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Post by Victoria Pechenyk IM45 on Sept 14, 2015 22:52:06 GMT
Latin: Collegium Dartmuthensis Motto: Vox clamantis in deserto Motto in English: The voice of one crying out in the wilderness Established: December 13, 1769; 245 years ago Type: Private research university Endowment: US$ 4.5 billion (As of 2014) President: Philip J. Hanlon Academic staff: 1059 Students 6,342 (Fall 2013) Undergraduates 4,276 (Fall 2013) Postgraduates 2,066 (Fall 2013) Location: Hanover, NH, United States 43°42′12″N 72°17′18″W Coordinates: 43°42′12″N 72°17′18″W Campus Rural, Total 31,869 acres (128.97 km2) 269 acres (1.09 km2), Hanover campus 4,600 acres (19 km2), Mount Moosilauke 27,000 acres (110 km2), Second College Grant Colors: Dartmouth green Athletics: NCAA Division I – Ivy League, ECAC Hockey Sports: 34 varsity teams Nickname: Big Green Mascot: Keggy the Keg, Moose & Indian (1922-1974) (All unofficial) University of the Arctic Matariki Network of Universities 568 Group NAICU Website: dartmouth.edu
Dartmouth College is a private Ivy League research university located in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. It consists of a liberal arts college, the Geisel School of Medicine, the Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences. Incorporated as the "Trustees of Dartmouth College," it is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution. Dartmouth is the smallest university in the Ivy League. It was the last Ivy League school to admit women, in 1972. Dartmouth College was established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, a Congregational minister. After a long period of financial and political struggles, Dartmouth emerged in the early 20th century from relative obscurity.
Dartmouth College had its origins in the Indian missionary movement and in the mid-eighteenth-century evangelical revival. In 1754 the Congregational clergyman Eleazar Wheelock, a graduate of Yale, founded Moor's Indian Charity School in Lebanon (now Columbia), Connecticut. Wheelock also hoped to train missionaries who would convert American Indians to the new evangelical faith. He found both governmental authorization and a location for his school in the province of New Hampshire. In 1769, Governor John Wentworth secured for Wheelock a sizable grant of land as well as a royal charter establishing the college, named for the earl of Dartmouth. The charter of the new school reflected its origins in Indian education but also provided for the education of "Englsh Youth and any others." Wheelock moved with his small band of students up the Connecticut Valley to Hanover, New Hampshire, and assembled the first class of Dartmouth College in 1770 in a log hut. This first class numbered only twenty students, but enrollments rose rapidly, in part because Dartmouth was one of the few colleges that kept its doors open during the American Revolution. Four students graduated in 1771, and by the end of the decade the college had graduated almost a hundred students.
Wheelock was succeeded as president in 1779 by his son John, who held the presidency until 1815. These were years of rapid growth, particularly notable for the founding in 1797 of the Dartmouth Medical School, the fourth in the nation. They were also years that produced a lengthening roster of distinguished alumni. At the same time, John Wheelock's presidency witnessed a bitter contest between the trustees and the State of New Hampshire for control of the college, a struggle finally resolved by Chief Justice John Marshall and the Supreme Court in 1819 with the Dartmouth College Case (Trustees of Dartmouth College v. William H. Woodward).
The struggle for control of the college had left it in a demoralized and impoverished state, and it fell to new president Nathan Lord in 1828 to restore its health and spirit. Building on the strong foundations and rich traditions laid down by the Wheelocks, Lord and his successors embarked on a broad program of expansion that, before the end of the century, gave Dartmouth a greatly increased endowment, additional buildings, an observatory, and a strong faculty. Lord resigned in 1863 because of his unpopular support of slavery.
The Thayer School of Engineering was established in 1871. In 1900, the college added a third professional school, the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, now the oldest school of its kind in the United States.
It was not until the twentieth century that Dartmouth experienced its greatest growth. Enrollments throughout the nineteenth century had remained small, averaging at the end of the century about three hundred men. After the 1890s, the number of students increased tenfold, stabilizing at about three thousand by the mid-1900s. Endowment, faculty, and the physical plant increased accordingly. A center for the arts, facilities for graduate work in a number of fields, and an extensive research library were added.
Dartmouth was among the earliest academic institutions to experiment with computing possibilities on campus, adding high-speed computer network links to all dormitory rooms, administrative offices, and academic buildings. Under President John G. Kemeny, who took office in 1969, the college expanded its medical school as part of the newly organized Mary Hitchcock Medical Center and adopted a plan to permit an increase in undergraduate enrollment to four thousand students. In 1972, Dartmouth formally began admitting women. The college achieved this by beginning year-round operations, expanding off-campus programs, and requiring a summer term, thus allowing women to enroll without increasing the college's physical facilities. Dartmouth's history of educating men and the deep tradition of fraternity culture made the transition to coeducation difficult. Enrollment of women, and full acceptance of women's participation in campus life, academics, and athletics occurred slowly but steadily. In 1999, Dartmouth admitted its first class of first-year students in which women outnumbered men. The college has also increased the number of women faculty. While men constituted 92 percent of the faculty in 1972, by 1997, 30 percent of the Arts and Sciences faculty was female.
In its increased effort to build a more diverse student body and academic program, the college sponsors and supports a wide range of student organizations and links to the community. One of the oldest student organizations is the Dartmouth Outing Club, which maintains New Hampshire's stretch of the Appalachian Trail and has pioneered camping, rock climbing, canoeing, and kayaking programs for incoming students.
In the 1980s and 1990s, persistent battles between new initiatives and conservative traditions made Dartmouth the subject of many difficult and publicized political battles. In 1999 the trustees of the college implemented the Student Life Initiative, a massive restructuring of Dart-mouth's social atmosphere that focused on improving options for students beyond the discrimination and elitism of the Greek system, improving student housing, and supporting campus activities.
About Dartmouth University
Dartmouth offers more than 2,100 courses in over 50 concentrations. Students are encouraged to customize their majors by adding studies from other departments or designing their own. About 45% of freshmen receive grants from the school averaging almost $41,000. Notable alumni include two former US Treasury Secretaries, Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, as well as three Nobel laureates. The school’s newspaper, The Dartmouth, was founded in 1799 and is considered America’s oldest college newspaper. Students participate in more than 160 student organizations on campus. Nicknamed the Big Green, Dartmouth 35 intercollegiate varsity sports teams compete within Division I, the eight-member Ivy League and the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference. Over half of the student body studies abroad through one of D40 off-campus programs. Approximately 60 percent of students are members of Greek organizations, which serve as the hubs of social life at Dartmouth. The Outing Club – the oldest and largest collegiate outing club in the country – is the most popular student organization at Dartmouth, offering outdoor activities, expeditions, gear rentals and courses. Dartmouth also offers a year-round study plan that allows students to choose which terms to spend on campus and which to spend working or traveling.
10 Fun Facts About Dartmouth
1. Dr. Seuss (real name: Theodor Geisel) was a member of the Dartmouth Class of 1925. After being busted for illegal drinking and banned from extracurricular activities, Geisel adopted the pen name “Seuss” to continue working on the college humor magazine.
2. The movie “Animal House” was written by Chris Miller (Dartmouth ’63), based on Miller’s experiences in Dartmouth’s fraternity Alpha Delta Phi.
3. Dartmouth’s Latin motto “Vox clamantis in deserto” translates into “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.”
4. As a Homecoming tradition, the freshman class builds a bonfire and runs around it a set number of times in concordance with their class year (so the Class of 2013 would do 113 laps), while upperclassmen cheer them on.
5. In another well-known tradition, hundreds of students plunge into the icy water of Occom Pond for the annual Polar Bear Swim that takes place during Winter Carnival.
6. Colby College’s Miller Library was actually modeled after the Baker Memorial Library of Dartmouth!
7. Dartmouth does not have an official mascot, although the controversial Keggy the Keg (an anthropomorphic beer keg – see photo) has become an “ingrained part of Dartmouth culture.”
8. The story behind Dartmouth’s color (forest green) is surprisingly simple: back in 1866, it was the only color not used by another college.
9. The majority of each incoming class take part in “trips”, a pre-orientation, student-run five-day outdoor program, designed to welcome them to Dartmouth and bond with other freshmen.
