���ϲ�����’s premier speaker series, the University Lectures brings to ���ϲ����� audience members and the larger public notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives. The series was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. Media sponsor for the University Lectures is .

Series events typically take place on campus, but—following public health guidance due to the COVID-19 pandemic—this fall’s lectures will all be virtual, viewable via Zoom. And audience members will be able to submit questions for consideration as part of the experience, time permitting. Connection information will be provided closer to each event.

Wilmer Valderrama
Tuesday, Sept. 22, 7:30 p.m.

Wilmer Valderrama

Valderrama will take part in a conversation with David Barbier Jr. ’23, an international relations major in the Maxwell School and a television, radio and film major in the Newhouse School. He is also a Posse Foundation Scholar and a participant in the Renée Crown University Honors Program.

Valderrama has amassed an extensive acting résumé in film and television that solidified him in Hollywood as a sought-after leading man. He is most recognized for his portrayal of the character Fez on Fox’s Emmy-nominated series “That ’70s Show” (1998-2006), a role that garnered him numerous Teen Choice Awards. In 2016, he joined the cast of the hit CBS drama “NCIS” (then in its 14th season) as NCIS Special Agent Nick Torres.

His other recent television credits include Fox’s “Minority Report,” Netflix’s “The Ranch,” ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” and Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s television series “From Dusk Till Dawn.” Valderrama also voiced the main character of Disney’s hugely popular animated children’s show “Handy Manny,” which introduced preschoolers to Spanish.

His film credits include the animated feature “Charming” (2018), for which he voiced Prince Charming, “The Adderall Diaries” (2015), “To Whom It May Concern” (2015), “Larry Crowne” (2011) and “From Prada to Nada” (2011).

Behind the camera, Valderrama created and produced the MTV series “YO MOMMA,” also serving as its host. And his production company WV Entertainment has multiple television and film projects in development.

In his community, Valderrama serves on the board of Voto Latino and is the spokesperson for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s Ready 2 Lead program, which works to educate and empower Latino youth. Valderrama also recently co-founded HARNESS, a group dedicated to connecting communities to inspire action and power change. In 2013, Valderrama was honored with an ALMA Award for Outstanding Social Activism.

Born in Miami, Valderrama moved to Venezuela with his family at age 3 and returned to the United States as a teen. He and his sisters were the first in their family to speak English, and his parents instilled in them the critical importance of education.

Fluent in both Spanish and English, Valderrama resides in Los Angeles.

Valderrama’s appearance is sponsored by the .

Nikole Hannah-Jones
Thursday, Oct. 8, 7:30 p.m.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Hannah-Jones will be interviewed by Rawiya Kameir, assistant teaching professor in the magazine, news and digital journalism department in the Newhouse School. A critic, editor and producer, Kameir was a finalist for the 2020 National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category.

Hannah-Jones covers racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine and has spent years chronicling the way official policy has created—and maintains—racial segregation in housing and schools.��Her deeply personal reports on the black experience in America��offer a compelling case for greater equity.

She was named a�� for “reshaping national conversations around education reform.” This is but one honor in a growing list. Her story “Worlds Apart” in The New York Times Magazine won the National Magazine Award (a.k.a. Ellie) for “journalism that illuminates issues of national importance” as well as the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism.

In 2016, Hannah-Jones was awarded a Peabody Award and a George Polk Award for radio reporting for her��“This American Life”��story “The Problem We All Live With.”��She was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists and was also named to 2019’s The Root 100 as well as Essence’s Woke 100. Her reporting has also won Deadline Club Awards, Online Journalism Awards,��the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service, the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting and��the Emerson College President’s Award for Civic Leadership.

Most recently, The New York Times Magazine’s that she spearheaded on the history and lasting legacy of American slavery went viral, and her powerful introductory essay—written under the headline “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True”—was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Named for the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in America, the project features an ongoing series of essays and art on the relationship between slavery and everything from social infrastructure and segregation, to music and sugar—all by Black American authors, activists, journalists and others.

Nothing we know about American life today has been untouched by the legacy of slavery. “The 1619 Project” quickly went viral—the print issue flew off shelves immediately, prompting hundreds of thousands of extra copies to be printed—spreading its heartbreaking and important message worldwide. Random House announced��that it will be adapting the project into a graphic novel and four��publications for young readers, while also releasing an extended version of the original��publication, including more essays, fiction and poetry.

Earlier this year, Hannah-Jones appeared on to discuss the project. And an impactful ad about the project—a collaboration with singer-songwriter Janelle Monáe—debuted at the Oscars just days later.

In addition to Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer, “The 1619 Project” won two 2020 National Magazine Awards this past May, in the Public Interest category and in the Podcasting category, for three audio pieces.

In February 2020, she was profiled by Essence as part of its Black History Month series, celebrating “the accomplishments made by those in the past, as well as those paving the way for the future.”

Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting with the goal of increasing the number of reporters and editors of color.

Along with��The New York Times, her reporting has been featured in ProPublica,��The Atlantic Magazine, Huffington Post, Essence, The Week Magazine,��Grist, Politico Magazine and on��“Face the Nation,” “This American Life,” “The Tom Joyner Morning Show,” MSNBC, C-SPAN,��Democracy Now and radio stations across the country.

Hannah-Jones’ appearance is co-sponsored by the , which is presenting .

Thom Filicia ’04
Tuesday, Oct. 27, 7:30 p.m.

Thom Filicia

Filicia started his career at renowned design firms Parish-Hadley, Robert Metzger and Bilhuber & Associates. He launched his acclaimed enterprise in 1998 and emerged as one of today’s most influential and respected interior and product designers. His projects range from residential and hospitality to commercial interiors all over the world.

includes such projects as the VIP Suite for the USA Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Aichi, Japan; an eco-friendly apartment for Riverhouse, Manhattan’s first premium (LEED certified) “green” luxury condominium tower; and the Delta Sky Decks at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Filicia has been praised as a top designer and international tastemaker. He gained widespread fame for his role as the interior design expert on the Emmy Award-winning “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” as well as for his television work for Style Network, HGTV and most recently Bravo’s “Get a Room with Carson & Thom.”

He is also the driving force behind the Thom Filicia Home Collection, which includes furniture, artwork, bedding, textiles and wallcovering, and has a flagship showroom, called , at The New York Design Center.

Filicia is the best-selling author of “Thom Filicia Style” (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2008) and “American Beauty: Renovating and Decorating a Beloved Retreat” (Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2012).

In 2011, he was named one of Elle Decor’s top 25 A-List Designers. In 2006, he was chosen as one of ’s Top 100 American Designers and ’s Top 50 “Tastemakers.”

Filicia’s appearance is co-sponsored by the and is part of ���ϲ�����’s LGBTQ History Month.

Carrie Mae Weems, flanked by ���ϲ����� Mayor Ben Walsh, speaks after receiving a proclamation announcing Carrie Mae Weems “Resist COVID Take 6” Day in the City of ���ϲ�����.

In recognition of ���ϲ����� Artist in Residence Carrie Mae Weems’ efforts to raise public awareness about the impact of COVID-19 on people of color, promote preventative measures and dispel harmful falsehoods about the coronavirus, ���ϲ����� Mayor Ben Walsh on Thursday issued a proclamation declaring July 9, 2020, as Carrie Mae Weems “Resist COVID Take 6” Day in the City of ���ϲ�����.

Weems is an internationally renowned artist and MacArthur Fellowship recipient who uses multiple mediums (photography, video, digital imagery, text, fabric and more) to explore themes of cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, family relationships and the consequences of power.

This wheat-paste poster campaign is appearing in Atlanta.

She was honored Thursday at a midday announcement event in the Common Council Chambers at ���ϲ����� City Hall. A recording of Mayor Walsh’s press conference is available for viewing on the .

���ϲ�����, where Weems lives, has served as a test market for her RESIST COVID TAKE 6! campaign. It launched in May with a series of digital billboards in targeted city neighborhoods and has continued with the distribution of various promotional items—bags, buttons, door hangers, hand fans, magnets—at community centers, COVID-19 testing sites, food banks, grocery stores and churches, as well as targeted mailings of informational flyers.

Additional waves of billboards will appear later this summer and in the fall. And RESIST COVID TAKE 6! signage will soon appear in bus shelters and on CENTRO buses. Also, a has been produced.

The project has begun expanding across the country, through the collaboration of Weems’ . and partner art centers and local community organizations in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; Manhattan, Bronx and Brooklyn, New York; Chicago; Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas; Detroit; Philadelphia; and Sarasota, Florida. In addition, a newspaper ad campaign has begun in Aspen, Colorado.

The proclamation presented to Carrie Mae Weems by ���ϲ����� Mayor Ben Walsh.

Growing research shows Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans are more likely to get sick from COVID-19 than their white neighbors. This may be due in large part to a long history of social inequality and economic inequity. RESIST COVID TAKE 6! brings these issues to the forefront of public consciousness while emphasizing steps members of these affected communities can take to stay safe.

“One of the things we’ve noticed in this pandemic is that it has shined a very bright light on the systemic issues that have impacted a number of marginalized communities, particularly communities of color, for the history of this country: systemic racism, inequality,” Mayor Walsh remarked. “And those systemic problems have shown themselves in many different ways and have shown themselves in a very specific way during this pandemic. That is, we know our communities of color are disproportionately impacted by health crises like this. And it’s reflected in the numbers. We pride ourselves in being data-driven in our response. If we’re looking at the data, we know we have a significant problem in helping to protect our communities of color.

“This crisis gives us an opportunity, not only to try to address the short-term crisis and to make sure we’re taking care of each other and helping each other, especially the most marginalized, but it also gives us an opportunity to address those systems that existed long before this pandemic,” he said. “And unless we do something about it in this moment, they will impact us long after this pandemic.

“In a way that very few people in this world could do, Carrie has created an opportunity for us to both: address the short-term crisis we’re facing as well as to address the long-term systemic issues that have impacted us for far too long.”

This mural is a part of the targeted awareness campaign in New York City.

“The Mayor used the term ‘inequality,’” Weems remarked. “Last week, my assistants Amy [Pennington-Lee] and Megan [King] and I were sitting looking at some of our material for this public art campaign, and I kept looking at the word and thinking about the word inequity. And the meaning of inequity. And the difference of the meanings of inequity and inequality.

“It dawned on me that there is something deep and wide and systemic about the idea of the word inequity,” Weems continued. “Its vastness across multiple series of landscapes, disciplines, cultures, practices and lives. And that it’s really inequity in the ways in which people of color have been treated through the lack of overall justice within the system that has given rise to this incredible health care crisis across the country.

“And this health care crisis has also linked to the escalating violence that is also ricocheting, unfortunately, at this time of this extraordinary epidemic through our community as well. They are all linked. And in that linkage, and in that connection, I think is where we find the depths of inequity and therefore where we have to work and focus our attention.”

���ϲ����� Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens spoke about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic: “COVID is not a hoax. Don’t let people fool you. It is very real. And it is very much affecting communities that I call my community—that I’ve grown up in: Black, Brown, Native people. Very much affecting us. Wash your hands. Socially distance yourself. Wear a mask. And get tested.”

More information about RESIST COVID TAKE 6! can be found at . The project is made possible through the support of ���ϲ�����, the Ford Foundation and the Rolex Foundation.

Bakari Sellers

Joined by a University panel, Sellers will also address the historical implications that led to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others, and discuss strategies for action and change.

The event is Friday, June 12, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. on Zoom. It’s free, but . Live closed captioning will be provided.

“The murder of George Floyd has not only been enraging to see, but as a Black man, I cannot help but think that he could’ve easily been me. He is one out of the many Black men and women whose lives we have lost due to police brutality,” says Marques Palmer ’21. “As a social work major, I am dedicated and committed to studying ways to help people within various communities, enhance their individual and collective well-being. The black community should not have to be burdened with worrying about our constant safety and the ongoing effects of systemic racism, but we do.

“I am looking forward to Bakari Sellers’ virtual conversation with our campus community on Friday, Palmer says.��“I am hopeful that with his words and our collective thoughts as a community, we will bring awareness to the ongoing injustices that we as Blacks face on a daily basis, because every Black life matters.”

“The heinous killing of George Floyd is not a singular event.��The omnipresent nature of systemic racism has to end,” says Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Keith Alford. “No more Black lives, not one, should be lost because of police brutality or any racial atrocities. We will keep pressing forward in making this change a lasting one. That’s why I am looking forward to Bakari Sellers’ visit. He has been a longtime advocate of civil rights. And his words, in this moment, will be welcomed.”

About Bakari Sellers

Widely considered a rising star in the Democratic Party, Sellers made history in 2006 when, at just 22 years old, he defeated a 26-year incumbent state representative to become the youngest member of the South Carolina state legislature and the youngest African American elected official in the nation. Sellers served South Carolina’s 90th district until 2014, when he vacated his position to run for lieutenant governor (losing his bid to Republican Henry McMaster, who would go on to become the state’s governor).

Sellers served on Barack Obama’s South Carolina steering committee during the 2008 election and spoke at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

He was named to TIME’s “40 Under 40” list in 2010; Politico’s “50 Politicos to Watch” list in 2012; the “HBCU Top 30 Under 30” list in 2014; and The Root’s “100 Most Influential African Americans” list in 2014 and 2015.

Sellers is the son of civil rights activist Cleveland Sellers Jr. He attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, earning a bachelor’s degree in African American studies, and went on to earn a juris doctor degree at the University of South Carolina School of Law. He has worked for U.S. Rep. James Clyburn and then-Mayor of Atlanta Shirley Franklin. He is an attorney with the Strom Law Firm, L.L.C., in Columbia, South Carolina.

His book (Amistad, 2020) was published this past May. Sellers highlights the systemic inadequacies in rural black America, using his hometown, Denmark, South Carolina, as an example. He traces his father’s rise to become a friend of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights hero and a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. And he explores the plight of the South’s dwindling rural, black working class—many of whom can trace their ancestry back for seven generations.

This is one of the project’s several billboard designs featuring Carrie Mae Weems’ photographs and text.

A new project by ���ϲ����� Artist in Residence Carrie Mae Weems is raising public awareness about COVID-19 among people of color—who have been disproportionately impacted by the deadly virus—by promoting preventative measures and dispelling harmful falsehoods, while also paying homage to front-line and essential workers who have placed themselves in harm’s way. The artist-driven project is called RESIST COVID TAKE 6! The “TAKE 6” in the title refers to the recommended six feet of separation in social distancing.

The project is led by Weems’ . ���ϲ�����, where Weems lives, will serve as a test market for the project over the next six months.

Flyer promoting masks and social distancing

The first phase of the ���ϲ����� rollout is a series of billboards that have debuted in targeted city neighborhoods. These will be followed by PSAs on local radio stations and on social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube). In addition, a series of promotional items—buttons, posters, flyers, shopping bags, hand fans, magnets and door hangers—will be made available at community centers, COVID-19 testing sites, food banks, grocery stores and churches. A resource website is also in development. Materials will be produced in English, Spanish and Onondaga language.

Eventually, Weems hopes to expand RESIST COVID TAKE 6! to other cities across the country with large African American, Latino and/or Native populations—among them Harlem and the Bronx in New York and Oakland, California.

Growing research shows black, Latino and members of Native American communities are more likely to get sick from COVID-19 than their white neighbors. This may be due in large part to a long history of social inequality and economic inequity. Among the more specific factors commonly cited:

• Many African Americans and Latino Americans work in health, service industry, manufacturing or agricultural jobs that have been deemed essential (e.g., hospitals, grocery stores, nursing homes, meat-packing plants, farms) and require close contact with others who potentially may be carrying COVID-19.
• They are more likely to live in densely populated urban centers, where it is more difficult to practice social distancing, and they use public transportation, where the virus can spread more easily.
• Multi-generational households, which may be more common among some racial and ethnic minority families, may find it difficult to take precautions to protect older family members or isolate those who are sick if space in the household is limited.
• Those with underlying health conditions—including cardiovascular issues and diabetes—are especially susceptible to complications from the coronavirus. And for those who are underinsured or have no insurance, access to affordable health care to obtain treatment is difficult.
• Many Native Americans live in remote areas and lack easy access to running water for frequent handwashing or nearby medical services if they become sick.

Flyer promoting healthy practices

“We’ve all been impacted by COVID-19. It’s an ecological health crisis of epic proposition—an international disaster,” Weems says. “And yet we have indisputable evidence that people of color have been disproportionately impacted. The death toll in these communities is staggering. This fact affords the nation an unprecedented opportunity to address the impact of social and economic inequality in real time.��Denial does not solve a problem.

“And I thought, ‘How can I use my art and my voice as a way of underscoring what’s possible and bring the general public into a conversation, into heightened awareness of this problem to better the community in which I live?’”

Weems says she began working on RESIST COVID TAKE 6! a few months ago, as the extent of the COVID-19 crisis became apparent. The idea came from a conversation between Weems and her close friend Pierre Loving, lamenting what they saw unfolding.

“Pierre came up with the initial proposal,” Weems says. “I’m designing the art and text along with , a fantastic branding firm. And then there is , which is the producing arm: a wonderful group of people that have worked with various artists over the years, and they’ve helped me to produce many of my other projects and performances.”

���ϲ����� became involved in the project through Weems’ role as the first University Artist in Residence and the institution’s keen interest in her artistic endeavors.

“When SU heard that I was doing this project, which just sort of came up in casual conversation, they said, ‘We want to be a part of bringing this important message to the community. We think this is really important, and we want to be a part of it.’ And so, they just stepped up,” Weems says.

Flyer thanking front-line workers

Weems is in the process of recruiting more partners including community organizations, to help with funding and distribution of materials. And she wants to invite other artists to join the project and develop additional imagery and text-based works.

