe-Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Life Sciences Pavilion, dinner and a special program on April 26, and scientific presentations all day April 27.

Registration deadline is April 15. For more information or to register, go to www.chem.northwestern.edu/~klotz.

April 28: Conference explores ‘ordinary people’ in Revolution

A two-day conference titled “The Genius of the People: New Perspectives on the American Revolution” will explore the role that ordinary men and women — not the Founding Fathers — played in creating and shaping the American Revolution. The event will draw some of the nation’s most respected scholars in early American history and literature to Northwestern for the April 28 and April 29 event

The free and public conference is unusual not only for its focus on the role of ordinary people in the American Revolution but also for its efforts to promote innovative conversation about the American Revolution between top scholars from some of America’s outstanding universities and graduate students in history and English from Northwestern and other institutions.

“The Genius of the People” will take place in Room 108 of Harris Hall. Organized by T.H. Breen, William Smith Mason Professor of American History and one of the country’s preeminent colonial scholars, and Sarah M.S. Pearsall, assistant professor of history, the conference is made possible by support from The Graduate School.

“’The genius of the people,’ a phrase widely used in the 18th century that referred to the spirit of the people, was a critical component of the American Revolution,” says Professor Pearsall. “Nonetheless, the Founding Fathers today remain a major focus in the way many people think about the Revolution. Our conference is a reminder of the many ways that all kinds of people influenced the events and ideas of the American Revolution.”

For further information, e-mail d-davidson@northwestern.edu or call (847) 467-1194.