10. Tea and cookies are served at 4pm each weekday at Sanborn Library, home of the English Department. It is estimated that around 1000 cups of teas are served every year!
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Post by Julia Hurin IM-45 on Sept 15, 2015 9:58:15 GMT
Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 in Saybrook Colony as the Collegiate School, the University is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. In 1718, the school was renamed Yale College in recognition of a gift from Elihu Yale, a governor of the British East India Company and in 1731 received a further gift of land and slaves from Bishop Berkeley.[6] Established to train Congregationalist ministers in theology and sacred languages, by 1777 the school's curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences and in the 19th century gradually incorporated graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first Ph.D. in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887.[7] Yale is organized into twelve constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and ten professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school's faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the University owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, including the Yale Bowl, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forest and nature preserves throughout New England. The university's assets include an endowment valued at $23.9 billion as of September 27, 2014, the second largest of any educational institution in the world. Yale College undergraduates follow a liberal arts curriculum with departmental majors and are organized into a system of residential colleges. Almost all faculty teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually.[8] The Yale University Library, serving all twelve schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States.[9][10] Outside of academic studies, students compete intercollegiately as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I Ivy League. Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 13 living billionaires,[11]and many foreign heads of state. In addition, Yale has graduated hundreds of members of Congress and many high-level U.S. diplomats, including former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and current Secretary of State John Kerry. Fifty-two Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the University as students, faculty, or staff, and 230 Rhodes Scholars graduated from the University. Interesting Facts about Yale University Prestigious Yale University was founded in 1701 in, what was known at that time, as the Colony of Connecticut. It is the third oldest university in the country and is part of the elite Ivy League with schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Brown. The university is currently ranked third on the US News & World Report college rankings. They are known as one of the premier research universities in the nation. However, there are some interesting and fun facts that not many people do not know about Yale University – 5 fun facts are listed below. Interesting Fact #1 Yale was originally founded as the Collegiate School at New Haven. Various clergymen in the colony wanted to establish a college to train clergy and political leaders for service to the colony. The founders were alumni from another prestigious school, Harvard, which was founded over 60 years prior. Interesting Fact #2 The Collegiate School officially changed their name to Yale University in 1701. This was to honor Elihu Yale, the governor of the East India Company out of Great Britain. He donated a crate of goods to help the struggling school continue to operate. Interesting Fact #3 Yale is know for its traditions and staying true to them. The Yale Daily News is the oldest collegiate daily newspaper still in existence. It has been printed five days a week since January 28, 1878. They also have the oldest and best known a cappella group. The Wiffenpoos have been singing on Monday nights since 1909. They typically perform at Mory’s, the famous, members only tavern on the Yale campus. Interesting Fact #4 One of the most prestigious secret societies in the country is Yale’s Skull and Bones. It was founded in 1832 by General William Russell and Alphonso Taft after two debating societies disputed that year’s award. Skull and Bones is the oldest of Yale’s secret societies and by far the most determinedly secretive. As such, it has long been an inspiration for speculation and imagination. It still is. The society is, of course, the inspiration for the new Universal Pictures thriller The Skulls, about a nefarious secret society at an Ivy League school in New Haven. In 1968, when George W. Bush was in Skull and Bones, there were eight “abovegrounds,” or societies that met in their own “tombs,” and as many as ten “undergrounds,” which held meetings in rented rooms. In an article in the 1968 Yale yearbook Lanny Davis, a 1967 Yale graduate and a secret-society member who would go on to become a White House special counsel in the Clinton Administration, described how Bones, famous for its distinguished list of members, held more sway than the others. Given the society’s history as an incubator and meeting point for rising generational elites, it is not surprising that an especially susceptible kind of “barbarian” — the Bones term for a nonmember — has long seen the society as a locus of mystery, wealth, and conspiracy (Source: skullandcrossbones.org). Fifteen male and female junior level students are chosen each spring for admission. They tend to be campus leaders, athletic team captains, newspaper editors, and members of the political union. The society’s most notorious members include George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, William Howard Taft, and John Kerry. The group is often steeped in intrigue and conspiracy. Interesting Fact #5 Yale prides itself on academic excellence. Therefore, they are extremely selective in their admittance. They receive over 20,000 student applications for each freshman class. Of those, only 1,300 are accepted. +video www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu9iAoTjLks
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Post by Olena Loburenko IM-45 on Sept 21, 2015 9:59:15 GMT
The University of Pennsylvania have a lot of advantages and plusses. As it focuses on natural sciences, there are a great number of professors of Medicine, Genetics, Pharmacology, Biochemistry, Biology, who have done a great influence on the development of this University. I will introduce you a few of them.
Contact information 12-102 Smilow Center for Translational Research 3400 Civic Center Boulevard / 5160 Philadelphia, PA 19104-5160 Office: (215) 898-0198 Fax: (215) 898-5408 Email: lazar@mail.med.upenn.edu Publications Search PubMed for articles Links Search PubMed for articles Lazar Lab Cell and Molecular Biology Graduate Group Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism Pharmacological Sciences Graduate Group Education: S.B. (Chemistry) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1976. Ph.D. (Neuroscience) Stanford Univerity, 1981. M.D. Stanford Univerity, 1982.
Mitchell A. Lazar
The Mitchell A. Lazar is the professor of Molecular Medicene. His laboratory is studying the transcriptional regulation of metabolism. It is particularly focused on the role played by nuclear receptors (NRs). Also he is studying the tissue-specific and physiological roles of the corepressor complexes using by combining genomic, genetic, proteomic, bioinformatic, and metabolic phenotyping approaches. His laboratory is especially interested in the circadian NR Rev-erb alpha, which utilizes the corepressor complex to potently repress transcription. Rev-erb alpha is a key repressive component of the circadian clock that coordinates metabolism and biological rhythms. Also studying PPAR gamma, a nuclear receptor that is a master regulator of adipocyte (fat cell) differentiation. Ligands for PPAR gamma have potent antidiabetic activity, and thus PPAR gamma represents a key transcriptional link between obesity and diabetes. The molecular, cellular, and integrative biology of these factors are being studied in mice and humans. Mitchell A. Lazar with his assistances has discovered resistin, a novel hormone and target of PPAR gamma that is made by fat cells in rodents and by macrophages in humans, and are testing the hypothesis that resistin links metabolism to inflammation in human metabolic diseases.
Contact information Clinical Research Bldg, 538A 415 Curie Blvd Philladelphia, PA, 19104 Philadelphia, PA 19103 Office: 650-468-5731 Lab: (215) 746-4049 Email: chrbro@upenn.edu Links Brown Lab Website Education: B.S. (Biochemistry) University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2001. Ph.D. (Genetics) Stanford University, 2007.
Christopher D. Brown
Another professor of the The University of Pennsylvania is Christopher D Brown. His research focuses on how genotypes produce phenotypes and how they vary and evolve. There is a particular interest in identifying and experimentally characterizing functional human non-coding sequence variation. The aim is to understand the mechanisms through which non-coding variants function, with an emphasis on understanding the mechanisms underlying complex human disease. Christopher D Brown with his assistances have leveraged a combination of high throughput experimental and computational approaches. The main attention si focused on massively parallelizing assays that interrogate non-coding DNA function and applying these approaches to the fine-mapping of the causal variants underlying human diseases. Contact information Richards Building D205 3700 Hamilton Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104 Office: 215-746-8683 Fax: 215-573-3111 Email: yosephb@upenn.edu Links Lab webpage Education: B.Sc. (Computer Science and Physics) Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.,1998. Ph.D. (Machine learning, computational biology) School of Computer Science, Engineering Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, 2006. Yoseph Barash
Yoseph Barash is the assistant professor of Genetics. His research interests: the lab develops machine learning algorithms that integrate high-throughput data (RNASeq, CLIPSeq , PIPSeq, etc.) to infer RNA biogenesis and function, followed by experimental verifications of inferred mechanisms. His research focuses on regulation of the nuclear genome in mammals and model organisms. The professor is particularly interested in changes in this chromatin structure via chemical modification of the histone proteins, and how attachment of certain chemical groups onto the histones leads to altered chromatin function. He with his colleagues are also fascinated by functional changes in chromatin. On balance it can be said a lot of information about the professors’ research that has done a grandiose influence on science and medicine.