Weems hopes RESIST COVID TAKE 6! will be impactful in both its immediate messaging and in prompting larger dialogue about the pandemic and the long-term state of those for whom it has taken the most severe toll.

“I’m not a policy-maker. I’m not a politician. I’m a citizen concerned about what’s going on in my community,” she says. “This coronavirus isn’t going away anytime soon, and neither are the underlying issues affecting people of color that it has made even more apparent.”

About Carrie Mae Weems

Weems is an internationally renowned artist who has used multiple mediums (photography, video, digital imagery, text, fabric and more) to explore themes of cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, family relationships and the consequences of power.

She was named ���ϲ�����’s first University Artist in Residence, a three-year appointment, in January 2020. In this role, she is engaging faculty and students in a number of important ways, including in the design, planning and preparation of major exhibitions in Madrid, Los Angeles, New York and other venues.

Carrie Mae Weems

Among her many honors, Weems is a recipient of a (a.k.a. “Genius” grant) and was the first African American woman to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum.

Her other accolades include the prestigious Prix de Roma, the Frida Kahlo Award for Innovative Creativity, the WEB DuBois Medal, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the BET Honors Visual Artist Award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art Photography and the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography. And she was named an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.

Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville; The Cleveland Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.

Most recently, Weems curated “What Could Have Been” in the Guggenheim Museum’s first-ever, artist-curated exhibition titled “Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection.” Weems has also created a body of work in theater and performing arts, including a commissioned event, “The Future is Now and I am It: A Parade to mark the moment,” to commemorate the opening of the Kennedy Center’s REACH expansion, and the theatrical works “Grace Notes” and “Past Tense,” among others. She is currently working on a commissioned project for the Park Avenue Armory.

Weems is represented in public and private collections around the world, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

She holds an honorary degree from ���ϲ�����, as well as from Bowdoin College, the California College of Art, Colgate University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the New York School of Visual Arts�� and Smith College.

About ���ϲ�����

���ϲ����� is a private research university that advances knowledge across disciplines to drive breakthrough discoveries and breakout leadership. Our collection of 13 schools and colleges with over 200 customizable majors close the gap between education and action, so students can take on the world. In and beyond the classroom, we connect people, perspectives and practices to solve interconnected challenges with interdisciplinary approaches. Together, we’re a powerful community that moves ideas, individuals and impact beyond what’s possible.

Due to the current course of COVID-19 and the expansion of public health directives relating to social distancing and containing the spread of the virus, ���ϲ����� is moving all previously scheduled residential courses to online delivery for the Summer Session II term: June 29-Aug. 7.

As mentioned in my previous email message on March 24, summer registration is now open in MySlice for all summer sessions, including:

• Maymester (May 11-22)
• Maymester Flex (May 11-open)
• Summer I (May 18-June 26)
• Combined Summer Sessions (May 18-Aug. 7)
• Summer II (June 29-Aug. 7)

If you plan to take summer courses and haven’t already contacted your academic advisor, please schedule an appointment through Orange SUccess or via email.

It’s also not too early to think about and plan for fall courses. Registration for fall is also open in MySlice.

You can add the courses to your shopping cart early to make sure to sign up for your preferred classes early!

Sincerely,

Siham Doughman
University Registrar

Borrowing

You can’t beat your local library. Easiest choice is right on campus: , most notably the massive E.S Bird Library. With your SU I.D. card, you have both access and the power to borrow. The Libraries has about four million(!) titles and a sizable, helpful staff (there’s even a website option to live chat with a library staff member). In addition to being a nexus of information and a popular study space, Bird has its own café and hosts a number of lectures, public exhibitions and special events.

Off campus, the system has 31 branch libraries across the county in addition to the Central Library (447 S. Salina St., ���ϲ�����), where you can take out books, eBooks, audiobooks and more. And a library card is free.

Another great place to borrow (or to donate a book): one of the dozens of community Little Free Library locations throughout the region. These are awesome! Walk up, look, take. And you can help restock by leaving a book of your own. There’s a for area Little Free Library locations. Search by zip code or community name or just click the “Near Me” radio button.

Keeping

There’s no place closer to shop than the in the Schine Student Center. Along with text books, art supplies, computers, cosmetics and all things Orange, the Bookstore carries a substantial quantity of books from new bestsellers to works by faculty authors. Hours are Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The Rescue Mission Alliance has throughout the region. They’re great places to find used books and give back in a meaningful way through your purchases. Same goes for the . And don’t forget, you can also donate your own used books for others to enjoy.

The big dog in the book-buying biz is, of course, Barnes & Noble. If you’re looking for new bestsellers at a sweet discount, you can’t beat a visit to a B&N location in DeWitt (3454 Erie Boulevard East), Clay (3956 Rt. 31, Liverpool), Ithaca (614 S. Meadow St.), Vestal (2443 Vestal Parkway East) or New Hartford (4811 Commercial Dr.). Or ; with a $25 B&N membership, you get member discounts and free mailing.

If you’re looking for older, rarer or harder-to-find tomes—or you just like the feel of a traditional bookstore, visit a local independent bookstore.

���ϲ�����’s two signature used bookstores are practically across the street from each other in the Eastwood neighborhood. Which makes it easy to go to one, load up, and then walk to the other and load up some more.

Books & Melodies Bookstore (2600 James St., ���ϲ�����) is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. They have no website, but there is a page. This is a very large bookstore (plan to spend some time here) billed as “CNY’s largest entertainment/intellectual exchange.”

Five large rooms are filled with thousands of used hardcovers and paperbacks, plus magazines, comics, graphic novels, old games, vinyl records, CD, DVDs and hard-to-find VHS tapes.

A massive basement has more, filled with $2 specials on more vinyl, additional books, sheet music, CDs and cassettes. Did we mention you’ll want to spend some time here?

Within a book’s throw (note: we’re not condoning book tossing) is the city’s other premier bookstore, Books End Bookshop (2443 James St., ���ϲ�����). It’s open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Books End has a and is also on and .

In square footage, it’s not as big as its neighbor, but Books End still offers a large selection of newer and older books (more than 70,000) covering every literary genre. It’s ���ϲ�����’s oldest used bookstore and specializes in rare, vintage and out-of-print books. There’s a large selection of fiction and nonfiction books available for purchase in person or online.

Also of note, Books End offers a Frequent Reader Card. For every $10 spent, you receive a stamp. Collect 10 stamps, and you’ll get $10 off your next purchase.

In addition to selling, Books End .

Further down the street from these two bastions of bookdom is another store, albeit a more specialized one: Sacred Melody (3501 James St.), “a third-generation family business that offers inspirational gifts and books that help people express their faith.” Hours are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Sacred Melody offers spirituals; bibles; devotionals; books on prayer and love and marriage; books for adults, teens and children; and much more.

In addition to the store itself, Sacred Melody has a and a . Oh, and as every bookstore should have, there is a coffee shop next door—a Café Kubal.

Another local bookstore, Golden Bee Bookshop, is in Liverpool (305 Vine St.). Hours are Tuesday through Friday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Hosts a book club, along with other events. Golden Bee is on the , and .

It’s an attractive little store that “carries a thoughtfully curated collection of Fiction books in a whimsical and welcoming setting.” What’s not on hand can be ordered and arrive within 3-4 business days. The store also features candles, bookmarks, mugs art and cards, most of which are produced by local artisans.

Golden Bee hosts a number of special events, including two monthly book clubs—one featuring new fiction, and the other focusing on paperbacks. And the store has a resident cat named Mia. Yes, along with coffee, every bookstore should have a cat.

Here are some other notable choices within a reasonable drive:

Backstreet Books and Bistro
No website. On .
Address: 201-203 Oneida St., Fulton
Hours: Tuesday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to noon.
Used bookstore offering a wide variety of genres. A program of .

Time and Again Books & Tea
No website: On .
Address: 18 E. Utica St., Oswego
Hours: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 12:30 to 6 p.m.; Wednesday, 4 to 6 p.m.; Saturday, noon to 4 p.m.
Offers used books, DVDs, CDs and books on CD.

River’s End Bookstore
. On .
Address: 19 W. Bridge St., Oswego
Winter hours: Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Boasts a large selection of new books, plus numerous special events, including author appearances. But in person or online.

Book Barn of the Finger Lakes
No website.
Address: 198 North Road/County Route 163, Dryden
Hours: Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.
Historic farmstead, with three red and green barns containing 2.5 miles of shelving of used, rare and scholarly books.

Autumn Leaves Used Books

Address: 115 E. State St., Ithaca
Hours: Monday through Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Features 60,000 books (including rare and collectibles), a basement with 10,000 records and an in-store café. “Offers the selection and quality of a new bookstore at used book prices.”

Buffalo Street Books
. On , and .
Address: Located in The Dewitt Mall, 215 N. Cayuga St., Ithaca
Hours: Sunday through Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Opened in 1981 as the Bookery II. Reopened in 2011 as a cooperatively owned bookstore. Stocks thousands of titles for both adults and children, as well as literary journals, cards and periodicals. Hosts several book clubs and groups, as well as numerous events.

Popeks Used and Rare Books
.
Address: 356 Main St., Otego
Hours: Closed for winter, but reopens March 6. Spring/summer/fall hours: Sunday and Monday, Friday and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Tuesday and Wednesday, 9 to 11 a.m.

Berry Hill Bookshop
.
Address: 2349 NY-12B, Deansboro
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The Book Peddler
. On .
Address: 5266 State Highway 41, Smithville Flats

The Book Vault Fine Books

Address: 46 Washington Ave, Endicott
Hours: Thursday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m.

Book Warehouse
Address: Located at Waterloo Premium Outlets, 655 State Highway 318, Waterloo
Hours: Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Stomping Grounds
On and .
Address: 41 Seneca St., Geneva
Hours: Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Joshua Aviv ’15, G’17, Kelsey Davis ’19, Daniel Folkman ’12, Julia Haber ’18, Erin Miller ’16 and Michelle Schenandoah G’18 will participate in a panel discussion, moderated by Davis, on Thursday, Nov. 14 at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel.

The event—“Young Alum Entrepreneurs: breaking the rules, blazing new paths, not waiting their turn”—is free and open to the public. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided.

It is presented by the with co-sponsors the , the , the�� and the Office of Academic Affairs

About the panelists

Josh Aviv (College of Arts and Sciences/Maxwell School, School of Information Studies)��

Josh Aviv launched as a ���ϲ����� student and has gone on to become a dynamic figure in the clean-tech community. SparkCharge makes portable, ultrafast charging units for electric vehicles and has been featured in major technology and clean energy publications.

While a student, Aviv won the grand prize in the New York Business Plan Competition, as well as top honors in more than seven business competitions while earning his degrees from the University. Aviv won the top prize of $1 million at 43North, a Buffalo-based startup competition, and won the California Climate Cup, Startup Fest’s global pitch competition and Plug and Play’s clean energy innovation award. TechCrunch most recently named Spark Charge as a top tech disruptor. He was selected for the prestigious Techstars accelerator program in Boston.

SparkCharge is now starting manufacturing operations in Buffalo and has an engineering division at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts, the world’s largest clean-tech incubator.

Aviv received the Generation Orange Award at this fall’s Orange Central celebration. The award recognizes Generation Orange alumni who have made an impact on campus and in their communities through their volunteer work and philanthropy on behalf of ���ϲ�����.

Kelsey Davis (Newhouse School)��

Kelsey Davis is the founder and CEO of , a platform that empowers the next generation of college creatives by connecting creatives with brands looking to reach Generation Z.

She has been featured in The New York Times and Adweek, and she created the column for .

Prior to CLLCTVE, Davis worked in production for Condé Nast Entertainment and UniWorld Group.

A recent graduate of the Newhouse School, she is pursuing a master’s degree in entrepreneurship at the Whitman School.

Daniel Folkman (Whitman School)

Daniel Folkman is the vice president of business at , the fastest-growing digital convenience retailer, delivering thousands of products—including ice cream, candy, beverages, cleaning products, diapers, pet goods and, in some markets, beer, wine and spirits—to customers directly from centrally located facilities.

goPuff is operating in more than 100 U.S. locations, with more than 1,500 employees. At goPuff, Folkman oversees business development, corporate development, brand and communications, which includes developing strategic partnerships with the world’s largest consumer brands, such as Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and many others.

Before goPuff, Folkman spearheaded business development at Sumpto, a marketing and insights platform for the college demographic. At Sumpto, he was the first hire and led user growth and partnership strategy.

A thought leader in the tech and CPG space, Folkman has spent time consulting, advising and operating startups with an emphasis on business development, corporate strategy and brand partnerships.

Additionally, he serves on the Young Whitman Advisory Council for the Whitman School.

Julia Haber (Newhouse School)

Julia Haber is a creator, innovator and go-getter. She is the founder and CEO of , which she began in her first year at ���ϲ�����. During her sophomore and junior years, respectively, Haber interned with Spotify and Snapchat.

WAYV is the brand of the college market, unlocking hyper-tailored experiences for college students. WAYV crafts experiential, data-driven pop up shops on college campuses across the country.

With WAYV and her earliest pop-up shop iterations, Haber worked with national brands such as��Lululemon, Rent The Runway and Shopify, and partnered with companies such as AT&T and Adobe.

Haber and Kelsey Davis were both featured on AdWeek magazine’s podcast.

Erin Miller (Newhouse School)

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Erin Miller, co-founder of , started making films with her brother by borrowing equipment from their community television center. After an enriching four years at ���ϲ�����, she started her own production company that specialized in making promotional videos for startups and small businesses.

Miller pivoted towards producing films after the successful premiere of her first short, “No Nuts” (now streaming on Amazon Prime), a romantic comedy about two camp counselors that fall in love at a summer camp for kids allergic to peanuts.

She values diverse representation on and off set, sharing friends’ films, and honest expression of self.

Miller currently helps tech startups reach their full potential at in Austin, Texas. There she helps run hackathons, happy hours and the Virtual Reality Lab.

Michelle Schenandoah (Newhouse School)

An inspirational speaker and thought leader, Michelle Schenandoah is a traditional member of the Oneida Nation Wolf Clan of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. She is the founder of , a new Indigenous women’s online media platform. Schenandoah is�� focused on leadership development and the reclaiming of Indigenous women’s traditional roles among their nations.�� She also operate Indigenous Concepts Consulting with the goal of incorporating Indigenous perspectives into the mainstream and in existing business and media paradigms.

Schenandoah is president of the board of directors of the nonprofit , focused on ending domestic violence and sexual assault through empowerment in Indigenous communities.

She earned a B.A. at Cornell University, an M.S. at ���ϲ����� and J.D. and LL.M. degrees at the New York University School of Law.

As you might imagine, fall is one of the best times for seasonal produce around these parts. The air gets crisper, the leaves turn shades of gloriousness, and the harvest is bountiful: apples, beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cranberries, escarole, fennel, leeks, pumpkins, squash and so much more.

So many delicious fruits and veggies, and so many ways to eat them: stews, salads, side dishes or just slice and munch.

Carmine Mortellaro

When we’re in need of ideas of what to prepare and how to prepare it, we turn to a favorite chef, Carmine Mortellaro. Carmine is the sous chef for ���ϲ����� Food Services. He studied culinary arts at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and worked in numerous high-volume hotels before coming to the University last April.

We asked Carmine for a couple, easy-to-cook fall vegetable recipes. But before getting to the good stuff, we wanted to ask Carmine for his thoughts on a few fun fall food topics.

Okay, Chef, putting you on the spot: what’s your fave fall vegetable and why?

My favorite vegetable harvested in the fall is butternut squash. It is a very versatile vegetable. It has a sweet and nutty flavor. It can make a great addition to many sweet and savory recipes. Butternut squash is also packed with a bunch of vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants. Butternut squash can be roasted or boiled. I would stay away from sautéing due to the fact the squash will not cook fully if you sauté. It can be used in soups and stews, roasted as a side for the main dish, cut into French fries and fried, shaved thinly for slaws and salads. There are many ways to use a butternut squash.

Now let’s talk fruit. What does it for you?

Apples. Why apples? New York produces 25 million bushels of apples annually. Apples can be used in a variety of ways: to make pies, cider, doughnuts, wine and juice to name a few. There are many different varieties of apples grown here in New York state: McIntosh, Empire, Red Delicious, Cortland, Golden Delicious, Rome, Idared, Crispin, Paula Red, Gala, Jonagold, Jonamac, Fuji, Macoun and Braeburn, among others.

How about fruit filling for pies?

There are many different pies that can be made in the fall. The three most common pies are apple, pumpkin and rhubarb. There is also cherry pie, sweet potato pie and pecan pie. Pies are always a common dessert in the fall due to holidays like Thanksgiving and family gatherings.

We’re on the hunt for the freshest produce. Roadside stand? Farmers market? Grocery store?

The best place to get the freshest produce in New York is a farm stand or farmers market. If you can’t find what you are looking for there, you could always run to the Central New York staple grocery store—Wegmans!

Now that our recyclable shopping bags are stuffed full of goodness, let’s pull out the veggies. We understand preparation depends on what we’re making, but, in general, is there a best way to cook vegetables so they retain their flavor and texture and nutrients: Steam? Sauté? Grill? Bake? Boil? Sun and magnifying glass?

Certain vegetables can be cooked in different ways. When you boil/steam vegetables, you lose a lot of nutrients. The best ways to cook vegetables so they keep their nutritional value are roasting, grilling and sautéing. For butternut squash, you can roast or boil and then puree to turn into a soup. Brussels sprouts are best blanched and then sautéed or roasted with olive oil, salt and pepper. Beets are good for roasting whole and then letting cool and peel and cut.

While you’re here, we have to ask about kale. What’s the deal? Some people love it, others hate it. Where do you stand on the kale debate? And for those who are new to kale, what’s a low-bar way to give it a try? (Don’t say smoothie. Please, don’t say smoothie.)

