Grain & Chaff

Extra, extra

One of the Journalism Department's most successful alumni, Boston Globe reporter Kevin Cullen, '81, gave the inaugural Howard Ziff Lecture on April 29. In his address to about 40 students and faculty, Cullen recounted his career covering the police beat in Holyoke and Boston, serving as the Globe's bureau chief in Dublin and London and reporting from Belgrade during the war in the Balkans. Cullen, who is currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, was a member of the Globe team that recently won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for its coverage of the priest abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

Teaching aid

Mary Deane Sorcinelli, associate provost and director of the Center For Teaching, and Jane Buck, president of the American Association of University Professors, discussed "The University Future: The Changing Role of Faculty," at the Committee on Institutional Cooperation Academic Leadership Program hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Madison on April 11. Sorcinelli also co-led a review team visit of faculty development programs at Michigan State University on April 16-17.

Academic pursuits

Brian W. Breed, assistant professor of Classics, delivered a paper entitled "Dialogues Literal and Metaphorical in Pastoral Poetics and Criticism" at a conference on "Uses and Abuses of Pastoral: Re-Visiting Arcadia" held April 24-26 in the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Oslo. ... Márgara Russotto, assistant professor in Spanish and Portuguese, gave a paper on "Propuestas de cultura: visiones de Costa Rica en las escritoras de la modernidad centroamericana" at the Ninth International Conference on Central American Literature, held March 5-7 in San José, Costa Rica. From March 11-21, she served as poet-in-residence at the Fondazione il Fiore in Florence, Italy, a center for world poetry, which was hosting an international conference, "Encounter and Dialogue among Cultures." Russotto gave a poetry reading and ran a seminar on poetry translation. She then traveled to Salerno's Casa della Poesia to give another poetry reading, which was recorded for its video-archives of world poets. On the occasion of her visit the Casa published a bilingual (Spanish-Italian) selection of her poetry.
Russotto also was invited to visit the Instituto de Estudios Latinoamericanos near Naples to meet with a team of researchers. From March 27-29, she attended the 24th international conference of the Latin American Studies Association in Dallas, where she was a discussant in the session on "La respuesta latinoamericana a los paradigmas teóricos: crítica, adaptación e invención."

Good planning

Regional Planning graduate student Margaret Ounsworth received the 2003 Distinguished Leadership Award for a Student Planner from the American Planning Association on March 31. The prize was presented at APA's annual meeting and awards ceremony held in conjunction with the National Planning Conference in Denver. Ounsworth's "incomparable service as a student leader affirms her distinction as a student and her potential for continued leadership as a planner," said Bruce Knight, chair of APA's awards jury.
"Margaret brings extraordinary dedication and energy to the planning field."
Ounsworth is president of the Planning Students Organization, organizing lecture series and brown bag lunches with practicing planners. "Meg has risen to the challenge and, importantly, has motivated others to step up and help," said Jack Ahern, professor and head of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning. "In large part to Meg's leadership, I believe I am seeing a change in the culture of the [Master's in Regional Planning] Program towards more professional awareness and participation."

News pile?

Like most other e-mail users, the Chronicle gets its share of junk messages, but we're still scratching our heads over this one: "I think the content of our website is similar enough to yours that our visitors would benefit from us sharing links. Therefore, I would like to make the proposal that we each put a link on our website to the other's site. Hopefully, this will increase the traffic of both sites and provide interest to our readers." The message was from a rug company...