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Post by Ulyana Panasyuk IM45 on Sept 21, 2015 15:22:36 GMT
University of Pennsylvania
Penn dates its founding to 1740, when prominent evangelist George Whitefield had the idea of building a Philadelphia charity school that would double as a house of worship for his followers.
Motto: Laws without morals are useless
“Hide not your Talents. They for use were made: "What's a Sun-Dial in the Shade?” Benjamin Franklin
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League, university located in Philadelphia. Incorporated as The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn is one of 14 founding members of the Association of American Universities and one of the nine original Colonial Colleges. Penn claims to be the oldest university in the United States of America.
Then in 1749, Benjamin Franklin—printer, inventor and future founding father of the United States—published his famous essay, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth, circulated it among Philadelphia’s leading citizens, and organized 24 trustees to form an institution of higher education based on his proposals. The group purchased Whitefield’s “New Building” and in 1751, opened its doors to children of the gentry and working class alike as the Academy and Charitable School in the Province of Pennsylvania. Franklin served as president of the institution until 1755 and continued to serve as a trustee until his death in 1790. Franklin’s educational aims, to train young people for leadership in business, government and public service, were innovative for the time. In the 1750s, the other Colonial American colleges educated young men for the Christian ministry, but Franklin's proposed program of study was much more like the modern liberal arts curriculum. His fellow trustees were unwilling to implement most of his then-radical ideas though, and Penn’s first provost, William Smith, turned the curriculum back to traditional channels soon after taking the helm from Franklin. In addition to challenging the educational conventions of the day, Franklin pushed boundaries that moved science and society forward and helped shape America’s very nationhood. He was a member of the Second Continental Congress, a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, and played a pivotal role in recruiting French aid for the Americans during the Revolutionary War. Franklin later signed the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the conflict with the British Empire. His broad knowledge spanned multiple disciplines, and far from regarding it as an end in itself, he saw knowledge as an asset that required practical application to be of value. His many essential inventions range from bifocals and the lightning rod to the iron furnace stove and odometer. Beyond that, the civic institutions that Franklin helped launch include the country’s first subscription library (1731) and first hospital (1751), in addition to what would become America’s first university, the University of Pennsylvania, in 1749. In the years that followed, Penn went on to obtain a collegiate charter (1755), graduate its first class (1757), establish the first medical school in the American colonies (1765) and become the first American institution of higher education to be named a university (1779). In 1802, the University expanded to a new campus, but by the 1860s had outgrown even that space, so in 1872 the trustees built a new campus in the street-car suburb of West Philadelphia.
Franklin's Influence & the Modern University
To this day, Penn’s 302-acre West Philadelphia campus reflects its rich heritage—a heritage closely bound with the birth of the United States—boasting more than 200 buildings and many notable landmarks, including the nation’s first student union and first double-decker college football stadium .
The 165 research centers and institutes on campus also reflect the University’s innovative, civic-minded and pragmatic creator: More than 250 years after Ben Franklin broke new ground in founding Penn, its faculty, students, and alumni continue make breakthroughs in research, scholarship, and education. Its many subsequent “firsts,” include the world’s first collegiate business school (Wharton, 1881), the world’s first electronic, large-scale, general-purpose digital computer (ENIAC, 1946), and the first woman president of an Ivy League institution (Judith Rodin, inaugurated in 1994) as well as the first female Ivy League president to succeed another female (Amy Gutmann, inaugurated in 2004).
From campus walkways engraved with Franklin’s words of wisdom to the University’s most important strategic initiatives such as Penn Compact 2020 and the President’s Engagement Prizes, Penn continues to educate and inspire future leaders to move our now-global society forward.
The official seal of the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania serves as the signature and symbol of authenticity on documents issued by the corporation.
Each year, the University of Pennsylvania Admissions Selection Committee seeks to enroll a class of 2,420 scholars, scientists, artists, athletes, entrepreneurs—and more—who hail from all corners of the world and a wide range of backgrounds.
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Post by Ulyana Panasyuk IM45 on Sept 21, 2015 16:30:19 GMT
Peter Conn
Peter Conn is Vartan Gregorian Emeritus Professor of English and Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, and is also a member of the graduate groups in the history of art and American civilization, a member of the urban studies and Asian-American studies faculties, and an affiliated member of the Center for East Asian Studies. His publications include The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917 (Cambridge University Press, 1983; paperback editions, 1988 and 2008), and Literature in America (Cambridge University Press, 1989), which was a main selection of Associated Book Clubs (UK). Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, 1996; Paperback 1998), was chosen as a "New York Times Notable Book," was listed among the best 25 books of 1996 by Publishers Weekly and among the best books of the year by Library Journal, was included among the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, and received the Athenaeum Award.
Conn's The American 1930s: A Literary History, was published by Cambridge in 2009. His most recent book, Adoption: a Brief Social and Cultural History, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. He has published editions of Washington Square, by Henry James, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. In 2009, The Teaching Company released Conn's video course and book on "American Best Sellers."
Conn's books and chapters have been translated into eight languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Romanian, and Korean. He has lectured at numerous American universities, and internationally in Ireland, England, Russia, Thailand, Romania, Japan, and China. He has also given talks at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Whitney Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutions, on a number of American artists, including Edward Hopper, William Christenberry, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Maxfield Parrish, Charles Sheeler, Wharton Esherick, and The Eight. In addition, he has published several essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on the job market in the humanities, and China and American universities, among other topics.
A John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Conn has directed National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) seminars for college and high school teachers, and was the recipient of an NEH Humanities Focus grant. He has received several awards for distinguished teaching, including the Ira Abrams award, the Mortarboard Award, and the Lindback Award, the university's senior teaching prize. Conn has served on the selection committee of the PEN Albrend award for non-fiction. He has received the Exemplary Leadership Award of the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. From 1987 through 1995, Conn acted as senior consultant on curriculum development to the Philadelphia Superintendent of Schools.
Conn has served as literary consultant on numerous television projects, including the Emmy-winning series, "The American Short Story," adaptations of novels by James Baldwin and Saul Bellow, and a video biography of John Dos Passos. He served as principal literary advisor to "Oprah's Book Club" for The Good Earth. His teaching projects have included College 005: The Great Books; English 401: Teaching American Studies, which places undergraduates as teaching assistants in a Philadelphia high school; English 800, a graduate course that combines the study of literature and composition with teacher training; and, for the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia, a course in children's literature.
Since 1993, Conn has served as visiting professor at the University of Nanjing, in the People's Republic of China. In 2011, and again in 2013, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Conn lectured in West China on topics in American studies.
Conn has served as Dean of the College, executive director of the Philadelphia Committee for College Placement, chair of the graduate groups in American Civilization and English, Faculty Master of Robert Hill College House and Community House and deputy and interim provost. He was the founding Faculty Director of Civic House, the university's center for community service, and the co-founder and director of the Urban Education minor program. Chairman Emeritus of the Welcome House adoption agency, he currently chairs the Major Gifts committee of the Pennsylvania/Delaware chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Peter Conn and his wife Terry have four children, Steven, David, Alison, and Jennifer, and (at last count) eight grandchildren.