Kale has been a trending vegetable for quite some time now. It is packed with minerals and fiber. There are different types of kale such as green kale, red kale, Tuscan kale and ornamental kale. Kale can be used as a salad green, braised, sautéed and fried for kale chips. I am a fan of kale because of its flavor profile. It has a bitter taste if it is plain by itself; but if you cook it, I would sauté it with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper.

And now for the recipes:

Butternut Squash Soup

Ingredients:

5 pounds of butternut squash, peeled and diced
10 ounces of celery, diced
10 ounces of white onion, diced
1.5 pounds of New York apples, peeled and diced
2 quarts of vegetable stock
1 quart of heavy cream
8 ounces of brown sugar
1 pint of maple syrup

Method:

Gather the ingredients.
Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large pot.
Add the butternut squash, celery and onions. Cook until the celery and onions are softened and the onions become translucent.
Add the apples and vegetable stock. Simmer until the squash is tender.
Transfer the mixture to a blender and blend until smooth. Add the heavy cream, brown sugar and maple syrup.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Serve hot!

Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Ingredients:

1.5 pounds of Brussels sprouts
3 tablespoons of olive oil
3/4 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of black pepper

Method:

Preheat oven to 400° F.
Cut off the brown ends of the Brussels sprouts and pull off any yellow outer leaves.
Mix them in a bowl with the olive oil, salt and pepper.
Pour them on a sheet pan and roast for 35 to 40 minutes, until crisp on the outside and tender on the inside.
Shake the pan from time to time to brown the sprouts evenly.
Serve hot!

Marcus Solis

Noted New York City broadcast journalist Marcus Solis ’91 will engage in an on-stage conversation with Simon Perez, associate professor of broadcast and digital journalism, on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel as a guest of the , the and the .

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided.

Solis joined (Eyewitness News 7) in 1997 as a general assignment reporter. He was part of the station’s Peabody Award-winning coverage of the events of 9/11. He led the station’s coverage of the December 2012 mass-casualty shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and was also on the scene to report on the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013.

Solis, who is fluent in Spanish, was among the first New York journalists to report from Haiti following the 2010 earthquake, and he has covered papal visits in Mexico City, hurricanes in Puerto Rico and the dissident movement in Cuba.

After beginning his career at WFAS AM-FM in White Plains, New York, he moved to WDTV in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and then spent four years as an anchor/reporter at New York 1 News before joining WABC-TV.

Solis was one of feted at the Newhouse School’s 50th anniversary gala event in October 2015 in New York City. In 2012, he was inducted into the Newhouse School Professional Gallery, honoring some of the school’s most successful graduates.

As a student at the Newhouse School (graduating with a B.S. in broadcast journalism), Solis was a recipient of the Bob Costas Scholarship.

Simon Perez

About Simon Perez

Like Solis, Perez is an accomplished, bilingual reporter with more than 20 years’ experience in the news industry. His background includes work in television (KPIX-TV/San Francisco, WRIC-TV/Richmond, Virginia, WGXA-TV/Macon, Georgia, Canal de Noticias, WCNC-TV/Charlotte, North Carolina); newspaper (ABC Prensa Española in Madrid, Spain, Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia and Danville Register & Bee in Danville, Virginia); and magazine (Macworld/España in Madrid, Spain).

He is a recipient of 2007 and 2008 Northern California Emmy Awards for best evening and daytime newscasts.

About the University Lectures

Now in its 19th season, the University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

Retired Adm. James Stavridis

James Stavridis—U.S. Navy retired four-star admiral, former dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and author of the forthcoming book ”—will speak on “The Secret to Being an Effective Leader” on Thursday, Oct. 10, from 1 to 2 p.m. in the Melanie Gray Ceremonial Courtroom in Dineen Hall.

Stavridis is a guest of the D’Aniello Family Speaker Series and the , with sponsorship support by the D’Aniello Family Foundation and the .

The event is open to all ���ϲ����� students, faculty and staff. Seating is limited, and a valid SU I.D. is required for admission. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided. A reception will follow the presentation.

Stavridis is an operating executive of The Carlyle Group—advising the global investment firm’s executive team and investment professionals on geopolitical and national security issues—as well as chair of the Board of Counselors of McLarty Associates, an international consulting firm; chair of the board of the U.S. Naval Institute, the professional association of the nation’s sea services; a monthly columnist for TIME Magazine; and chief international security analyst for NBC News.

After retiring from the navy in 2013, Stavridis served as dean of the Fletcher School for five years.

In 2016, he was vetted as a potential vice president running mate by then-Democratic presidential hopeful, and later Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. After the election, he was invited by President-elect Donald J. Trump to Trump Tower to discuss a possible cabinet position in the Trump Administration.

During his distinguished 37-year military career, Stavridis was awarded more than 50 medals, including 28 from foreign nations. From 2009-13, he was commander of U.S. European Command and NATO supreme allied commander Europe, where he oversaw operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Balkans and counter-piracy off the coast of Africa. From 2006-09, he commanded U.S. Southern Command in Miami, charged with military operations throughout Latin America.

From 2002-04, Stavridis commanded the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, conducting combat operations in the Persian Gulf in support of both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

Stavridis commanded the destroyer U.S.S. Barry from 1993-95, completing deployments to Haiti, Bosnia and the Persian Gulf; under his command, the Barry won the Battenberg Cup as the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet. Beginning in 1998, he commanded Destroyer Squadron 21 and deployed to the Persian Gulf, during which time Stavridis received the Navy League’s John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational Leadership.

Stavridis has served as a strategic and long-range planner on the staffs of the chief of naval operations and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the start of the “Global War on Terror,” he was selected as director of the Navy Operations Group, Deep Blue, USA. He has also served as executive assistant to the secretary of the navy and senior military assistant to the secretary of defense.

A distinguished graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Stavridis also received an M.A. in law and diplomacy and a Ph.D. in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

In addition to “Sailing True North” (available Oct. 15 from Penguin Publishing Group), Stavridis is author or co-author of eight other books:

• “Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans” (Penguin, 2017);
• “The Leader’s Bookshelf” (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2017);
• “The Accidental Admiral: A Sailor Takes Command at NATO” (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2014);
• “Partnership for the Americas: Western Hemisphere Strategy and U.S. Southern Command” (NDU Press, 2010);
• “Command at Sea” (U.S. Naval Institute Press, sixth edition, 2010);
• “Destroyer Captain: Lessons of a First Command” (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2007);
• “Watch Officer’s Guide” (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 12^th edition, 2006); and
• “Division Officer’s Guide (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2005).

About the D’Aniello Speaker Series

The D’Aniello Speaker Series is a Universitywide lecture series promoting dialogue on subjects with national impact. Some of the nation’s most prominent leaders and thinkers speak on topics including entrepreneurship, free enterprise, patriotism, veterans issues and leadership.

About the University Lectures

Now in its 19^th season, the University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

Joshua Gillaume

Joshua Gillaume ’14 (VPA, history of art) was the compositing supervisor among a team at Framestore that completed “Free Solo: 360,” which won the Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media Within an Unscripted Program.

Dan Gurewitch

Dan Gurewitch ’06 (Newhouse, television, radio and film), senior writer for “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” was part of the team that won the award for Outstanding Writing For A Variety Series.

David Young

David Young ’05 (Newhouse, television, radio and film), supervising producer of “Carpool Karaoke: The Series,” was part of the team that won the award for Outstanding Short Form Variety Series.

Betsy West

Betsy West G’74 (Newhouse, television-radio) is the producer and co-director of “RBG,” the critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated documentary on the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She and the “RBG” production team received an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. West was also a nominee for Outstanding Director For A Documentary/Nonfiction Program, for “RBG.”

Jacqueline Wilson

Jacqueline Wilson (Newhouse), co-executive producer of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” was part of the team that won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program. Wilson died earlier this month, prior to the Emmys presentations.

Tony Zajkowski

Tony Zajkowski ’88 (VPA, advertising design) was part of the “Queer Eye” editing team that won the Emmy for Outstanding Picture Editing For A Structured Reality Or Competition Program.

“VPA has a strong alumni presence throughout the entertainment industry, and given how talented our graduates are, I’m not surprised that the Television Academy continues to recognize them for their achievements” says Dean Michael S. Tick. “On behalf of the college, I congratulate all of our Emmy nominees and especially our winners.”

Other alumni who received nominations:

• Ellen Burke ’11 (VPA, film), production manager, “HQ Trivia”: Outstanding Original Interactive Program
• Glenn Eichler ’76 (A&S, English), writer, “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”: Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series
• Vera Farmiga ’95 (VPA, drama), actress, “When They See Us”: Outstanding Supporting Actress In a Limited Series Or Movie
• Eric Gurian ’04 (Newhouse, television, radio and film), producer, “The 76^th Annual Golden Globe Awards”: Outstanding Variety Special (Live)
• Philip Gurin ’81 (Newhouse, television-radio), executive producer, “Shark Tank”: Outstanding Structured Reality Program
• David Hyman ’75 (VPA, drama), nominated twice in the same category, in his roles as producer of “The Good Place” and co-executive producer of “Veep,” Outstanding Comedy Series
• Chris Licht ’93 (Newhouse, broadcast journalism), nominated twice in two categories, in his role as executive producer of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Outstanding Interactive Program and Outstanding Variety Talk Series
• David Markus ’74 (A&S/Maxwell, political science), co-executive producer, “American Ninja Warrior”: Outstanding Competition Program
• Max Porus ’00 (Newhouse, producing for electronic media), supervising producer, “American Ninja Warrior”: Outstanding Competition Program
• Kevin M. Richardson ’88 (VPA, drama), voice actor, nominated for the “F is For Family” episode “The Stinger”: Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance
• Kent Sublette ’91 (VPA, musical theatre), head writer, “Saturday Night Live”: Outstanding Writing For A Variety Series
• Briana Vowels ’05 (VPA, stage management), supervising producer, “American Ninja Warrior”: Outstanding Competition Program

Our pride is overflowing for SU-Newhouse alums who won or were nominated for Emmys this year, not only on individual merits but also for the broad spectrum of works that were recognized,” says Michael Schoonmaker, professor and chair of the Department of Television, Radio and Film. “Our alums reach all the corners of the entertainment industry when they go out into the world and they leave an��unforgettable impact.

“And we will never forget Jacqueline Wilson, co-executive produced for ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race,’ took home yet another Emmy this year,” Schoonmaker says. “Sadly, Jacqueline passed away earlier this month.��From day one, Jacqueline stood out with her talent, charisma and extraordinary ability to bring people together. Most importantly, Jacqueline always brought her heart, compassion and creative soul to her work.”

Kevin Richardson

Kevin Richardson was one of five teens—four African-American and one Hispanic, ages 14-16—who were arrested, interrogated and subsequently charged in the brutal beating and sexual assault of a 28-year-old woman in Manhattan’s Central Park in April 1989. While there was no physical evidence tying the teens to the crime, they were tried and convicted based on what they and their families claimed were coerced confessions.

The “Central Park Jogger” case inflamed racial tensions in New York City and drew nationwide attention. Richardson, 14 at the time of his arrest, served more than five years in a juvenile detention facility; three of the others did the same, held for between five and seven years. The 16-year-old, convicted as an adult, served 12 years in prison.

All five were later exonerated, in June 2002, when a convicted murderer and serial rapist serving a life sentence admitted that he was responsible for the attack. This was confirmed by DNA testing, and the convictions of the “Central Park Five” were vacated. They filed a wrongful conviction lawsuit against the City of New York that was settled in 2014 for $41 million.

Their story has received renewed attention by way of the Netflix four-part series which premiered this past May and has earned 16 Emmy Award nominations.

Richardson will visit ���ϲ����� and take part in an on-stage conversation—“Justice in America: A Discussion on the Exoneration of the Central Park 5”—on Monday, Sept. 9, at 7:30 p.m. in the Schine Student Center’s Goldstein Auditorium.

Participating with Richardson in the conversation are Candice L. Carnage ’90, chief operating officer of , and Paula C. Johnson, ���ϲ����� professor of law and co-director of the .

“Justice in America” is free to ���ϲ����� students, faculty and staff, but tickets are required. Tickets—one general admission ticket per person with a valid SU I.D.—are available starting Aug. 21 in person at the Schine Box Office, now located in Room 119 in the Women’s Building. Box Office hours are Mondays through Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 9 p.m.

Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) and American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be available. For more information or to request an accommodation, contact Alex Snow at adsnow@syr.edu.

The event is sponsored by Faculty Affairs in the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Office of Multicultural Advancement.

The previous day—Sunday, Sept. 8—Richardson will attend a 2 p.m. matinee performance of the ���ϲ����� Stage production “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” highlighting the Black male experience in America. Afterward, he is the guest of honor at a benefit reception for the across the street at the Community Folk Art Center, 805 E. Genesee St. in ���ϲ�����. The reception is from 5 to 7 p.m. The combination play-and-reception ticket is $75; food and drinks are included. Registration is .

About Kevin Richardson

In June, Oprah Winfrey interviewed “When They See Us” creator/director and the five men in the Central Park Jogger case—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise, now known as the Exonerated Five—for a special released simultaneously on Netflix and Oprah’s OWN channel: “Oprah Winfrey Presents When They See Us Now.” In the interview, Richardson told Winfrey that he once dreamed of attending ���ϲ����� and playing the trumpet.

He never had a chance to fulfill that dream. Today, Richardson, 44, lives in New Jersey with his wife and children. He is a motivational speaker and an advocate for criminal justice reform. He works with , which employs various legal resources, foremost being DNA testing, to “free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated and to bring reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment.”

“Using my platform to raise awareness is therapeutic in a way that it’s touching others globally,” Richardson says. “I have dreams and aspirations to change the criminal landscape of this unjust society that we live in.”

About Candice L. Carnage

At The Bronx Defenders, Carnage has leveraged her love for numbers and problem solving into the chief operating officer role for the $40 million legal organization that redefined public defense and pioneered the holistic defense model.

Carnage is a versatile, high-energy executive with more than 25 years of nonprofit experience with such organizations as Columbia University, the Innocence Project, Amnesty International USA, the Ms. Foundation for Women and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. Additionally, she worked in the private sector for Deloitte & Touche, LLP, Arista–Bad Boy Entertainment and Diversified Investment Advisors.

She is a hands-on leader with an extensive background in finance complemented by diverse talents in human capital, information technology, facilities and operations management.

Carnage is a 1990 graduate of ���ϲ�����, with a B.A. in economics and mathematics, and later earned an MBA at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. She is a member of the ���ϲ����� Multicultural Advancement Advisory Board.

About Paula C. Johnson

Johnson is a professor of law at the and author of several publications on race, gender and the criminal justice system. She co-founded and directs the Cold Case Justice Initiative, which investigates civil rights-era and contemporary racially motivated murders.

Johnson has held the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights at CUNY Law School, the Sparks Chair at the University of Alabama School of Law and the ���ϲ����� College of Law Bond, Schoeneck and King Distinguished Professorship.

She is a member of the at ���ϲ����� and previously served as co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers. Her honors include the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation Woman of Courage Award in Honor of Mamie Till Mobley and the Unsung Heroine Award from the ���ϲ����� Martin Luther King Jr. Awards Committee.

Everyone who purchases a game ticket through the University will receive a commemorative ���ϲ�����/New York Mets cap, and one lucky ���ϲ����� fan will be selected to participate in the in-game contest. Otto the Orange will be on hand, and a ���ϲ����� celebrity (TBA) will throw out the honorary first pitch.

This is the ninth year for the annual ���ϲ����� Day game in which alumni, family and friends—more than 1,000 each year—come together to cheer on the Mets or the Yankees (games alternate from year to year between Citi Field and Yankee Stadium). The concept is the brainchild of alumnus Brian Spector ’78, past president of the ���ϲ����� Alumni Association, with event planning and logistics managed by the SU in NYC team.

This year’s game coincides with the inaugural season of the , the New York Mets’ new Triple A affiliate.

Tickets are available from the University through May 10 at :

• A Promenade (upper deck) seat is $30.
• A Right Field Party Plaza (300 level) seat is $54.
• A Right Field Party Plaza seat plus a food voucher (choice of hot dog/fries combo, burger/fries combo or pizza, plus unlimited beer/soda/water from one hour before the game through the seventh inning) is $105.

After May 10, if tickets remain, additional ticket sales will be accommodated by the New York Mets through Will Call.

Bus transportation from campus—arranged by the ���ϲ����� Central New York Alumni Club—is available for an additional $60 per seat. Departure is from Manley Field House at 6:30 a.m. Sunday, with arrival back in ���ϲ����� at about 10 p.m. There is a stop along the way in Binghamton to pick up and drop off Binghamton-area passengers.

Questions? Email sumets@syr.edu or call 212.826.0320.

Sparks fly as Fred Wellner uses an oxy-acetylene torch in his LaFayette workshop.

Fred Wellner ’17 is a native of Baldwinsville and a senior designer with ���ϲ����� Press. He is also a talented metalwork artist and a regular participant in the University’s On My Own Time (OMOT) exhibition. Through the years, OMOT judges have deemed many of his pieces worthy of selection for the annual community-wide exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art.

Here, Wellner talks about his day job and his art, as well as OMOT and collaborations with his wife, Laura Wellner ’84, the registrar at the SUArt Galleries and a 35-year staff member at the University (fun fact: the couple met on the Crouse College steps in 1984 and were married the next year).

What exactly does a senior designer for ���ϲ����� Press do?

Broadly, I design inside text and covers of some of the SU Press titles. There’s a more technical side to it, all which probably needs less description, but we can refer to it as digital preparation for the various uses in which a book will become and exist. And then there’s the trafficking of each job. I do, on occasion, create art for covers.

How long have you been with the Press?

Thirty years as of this coming Sept. 5. The first seven years I worked in the warehouse.

“Mask,” Fred Wellner’s first metal piece exhibited in OMOT.

What did you do before?

Laborer, lumber delivery driver, etc.

Did you study art in school or are you self-taught?

Self-taught. Actually, my degree is in philosophy and religion [from ���ϲ�����, in 2017].

Is metalwork your favorite form of art? Do you delve into other art forms, too?

My start was in graphite. Later, I was a painter (oils and then acrylic) and soapstone sculptor for many years before working with metal. I sold work out of the Delavan Art Center and then Szozda Gallery before that closed.

You mention the Delavan Center and Szozda Gallery. Have you had material exhibited elsewhere?

Yes, besides the Delavan and Szozda Galleries, Laura and I have had work shown at Floor One Gallery in Beacon [New York], Launchpad in Brooklyn, the Contemporary Art Gallery in ���ϲ�����, Redhouse in ���ϲ�����, and The Tech Garden in ���ϲ�����.

How do you come by your ideas? What’s your inspiration?

Dying rustbelt, Transhumanism, lost pagan roots, and musing on what humanity trades for modern convenience.

“The Obstinate Particle,” a painting by Fred Wellner.

Ballpark, how many pieces have you created?

A couple dozen.

Once you’ve created a piece, what do you do with it?

For now I’m still building a body of work. I keep things stored in my shop or out in the yard [in LaFayette, New York]. I have a large, four-legged creature called “Relic” about the size of a small pony out in the front yard near the road. Surprisingly, the metal scrappers haven’t stolen it.

What’s the typical size of your work? Is there a typical size, or do you do metal pieces of all sizes?

Average size would be about that of a small dog. My wife, Laura, has a small six- to eight-inch robot on a table next to where she works at the ���ϲ����� Art Galleries. My largest work is “Relic.”

Where can people find your pieces to buy them?

For now, it’s word-of-mouth, e-mail, Facebook.

How long have you been entering art in On My Own Time?

On and off, maybe 20-25 years. Regularly, the last five to 10, I think.

“Relic”

What do you have entered in this year’s On My Own Time?

It’s a joint work with Laura. My part is the rusted remains of a robot on one knee holding Laura’s beautiful handmade book with ones and zeros, and quotes from “Hamlet,” etc. There’s a message in the combination about existence and individual meaning. Technically, the two parts are in the show as separate pieces for reasons of OMOT policy, but Laura and I consider them together.

And you’ve had work selected for display at the community-wide exhibition at the Everson Museum.

I think I had a watercolor painting in the 1990s, an oil painting or two in the early to mid-2000s and metal sculpture the last five years.

That says a lot about the quality of the work you produce. Do you still get a kick out of seeing your art on display in the show?

OMOT has been very generous with their interest. I always get a charge seeing my work on display. I enjoy more that other people get to see it. I get inspired by seeing the other artists’ work, and I hope mine has the same effect back.

ABOUT ON MY OWN TIME

On My Own Time, now in its 46th year, was developed as a community arts program to bring visibility to the creative skills of people employed in local businesses and organizations. It is co-sponsored by CNY Arts and the Everson Museum of Art.

���ϲ�����’s in-house exhibition opens Monday, April 29, and continues through the closing reception for artists, family members and volunteers on Wednesday, May 15. The exhibition may be viewed weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Noble Room in Hendricks Chapel.

A panel of professional artists assembled by CNY Arts will serve as judges for the in-house exhibition. Artwork selected by the panel will be featured in a public exhibition at the Everson Museum in the fall.

The event—co-sponsored by the , with media sponsor —is free and open to all. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided.

Martin Indyk

Indyk—an authority on the Middle East, North Africa and U.S. foreign policy—is distinguished fellow and director of executive education at the .��Previously, he was��the John C. Whitehead Distinguished Fellow in International Diplomacy in the Foreign Policy program at the . From February 2015 to March 2018, he served as executive vice president of Brookings.

Indyk was the U.S. special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from July 2013 to June 2014. Prior to his time as special envoy, he was vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program��and a senior fellow and the founding director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.

The U.S. ambassador to Israel from 1995-97 and again from 2000-01, Indyk also served as special assistant to President Bill Clinton and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council (1993-95) and assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the U.S. Department of State (1997-2000).

Before entering government, Indyk was founding executive director of the for eight years.

He is author of (Simon and Schuster, 2009) and co-author of ��with Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Lieberthal (Brookings Institution Press, 2012). He is currently completing a book tentatively titled��“Henry Kissinger and the Art of the Middle East Deal”��to be published by A.A. Knopf in 2019.

Indyk serves on the boards of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia, the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel and the Aspen Institute’s Middle East Investment Initiative. Indyk also is a member of the advisory boards of the Israel Democracy Institute and America Abroad Media.

About the University Lectures
This event is the last lecture of the 2018-19 season. Previous University Lectures guests this season were:

• award-winning author and ���ϲ����� professor of English George Saunders (Oct. 18);
• internationally renowned author Margaret Atwood (Oct. 25), in collaboration with the ���ϲ����� Symposium;
• accomplished artist Robert Shetterly (Nov. 29), along with an exhibition of his omnibus portrait series “Americans Who Tell the Truth: Models of Courageous Citizenship”;
• comedian, author and “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, in collaboration with the 34th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration (Jan. 27);
• NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg (March 5); and
• internationally renowned research engineer Lynn Conway (March 26).

The University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

Lynn Conway

The University Lectures series continues with Lynn Conway, professor emerita of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, on Tuesday, March 26. Conway’s presentation, “An Invisible Woman: The Inside Story Behind the VLSI Revolution in Silicon Valley,” begins at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel and is free and open to the public.

Conway’s appearance is co-sponsored by the , with media sponsor . American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided.

Conway’s discussion will focus on a phenomenon that occurred to her and that she believes has also affected other women scientists, as well as members of underrepresented populations: one in which the discoveries they have made, and their contributions to science and technology, have faded over time from the annals of history.

In 2015, U.S. Chief Technology Officer raised about women’s contributions in science, engineering and math being erased from history. In her talk, Conway will explore a case study of such an erasure and surface about the underlying causes and effects.

“As a woman, I disappeared from history and so did my innovations,” Conway wrote in an insightful essay, in the October 2018 issue of Computer Magazine.

As a young researcher at IBM in the 1960s, she made pioneering innovations in computer architecture. IBM fired her in 1968 upon learning she was undergoing gender transition. A gritty survivor, she restarted her career in “stealth-mode” after completing her transition.

While working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, Conway innovated breakthrough methods that dramatically simplified the design of silicon chips, triggering the microelectronics very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) revolution in Silicon Valley and forever transforming computing and information technology. The Mead-Conway VLSI Design methodology—created by Conway and Caltech Professor Carver Mead—is credited with making cell phones and laptops possible.

However, over time, the credit fell more to Mead and less to Conway. To the point that her involvement all but disappeared. In 2009, Mead was an honoree—hailed as one of 16 men lauded as “the [Silicon] Valley’s founding fathers”—at the Computer History Museum’s gala celebration of the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit. Not only was Conway not invited, she did not even know the event was taking place.

This prompted Conway to research her “disappearance.” By 2010, she had compiled an “,” a collection of artifacts that helped her sort through events.

It was an important step toward telling her story, and her contributions began to reappear. She has since become a member of the Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum; been awarded several honorary degrees; and received the (IEEE)/Royal Society of Edinburgh James Clerk Maxwell Medal, the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Award and the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award.

She is a fellow of the IEEE and the , and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

In the early 1980s, Conway left Xerox to become assistant director for strategic computing at the . In 1985, she moved to the University of Michigan as professor of electrical engineering and computer science and associate dean of engineering.

For decades, Conway had kept her gender transition a secret. When nearing retirement from the university, in 1999, she began quietly coming out as a trans woman, sharing with her friends and colleagues, and using her to tell her story. It was more widely reported in 2000 by way of profiles in Scientific American and The Los Angeles Times.

After going public with her story, Conway began work in transgender activism, intending to “illuminate and normalize the issues of gender identity and the processes of gender transition.” She has worked to protect and expand the rights of transgender people, including by evolving her website into a multilingual beacon of encouragement and hope for transgender people worldwide.

In addition, in 2012, she published a memoir that finally revealed how—closeted and hidden behind the scenes—she conceived the ideas and orchestrated the events that disruptively changed an entire industry.

About the University Lectures
Now in its 18th season, the University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

The next and final speaker in the spring semester is , distinguished fellow and director of executive education at the , former executive vice president��of the and two-time U.S. ambassador to Israel (April 16).

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

Proceeds will benefit the Our Time Has Come Vanessa Williams Scholarship supporting Black and Latino students in the . Tickets start at $120 and are .�� For more information, contact Miko Horn at 315.443.9406.

Vanessa Williams (Photo by Gilles Toucas)

“We are thrilled to have Ms. Williams perform for our inaugural OTHC Benefit Concert, which raises money for the Vanessa Williams Scholarship Fund,” says Assistant Vice President Rachel Vassel ’91. “This kind of fundraiser is a great way to showcase the world class talent that comes out of ���ϲ�����, to engage our amazing alumni and to support students of color with an unmet financial need. It’s a win-win for everyone.”

Williams is one of the most respected and multi-faceted performers in entertainment today.�� She has conquered the music charts, Broadway, music videos, television and motion pictures. She has earned four Emmy nominations, 11 Grammy nominations, a Tony nomination,��three SAG Award nominations, seven NAACP Image Awards and three Satellite Awards.

In 2007, she achieved a career pinnacle, with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her accomplishments as a performer. The International Foreign Press Academy named her the recipient of the 2010 Mary Pickford Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to the Entertainment Industry.

In 2012, Williams and her mother, Helen, landed on The New York Times Best Seller list with their acclaimed memoir “You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-Nonsense Mother and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss (and Each Other)” (Penguin, 2012).�� The book brought readers on the personal journey of Vanessa’s life—told for the first time from her perspective and with the wisdom and frankness of her mother, the firecracker Miss Helen.

Music career

Williams’ albums “The Right Stuff,” “The Comfort Zone” and “The Sweetest Days” earned multiple Grammy nominations and have yielded such classic hits as “Save the Best For Last,” “Dreamin’,” “Work To Do” and “Love Is.” Her platinum single��“Colors of the Wind”��from the Disney film��“Pocahontas” won an Oscar, Grammy and Golden Globe for Best Original Song.

Her recordings also include two holiday albums, “Star Bright” and “Silver & Gold”; “Vanessa Williams Greatest Hits: The First Ten Years”; and “Everlasting Love,” a romantic collection of love songs from the 1970s. In addition, her “The Real Thing” from Concord Records earned Williams an NAACP nomination for Outstanding Jazz Artist.

Vanessa Williams (Photo by Mike Ruiz)

Stage career

In 1994, Williams took Broadway by storm when she replaced Chita Rivera in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” winning the hearts of critics and becoming a box office sensation. In 2002, she garnered rave reviews and was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as the Witch in the revival of “Into the Woods.” She also headlined a limited special engagement of the classic “Carmen Jones” at the Kennedy Center and starred in the Encore! series staged concert production of “St. Louis Woman.”

After appearing on stage in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sondheim on Sondheim,” an original Broadway musical that ran in spring 2010 at The Roundabout Theatre, Williams returned to the stage in 2013, starring alongside Cicely Tyson as Jessie Mae Watts, the self-involved daughter-in-law to Tyson’s Mother Watts, an elderly widow wishing to revisit her hometown, in the Tony-nominated play “The Trip to Bountiful.” In early 2014, Williams reprised her role as Jessie Mae for Lifetime’s television adaptation of the Horton Foote classic during Black History Month. She also appeared in “After Midnight” in 2014 and in a special limited engagement of “Hey, Look Me Over” at New York City Center in 2018.

Film career

Williams made her film debut in 1986 in “Under the Gun.” She has starred in such feature films as “Eraser,” “Hoodlum,” “Soul Food,” “Dance With Me,” “Light It Up,” “Shaft” and “Johnson Family Vacation.” More recently, her film credits have included the independent features “My Brother,” “Somebody Like You” and the Disney feature film “Hannah Montana: The Movie.” She was last seen on the big screen in Tyler Perry’s “Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor.”

Television career

Williams has some four dozen television acting credits to her name. It was recently announced that she has joined the cast of the ABC comedy pilot “Happy Accident.” Previously, she starred in such movies and mini-series as “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “The Boy Who Loved Christmas,” “The Jacksons: An American Dream,” ABC’s revival of “Bye, Bye Birdie,” “Nothing Lasts Forever,” “The Odyssey,” “Don Quixote” and “Keep the Faith, Baby.”

She has appeared in “666 Park Avenue,” “The Mindy Project,” “Royal Pains,” “The Good Wife,” “The Librarians,” “Daytime Divas” and “Modern Family,” among other series.

Williams starred in ABC’s critically acclaimed hit series “Ugly Betty,” earning three Emmy nominations as the deliciously wicked Wilhelmina Slater.

In 2010, she moved to Wisteria Lane to stir things up as the newest resident on ABC’s long-running hit “Desperate Housewives,” winning an NAACP Image Award and helping to carry the show to the end of its eight-year run in 2012.

Williams executive produced and starred in Lifetime’s “The Courage to Love” and the VH1 Original Movie “A Diva’s Christmas Carol.”

She received an Emmy nomination for her voice-over performance in the 2009 PBS series “Mama Mirabelle Home Movies.”

���ϲ����� 2018 On My Own Time artists whose work was selected for the community-wide OMOT exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art.

Calling all creatives: The organizers of ���ϲ�����’s On My Own Time exhibition are looking for artwork submissions from full- and part-time faculty and staff members in the categories of painting, ceramics, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, photography, collage/assemblage, fiber art, glasswork, computer art, metalwork and mixed media.

Criteria for submission are listed on the OMOT_2019_Artist_Registration_Form, which is due by Monday, April 15. The form may be emailed to Lucille Murphy at lumurphy@syr.edu or faxed to x1063. Note to applicants who are art instructors: you may not submit work in your primary discipline.�� The same registration form may be used for volunteering; volunteers are needed to assist with logging in artwork, assisting in hanging and taking down the exhibition, and helping with artwork pick up.

On My Own Time (OMOT), now in its 46th year, is co-sponsored by CNY Arts and the Everson Museum of Art. It was developed as a community arts program to bring visibility to the creative skills of people employed in local businesses and organizations.

���ϲ�����’s in-house exhibition opens Monday, April 29, and continues through the closing reception for artists, family members and volunteers on Wednesday, May 15. The exhibition will be in the Noble Room in Hendricks Chapel and may be viewed weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

A panel of professional artists assembled by CNY Arts will serve as judges for the in-house exhibition. Artwork selected by the panel will be featured in a public exhibition at the Everson Museum in the fall.

Nina Totenberg

The University Lectures series welcomes award-winning NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg on Tuesday, March 5, at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel. The event—featuring the veteran journalist in an on-stage conversation with College of Law Dean Craig M. Boise—is free and open to all.

It is co-sponsored by the , the , the , and the , along with media sponsor . American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided.

Newsweek has called Totenberg the “crème de la crème” of NPR, and Vanity Fair refers to her as the “Queen of Leaks.” Esquire named her one of the “Women We Love” in both 1988 and 1992.

Among her biggest stories was her 1991 groundbreaking report of sexual harassment allegations against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas by University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, which prompted the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open its confirmation hearings. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage—anchored by Totenberg—of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Hill’s allegations, and for Totenberg’s reports and exclusive interview with Hill.

Earlier, in 1986, she broke the story that Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg had smoked marijuana, leading to Ginsburg withdrawing from consideration. In 1988, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations. The jurors of the award stated, “Ms. Totenberg broke the story of Judge (Douglas) Ginsburg’s use of marijuana, raising issues of changing social values and credibility with careful perspective under deadline pressure.”

That same coverage earned Totenberg additional awards, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for excellence in journalism; the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting; the Carr Van Anda Award from the Scripps School of Journalism; and the prestigious Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting, which also acknowledged her coverage of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s retirement.

Totenberg was the first radio journalist to be honored by the as Broadcaster of the Year. She has been recognized seven times by the for excellence in legal reporting and won the first-ever Toni House award presented by the for a career body of work.

A frequent contributor to major newspapers and periodicals, Totenberg has published articles in The New York Times Magazine, The Harvard Law Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Parade Magazine and New York Magazine.

Before joining NPR in 1975, she served as Washington editor of New Times Magazine. Prior to that, she was the legal affairs correspondent for the National Observer.

.

About the University Lectures
The University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

Upcoming speakers in the series are:

• , professor of electrical engineering and computer science emerita at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, internationally renowned research engineer, university educator and LGBTQ advocate (March 28)
• , distinguished fellow and director of executive education at the , former executive vice president��of the and two-time U.S. ambassador to Israel (April 16).

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

Faculty and Staff Appreciation Week—Monday, Feb. 25, through Friday, March 1—is presented by the Office of Human Resources in recognition and support of faculty and staff across the institution.

Stop by Schine to enjoy a fun afternoon reception

The Faculty and Staff Appreciation Reception—Wednesday, Feb. 27, from 2 to 5 p.m. in 304ABC, 302 and 303 Schine Student Center—is the University’s thank-you to faculty and staff members. The event includes free coffee and dessert; relaxing free chair massages (first-come/first-served, with five massage therapists on hand); information on professional development and wellness opportunities; gauging interest in specific groups for the relaunch of affinity groups/employee resource groups, gift raffles; and a Bookstore discount coupon for all attendees.