AWARDS
1996 Penn Mortar Board Alumni Association Award For Outstanding Teacher
1989 Ira Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching
1973 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching
INTERESTS 19th-Century American Literature20th-Century American Literature
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Post by Julia Pavlushenko IM-45 on Sept 21, 2015 16:30:45 GMT
John Forbes Nash Born: 13 June 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, USA Died: 23 May 2015 in New Jersey, USA
John F Nash's father, also called John Forbes Nash so we shall refer to him as John Nash Senior, was a native of Texas. John Nash Senior was born in 1892 and had an unhappy childhood from which he escaped when he studied electrical engineering at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical. After military service in France during World War I, John Nash Senior lectured on electrical engineering for a year at the University of Texas before joining the Appalachian Power Company in Bluefield, West Virginia. John F Nash's mother, Margaret Virginia Martin, was known as Virginia. She had a university education, studying languages at the Martha Washington College and then at West Virginia University. She was a school teacher for ten years before meeting John Nash Senior, and the two were married on 6 September 1924. Johnny Nash, as he was called by his family, was born in Bluefield Sanitarium and baptised into the Episcopal Church. He was [2]:- ... a singular little boy, solitary and introverted ... but he was brought up in a loving family surrounded by close relations who showed him much affection. After a couple of years Johnny had a sister when Martha was born. He seems to have shown a lot of interest in books when he was young but little interest in playing with other children. It was not because of lack of children that Johnny behaved in this way, for Martha and her cousins played the usual childhood games: cutting patterns out of books, playing hide-and-seek in the attic, playing football. However while the others played together Johnny played by himself with toy airplanes and matchbox cars. His mother responded by enthusiastically encouraging Johnny's education, both by seeing that he got good schooling and also by teaching him herself. Johnny's father responded by treating him like an adult, giving him science books when other parents might give their children colouring books. Johnny's teachers at school certainly did not recognise his genius, and it would appear that he gave them little reason to realise that he had extraordinary talents. They were more conscious of his lack of social skills and, because of this, labelled him as backward. Although it is easy to be wise after the event, it now would appear that he was extremely bored at school. By the time he was about twelve years old he was showing great interest in carrying out scientific experiments in his room at home. It is fairly clear that he learnt more at home than he did at school. Martha seems to have been a remarkably normal child while Johnny seemed different from other children. She wrote later in life (see [2]):- Johnny was always different. [My parents] knew he was different. And they knew he was bright. He always wanted to do things his way. Mother insisted I do things for him, that I include him in my friendships. ... but I wasn't too keen on showing off my somewhat odd brother. His parents encouraged him to take part in social activities and he did not refuse, but sports, dances, visits to relatives and similar events he treated as tedious distractions from his books and experiments. Nash first showed an interest in mathematics when he was about 14 years old. Quite how he came to read E T Bell's Men of Mathematics is unclear but certainly this book inspired him. He tried, and succeeded, in proving for himself results due to Fermat which Bell stated in his book. The excitement that Nash found here was in contrast to the mathematics that he studied at school which failed to interest him. He entered Bluefield College in 1941 and there he took mathematics courses as well as science courses, in particular studying chemistry, which was a favourite topic. He began to show abilities in mathematics, particularly in problem solving, but still with hardly any friends and behaving in a somewhat eccentric manner, this only added to his fellow pupils view of him as peculiar. He did not consider a career in mathematics at this time, however, which is not surprising since it was an unusual profession. Rather he assumed that he would study electrical engineering and follow his father but he continued to conduct his own chemistry experiments and was involved in making explosives which led to the death of one of his fellow pupils. [2]:- Boredom and simmering adolescent aggression led him to play pranks, occasionally ones with a nasty edge. He caricatured classmates he disliked with weird cartoons, enjoyed torturing animals, and once tried to get his sister to sit in a chair he had wired up with batteries. Nash won a scholarship in the George Westinghouse Competition and was accepted by the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) which he entered in June 1945 with the intention of taking a degree in chemical engineering. Soon, however, his growing interest in mathematics had him take courses on tensor calculus and relativity. There he came in contact with John Synge who had recently been appointed as Head of the Mathematics Department and taught the relativity course. Synge and the other mathematics professors quickly recognised Nash's remarkable mathematical talents and persuaded him to become a mathematics specialist. They realised that he had the talent to become a professional mathematician and strongly encouraged him. Nash quickly aspired to great things in mathematics. He took the William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition twice but, although he did well, he did not make the top five. It was a failure in Nash's eyes and one which he took badly. The Putnam Mathematics Competition was not the only thing going badly for Nash. Although his mathematics professors heaped praise on him, his fellow students found him a very strange person. Physically he was strong and this saved him from being bullied, but his fellow students took delight in making fun of Nash who they saw as an awkward immature person displaying childish tantrums. One of his fellow students wrote:- He was a country boy unsophisticated even by our standards. He behaved oddly, playing a single chord on a piano over and over, leaving a melting ice cream cone melting on top of his cast-off clothing, walking on his roommate's sleeping body to turn off the light. Another wrote:- He was extremely lonely. And a third fellow student wrote:- We tormented poor John. We were very unkind. We were obnoxious. We sensed he had a mental problem.He showed homosexual tendencies, climbing into bed with the other boys who reacted by making fun of the fact that he was attracted to boys and humiliated him. They played cruel pranks on him and he reacted by asking his fellow students to challenge him with mathematics problems. He ended up doing the homework of many of the students. Nash received a BA and an MA in mathematics in 1948. By this time he had been accepted into the mathematics programme at Harvard, Princeton, Chicago and Michigan. He felt that Harvard was the leading university and so he wanted to go there, but on the other hand their offer to him was less generous than that of Princeton. Nash felt that Princeton were keen that he went there while he felt that his lack of success in the Putnam Mathematics Competition meant that Harvard were less enthusiastic. He took a while to make his decision, while he was encouraged by Synge and his other professors to accept Princeton. When Lefschetz offered him the most prestigious Fellowship that Princeton had, Nash made his decision to study there. In September 1948 Nash entered Princeton where he showed an interest in a broad range of pure mathematics: topology, algebraic geometry, game theory and logic were among his interests but he seems to have avoided attending lectures. Usually those who decide not to learn through lectures turn to books but this appears not to be so for Nash, who decided not to learn mathematics "second-hand" but rather to develop topics himself. In many ways this approach was successful for it did contribute to him developing into one of the most original of mathematicians who would attack a problem in a totally novel way. In 1949, while studying for his doctorate, he wrote a paper which 45 years later was to win a Nobel prize for economics. During this period Nash established the mathematical principles of game theory. P Ordeshook wrote:- The concept of a Nash equilibrium n-tuple is perhaps the most important idea in noncooperative game theory. ... Whether we are analysing candidates' election strategies, the causes of war, agenda manipulation in legislatures, or the actions of interest groups, predictions about events reduce to a search for and description of equilibria. Put simply, equilibrium strategies are the things that we predict about people. Milnor, who was a fellow student, describes Nash during his years at Princeton in [6]:- He was always full of mathematical ideas, not only on game theory, but in geometry and topology as well. However, my most vivid memory of this time is of the many games which were played in the common room. I was introduced to Go and Kriegspiel, and also to an ingenious topological game which we called Nash in honor of the inventor. In fact the game "Nash" was almost identical to Hex which had been invented independently by Piet Hein in Denmark. Here are three comments from fellow students: - Nash was out of the ordinary. If he was in a room with twenty people, and they were talking, if you asked an observer who struck you as odd it would have been Nash. It was not anything he consciously did. It was his bearing. His aloofness. - Nash was totally spooky. He wouldn't look at you. he'd take a lot of time answering a question. If he thought the question was foolish he wouldn't answer at all. He had no affect. It was a mixture of pride and something else. He was so isolated but there really was underneath it all a warmth and appreciation of people. - A lot of us would discount what Nash said. ... I wouldn't want to listen. You didn't feel comfortable with the person. He had ideas and was very sure they were important. He went to see Einstein not long after he arrived in Princeton and told him about an idea he had regarding gravity. After explaining complicated mathematics to Einstein for about an hour, Einstein advised him to go and learn more physics. Apparently a physicist did publish a similar idea some years later. In 1950 Nash received his doctorate from Princeton with a thesis entitled Non-cooperative Games. In the summer of that year he worked for the RAND Corporation where his work on game theory made him a leading expert on the Cold War conflict which dominated RAND's work. He worked there from time to time over the next few years as the Corporation tried to