There will also be three presentations: a yoga demonstration and information at 2 p.m.; a demonstration at 3 p.m. on Qichong, a mind-body-spirit practice that improves one’s mental and physical health; and a 4 p.m. presentation on ways to be involved in the ���ϲ����� community with Emily Winiecki and Mark Jackson from the Office of Community Engagement and Syeisha Byrd from Hendricks Chapel.

Take part in a professional development workshop

Three workshops offer opportunities for learning:

• “Diversity and Inclusion: Next Steps—Skill Expansion”: Tuesday, Feb. 26, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in 304ABC Schine Student Center. In partnership with the Office of the Interim Chief Diversity Officer Keith Alford, this engaging workshop, led by Al Vivian, president and CEO of , will focus on prompting an enriching and deeper discussion to impact the University beyond the higher-level bias awareness training that has already been offered across campus.Vivian is a former U.S. Army captain with a background in human resources. He has provided diversity counsel to CEOs, civic and religious leaders, political officials and television news personnel. He learned about managing diversity very early in life via personal interactions with Dr. Martin L. King Jr.′s staff and later honed his diversity skills in the Army (one of the largest and most diverse organizations in the world), where he held numerous executive positions, including equal opportunity officer (the military equivalent to diversity manager). Registration is limited to 55 participants and is open now
• “Understanding Our Diverse Student Population”: Thursday, Feb. 28, from 9 to 10 a.m. in the Milton Room, 411 Whitman School of Management building. ���ϲ�����’s student population is unquestionably diverse. From the University’s rich international student diversity to first-generation students and the distinct characteristics of Generation Z students, all have specific needs.��A better understanding of students’ values, cultures, challenges and expectations can directly impact faculty and staff members’ ability to better support the student experience. This workshop, presented by Amanda Nicholson and Wei Gao, was first presented in an abbreviated version during the “Service Leadership Workshop” last December. As a result of the positive response that presentation received, a more in-depth workshop has been developed. Registration is open now .
• “Introduction to Project Management” (for supervisors of benefits-eligible staff): Friday, March 1, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Milton Room, 411 Whitman School of Management building. Presented by Pat Penfield, this workshop offers an introduction and overview of project management, project teams, budgets and schedules, and reporting and project closeout. It is limited to 20 participants and carries a fee of $100 per participant (payable by the participant’s department). Registration is open now .

Cheer on the Orange women’s basketball team

Faculty and staff are invited to cheer on the and help set a new attendance record as Coach Quentin Hillsman’s squad hosts No. 6 Notre Dame on Monday, Feb. 25, at 6 p.m. in the Dome. Discount tickets are $2 each and may be purchased . Parking is available in home lots, West Campus lots and Manley lots.

For more information on Faculty and Staff Appreciation Week, visit the .

All three events will take place in and are free and open to the public. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available at each lecture. Media sponsor for the University Lectures is .

Now in its 18^th season, the University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

Nina Totenberg
Tuesday, March 5
7:30 p.m., Hendricks Chapel

One of the country’s most respected journalists, Nina Totenberg is ’s award-winning legal affairs correspondent. With more than 40 years’ experience at NPR, her reports are regularly featured on and

Totenberg’s coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs has won her widespread recognition. As Newsweek stated: “The mainstays [of NPR] are ‘Morning Edition’ and ‘All Things Considered.’ But the crème de la crème is Nina Totenberg.”

Totenberg was the first radio journalist to be honored by the as Broadcaster of the Year. She has been recognized seven times by the for excellence in legal reporting and won the first-ever Toni House award presented by the for a career body of work.

In 1988, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations. The jurors of the award stated, “Ms. Totenberg broke the story of Judge (Douglas) Ginsburg’s use of marijuana, raising issues of changing social values and credibility with careful perspective under deadline pressure.”

In 1991, her groundbreaking report about University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill’s charges. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage—anchored by Totenberg—of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Hill’s allegations, and for Totenberg’s reports and exclusive interview with Hill.

That same coverage earned Totenberg additional awards, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for excellence in journalism; the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting; the Carr Van Anda Award from the Scripps School of Journalism; and the prestigious Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting, which also acknowledged her coverage of Justice Thurgood Marshall’s retirement.

On a lighter note, in 1988 and 1992, Esquire magazine named her one of the “Women We Love.”

A frequent contributor to major newspapers and periodicals, she has published articles in The New York Times Magazine, The Harvard Law Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Parade Magazine and New York Magazine.

Before joining NPR in 1975, Totenberg served as Washington editor of New Times Magazine. Prior to that, she was the legal affairs correspondent for the National Observer.

Totenberg’s appearance is co-sponsored by the , the , the , and the .

Lynn Conway
Tuesday, March 26
7:30 p.m., Hendricks Chapel

Lynn Conway, professor of electrical engineering and computer science emerita at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is an internationally renowned research engineer, university educator and LGBTQ advocate.

As a young researcher at IBM in the 1960s, she made pioneering innovations in computer architecture. IBM fired her in 1968 upon learning she was undergoing gender transition. A gritty survivor, she restarted her career in “stealth-mode” after completing her transition.

While working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, Conway innovated breakthrough methods that dramatically simplified the design of silicon chips, triggering the microelectronics “VLSI revolution” in Silicon Valley and forever transforming computing and information technology.

She went on to serve as assistant director for strategic computing at the , then joined the University of Michigan in 1985 as professor of electrical engineering and computer science and associate dean of engineering.

Quietly coming out after retiring in 1999, Conway evolved her trans-support website, , into a multilingual beacon of encouragement and hope for transgender people worldwide. Then, in 2012, she published a memoir that finally revealed how—closeted and hidden behind the scenes—she conceived the ideas and orchestrated the events that disruptively changed an entire industry.

Conway is a fellow of the (IEEE) and the , and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Among Conway’s other honors: the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Award, the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award, the James Clerk Maxwell Medal from the IEEE and Royal Society of Edinburgh, and four honorary doctorates.

Conway’s appearance is co-sponsored by the .

Martin S. Indyk
Tuesday, April 16
7:30 p.m., Hendricks Chapel

Martin Indyk is distinguished fellow and director of executive education at the .��Previously, he was��the John C. Whitehead Distinguished Fellow in International Diplomacy in the Foreign Policy program at the . From February 2015 to March 2018, he served as executive vice president of Brookings.

Indyk was the U.S. special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from July 2013 to June 2014. Prior to his time as special envoy, he was vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program��and a senior fellow and the founding director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.

The U.S. ambassador to Israel from 1995-97 and again from 2000-01, Indyk also served as special assistant to President Bill Clinton and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council (1993-95) and assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the U.S. Department of State (1997-2000).

Before entering government, Indyk was founding executive director of the for eight years.

He is author of (Simon and Schuster, 2009) and co-author of ��with Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Lieberthal (Brookings Institution Press, 2012). He is currently completing a book tentatively titled��“Henry Kissinger and the Art of the Middle East Deal”��to be published by A.A. Knopf in 2019.

Indyk serves on the boards of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia, the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel and the Aspen Institute’s Middle East Investment Initiative. Indyk also is a member of the advisory boards of the Israel Democracy Institute and America Abroad Media.

Indyk’s appearance is co-sponsored by the .

Previous University Lectures guests this season were: award-winning author and ���ϲ����� professor of English George Saunders (Oct. 18); internationally renowned author Margaret Atwood (Oct. 25), in collaboration with the ���ϲ����� Symposium; accomplished artist Robert Shetterly (Nov. 29), along with an exhibition of his omnibus portrait series “Americans Who Tell the Truth: Models of Courageous Citizenship”; and comedian, author and “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, in collaboration with the 34th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

The theme of the 2019 MLK Celebration is “The Global Impact of Civil Rights.” As part of the program, Sanders and Noah will discuss “Born a Crime,” the life and legacy of Dr. King, and the worldwide��effect of the civil rights movement. The event also includes musical performances and presentation of Unsung Hero awards to five individuals.

The event begins at 5 p.m. with dinner near the Dome’s west end zone, followed by the main program from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the east side. The dinner is sold out. However, tickets for the program alone are still available ; in person at the Carrier Dome Box Office (Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.); and by phone (888-DOME-TIX or 315-443-2121, option “zero”). Tickets are $5 for ���ϲ����� students and youths, and $15 for University faculty/staff and the public.

Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson

After graduating from the Newhouse School, Robinson spent 35 years with WSTM-TV and CNY Central, first as a general assignment reporter and moving to weekend anchor and then primary news anchor—becoming the station’s first female African American anchor.

She has received numerous accolades, including induction into the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Silver Circle in 2016 and the New York State Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2012, the ���ϲ����� Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Journalist and ���ϲ�����’s Woman of Distinction in 2011.

Robinson is recipient of The Governor’s Award for Outstanding African American of Distinction and was named a 1990 ���ϲ����� Post-Standard Woman of Achievement. She has been honored with the ���ϲ����� Press Club’s Career Achievement Award and been named to the organization’s Wall of Distinction. In addition, she has been recognized numerous times by The Associated Press, United Press International and ���ϲ����� Press Club. She received an honorary doctorate from Cazenovia College.

Robinson has contributed to H.O.M.E. Inc.’s efforts to improve the lives of the developmentally disabled and the YWCA’s annual Diversity Award, and she is a participant in the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign. Her other community service efforts have benefited Central New York Minority Network, the ���ϲ����� Boys & Girls Club, the United Way of Central New York and Central Baptist Church of ���ϲ�����.

Jennifer Sanders

Jennifer Sanders

Before joining ���ϲ�����’s ABC affiliate, Sanders was a multi-media journalist at KXII-TV in Sherman, Texas, where she was responsible for shooting, writing and editing her news and sports stories.��She also hosted a weekly talk show called “Forum” in which she did in-depth coverage of key issues impacting people across Texas and Oklahoma. Prior to that, she was a writer/web producer at KDAF-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth. She started her journalism career in newspaper and radio in Seguin, Texas.

Sanders is the founder of Beyond Your Lens Inc., a nonprofit that provides students hands-on education, exposure and financial assistance to become well-trained journalists in the evolving world of television and digital news. Throughout the school year, she travels to various schools and universities, hosting workshops and lecturing about the importance of journalism and how to have a successful career in news.

She works with children and teens through the ���ϲ����� City School District mentoring program and other advisory councils in the district. She also sits on the board of directors of Vera House Inc. and the board of GEAUX Lead Inc., an organization that improves the lives of marginalized youth through various service initiatives.

A member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. and The Links Inc.—two organizations committed to service—Sanders earned a bachelor’s degree in mass communications/Spanish at Texas Lutheran University and a master’s degree in journalism at the University of North Texas.

Trevor Noah and “Born a Crime”

Trevor Noah

Noah is host of the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning on Comedy Central. He joined the program in 2014 as a contributor and took over as host of the show in September 2015, upon Jon Stewart’s retirement. He began his career as a comedian, presenter and actor in his native South Africa in 2002 and through his television roles and stand-up tours became the most popular comedian in Africa.

In “Born a Crime” (Random House, 2016), Noah, who was born in Johannesburg in 1984 to a black South African mother and a white European father, recounts his childhood growing up during the last days of apartheid and the opportunities and adventures with his mother in the tumultuous days of freedom that followed.

Noah’s acclaimed memoir was the selected book for the 2018-19 ���ϲ����� Reads program, a shared reading initiative that is part of the First-Year Experience for all new ���ϲ����� students. The University provided more than 3,900 special softcover copies and e-copies of the book to incoming first-year and transfer students last summer.

After their arrival on campus for the fall semester, the students participated in a series of five-week discussion sessions—co-led by a student peer facilitator and a faculty, staff or graduate student lead facilitator—intended to enhance the students’ understanding of the topics addressed in the book and engage them in broader contexts about identity, resiliency, inclusion and community.

In addition, free copies of “Born a Crime” were made available through the SU Bookstore to other current students, SU faculty and staff with a valid SU I.D. Also, Central New York were encouraged to read the book as part of the initiative.

About the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration

The MLK Celebration is the largest university-sponsored event in the nation to honor the life and legacy of Dr. King. By celebrating Dr. King each year, ���ϲ����� honors the values that he epitomized: courage, truth, justice, compassion, dignity, humility and service.

The MLK Celebration is presented by Hendricks Chapel in collaboration with the University Lectures, the ���ϲ����� Reads Program and media partner WAER. For more information, visit .

More information on the changes can be found on the IRS website. For ���ϲ�����-specific questions, contact the Office of the Comptroller at 315.443.3765 or email University Comptroller Jean Gallipeau at jbgallip@syr.edu.

The portraits and accompanying narratives in the “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series highlight citizens who courageously address issues of social, environmental and economic fairness. Combining art and other media, the series “offers resources to inspire a new generation of engaged Americans who will act for the common good, our communities, and the Earth.”

Robert Shetterly’s portrait of Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha

Among the historical and contemporary figures portrayed in the collection are Muhammad Ali, Susan B. Anthony, James Baldwin, Majora Carter, Shirley Chisholm, Dwight Eisenhower, Langston Hughes, Van Jones, Martin Luther King Jr., Naomi Klein, Ron Kovic, Arthur Miller, Ralph Nader, Paul Robeson, Edward Snowden, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Malcolm X.

Major sponsor of the exhibition and the accompanying lecture is the Maxwell School’s in cooperation with the and the in the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ (VPA) School of Design, along with media sponsor .

Museum studies students and faculty have been busy transforming the Schine Student Center’s Panasci Lounge into a gallery space suitable for displaying the many portraits in the series. Earlier this month, a museum studies team traveled to Shetterly’s Maine studio to pack and transport the paintings to ���ϲ�����.

The exhibition will be open for public viewing Mondays through Fridays from 7:30 a.m. to midnight and Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to midnight, beginning Thursday, Nov. 29, and continuing through Friday, Dec. 14.

Robert Shetterly

In an on-stage conversation on Thursday, Nov. 29, at 7:30 p.m. in Crouse College’s Rose and Jules R. Setnor Auditorium, Shetterly will be joined by , public health advocate and pediatrician at the Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Michigan, and , senior lecturer in the Naveen Jindal School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas. LaVonda Reed, professor of law and SU associate provost for faculty affairs, will moderate the discussion.

Both the exhibition and the lecture event are free and open to the public. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided for the lecture.

Several portrait subjects have expressed interest in traveling to ���ϲ����� to attend the exhibition and lecture, including , , , , , , , , , , , , and . One of Shetterly’s subjects lives nearby: SU alumnus ’58, H’93, faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation and a chief of the Council of the Chiefs of the Haudenosaunee.

Hanna-Attisha is author of “What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City” (Random House, 2018), her first-hand account of the Flint water crisis. Hanna-Attisha made headlines across the country in September 2015 when she sounded the alarm about the high presence of lead in Flint’s drinking water. She has received numerous honors for her efforts on behalf of the people—and especially the children—of Flint, including being named to Time magazine’s 2016 list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Bowen is widely known as the Citigroup whistleblower. As business chief underwriter for Citigroup during the housing bubble financial crisis meltdown, he repeatedly warned Citi executive management and the board about fraudulent behavior within the organization. The company certified poor mortgages as quality mortgages and sold them to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other investors. Citigroup responded by stripping him of all responsibilities, placing him on administrative leave and eventually terminating him. Bowen subsequently testified before the Securities and Exchange Commission, giving them more than 1,000 pages of evidence of fraudulent activities. In 2010, he was a key witness in the mortgage mishaps and gave nationally televised testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Robert Shetterly’s portrait of Richard Bowen

Shetterly was born in Cincinnati and graduated from Harvard College in 1969 with a degree in English literature. After moving to Maine in 1970, he taught himself drawing, printmaking and painting. While trying to become proficient in printmaking and painting, he illustrated widely. For 12 years he created the editorial page drawings for the Maine Times newspaper and illustrated the National Audubon Society’s children’s newspaper, Audubon Adventures and some 30 books.

His work appears in collections across the United States and Europe. Along with his “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series, he is well known for his series of 70 painted etchings based on William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” and for another series of 50 painted etchings reflecting on the metaphor of the Annunciation.

He began “Americans Who Tell the Truth” in the early 2000s in response to U.S. government actions following 9/11. Shetterly undertook the project as a way to deal with his own grief and anger by painting Americans who inspired him. He initially intended to paint only 50 portraits, but by 2013 the series had grown to more than 180 paintings. Today, it numbers 238. Portions of the series have toured widely across the United States, shown in schools, museums, libraries, galleries and other public spaces.

A few of Shetterly’s paintings have previously visited ���ϲ�����. A small portion of the “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series was on display in March and April 2014 at VPA’s 914Works gallery.

An “Americans Who Tell the Truth” book featuring Shetterly’s first 50 portraits was published in 2008. He says the portraits have given him an opportunity to speak with children and adults throughout the United States about “the necessity of dissent in a democracy, the obligations of citizenship, sustainability, U.S. history, and how democracy cannot function if politicians don’t tell the truth, if the media don’t report it, and if the people don’t demand it.”

Shetterly is the subject of a documentary that’s in production, “Our Children’s Future: A Portrait of Robert Shetterly,” sponsored by the Union of Maine Visual Artists and directed by SU alumnus Richard Kane ’72. . Kane will be in ���ϲ����� this week to record additional interviews for the film.

Shetterly is no stranger to SU. He has visited campus on several occasions as a guest lecturer, most recently in early October, speaking to students in the Cultural Heritage Preservation (IST 622/MUS 600), Studio 1: Practices of Artistic Writing (WRT 109), Solo Creation (DRA 374), Production Crew (DRD 115) and Teaching and Leadership for Social Justice (EDU 915) courses, as well as visiting an honors class studying human rights and the Maxwell School’s Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration.

This week, he will be engaged in a full schedule of classroom appearances tied in to the exhibition, visiting VPA, the Falk College, the School of Education, the Whitman School and the Renée Crown University Honors Program.

About the Tanner Lecture Series on Ethics, Citizenship, and Public Responsibility

What does it mean to be an ethical citizen? What do the needs for public responsibility demand from us, whether we work in the private or the public sectors, and whether we are entry-level employees or top leaders? The Tanner Lecture Series on Ethics, Citizenship, and Public Responsibility provides a public forum for exploring these questions in provocative and challenging ways. The series has been generously endowed by alumnus W. Lynn Tanner ’75 Ph.D., founder, CEO and chairman of TEC, a leadership development organization dedicated to accelerating the growth and development of outstanding 21st-century leaders.

About the University Lectures

Now in its 18th season, the University Lectures is ���ϲ�����’s premier lecture series. Created through and supported by the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51, the cross-disciplinary series brings to campus notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

About ���ϲ�����

���ϲ����� is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings and an��undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic , with a global footprint, and��, ���ϲ����� offers a quintessential college experience. The scope of ���ϲ����� is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors and 100 minors offered through 13 schools and colleges; nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit .

“Born a Crime” is the selected book for the 2018-19 ���ϲ����� Reads Program, a shared reading initiative coordinated by the Provost’s Office that is part of the First-Year Experience for all new ���ϲ����� students.

The University provided more than 3,900 special softcover copies and e-copies of the book to all incoming first-year and transfer students in June. The students were instructed to read “Born a Crime” over the summer. This semester, they have all participated in a series of five-week discussion sessions—co-led by a student peer facilitator and a faculty, staff or graduate student lead facilitator—intended to enhance the students’ understanding of the topics addressed in the book and engage them in broader contexts about identity, resiliency, inclusion and community.

Hosted by WAER General Manager Joe Lee and the Rev. Brian Konkol, dean of Hendricks Chapel, Tuesday’s round table is a conversation with four first-year students—Bryan Hudnell, Dassy Kemedjio, Hadiya Lee and Allison Weiss—focusing on themes of identity and belonging, spirituality, and diversity and inclusion. The students will discuss the reading assignment and how events described by Noah relate to their own lives and academic experience.

Noah,��host of the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning will be visiting ���ϲ����� in person in a couple months’ time. He is a special guest participant in the 2019 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2019, in the Carrier Dome. Noah will take part in an on-stage conversation about “Born a Crime” and reflect on Dr. King and the global impact of the civil rights movement.

Tickets for the $30 combined dinner (5 to 6:30 p.m.) and main program (7 to 8:30 p.m.) option have sold out. Tickets for the main program alone—$15 for SU staff, SU faculty and the general public; $5 for students—are still available and may be purchased , in person at the Dome Box Office (Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) and by phone (888-DOME-TIX or 315.443.2121, option “zero”). For more information on the MLK Celebration, visit .

In addition to new SU students, free copies of “Born a Crime” were made available to other SU students, as well as to faculty and staff, who were encouraged to host their own discussions or book club readings about the book.

The book will also be utilized for “CNY Reads”—one of the largest “one book, one community” programs in New York state—from January through March 2019. By encouraging Central New York residents to read the same book and engage in experiences related to its subject matter, the 2019 CNY Reads program seeks to cultivate a culture of community building and programing while celebrating the written word. For more information, visit

Trevor Noah

Tickets are now available for the 2019 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration—featuring comedian and author Trevor Noah, host of the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning —on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2019, in the Dome.

This year’s theme for the MLK Celebration, the nation’s largest university-sponsored celebration of Dr. King’s life and legacy, is “The Global Impact of Civil Rights.” Noah will take part in an on-stage conversation about his acclaimed memoir, (Random House, 2016), reflecting on Dr. King and discussing the global impact of the civil rights movement.

The 34th annual event—presented in collaboration with the series and the ���ϲ����� Reads program—also includes a dinner; performances by students and Central New York community members; and presentation of the Unsung Hero Awards, recognizing local community members who have championed the rights of those in need. Dinner will take place from 5 to 6:30 p.m. near the Dome’s west end zone, followed by the main program from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the east side.

Following are the various ticket purchase options:

• SU staff, SU faculty and General Public (Dinner and Program): $30
• SU staff, SU faculty and General Public (Main Program Only): $15
• Students (Dinner and Program): $15
• Students (Main Program Only): $5

Tickets are available , in person at the Dome Box Office (Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) and by phone (888-DOME-TIX or 315.443.2121, option “zero”).

After Jan. 14, 2019, student tickets for the dinner and program may also be obtained with the��option of one meal deduction or $15 SUpercard Food at all dining centers and Schine Dining.

Noah’s “Born a Crime” is the selected book for the 2018-19 ���ϲ����� Reads program, a shared reading initiative coordinated by the Provost’s Office that is part of the First-Year Experience for all new SU students. The University provided more than 3,900 special softcover copies and e-copies of the book to these incoming first-year and transfer students in June. Free copies of “Born a Crime” were also made available through the SU Bookstore to other current students, as well as SU faculty and staff with a valid SUID.

The new students were instructed to read “Born a Crime” over the summer. After their arrival on campus for the fall semester, they have participated in a series of five-week discussion sessions—co-led by a student peer facilitator and a faculty, staff or graduate student lead facilitator—intended to enhance the students’ understanding of the topics addressed in the book and engage them in broader contexts about identity, resiliency, inclusion and community.

The book will also be utilized for “CNY Reads”—one of the largest “one book, one community” programs in New York state—from January through March 2019. By encouraging Central New York residents to read the same book and engage in experiences related to the subject matter of the book, the 2019 CNY Reads program seeks to cultivate a culture of community building and programing while celebrating the written word.

The MLK Celebration offers all who have read the book—and who will read the book—a special opportunity to see and hear the author live and in person.

For more information on Noah and the ���ϲ����� Reads program, see the MLK Celebration speaker announcement.

To learn more about the MLK Celebration, visit .

Margaret Atwood

Acclaimed author Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Alias Grace”) will visit ���ϲ����� on Thursday, Oct. 25, and participate that evening in an on-stage conversation in Hendricks Chapel for the series.

The event, which is free and open to the public, starts at 7:30 p.m. Part of SU’s , it is co-sponsored by the and the , with media sponsor . Atwood’s appearance is also part of the Humanities Center’s programming, which is focusing this year on the meaning and impact of “STORIES” from diverse perspectives.

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided.

Atwood will be speaking with fellow novelist , associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences. At the conclusion of their conversation, the floor will open for questions from the audience. The SU Bookstore will have a selection of Atwood’s books available for purchase in the Hendricks narthex before and after the event. There will be no book signing opportunity.

Margaret Atwood
The renowned Canadian author has more than 40 novels, non-fiction works, short story collections, children’s books, books of poetry, a graphic novel and a comic books series to her credit spanning her more than 50-year career.

Atwood has been a recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the Harvard Arts Medal, the Raymond Chandler Award, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among more than a hundred honors. She has also received 26 honorary degrees.

Two relatively new blockbuster adaptations of a pair of Atwood’s most notable books—“The Handmaid’s Tale” (McClelland & Stewart, Houghton Mifflin, 1985) and the mystery “Alias Grace” (McClelland & Stewart, Bloomsbury, Doubleday, 1996)—have brought a fresh recognition of her work to new audiences.

The two seasons of the Hulu production of “The Handmaid’s Tale” have garnered nine Primetime Emmy Awards, including the 2017 award for Outstanding Drama Series. The series has also earned a Peabody Award, two Television Critics Association Awards, an American Cinema Editors Award, an Art Directors Guild Award, three Critics’ Choice Television Awards and two Golden Globe Awards, among other honors.

The six-episode adaptation of Atwood’s murder mystery “Alias Grace” is currently available on Netflix, having debuted in November 2017.

Her children’s book “Wandering Wenda and “Widow Wallop’s Wunderground Washery” (McArthur & Co., 2011) was produced as an animated children’s series. MGM is producing a series from her novel “The Heart Goes Last” (McClelland & Stewart, Bloomsbury, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2015). And Paramount is adapting the three books in her MaddAddam series (McClelland & Stewart, Bloomsbury, Doubleday)—“Oryx and Crake”��(2003),��“The Year of the Flood”��(2009) and “MaddAddam” (2013)—into a television series.

In 2016, Atwood entered the world of graphic novels with “Angel Catbird” (Dark Horse), the story of a young genetic engineer who accidentally mutates into a cat-owl hybrid, which debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times Bestseller List. She has since written volumes two and three. And the complete 320-page collection was released Oct. 16.

Atwood recently teamed with Eisner Award-winning illustrator Ken Steacy for a three-issue comic book series, “War Bears,” which tells the story of the early days of comics in Toronto and one fictional cartoonist’s struggles with the industry in the 1940s.

Atwood is a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize and a founder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, a nonprofit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada’s writing community.

In addition to her literary endeavors, Atwood is an inventor. In 2004, while on a paperback tour in Denver for her novel “Oryx and Crake,” Atwood conceived the concept of a remote robotic writing technology, the LongPen, that would allow someone to write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the internet.

Dana Spiotta
Spiotta��is author of four novels:����(Simon & Schuster, 2016), winner of the St. Francis College��Literary Prize and a finalist for the��Los Angeles Times��Book Prize;����(Simon & Schuster, 2011), a finalist for the��National Book Critics Circle Award;����(Simon & Schuster, 2006), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Foundation Award; and����(Simon & Schuster, 2001), a��New York Times��Notable Book.

Spiotta is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for��the Arts Fellowship and the Rome Prize in Literature. In 2017, she��received the John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

About the University Lectures
The University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

Saunders will engage in an on-stage conversation with fellow author Jonathan Dee, assistant professor of English in A&S. The ���ϲ����� Bookstore will have Saunders’ and Dee’s books available for purchase in the Hendricks narthex, and Saunders will be available after the lecture for signings.

The University Lectures event is co-sponsored by the University’s as part of . Media sponsor for the University Lectures is . American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be provided.

George Saunders (photo by Chloe Aftel)

George Saunders

Saunders has taught since 1996 in the University’s M.F.A. program in creative writing, the same program in which he was a student, studying with literary mentors Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger. He graduated in 1988.

His path to ���ϲ����� was winding and adventurous. Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up in Chicago. His college undergraduate studies had little to do with literature and everything to do with science: he majored in exploration geophysics, earning a degree in the discipline from the Colorado School of Mines. After college, Saunders was off to Sumatra, working as a field geophysicist. To pass the long weeks in camp, he stocked up on books and read vociferously. But about a year and half into the job, he became very ill after swimming in contaminated river water. It was then that Saunders decided to head home and “try and be Kerouac II.”

He worked as a doorman, a roofer, a convenience store clerk and a slaughterhouse worker. In 1986, his life path took a new and important turn. One night in 1986, at a party in Amarillo, Saunders happened upon a copy of People magazine. In it was a profile about renowned short-story writer, poet and ���ϲ����� English professor Raymond Carver and an accomplished young author and student of Carver’s, Jay McInerney G’86. Saunders was unfamiliar with ���ϲ����� and had never heard of an M.F.A. program, but he was intrigued. He applied to ���ϲ����� and was accepted.

While pursuing his graduate degree in the creative writing program, Saunders met, became engaged to and married Paula Redick. In 1988, their first daughter, Caitlin, was born. In 1990, second daughter Alena followed. Upon graduating from the University, Saunders worked as a tech writer, first for a pharmaceutical company and then for an environmental engineering company. And he also wrote fiction.

Saunders’ first significant success with his fiction came with the publication of his short story “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1992 (and was one of the pieces in his first published book, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” Random House, 1996) and for Saunders launched a long and very successful relationship with the magazine that continues to this day.

When ���ϲ����� extended to Saunders an offer to teach in the creative writing program, it gave him the security of a regular paycheck with benefits and the opportunity to continue to advance his writing. He produced more short stories for The New Yorker, as well as for Harper’s, McSweeney’s and GQ. He contributed a weekly column, “American Psyche,” to the weekend magazine of The Guardian (2006-08). And he wrote and had published several collections of short stories, including “Pastoralia” (Penguin, 2000), named a New York Times Notable Book, and “In Persuasion Nation” (Penguin, 2006), a finalist for the Story Prize.

His short-story collection “Tenth of December” was published by Random House in 2013. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Prize (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection).

Also in 2013, the transcript of a memorable convocation address by Saunders to College of Arts and Sciences graduates, a moving essay on kindness, was picked up by The New York Times website and went viral—within days, it was viewed more than one million times. It inspired an voiced by Saunders. And the following spring, it was published in book form— (Random House, 2014)—and became a bestseller.

Random House published Saunders’ first full-length novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” in 2017. It was a No. 1 New York Times Bestseller and won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. It also became a hit audiobook (seven hours, 25 minutes), with an impressive voice cast of actors, authors and comedians, including Don Cheadle, Lena Dunham, Bill Hader, Mary Karr, Megan Mullally, Julianne Moore, Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Susan Sarandon, Ben Stiller, Jeffrey Tambor, Bradley Whitford and Rainn Wilson.

Among Saunders’ other notable honors, he was named to Time magazine’s TIME 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2013. That same year, he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. He has also won four National Magazine Awards (from seven nominations), a PEN/Malamud Award and a World Fantasy Award. He has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. This past spring, Saunders was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In all, Saunders has written nine books; his a hardcover short story with illustrations, becomes available Nov. 13. And he recently completed the for Jeff Tweedy’s new album, “Warm,” which comes out Nov. 30.

Jonathan Dee

Dee is author of seven novels, including “A Thousand Pardons” (Random House, 2013), “Palladio” (Doubleday, 2002) and “The Privileges” (Random House, 2010), which was a runner-up for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2011 Prix Fitzgerald and the St. Francis College Literary Prize.

His most recent novel, “The Locals” (Random House, 2017), was longlisted for the inaugural Aspen Institute Literary Prize for “a work of fiction with social impact.” It was named a Best Book of 2017 by, among others, The Washington Post, the Guardian, Vox, Kirkus and the Seattle Times.

Dee is a National Magazine Award-nominated literary critic for Harper’s and The New Yorker,��a former contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a former senior editor of The Paris Review and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

About the University Lectures

The University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

Nicole Sealey (Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths)

Author launches the 2018-19 Raymond Carver Reading Series on Wednesday, Sept. 19. She will take part in a Q&A at 3:45 p.m. and an author reading at 5:30 p.m., both in Huntington Beard Crouse Hall’s Gifford Auditorium.

The series is presented by the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences. The events are free and open to the public. Parking is available in SU pay lots.

Sealey is executive director of the and the 2018-19 Doris Lippman Visiting Poet at The City College of New York. She is author of (HarperCollins, 2017), finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award, and (Northwestern University Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Her other honors include a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, the Cave Canem Foundation, MacDowell Colony and��the Poetry Project.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times and elsewhere.

Born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida, Sealey holds an M.L.A. degree in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from New York University.

In total, six authors will appear in the fall half of the Raymond Carver Reading Series. In addition to Sealey, participants are:

Arthur Flowers, Sept. 26
SU associate professor of English
novelist, essayist, performance poet
“I See the Promised Land”
“Mojo Rising: Confessions of a 21st Century Conjureman”

Robert Lopez, Oct. 10
Visiting Writer
novelist, poet
“Part of the World”
“Kamby Bolongo Mean River”

Katie Kitamura, Oct. 24
The Leonard and Elise Elman Visiting Writer
novelist
“A Separation”
“The Longshot”

Mary Karr, Nov. 7
SU Peck Professor of Literature
memoirist, poet
“The Liar’s Club”
“Tropic of Squalor”

George Saunders, Dec. 5
SU professor of English
The Jane and Daniel Present Lecturer
short-story writer, novelist
“Lincoln in the Bardo”
“Tenth of December”

The Raymond Carver Reading Series is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, Stephen King, the Dr. Scholl Foundation, the Lynn & David Pleet ’53 Fund for Creative Writing, the Richard Elman Visiting Writer Fund, the Friends of Creative Writing, Chris Tennyson, Jerome Cohen, Jane and Daniel Present, Don McNaughton, and the Interdisciplinary Fund for the Humanities from Leonard and Elise Elman.

In addition, as previously announced, the University Lectures welcomes in January—in collaboration with the 34th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration—comedian/author Trevor Noah. “The Daily Show” host will talk about his acclaimed memoir (“Born a Crime: Stories of a South African Childhood”), reflect on the life and legacy of Dr. King, and discuss the global impact of the civil rights movement.

Now in its 18th season, the University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available at each lecture. Media sponsor for the University Lectures is WAER.

Appearing this fall:

George Saunders
Thursday, Oct. 18
7:30 p.m., Hendricks Chapel
Free; part of Orange Central 2018

George Saunders G’88 is author of nine books, including the short-story collection “Tenth of December” (Random House, 2013)—a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Prize (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection)—and his first full-length novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo” (Random House, 2017), a No. 1 New York Times Bestseller and winner of the Man Booker Prize.

George Saunders (photo by Chloe Aftel)

A member of the College of Arts and Sciences since 1997, Saunders is a professor of English teaching in the college’s renowned Creative Writing Program. This past spring, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2013, Saunders was named to Time magazine’s TIME 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. That same year, he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. He has also won four National Magazine Awards (from seven nominations), a PEN/Malamud Award and a World Fantasy Award.

He has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

In May 2013, Saunders delivered a memorable convocation address to College of Arts and Sciences graduates. The New York Times posted the transcript on its website a couple months later, and the speech quickly went viral—within days, it was viewed more than one million times. It inspired an voiced by Saunders. And the following spring, his moving essay on kindness was published in book form— (Random House, 2014)—and became a bestseller.

In addition to “Tenth of December,” Saunders has written several popular short-story collections, including “Pastoralia” (Penguin, 2000) and “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (Random House, 1996), which were New York Times Notable Books. Another collection, “In Persuasion Nation” (Penguin, 2006), was a finalist for the 2006 Story Prize.