apply game theory to military and diplomatic strategy. Back at Princeton in the autumn of 1950 he began to work seriously on pure mathematical problems. It might seem that someone who had just introduced ideas which would, one day, be considered worthy of a Nobel Prize would have no problems finding an academic post. However, Nash's work was not seen at the time to be of outstanding importance and he saw that he needed to make his mark in other ways. We should also note that it was not really a move towards pure mathematics for he had always considered himself a pure mathematician. He had already obtained results on manifolds and algebraic varieties before writing his thesis on game theory. His famous theorem, that any compact real manifold is diffeomorphic to a component of a real-algebraic variety, was thought of by Nash as a possible result to fall back on if his work on game theory was not considered suitable for a doctoral thesis. He said in a recent interview:- I developed a very good idea in pure mathematics. I got what became Real Algebraic Manifolds. I could have published that earlier, but it wasn't rushed to publication. I took some time in writing it up. Somebody suggested that I was a prodigy. Another time it was suggested that I should be called "bug brains", because I had ideas, but they were sort of buggy or not perfectly sound. So that might have been an anticipation of mental problems. I mean, taking it at face value. In 1952 Nash published Real Algebraic Manifolds in the Annals of Mathematics. The most important result in this paper is that two real algebraic manifolds are equivalent if and only if they are analytically homeomorphic. Although publication of this paper on manifolds established him as a leading mathematician, not everyone at Princeton was prepared to see him join the Faculty there. This was nothing to do with his mathematical ability which everyone accepted as outstanding, but rather some mathematicians such as Artin felt that they could not have Nash as a colleague due to his aggressive personality. Halmos received the following letter in early 1953 from Warren Ambrose relating to Nash (see for example [2]):- There's no significant news from here, as always. Martin is appointing John Nash to an Assistant Professorship (not the Nash at Illinois, the one out of Princeton by Steenrod) and I'm pretty annoyed at that. Nash is a childish bright guy who wants to be "basically original," which I suppose is fine for those who have some basic originality in them. He also makes a damned fool of himself in various ways contrary to this philosophy. He recently heard of the unsolved problem about imbedding a Riemannian manifold isometrically in Euclidean space, felt that this was his sort of thing, provided the problem were sufficiently worthwhile to justify his efforts; so he proceeded to write to everyone in the math society to check on that, was told that it probably was, and proceeded to announce that he had solved it, modulo details, and told Mackey he would like to talk about it at the Harvard colloquium. Meanwhile he went to Levinson to inquire about a differential equation that intervened and Levinson says it is a system of partial differential equations and if he could only [get] to the essentially simpler analog of a single ordinary differential equation it would be a damned good paper - and Nash had only the vaguest notions about the whole thing. So it is generally conceded he is getting nowhere and making an even bigger ass of himself than he has been previously supposed by those with less insight than myself. But we've got him and saved ourselves the possibility of having gotten a real mathematician. He's a bright guy but conceited as Hell, childish as Wiener, hasty as X, obstreperous as Y, for arbitrary X and Y. Ambrose, the author of this letter, and Nash had rubbed each other the wrong way for a while. They had played silly pranks on each other and Ambrose seems not to have been able to ignore Nash's digs in the way others had learned to do. It had been Ambrose who had said to Nash:- If you're so good, why don't you solve the embedding theorem for manifolds. From 1952 Nash had taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but his teaching was unusual (and unpopular with students) and his examining methods were highly unorthodox. His research on the theory of real algebraic varieties, Riemannian geometry, parabolic and elliptic equations was, however, extremely deep and significant in the development of all these topics. His paper C1 isometric imbeddings was published in 1954 and Chern, in a review, noted that it:- ... contains some surprising results on the C1-isometric imbedding into an Euclidean space of a Riemannian manifold with a positive definite C0-metric. Nash continued to develop this work in the paper The imbedding problem for Riemannian manifolds published in 1956. This paper contains his famous deep implicit function theorem. After this Nash worked on ideas that would appear in his paper Continuity of solutions of parabolic and elliptic equations which was published in the American Journal of Mathematics in 1958. Nash, however, was very disappointed when he discovered that E De Giorgi had proved similar results by completely different methods. The outstanding results which Nash had obtained in the course of a few years put him into contention for a 1958 Fields' Medal but since his work on parabolic and elliptic equations was still unpublished when the Committee made their decisions he did not make it. One imagines that the Committee would have expected him to be a leading contender, perhaps even a virtual certainty, for a 1962 Fields' Medal but mental illness destroyed his career long before those decisions were made. During his time at MIT Nash began to have personal problems with his life which were in addition to the social difficulties he had always suffered. Colleagues said:- Nash was always forming intense friendships with men that had a romantic quality. He was very adolescent, always with the boys. He was very experimental - mostly he just kissed. He met Eleanor Stier and they had a son, John David Stier, who was born on 19 June 1953. Eleanor was a shy girl, lacking confidence, a little afraid of men, did not want to be involved. She found in Nash someone who was even less experienced than she was and found that attractive. [2]:- Nash was looking for emotional partners who were more interested in giving than receiving, and Eleanor, was very much that sort. Nash did not want to marry Eleanor although she tried hard to persuade him. In the summer of 1954, while working for RAND, Nash was arrested in a police operation to trap homosexuals. He was dismissed from RAND.
One of Nash's students at MIT, Alicia Larde, became friendly with him and by the summer of 1955 they were seeing each other regularly. He also had a special friendship with a male graduate student at this time: Jack Bricker. Eleanor found out about Alicia in the spring of 1956 when she came to Nash's house and found him in bed with Alicia. Nash said to a friend:- My perfect little world is ruined, my perfect little world is ruined. Alicia did not seem too upset at discovering that Nash had a child with Eleanor and deduced that since the affair had been going on for three years, Nash was probably not serious about her. In 1956 Nash's parents found out about his continuing affair with Eleanor and about his son John David Stier. The shock may have contributed to the death of Nash's father soon after, but even if it did not Nash may have blamed himself. In February of 1957 Nash married Alicia; by the autumn of 1958 she was pregnant but, a couple of months later near the end of 1958, Nash's mental state became very disturbed. At a New Year's Party Nash appeared at midnight dressed only with a nappy and a sash with "1959" written on it. He spent most of the evening curled up, like the baby he was dressed as, on his wife's lap. Some described his behaviour as stranger than usual. On 4 January he was back at the university and started to teach his game theory course. His opening comments to the class were:- The question occurs to me. Why are you here? One student immediately dropped the course! Nash asked a graduate student to take over his course and vanished for a couple of weeks. When he returned he walked into the common room with a copy of the New York Times saying that it contained encrypted messages from outer space that were meant only for him. For a few days people thought he was playing an elaborate private joke. Norbert Wiener was one of the first to recognize that Nash's extreme eccentricities and personality problems were actually symptoms of a medical disorder. After months of bizarre behaviour, Alicia had her husband involuntarily hospitalised at McLean Hospital, a private psychiatric hospital outside of Boston. Upon his release, Nash abruptly resigned from MIT, withdrew his pension, and went to Europe, where he intended to renounce his US citizenship. Alicia left her newborn son with her mother, and followed the ill Nash. She then had Nash deported - back to the United States. After their return, the two settled in Princeton where Alicia took a job. Nash's illness continued, transforming him into a frightening figure. He spent most of his time hanging around on the Princeton campus, talking about himself in the third person as Johann von Nassau, writing nonsensical postcards and making phone calls to former colleagues. They stoically listened to his endless discussions of numerology and world political affairs. Her husband's worsening condition depressed Alicia more and more. In January 1961 the despondent Alicia, John's mother, and his sister Martha made the difficult decision to commit him to Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey where he endured insulin-coma therapy, an aggressive and risky treatment, five days a week for a month and a half. A long sad episode followed which included periods of hospital treatment, temporary recovery, then further treatment. Alicia divorced Nash in 1962. Nash spent a while with Eleanor and John David. In 1970 Alicia tried to help him taking him in as a boarder, but he appeared to be lost to the world, removed from ordinary society, although he spent much of his time in the Mathematics Department at Princeton. The book [2] is highly recommended for its moving account of Nash's mental sufferings. Slowly over many years Nash recovered. He delivered a paper at the tenth World Congress of Psychiatry in 1996 describing his illness; it is reported in [3]. He was described in 1958 as the:- ... most promising young mathematician in the world ... ,- but he soon began to feel that:- ... the staff at my university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later all of Boston were behaving strangely towards me. ... I started to see crypto-communists everywhere ... I started to think I was a man of great religious importance, and to hear voices all the time. I began to hear something like telephone calls in my head, from people opposed to my ideas. ...The delirium was like a dream from which I seemed never to awake. Despite spending periods in hospital because of his mental condition, his mathematical work continued to have success after success. He said:- I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia. In the 1990s Nash made a recovery from the schizophrenia from which he had suffered since 1959. His ability to produce mathematics of the highest quality did not totally leave him. He said:- I would not treat myself as recovered if I could not produce good things in my work. Nash was awarded (jointly with Harsanyi and Selten) the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Science for his work on game theory. In 1999 he was awarded the Leroy P Steele Prize by the American Mathematical Society:- ... for a seminal contribution to research. Nash and Louis Nirenberg were awarded the Abel prize in 2015 for: ... striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis. A few days after picking up the prize in Norway, Nash and his wife Alicia were killed in an accident to their taxi on the New Jersey turnpike.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson List of References (10 books/articles) Some Quotations (2) Mathematicians born in the same country Additional Material in MacTutor Raoul Bott on John Nash Obituary: Guardian Obituary: Telegraph Obituary: Economist Obituary: New York Times Honours awarded to John F Nash (Click below for those honoured in this way) Nobel Prize 1994 AMS Steele Prize 1999 Abel Prize 2015 Popular biographies list Number 25 Other Web sites Encyclopaedia Britannica Nobel prize winners Nobel prizes site (An autobiography of Nash and his Nobel prize presentation speech) Nash's home page AMS [registration required] PBS Mathematical Genealogy Project