Saunders’ appearance is co-sponsored by SU’s as part of .

Margaret Atwood
Thursday, Oct. 25
7:30 p.m., Hendricks Chapel
Free; part of Family Weekend 2018

Canadian author Margaret Atwood is the definition of a literary titan, with more than 40 novels, non-fiction works, short story collections, children’s books, books of poetry and one graphic novel to her credit over her more than 50-year career. Her work has been published in more than 40 languages.

Margaret Atwood

Arguably her most famous book, “The Handmaid’s Tale” (McClelland & Stewart, Houghton Mifflin, 1985), was transformed into a critically acclaimed television series on Hulu. The first season won eight Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series. The recently completed second season has earned 20 Emmy nominations.

Along with the deep dystopian novel, television is treating new generations to other of Atwood’s notable works. An adaption of her murder mystery “Alias Grace” (McClelland & Stewart, Bloomsbury, Doubleday, 1996) is now streaming on Netflix. Her children’s book “Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop’s Wunderground Washery” (McArthur & Co., 2011) was produced as an animated children’s series. MGM is producing a series from her novel “The Heart Goes Last” (McClelland & Stewart, Bloomsbury, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2015). And Paramount is adapting the three books in her MaddAddam series (McClelland & Stewart, Bloomsbury, Doubleday)—“Oryx and Crake”��(2003),��“The Year of the Flood”��(2009) and “MaddAddam” (2013)—into a television series.

In 2016, Atwood entered the world of graphic novels with “Angel Catbird” (Dark Horse), the story of a young genetic engineer who accidentally mutates into a cat-owl hybrid, which debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times Bestseller List. She has since written volumes two and three.

Her list of honors exceeds 125 recognitions, starting in the early 1960s and including the Man Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the Harvard Arts Medal, the Raymond Chandler Award, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has received 26 honorary degrees.

Atwood is a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize and a founder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, a nonprofit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada’s writing community.

She is also an inventor. In 2004, while on a paperback tour in Denver for her novel “Oryx and Crake,” Atwood conceived the concept of a remote robotic writing technology, the LongPen, that would allow someone to write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the internet.

Atwood’s University Lectures presentation is also part of the ���ϲ����� Humanities Center’s programming, which is focusing this year on the meaning and impact of “STORIES” from diverse perspectives.

Her appearance is co-sponsored by the and the , and is part of .

Robert Shetterly

Exhibition
Nov. 26-30
Panasci Lounge, Schine Student Center
Free

Lecture
Thursday, Nov. 29
7:30 p.m., Setnor Auditorium, Crouse College
Free

Not only is noted painter Robert Shetterly coming to ���ϲ�����, he is bringing along the full collection of his masterwork portrait series which marks the first time ever all 235 pieces will be displayed publicly in one location.

Robert Shetterly

The portraits and accompanying narratives highlight citizens who courageously address issues of social, environmental and economic fairness. Combining art and other media, the series “offers resources to inspire a new generation of engaged Americans who will act for the common good, our communities, and the Earth.”

Among the historical and contemporary figures portrayed in the collection are Muhammad Ali, Susan B. Anthony, James Baldwin, Majora Carter, Shirley Chisholm, Dwight Eisenhower, Langston Hughes, Van Jones, Martin Luther King Jr., Naomi Klein, Ron Kovic, Oren Lyons ’58, Arthur Miller, Ralph Nader, Paul Robeson, Edward Snowden, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Malcolm X.

The University will transport the paintings to ���ϲ����� from Shetterly’s Maine home in late fall, and the Panasci Lounge will be transformed into a gallery setting, while continuing as a student study space, to host the public exhibition Nov. 26-30.

All of Shetterly’s living portrait subjects have been invited to visit ���ϲ����� to see the display and enjoy a gallery reception and the accompanying Nov. 29 University Lectures event in which the artist will take part in an on-stage conversation with two of his subjects—Richard Bowen and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha.

Bowen is a former vice president at Citigroup who blew the whistle on Citibank’s subprime mortgage practices that helped lead to the country’s 2008 financial crisis. He appeared before the Securities and Exchange Commission—giving them more than 1,000 pages of evidence of fraudulent activities—and later gave nationally televised testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician and public health advocate in Flint, Michigan, sounded the alarm about the high presence of lead in the city’s drinking water; her book on the Flint Water Crisis, “What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City” (Random House), was published this past June.

Shetterly taught himself drawing, printmaking and painting after graduating from Harvard College with a degree in English literature. His work appears in collections across the United States and Europe. Along with his “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series, Shetterly is well known for his series of 70 painted etchings based on William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” and for another series of 50 painted etchings reflecting on the metaphor of the Annunciation.

He began “Americans Who Tell the Truth” in the early 2000s. A book by the same name and featuring his first 50 portraits was published in 2008. Shetterly says the portraits have given him an opportunity to speak with children and adults throughout the United States about “the necessity of dissent in a democracy, the obligations of citizenship, sustainability, U.S. history, and how democracy cannot function if politicians don’t tell the truth, if the media don’t report it, and if the people don’t demand it.”

Major support for Shetterly’s appearance and the exhibition of his portrait series is provided by the Maxwell School’s .

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

ABOUT THE OFFICE OF ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT

The Office of Alumni Engagement (OAE) provides ���ϲ�����’s 241,000 alumni with a variety of ways to stay connected to their alma mater and their fellow alumni. Engagement opportunities include, but are not limited to, academic-based programs, regional celebrations, social activities via alumni clubs and affinity groups, service projects, career support/professional development, reunion and homecoming celebrations, digital engagement and communications, legacy programs, and giving initiatives. OAE seeks to build an integrated, inclusive and premier alumni engagement program, which results in an increase in participation and lasting, genuine relationships with SU alumni.

ABOUT THE SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY HUMANITIES CENTER

A hub of vibrant scholarship��and public programming, the ���ϲ����� Humanities Center—whose home is in the College of Arts and Sciences—cultivates humanities research; sponsors dynamic programming; and highlights the humanities as a public good. In addition to offering��numerous fellowships and other initiatives, the Humanities��Center is home to�����ϲ����� Symposium, an annual public events series that engages wider publics with innovative, interdisciplinary work in the humanities by renowned scholars, artists, authors, and performers. This year,�����ϲ�������Symposium��takes up��the meaning of “STORIES” from diverse perspectives and��across��genres, locally and globally.

ABOUT THE TANNER LECTURE SERIES ON ETHICS, CITIZENSHIP, AND PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY

What does it mean to be an ethical citizen? What do the needs for public responsibility demand from us, whether we work in the private or the public sectors, and whether we are entry-level employees or top leaders? The Tanner Lecture Series on Ethics, Citizenship, and Public Responsibility provides a public forum for exploring these questions in provocative and challenging ways. The series has been generously endowed by alumnus Dr. W. Lynn Tanner ’75 Ph.D., founder, CEO and chairman of TEC, a leadership development organization dedicated to accelerating the growth and development of outstanding 21st-century leaders.

ABOUT THE DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. CELEBRATION

���ϲ�����’s celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the largest event of its kind on a college campus. The 34th annual event will take place on Sunday, Jan. 27, in the Carrier Dome. The event got its start before Congress acted to recognize Dr. King with a federal holiday honoring his memory and accomplishments. ���ϲ�����’s celebration includes student and community entertainment, dinner and presentation of the Unsung Hero Awards, which recognize local community members who have championed the plight of those in need.

About ���ϲ�����

���ϲ����� is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings and an��undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic , with a global footprint, and��, ���ϲ����� offers a quintessential college experience. The scope of ���ϲ����� is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors and 100 minors offered through 13 schools and colleges; nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit .

��

Trevor Noah

Comedian and author Trevor Noah, host of the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning on Comedy Central, will visit ���ϲ����� in late January 2019 as a special guest of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration, in collaboration with the University Lectures series.

���ϲ�����’s 34th annual —the largest event of its kind in the country—will take place on Sunday, Jan. 27, in the Carrier Dome. Noah will take part in an on-stage conversation, talking about his acclaimed memoir, (Random House, 2016), reflecting on the life and legacy of Dr. King, and discussing the global impact of the civil rights movement. Further details of the event will be announced later in the fall.

“Not only is Trevor Noah a popular television personality and the most successful comedian in South African history, his recent and renowned text has proven to be informative, formative and deeply transformative,” says the Rev. Brian E. Konkol, dean of Hendricks Chapel and co-chair of the 2019 MLK Celebration. “By showing the connections among Soweto, Selma and ���ϲ����� at our 2019 MLK Celebration, we will recognize the global impact of the civil rights movement and consider how we, too, may receive the freedom to flourish as citizens of the world.”

“Born a Crime” is the selected book for the 2018-19 ���ϲ����� Reads Program, a shared reading initiative coordinated by the Provost’s Office that is part of the First-Year Experience for all new SU students. The initiative aims to engage students in a shared experience that explores themes of identity, belonging, diversity, inclusion, and health and wellness.

In the book, Noah, who was born in South Africa to a black South African mother and a white European father, recounts his childhood growing up during the last days of apartheid and the opportunities and adventures with his mother in the period that followed.

The University provided more than 3,900 special softcover copies and e-copies of the book to all incoming first-year and transfer students in June. The students were instructed to read “Born a Crime” over the summer. After their arrival on campus for the fall semester, the students will participate in a series of five-week discussion sessions—co-led by a student peer facilitator and a faculty, staff or graduate student lead facilitator—intended to enhance the students’ understanding of the topics addressed in the book and engage them in broader contexts about identity, resiliency, inclusion and community.

Free copies of “Born a Crime” have also been made available through the SU Bookstore to current students, faculty and staff with a valid SUID, and individuals have been encouraged to host their own discussions or book club readings about the book.

“Trevor Noah’s book provides a foundation for the critical topics of identity, belonging and inclusion that all college students can and should examine,” says Amanda G. Nicholson, assistant provost, dean of student success and co-chair of the First-Year Experience Initiative. “To hear from him firsthand will be a truly meaningful opportunity to explore difficult themes from a global perspective and continue our shared campus conversation through the First-Year Experience around those themes.”

“We are thrilled to host Trevor Noah, who will share his experiences and reflections with our students and the entire campus community as we continue to build a more welcoming, inclusive community,” says Kira Kristal Reed, provost faculty fellow, associate professor in the Whitman School and co-chair of the First-Year Experience Initiative. “His appearance will enhance the First-Year Experience as we engage in a shared reading and discussions, and wellness opportunities throughout the fall, and conclude with the MLK celebration.”

Noah is the most successful comedian in Africa. He joined “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” in 2014 as a contributor and took over as host of the show in September 2015, upon Stewart’s retirement.

He was named one of “The 35 Most Powerful People in New York Media” by The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 and 2018, and Time magazine named him to its Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world,” for 2018.

Born in Johannesburg in 1984, Noah began his career as a comedian, presenter and actor in his native South Africa in 2002. He held several television hosting roles with the South African Broadcasting Corp. and performed in stand-up comedy tours across South Africa. He was creator and host of “Tonight with Trevor Noah” from 2010 until 2011, when he relocated to the United States.

On Jan. 6, 2012, Noah became the first South African stand-up comedian to appear on “The Tonight Show.” In May 2013, he had the same distinction appearing on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

Noah was the subject of the award-winning 2012 documentary “You Laugh But It’s True,” which tells the story of his remarkable career in post-apartheid South Africa. That same year, he starred in the one-man comedy show “Trevor Noah: The Racist,” which was based on his similarly titled South African special, “That’s Racist.” His Showtime comedy special “Trevor Noah: African American” premiered in 2013. He recorded the stand-up special “Trevor Noah: Lost in Translation” for Comedy Central in 2015 and debuted his ninth comedy special, “Trevor Noah: Afraid of the Dark,” on Netflix in 2017.

In his time as host of “The Daily Show,” both he and the program have won numerous honors, including a Writers Guild of America Award, a Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Award, a GLAAD Media Award, an MTV Movie & TV Award and a Primetime Emmy Award, all in 2017. “The Daily Show” has been nominated for several awards in 2018, including three Primetime Emmys: for Outstanding Variety Talk Series, Outstanding Interactive Program and Outstanding Short Form Variety Series; the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards will be broadcast on NBC on Sept. 17.

In 2016, Noah released “Born a Crime,” his first book, which was an immediate New York Times bestseller. Additionally, his performance on the “ was Audible’s highest rated audiobook of 2016, and it has remained one of the top selling titles on Audible since its release. It was also nominated for two NAACP Image Awards, one for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author and another for Outstanding Literary Work in the Biography/Auto-Biography category.

The book is a collection of personal stories about growing up in South Africa during the last gasps of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that came with its demise. Already known for his incisive social and political commentary, Noah with the book turns his focus inward, giving readers an intimate look at the world that shaped him.

He shares true stories, sometimes dark, occasionally bizarre, frequently tender, and often hilarious: from subsisting on caterpillars during months of extreme poverty to making comically hapless attempts at teenage romance to the occasion he was thrown in jail to the time he was tossed from a speeding car driven by murderous gangsters.

ABOUT THE FIRST-YEAR EXPERIENCE

For the 2018-19 academic year, the First-Year Experience is focused on three core areas: anchor courses within each school or college; a shared reading and discussion experience with peers, faculty and staff; and health and wellness activities. These three areas aim to build community, improve cross-cultural skills and increase practices of healthy habits for first-year and transfer students. With the selection of Trevor Noah’s memoir, “Born a Crime,” the shared reading is meant for new students—and the entire University community—to engage in a common experience and explore themes of identity, belonging, wellness, diversity and inclusion.

ABOUT THE MLK CELEBRATION

���ϲ�����’s celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the largest event of its kind on a college campus. The 34thannual event will take place on Sunday, Jan. 27, in the Carrier Dome. The event got its start before Congress acted to recognize Dr. King with a federal holiday honoring his memory and accomplishments. ���ϲ�����’s celebration includes student and community entertainment, dinner and presentation of the Unsung Hero Awards, which recognize local community members who have championed the plight of those in need.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY LECTURES

The is ���ϲ�����’s premier speaker series, with a long and distinguished history of showcasing individuals of exceptional accomplishment who share their talents, experiences and perspectives for the enjoyment of SU students/faculty/staff and the Central New York community. Now entering its 18th year, the cross-disciplinary series was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51.

The event—co-sponsored by the , with media sponsor WAER—is free and open to the public. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available at the lecture.

Rick Fedrizzi

Fedrizzi is chairman and CEO of the (IWBI). Previously, he was the founding chair and CEO of the (USGBC) and CEO of Green Business Certification Inc.

During his tenure with the USGBC, , or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, became the world’s most widely used green building rating system.

���ϲ����� has several buildings that have received LEED certification: ���ϲ����� Center of Excellence (Platinum), Ernie Davis Hall (Gold), Dineen Hall (Gold), Bowne Hall (Certified), the Carmelo K. Anthony Center (Certified) and the Green Data Center (Certified). The University is working toward certification for two other projects: (seeking Certified status) and the (seeking Gold status).

Fedrizzi co-founded USGBC while serving as the environmental marketing officer at UTC’s Carrier Corp., where he served for more than 25 years.��A ���ϲ����� native, he received an M.B.A. from ���ϲ����� in 1987 and was recipient of an Arents Award for Excellence in Sustainability Innovation in 2011.

He brought his global environmental track record and keen business insight to IWBI in November 2016. With more than 100 million square feet registered and certified in more than 30 countries, IWBI’s evidence-based is the premier system for measuring and monitoring real estate features that impact health and well-being and third-party certifying their successful achievement.

Fedrizzi serves on numerous boards and advisory councils, including the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; View Inc.; and Global Green.

His book (Disruption Books, 2015) won a prestigious EPPY award for Public Affairs in 2015.

Fedrizzi is the last of eight speakers in the 2017-18 University Lectures series, following documentarian/journalist/news anchor Soledad O’Brien; NPR “Morning Edition” anchor David Greene; comedian and “The Daily Show” correspondent Hasan Minhaj; historian and “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” author Jill Lepore; Penn Engineering Dean Vijay Kumar; MSNBC host/commentator Joy-Ann Reid; and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

Julie Otsuka (Photo by Robert Bessoir)

Award-winning author is the final speaker in the 2017-18 Raymond Carver Reading Series. She will participate in a Q&A session at 3:45 p.m. and do an author reading at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 25, in Huntington Beard Crouse Hall’s Gifford Auditorium.

Recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Asian American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, France’s Prix Femina Étranger, an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Otsuka is the Spring 2018 Don MacNaughton Reader in the .

Among her other honors, Otsuka was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the��Los Angeles Times��Book Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Her first novel,����(Knopf, 2002), is about the internment of a Japanese-American family during World War II. It has been translated into 11 languages and was a��New York Times��Notable Book, a��San Francisco Chronicle��Best Book of the Year and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers finalist, and was recently added to the National Endowment for the Arts’ “The Big Read” Library.

The book is based on Otsuka’s own family history: her grandfather was arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and her mother, uncle and grandmother spent three years in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah.

The New York Times��called the book “a resonant and beautifully nuanced achievement,” and��USA Today��described it as “A gem of a book and one of the most vivid history lessons you’ll ever learn.” It has been assigned to all incoming freshmen at more than 45 colleges and universities and is a regular “Community Reads” selection across the United States.

Her second novel,����(Knopf, 2011), is about a group of young Japanese “picture brides” who sailed to America in the early 1900s to become the wives of men they had never met and knew only by their photographs. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award, France’s Prix Femina Étranger and the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the��Los Angeles Times��Book Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

A��New York Times,��San Francisco Chronicle��and��Los Angeles Times��bestseller,��“The Buddha in the Attic”��has been translated into 22 languages. It was selected as a��New York Times��Notable Book, a��San Francisco Chronicle��and��Boston Globe��Best Book the Year, and was named a Top Ten Book by��Library Journal��and��Vogue.