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Post by Tetyana Mulko IM45 on Sept 21, 2015 17:01:23 GMT
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is an American philosopher, literary theorist and historian of culture. Professor of French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese literature at Stanford University. Born June 15, 1948 in Würzburg (Germany). He was educated at the universities of Paris, Munich, Regensburg, Salamanca, Pavia and Constanta. In 1971 he defended his thesis at the University of Konstanz. From 1971 to 1974 he was an assistant J.-R. Jauss - one of the founders of the school of "receptive aesthetics." Later, he taught at various German universities, was vice president of the German Association of Romance Philology . In 1989, he took up the post of professor at Stanford University (USA), where at one time headed the Department of Comparative Literature. From 1992 to 1993 he was a member of the Academic Senate. From 1991 till 1994 he was a member of the expert council of the Center for the Humanities and a member of the Editorial Board of the publishing house Stanford University. From 1996 to 1997 he was the manager of the publishing house, also H.U.Gumbreht led the research team to study the "medieval theatricality." In 1995 Gumbrecht won Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Humanities and Sciences, as well as Kenneth M. Cuthbertson Award for exceptional service the university. He is also an honorary professor at several universities, such as St. Petersburg (Russia), Lisbon (Portugal) and Montreal (Canada). Gumbrecht’s writing on philosophy and modern thought extends from the Middle Ages to today and incorporates an array of disciplines and styles, at times combining historical and philosophical inquiry with elements of memoir. Much of Gumbrecht's scholarship has focused on national literatures in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, and he is known for his work on the Western philosophical tradition, the materiality of presence, shifting views of the Enlightenment, forms of aesthetic experience, and the joys of watching sports. In addition, Gumbrecht tries to analyze and to understand forms of aesthetic experience 21st-century everyday culture. Over the past forty years, he has published more than two thousand texts, including books, translated into more than twenty languages. In Europe and in South America, Gumbrecht has a presence as a public intellectual; whereas, in the academic world, he has been acknowledged by eight honorary doctorates in six different countries: Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, and Russia. He has also held a large number of visiting professorships, at the Collège de France, University of Lisbon, University of Manchester, and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, among others. As well as publishing academic works and teaching graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford, Gumbrecht is recognized as a public intellectual in Europe and South America and contributes to a range of newspapers and journals in English, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. His most famous books are: «Living at the edge of time» - 1997, «In Praise of Athletic Beauty» - 2006, «Production of Presence: what meaning can not convey» - 2004. His honours • April 2012: Winner of the José Vasconcelos World Award of Education granted by the World Cultural Council at Aarhus University, Denmark • September 2010: honorary doctorate of Aarhus University, Denmark • January 2009: honorary doctorate of the Phillips-Universität Marburg, Germany • January 2009: honorary doctorate of the University of Lisbon, Portugal • May 2008: honorary doctorate of the University of Greifswald, Germany • May 2007: honorary doctorate of the Saint Petersburg State University, Russia • May 2007: honorary doctorate of the University of Siegen, Germany • May 2003: honorary doctorate of the Université de Montréal, Canada Currently H.U.Gumbreht teaches literature at the Department of Comparative Literature, and besides it is cooperating with the departments of French and Italian, and Spanish and Portuguese. He is also an active participant in the Program for German Studies (German Studies) and the Programme for the study of contemporary thought and literature (Program in Modern Thought and Literature). In addition to Stanford University, Gumbrecht lectured at various universities in America and Europe.
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Post by Tetyana Mulko IM45 on Sept 22, 2015 16:01:19 GMT
Modern Language Association Founded: 1883 Admitted to ACLS: 1920
The Modern Language Association promotes the study and teaching of languages and literatures through its programs, publications, annual convention, and advocacy work. The MLA exists to support the intellectual and professional lives of its members; it provides opportunities for members to share their scholarly work and teaching experiences with colleagues, discuss trends in the academy, and advocate humanities education and workplace equity.
The association aims to advance the many areas of the humanities in which its members currently work, including literature, language, writing studies, screen arts, digital humanities, pedagogy, and library studies. The MLA facilitates scholarly inquiry in and across periods, geographic sites, genres, languages, and disciplines in higher education that focus on communication, aesthetic production and reception, translation, and interpretation. Through the Association of Departments of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages, the MLA also supports the work of department chairs and directors of graduate studies.
Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association of America is one of the world’s largest scholarly associations; it has over 26,000 members in approximately 100 countries. MLA members host an annual convention and other meetings and sustain a wide-ranging print and electronic publishing program that includes books, journals, style guides, and an international bibliography. Drawing on studies and reports produced by the MLA staff and MLA committees and collaborating with related organizations, MLA members engage in a variety of advocacy projects that pertain to the association’s mission. Members pursue advocacy projects and scholarly initiatives by communicating with their elected officers (president, first vice president, second vice president); with their elected representatives on the Executive Council and their regional elected representatives; with colleagues who have been elected to the field-based executive committees; and with the MLA executive director and the staff liaisons to the MLA’s committees.
The officers of the MLA are elected by its members. The president in 2011 was Russell A. Berman (Stanford University and Hoover Institution); the first vice president was Michael Bérubé (Pennsylvania State University), who assumed the MLA presidency in 2012; and the second vice president was Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University), who advanced to first vice president in 2012 and became MLA President in 2013. Margaret W. Ferguson was elected second vice president of the MLA in December 2011; she served as president from January 2014 through January 2015.
The MLA publishes several academic journals, including Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (abbreviated as PMLA), one of the most prestigious journals in literary studies, and Profession, which discusses the professional issues faced by teachers of language and literature. The association also publishes the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, a guide that is geared toward high school and undergraduate students and has sold more than 6,500,000 copies. The MLA Style Manual is geared toward graduate students, scholars, and professional writers; the third edition was published in May 2008. The MLA produces the print and online database, MLA International Bibliography, the standard bibliography in language and literature.
In addition to its job-placement activities, the convention features about 800 sessions, including presentations of papers and panel discussions on diverse topics (special sessions, forums, poetry readings, film presentations, interdisciplinary studies involving art and music, governance meetings) and social events hosted by English and language departments and allied or affiliated organizations. There are also extensive book exhibits in one of the main hotel or convention center exhibition areas.
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Post by Tetyana Mulko IM45 on Sept 22, 2015 16:22:51 GMT
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly, American monthly journal of literature and opinion, published in Boston. One of the oldest and most respected of American reviews, The Atlantic Monthly was founded in 1857 by Moses Dresser Phillips and Francis H. Underwood. It has long been noted for the quality of its fiction and general articles, contributed by a long line of distinguished editors and authors that includes James Russell Lowell,Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1869 The Atlantic Monthly created a sensation when it published an article by Harriet Beecher Stowe about Lord Byron and his salacious personal life. Stowe intended the article to “arrest Byron’s influence upon the young”; instead, it fascinated young readers, whose outraged parents canceled 15,000 subscriptions.
In the early 1920s The Atlantic Monthly expanded its coverage of political affairs, featuring articles by such figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Booker T. Washington. The high quality of its literature—notably, serialized novels, including best-sellers—and its literary criticism have preserved the magazine’s reputation as a lively literary periodical with a moderate worldview. In the 1970s increasing publication and mailing costs, far outstripping revenues from subscriptions and meagre advertising sales, nearly shut the magazine down. It was purchased in 1980 by Mortimer B. Zuckerman. The magazine is often referred to as The Atlantic, and issues from April 1981 to October 1993 carried that name until the original was reinstated. The Atlantic is an American magazine, founded (as The Atlantic Monthly) in 1857 in Boston, Massachusetts, now based in Washington, D.C. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine, growing to achieve a national reputation as a high-quality review with a moderate worldview.The magazine has notably recognized and published new writers and poets, as well as encouraged major careers. It has also published leading writers' commentary on abolition, education, and other major issues in contemporary political affairs. The magazine has won more National Magazine Awards than any other monthly magazine. After experiencing financial hardship and a series of ownership changes, the magazine was reformatted as a general editorial magazine. Focusing on "foreign affairs, politics, and the economy [as well as] cultural trends", it is now primarily aimed at a target audience of serious national readers and "thought leaders". The first issue of the magazine was published on November 1, 1857.The magazine's initiator and founder was Francis H. Underwood, an assistant to the publisher, ho received less recognition than his partners because he was "neither a 'humbug' nor a Harvard man".The other founding sponsors were prominent writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Harriet Beecher Stowe; John Greenleaf Whittier; and James Russell Lowell, who served as its first editor.
In 2010, The Atlantic posted its first profit in the previous decade. In profiling the publication at the time, The New York Times noted the accomplishment was the result of "a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue.
A leading literary magazine, The Atlantic has published many significant works and authors. It was the first to publish pieces by the abolitionists Julia Ward Howe ("Battle Hymn of the Republic" on February 1, 1862), and William Parker's slave narrative, "The Freedman's Story" (in February and March 1866). It also published Charles W. Eliot's "The New Education", a call for practical reform that led to his appointment to presidency of Harvard University in 1869; works by Charles Chesnutt before he collected them in The Conjure Woman (1899); and poetry and short stories, helping launch many national literary careers. For example, Emily Dickinson, after reading an article in The Atlantic by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asked him to become her mentor. In 2005, the magazine won a National Magazine Award for fiction.
The magazine also published many of the works of Mark Twain, including one that was lost until 2001.Editors have recognized major cultural changes and movements; for example, the magazine published Martin Luther King, Jr.'s defense of civil disobedience in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in August 1963.
The magazine has also published speculative articles that inspired the development of new technologies. The classic example is Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" (July 1945), which inspired Douglas Engelbart and later Ted Nelson to develop the modern workstation and hypertext technology.
In addition to its fiction and poetry, the magazine publishes writing on society and politics. "A three-part series by William Langewiesche in 2002 on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center generated headlines, as have articles by James Fallows on planning for the Iraq war and reconstruction."
As of 2012, its writers included Mark Bowden, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows, Jeffrey Goldberg, Robert D. Kaplan, Megan McArdle, and Jeffrey Tayler.
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Post by Ulyana Panasyuk IM45 on Sept 22, 2015 20:20:57 GMT
Modern Language Association of America
Founded: 1883 Admitted to ACLS: 1920
Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association of America provides support and opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy. MLA members host an annual convention and other meetings, work with related organizations, and sustain one of the finest publishing programs in the humanities. For over a hundred years, members have worked to strengthen the study and teaching of language and literature. What Is MLA Style? All fields of research agree on the need to document scholarly borrowings, but documentation conventions vary because of the different needs of scholarly disciplines. MLA style for documentation is widely used in the humanities, especially in writing on language and literature. Generally simpler and more concise than other styles, MLA style features brief parenthetical citations in the text keyed to an alphabetical list of works cited that appears at the end of the work.
MLA style has been widely adopted by schools, academic departments, and instructors for over half a century. The association's guidelines are also used by over 1,100 scholarly and literary journals, newsletters, and magazines and by many university and commercial presses. The MLA's guidelines are followed throughout North America and in Brazil, China, India, Japan, Taiwan, and other countries around the world. The MLA publishes two authoritative explanations of MLA style: the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers and the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. MLA International Bibliography The MLA International Bibliography provides a subject index for books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is compiled by the staff of the MLA Office of Bibliographic Information Services with the cooperation of more than 100 contributing bibliographers in the United States and abroad. Available online, the MLA International Bibliography annually indexes over 66,000 books and articles.
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Post by Victoria Pechenyk IM45 on Sept 22, 2015 20:24:47 GMT
Modern Language Association Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association (MLA) of America is the largest society of humanists in the United States. Its mission is to promote study, criticism, and research in the modern languages and their literatures and to further the common interests of teachers of these subjects.
Programs and Publications
The MLA's programs are designed to serve the scholarly and professional interests of its members. The association publishes two journals: PMLA, a distinguished scholarly journal, appears six times per year; Profession is an annual that carries committee reports, association surveys, and articles on a range of professional topics. Established in 1922, the MLA International Bibliography provides an annual classified listing and subject index of more than 50,000 books and articles about film, folklore, language, linguistics, and literature that are published worldwide. It is available in print and electronic formats. The reference work began to cover publications about rhetoric and composition and the teaching of language and literature with the 2000 edition. The MLA's book publication program meets the needs of students, teachers, and scholars through several series: Approaches to Teaching World Literature, Texts and Translations, Introductions to Older Languages, Options for Teaching, and Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Well-known to students are the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, A Re-search Guide for Undergraduate Students, and the Literary Research Guide. The Job Information List, which is available in print and electronic formats, offers up-to-date descriptions of employment opportunities in postsecondary English and foreign language departments.
The MLA convention, which takes place each year from December 27 through 30 and attracts between 8,000 and 9,000 participants, gives members opportunities for scholarly exchange on a wide range of topics. The association is also committed to collecting statistical information about the field. Recent studies examine enrollment trends in foreign languages, the use of part-time faculty members in English and foreign language departments, employment opportunities for new Ph.D.s, and the characteristics of successful college and university foreign language programs.
The MLA houses the Association of Departments of English (ADE) and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL). These organizations arrange summer seminars for chairs of English and foreign language departments, develop standards for the field, and publish the ADE Bulletin and ADFL Bulletin, which serve departmental administrators.
In 1997 the MLA introduced What's the Word?, a 29-minute weekly radio series that was available by 2001 on 125 National Public Radio stations and through Armed Forces Radio. The series showcases scholars in the field. Its purpose is to demonstrate how the study of languages and literature enriches people's lives. Sample topics include "Literature of the Sea," "Shakespeare Then and Now," "Film Couples," "Post-Apartheid South African Literature," "The Blues as Literature," and "Sermon Traditions."
Organizational Structure
Seventeen MLA members are elected to serve on the executive council, which has fiduciary responsibility for the association and selects the executive director, approves the annual budget, and appoints committees. A larger elected body, the delegate assembly, meets at the annual convention and considers a range of issues affecting the profession and the association. The assembly recommends actions to the executive council. MLA committees and staff members develop and implement the association's programs.
The MLA is a constituent society of the American Council of Learned Societies and an associate member of the American Council on Education. The MLA maintains membership in two advocacy coalitions–the National Humanities Alliance and the Joint National Committee for Languages. It is also a member of the Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes.
Membership and Financial Support
Membership in the MLA is open to any individual interested in advancing the goals of the association. The association has 30,000 members and supports its programs through publication revenue, library subscriptions, annual dues, and registration fees for the annual meeting. An endowment fund is valued at $1.1 million.
History and Development
The MLA was established in 1883 by forty college teachers who wished to encourage the study of the modern languages in U.S. colleges and universities at a time when the role of the classical languages was beginning to decline. Initially, MLA members established a journal for the publication of research in the field and organized an annual meeting to discuss scholarly and pedagogical issues. As the study of the modern languages grew increasingly important in both higher education and the schools, the MLA also grew.
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Post by Olena Loburenko IM-45 on Sept 22, 2015 20:24:59 GMT
Tin House
Tin House is one of the best and well known literary magazines in the USA. It started in 1998. Tin House has been honored by national anthologies more times than many literary magazine that have been publishing for over 100 years.
Meg Storey is an editor with Tin House Books and copy editor of Tin House magazine. The first issue of Tin House magazine arrived in the spring of 1999, the singular lovechild of an eclectic literary journal and a beautiful glossy magazine. Publisher Win McCormack said of the effort, “I wanted to create a literary magazine for the many passionate readers who are not necessarily literary academics or publishing professionals.” The first issue of Tin House magazine arrived in the spring of 1999, the singular lovechild of an eclectic literary journal and a beautiful glossy magazine. Publisher Win McCormack said of the effort, “I wanted to create a literary magazine for the many passionate readers who are not necessarily literary academics or publishing professionals.” With the help of New York editors Rob Spillman and Elissa Schappell, along with managing editor Holly MacArthur, McCormack accomplished just that.
Tin House offers an artful and irreverent array of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews as well as columns on food and drink, out-of-print and underappreciated books, and a literary crossword puzzle. Perhaps most indicative of the magazine’s mission to stake out new territory and showcase not only established, prize-winning authors is its commitment that every issue include the work of an undiscovered fiction writer and poet.
In 2002, Tin House ventured into the world of book publishing as an imprint with Bloomsbury. In 2005, the independent press Tin House Books was launched, Spearheaded by editorial director Lee Montgomery, Tin House Books publishes a dozen titles a year, and its authors have garnered attention from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and O, the Oprah magazine.
In 2003, Montgomery founded the annual Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop, where some of Tin House’s most esteemed and exciting colleagues gather together with ambitious and talented up-and-coming writers for a week of workshops, seminars, and readings on the beautiful campus of Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
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Post by Olena Loburenko IM-45 on Sept 22, 2015 20:27:21 GMT
The Modern Language Association of America
The Modern Language Association of America was founded in 1883 as a forum for scientosts to share their ideas, experiences, and findings with counterparts in their respective fields. Since it was founded, the MLA has grown to more than 30,000 members from over 100 countries. The attention of this Association is focused on advancing a lot of areas of humanities and on studding of languages and literatures through its programs, publications, annual convention, and advocacy work.
The MLA exists to support the intellectual and professional lives of its members; it provides opportunities for members to share their scholarly work and teaching experiences with colleagues, discuss trends in the academy, and advocate humanities education and workplace equity. MLA documentation style covers all aspects of scholarly writing, beginning with the mechanics of writing and publishing, through the basics of writing style, to guidelines for the preparation of theses and dissertations. Although the MLA guidelines cover all aspects of writing and publishing a paper, MLA documentation style places special emphasis on the proper citing of sources of information in one’s written work, and how to properly and consistently cite them throughout a paper or manuscript. MLA produces two major style publications as follows:
1. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (targets high school and undergraduate college and university students).
2. The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (targets graduate students, scholars, and professional writers).
The style recommended by the association for preparing scholarly manuscripts and student research papers concerns itself with the mechanics of writing, such as punctuation, quotation, and documentation of sources. MLA style has been widely adopted by schools, academic departments, and instructors for nearly half a century.
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Post by Victoria Pechenyk IM45 on Sept 22, 2015 21:04:18 GMT
Ploughshares is an American literary magazine established in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in The Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1989, Ploughshares has been based at Emerson College in the heart of Boston. Published in April, August, and December in quality paperback, each issue is guest-edited by a prominent writer who explores personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles. Guest editors have been the recipients of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, National Book Awards, MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, and numerous other honors. The editor-in-chief is Ladette Randolph.
DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley History In 1970 DeWitt Henry, a Harvard Ph.D. student, and Peter O'Malley, an Irish expatriate, joined together at the Plough and Stars pub to fill a void they felt existed in the literary scene in Boston. Neither one was happy with what was currently being published, and, with their friends and followers, decided to create their own literary magazine. Realizing that they and their supporters would never be able to agree on a specific editorial outlook for the magazine, the co-founders decided that the position of editor would be a rotating one. Since then, Ploughshares has been edited by a different author for every issue, giving the magazine a unique and constantly changing voice. The first issue was published in September 1971. The magazine soon became recognized as a beacon for talented new writers. Some of the writers whose first or early works have appeared in Ploughshares are Thomas Lux, John Irving, Russell Banks, Sue Miller, Mona Simpson, Ethan Canin, Tim O'Brien, Robert Pinsky, and Jayne Anne Phillips. In later years it has gone on to publish some of the leading voices in contemporary literature, including Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Jennifer Egan, Lydia Davis, ZZ Packer, E. Annie Proulx, Ann Beattie, Gordon Lish, Louise Glück, Haruki Murakami, Amy Hempel, Mark Doty and Alice Munro. In 1989, Ploughshares became affiliated with Emerson College. Author Don Lee took the reins as Editor-in-Chief, and would serve in that position until 2007. In 1990, Ploughshares received the first of three large grants from the Wallace–Reader's Digest Funds, and thereafter came rapid growth, state-of-the-art computers, a new design, and aggressive marketing campaigns. In 2008, Ladette Randolph replaced Don Lee as Editor-in-Chief. The quality of the magazine's content remains the same, though its appearance has changed to reflect its firm place in today's literary world. Ploughshares has had more selections in The Best American Short Stories than any other literary journal in the past ten years. In the past several years, it has had more stories published in The Pushcart Prize anthology than any other publication, and the magazine continues to be considered one of the most prestigious in the country. Awards and recognition - 2007 Commonwealth Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC) - Ploughshares is cited in the Global Politician as being "a leading literary portal." Cohen AwardsEach year, Ploughshares honors the best short story and poem published in the journal with the Cohen Awards, which are sponsored by their longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by the advisory editors. Each winner receives a cash prize of $600. John C. Zacharis First Book AwardNamed after Emerson College's former president, the John C. Zacharis First Book Award was instituted in 1991 to honor the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer. The award alternates annually between poetry and fiction and carries a cash prize of $1,500 to the winning author.
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Post by Julia Pavlushenko IM-45 on Sept 22, 2015 21:53:46 GMT
About the MLA Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association of America provides opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy. MLA members host an annual convention and other meetings, work with related organizations, and sustain one of the finest publishing programs in the humanities. For more than a century, members have worked to strengthen the study and teaching of language and literature. Learn more about the MLA's mission. The MLA at a Glance
Over 26,000 members in 100 countries Programs serving English and foreign language teachers An annual convention, with meetings on a wide variety of subjects, and smaller seminars across the country The MLA International Bibliography, the only comprehensive bibliography in language and literature, available online A book publication program issuing a number of new books each year and maintaining a backlist of over 200 titles 4 major periodicals: the ADE Bulletin; the ADFL Bulletin; Profession; and PMLA, one of the most distinguished journals in the humanities MLA Commons, a scholarly communication network and publishing platform A quarterly newsletter providing association news, lists of deadlines, and items of interest to members 147 forums for the scholarly, teaching, and professional interests of members 49 membership committees overseeing association activities and publications Leadership in the national education community Membership Involvement in Association Activities
Over 300 members are elected to govern the association through its Executive Council, Delegate Assembly, and other governance committees. Over 700 members serve on the executive committees of the 147 forums that represent the scholarly, teaching, and professional interests of various constituencies within the membership and that help determine much of the program at the annual convention. Over 2,000 members give papers and readings each year at the convention. Hundreds of readers join the 51 members of the PMLA Editorial Board and Advisory Committee in reviewing essays submitted for publication. More than 120 specialists index articles and journals for the MLA International Bibliography. Over 80 members are involved in selecting the winners of the 25 prizes the MLA awards for outstanding scholarly books and articles on language and literature. The ADE and ADFL
As projects of the Modern Language Association, the Association of Departments of English (ADE) and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) advocate for departments of English and departments of languages other than English, respectively. The ADE and ADFL provide information and research for member departments, creating institutional, national, and professional contexts for exploring policy, disciplinary challenges, trends, and best practices in the fields of composition and rhetoric, language studies, and literature in higher education
What Is MLA Style?
All fields of research agree on the need to document scholarly borrowings, but documentation conventions vary because of the different needs of scholarly disciplines. MLA style for documentation is widely used in the humanities, especially in writing on language and literature. Generally simpler and more concise than other styles, MLA style features brief parenthetical citations in the text keyed to an alphabetical list of works cited that appears at the end of the work.
MLA style has been widely adopted by schools, academic departments, and instructors for over half a century. The association's guidelines are also used by over 1,100 scholarly and literary journals, newsletters, and magazines and by many university and commercial presses. The MLA's guidelines are followed throughout North America and in Brazil, China, India, Japan, Taiwan, and other countries around the world.
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