Otsuka’s fiction has been published in��Granta,��Harper’s,��100 Years of The Best American Short Stories,��The Best American Short Stories 2012 and��The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and has been read aloud on PRI’s “Selected Shorts” and BBC Radio 4’s “Book at Bedtime.”

About ���ϲ�����

���ϲ����� is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings and an��undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic , with a global footprint, and��, ���ϲ����� offers a quintessential college experience. The scope of ���ϲ����� is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors and 100 minors offered through 13 schools and colleges; nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit .

Maureen Dowd

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and best-selling author will speak for the on Friday, April 13, at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel.

The event—co-sponsored by the Lubin Society, with media sponsor WAER—is free and open to the public. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available at the lecture.

described Dowd as “the most dangerous columnist in America.” Her columns appear every Sunday in The Times. is her most recent. In 1999, she won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary.

She is also a noted author. Her first book, (Penguin, 2004) covered the presidency and personality of George W. Bush. Dowd then switched from presidential politics to sexual politics in another best seller, (Penguin, 2005).

In her most recent book, (Grand Central Publishing, 2016), Dowd headed back to politics as a subject, examining “the psychologies and pathologies in one of the nastiest and most significant battles of the sexes ever,” the 2016 presidential campaign.

Known for her witty, incisive and often acerbic portraits of the powerful, Dowd began her journalism career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for the Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. When the Star closed, she went to TIME magazine. She joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in 1983, went on to serve as a correspondent in the paper’s Washington bureau in 1986 and became a columnist on The Times Op-Ed page in 1995. In 2014, she also became a writer for The Times Magazine.

Dowd has covered seven presidential campaigns; served as The Times’ White House correspondent; and written “On Washington,” a column for The Times Magazine. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting in 1992 and was named one of Glamour’s Women of the Year for 1996.

In addition to The New York Times, Dowd has written for GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Mademoiselle and Sports Illustrated, among other publications.

Dowd is the third of four University Lectures speakers in the Spring 2018 semester. The final guest, International WELL Building Institute Chairman and CEO G’87, will speak on April 24. Previously, the University Lectures hosted Penn Engineering Dean Vijay Kumar on Feb. 20 and MSNBC host/commentator Joy-Ann Reid on April 3.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

Reid will be engaged in an on-stage conversation with Dean Lorraine Branham from the and will take questions from the audience. The event is free and open to the public.

Her appearance is co-sponsored by the Newhouse School, with media sponsor . American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available at the lecture.

In addition to her journalistic responsibilities, Reid teaches the Newhouse School course Race, Gender and Media at SU’s in Manhattan. And she is very popular on social media with her (1.17 million followers), and accounts.

Reid is author of (William Morrow/Harper Collins, 2015) and co-editor with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne of (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Prior to her current responsibilities, Reid was host of “The Reid Report,” a daily program that offered her distinctive analysis and insight on the day’s news. Before that, she was managing editor of , a daily online news and opinion platform devoted to delivering stories and perspectives that reflect and affect African-American audiences. Reid joined theGrio.com with experience as a freelance columnist for the Miami Herald and as editor of the political blog “The Reid Report.” She is a former talk radio producer and host for Radio One as well as an online news editor for the NBC affiliate WTVJ in Miramar, Florida.

Reid served as the Florida deputy communications director for the 527 “America Coming Together” initiative during the 2004 presidential campaign and was a press aide in the final stretch of President Barack Obama’s Florida campaign in 2008.

Reid is the first of three University Lectures speakers in the month of April. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist will appear on April 13, and International WELL Building Institute Chairman and CEO G’87 will speak on April 24.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

About ���ϲ�����

���ϲ����� is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings and an��undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic , with a global footprint, and��, ���ϲ����� offers a quintessential college experience. The scope of ���ϲ����� is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors and 100 minors offered through 13 schools and colleges; nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit .

Yiyun grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection,�� (Random House, 2005), won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the California Book Award for first fiction.

Her novel�� (Random House, 2009) won the gold medal of the California Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award.�� (Random House, 2010), her second collection, was a finalist for the Story Prize and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.��Her latest novel, (Random House, 2014), was published to critical acclaim.

Yiyun has received numerous awards, including the Whiting Award, a Lannan Foundation Residency fellowship, a 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize.

She has served on the jury panel for the Man Booker International Prize, the National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Her books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

The Raymond Carver Reading Series is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, Stephen King, the Dr. Scholl Foundation, the Lynn & David Pleet ’53 Fund for Creative Writing, the Richard Elman Visiting Writer Fund, the Friends of Creative Writing, Chris Tennyson, Jerome Cohen, Jane and Daniel Present, Don McNaughton, and the Interdisciplinary Fund for the Humanities from Leonard and Elise Elman.

About ���ϲ�����

���ϲ����� is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings and an��undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic , with a global footprint, and��, ���ϲ����� offers a quintessential college experience. The scope of ���ϲ����� is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors and 100 minors offered through 13 schools and colleges; nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit .

Joy-Ann Reid

The University Lectures will welcome MSNBC political analyst and host of “AM Joy” Joy-Ann Reid as a new addition to the 2017-18 series. She will speak on Tuesday, April 3, at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel.

Previously, aerial robotics expert , dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, spoke on Feb. 20. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist will appear on April 13, and International WELL Building Institute Chairman and CEO G’87 rounds out the lineup on April 24.

Reid’s appearance is co-sponsored by the , with media sponsor . American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available at each lecture.

In addition to her work on MSNBC, including hosting �� Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to noon ET, Reid is a columnist for The Daily Beast and teaches the Newhouse School course Race, Gender and Media at SU’s in Manhattan.

She is also author of (William Morrow/Harper Collins, 2015) and co-editor with Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne of (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Reid is very active on social media with popular (1.12 million followers), and accounts.

Prior to her current responsibilities, Reid was host of “The Reid Report,” a daily program that offered her distinctive analysis and insight on the day’s news. Before that, she was managing editor of , a daily online news and opinion platform devoted to delivering stories and perspectives that reflect and affect African-American audiences. Reid joined theGrio.com with experience as a freelance columnist for the Miami Herald and as editor of the political blog “The Reid Report.” She is a former talk radio producer and host for Radio One as well as an online news editor for the NBC affiliate WTVJ in Miramar, Florida.

Reid served as the Florida deputy communications director for the 527 “America Coming Together” initiative during the 2004 presidential campaign and was a press aide in the final stretch of President Barack Obama’s Florida campaign in 2008.

She is a 1991 graduate of Harvard University and a 2003 Knight Foundation fellow.

About ���ϲ�����

���ϲ����� is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings and an��undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic , with a global footprint, and��, ���ϲ����� offers a quintessential college experience. The scope of ���ϲ����� is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors and 100 minors offered through 13 schools and colleges; nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit .

Tarfia Faizullah

Poet will take part in a Q&A session and read from her work on Wednesday, Feb. 28, as part of the 2017-18 Raymond Carver Reading Series. The Q&A is at 3:45 p.m. and the reading is at 5:30 p.m., with both activities taking place in Huntington Beard Crouse Hall’s Gifford Auditorium.

Faizullah teaches in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry. Her new book of poems, “” will be published by Graywolf Press on March 6.

Her debut poetry collection, “” (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), won a VIDA Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Milton Kessler First Book Award and the Drake University Emerging Writers Award.

Faizullah has been a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes and the Frederick Bock Prize. Her poems have been published widely in periodicals and anthologies in the United States and abroad; have been translated into Bengali, Chinese, Persian, Spanish and Tamil; and have been featured at the Smithsonian and the Rubin Museum of Art.

She has collaborated with photographer Elizabeth Herman, emcee and producer Brooklyn Shanti and composer Jacob Cooper, and has served as an editor for Blackbird, Asian American Literary Review, Four Way Review, Orison Books, New England Review, Organic Weapon Arts and most recently, an issue of Poetry Magazine, guest-edited with Lawrence Minh-Bui Davis and Timothy Yu.

is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, Stephen King, the Dr. Scholl Foundation, the Lynn & David Pleet ’53 Fund for Creative Writing, the Richard Elman Visiting Writer Fund, the Friends of Creative Writing, Chris Tennyson, Jerome Cohen, Jane and Daniel Present, Don McNaughton, and the Interdisciplinary Fund for the Humanities from Leonard and Elise Elman.

Penn Engineering Dean Vijay Kumar with an aerial robot in his lab

His appearance is free and open to the public. The lecture is co-sponsored by the , with media sponsor . American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available. Requests for accessibility and accommodations may be made to the Equal Opportunity, Inclusion and Resolution Services (EOIRS) office at 315.443.4018.

is recognized around the world for his groundbreaking work on the development of autonomous ground and aerial robots, on designing biologically inspired algorithms for collective behavior and on robot swarms.

In his 2015 TED Talk, he describes his team’s Precision Farming project, in which swarms of robots map, reconstruct and analyze every plant and piece of fruit in an orchard, providing vital information to farmers that can help improve yields and make water management smarter.

In an earlier TED Talk, from 2012, he concludes his presentation with a recorded demonstration of nine flying robots performing the James Bond theme on six different instruments. Kumar is a huge James Bond fan, and he credits the character “Q” for motivating him to pursue a career in technology. This particular video has had more than 4.36 million viewings.

Kumar was named dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science in 2015. He joined the Penn Engineering faculty in 1987 and prior to his current position served as UPS Foundation Professor with appointments in the departments of mechanical engineering and applied mechanics, computer and information science and electrical and systems engineering. As deputy dean for education in 2008-12, he was instrumental in the creation of several innovative master’s degree programs.

Earlier, he served as chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (2005-08), deputy dean for research (2000-04) and director of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception, or GRASP, Laboratory, a multidisciplinary robotics and perception lab (1998-2004). During a scholarly leave in 2012-14, he served in the White House as assistant director for robotics and cyber physical systems in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Kumar has authored more than 400 refereed articles and papers and more than 20 books and book chapters.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

Kumar is recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 1991 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator award; the 1996 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (University of Pennsylvania); the 1997 Freudenstein Award for significant accomplishments in mechanisms and robotics; the 2012 ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award; the 2012 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award; a 2012 World Technology Network Award; a 2013 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough award; a 2014 Engelberger Robotics Award; and the 2017 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation.

The University Lectures series continues with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist on April 13 and International WELL Building Institute Chairman and CEO on April 24.

About ���ϲ�����

Founded��in 1870, ���ϲ����� is a private international research university��dedicated to advancing knowledge and fostering student success through teaching��excellence,��rigorous scholarship and interdisciplinary research. Comprising 11��academic schools and colleges, the University has a long legacy of excellence��in the liberal arts, sciences and��professional disciplines that prepares��students for the complex challenges and emerging opportunities of a rapidly��changing world. Students enjoy the resources of a 270-acre main��campus and��extended campus venues in major national metropolitan hubs and across three��continents. ���ϲ�����’s student body is among the most diverse for an��institution of its��kind across multiple dimensions, and students typically represent��all 50 states and more than 100 countries. ���ϲ����� also has a long legacy of��supporting veterans and is home to��the nationally recognized Institute for��Veterans and Military Families, the first university-based institute in the��U.S. focused on addressing the unique needs of veterans and their��families.

Mira Jacob (Photo by In Kim)

The 2017-18 Raymond Carver Reading Series continues Wednesday, Feb. 14, with , author of the critically acclaimed novel�� (Random House, 2014). She will participate in a Q&A session at 3:45 p.m. and do an author reading at 5:30 p.m., both in Huntington Beard Crouse Hall’s Gifford Auditorium.

Jacob is the Spring 2018 Visiting Writer for the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. “The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing” was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, was shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award and was longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize. It was also honored by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association and was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle and The Millions.

“With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart,” read the review by People magazine. The Associated Press called the book “Optimistic, unpretentious and refreshingly witty.” And Entertainment Weekly stated: “By turns hilarious and tender and always attuned to shifts of emotion . . . [Jacob’s] characters shimmer with life.”

Jacob is the��co-founder of the much-loved����in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry to the city’s sweetest stage.

Her recent writing and��short stories have appeared��in��,��,��, the��,����and��,��and her earlier work has appeared in various magazines and books, on television and across the internet.

Jacob has taught writing to students of all ages in New York, New Mexico and Barcelona, and she currently teaches fiction at NYU.

In September 2014, she was named the Emerging Novelist Honoree at Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, where she received a commendation from the U.S. Congress.

Jacob is currently��drawing and writing a graphic memoir,��“Good Talk: Conversations I’m Still Confused About,” to be published this year by Dial Press.

About ���ϲ�����

Founded��in 1870, ���ϲ����� is a private international research university��dedicated to advancing knowledge and fostering student success through teaching��excellence,��rigorous scholarship and interdisciplinary research. Comprising 11��academic schools and colleges, the University has a long legacy of excellence��in the liberal arts, sciences and��professional disciplines that prepares��students for the complex challenges and emerging opportunities of a rapidly��changing world. Students enjoy the resources of a 270-acre main��campus and��extended campus venues in major national metropolitan hubs and across three��continents. ���ϲ�����’s student body is among the most diverse for an��institution of its��kind across multiple dimensions, and students typically represent��all 50 states and more than 100 countries. ���ϲ����� also has a long legacy of��supporting veterans and is home to��the nationally recognized Institute for��Veterans and Military Families, the first university-based institute in the��U.S. focused on addressing the unique needs of veterans and their��families.

The spring series features an internationally known expert in aerial robotics, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times and a renowned evangelist for construction and operation practices of buildings that advance human health and well-being.

The first speaker is Vijay Kumar on Feb. 20, followed by Maureen Dowd on April 13 and Rick Fedrizzi on April 24. All three events are free and will take place in Hendricks Chapel. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available at each lecture.

The University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives.

Appearing this spring

Vijay Kumar
Tuesday, Feb. 20
7:30 p.m., Hendricks Chapel

Vijay Kumar

is a renowned roboticist and the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering with appointments in the departments of mechanical engineering and applied mechanics, computer and information science, and electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

His research interests are in robotics, specifically multi-robot systems, and micro aerial vehicles.

Kumar’s 2012 TED Talk, has had more than 4.3 million views; it concludes with a recorded demonstration of nine flying robots performing the James Bond theme on six different instruments. Kumar is a huge James Bond fan, and he credits the character “Q” for motivating him to pursue a career in technology.

In another TED Talk, from 2015, Kumar discusses his lab’s work creating autonomous small robots constructed with smartphones, an aerial robot with an eagle-like claw and very small aerial robots inspired by honeybees. He goes on to describe his team’s Precision Farming project, in which swarms of robots map, reconstruct and analyze every plant and piece of fruit in an orchard, providing vital information to farmers that can help improve yields and make water management smarter.

Kumar is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2003), a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (2005) and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2013).

He is recipient of the 1991 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator award; the 1996 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (University of Pennsylvania); the 1997 Freudenstein Award for significant accomplishments in mechanisms and robotics; the 2012 ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award; the 2012 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award; a 2012 World Technology Network Award; a 2013 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough award; a 2014 Engelberger Robotics Award; and the 2017 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation.

Since joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1987, Kumar has served Penn Engineering in many capacities, including deputy dean for research; deputy dean for education; chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics; and director of the GRASP Laboratory, a multidisciplinary robotics and perception laboratory.

In 2012-13, Kumar served as the assistant director of robotics and cyber physical systems at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Kumar’s visit is co-sponsored by the , with media sponsor WAER.

Maureen Dowd
Friday, April 13
7:30 p.m., Hendricks Chapel

Maureen Dowd

is recipient of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and a best-selling author.

Known for her witty, incisive and often acerbic portraits of the powerful, Dowd began her journalism career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. When The Star closed, she went to TIME magazine. She joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in 1983, went on to serve as a correspondent in the paper’s Washington bureau in 1986 and became a columnist on The Times Op-Ed page in 1995; her column appears Sundays. In 2014, she also became a writer for The Times Magazine.

Dowd has covered seven presidential campaigns, served as The Times’ White House correspondent and written “On Washington,” a column for The Times Magazine. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting in 1992 and was named one of Glamour’s Women of the Year for 1996.

In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, G.P. Putnam published her first book, which covered the presidency and personality of George W. Bush. After “Bushworld” quickly climbed the best-seller list, Dowd switched from presidential politics to sexual politics in another best seller, (Penguin, 2005).

In her most recent book, (Grand Central Publishing, 2016), Dowd “traces the psychologies and pathologies in one of the nastiest and most significant battles of the sexes ever,” the 2016 presidential campaign.

In addition to The New York Times, Dowd has written for GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Mademoiselle and Sports Illustrated, among other publications.

Dowd’s visit is co-sponsored by the Lubin Society, with media sponsor WAER.

Rick Fedrizzi
Tuesday, April 24
7:30 p.m., Hendricks Chapel

Rick Fedrizzi

G’87 joined the (IWBI) as chairman and CEO in November 2016, bringing his global environmental track record and keen business insight to IWBI’s work to advance human health through better buildings and communities.

With more than 100 million square feet registered and certified in over 30 countries, IWBI’s evidence-based is the premier system for measuring and monitoring real estate features that impact health and well-being and third-party certifying their successful achievement.

Fedrizzi is also founding chair of the (USGBC) and former CEO of both USGBC and of Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI), nonprofit organizations that promote high-performing buildings and communities. During his tenure, , or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, became the world’s most widely used green building rating system.

���ϲ����� has several buildings that have received LEED certification: ���ϲ����� Center of Excellence (Platinum), Ernie Davis Hall (Gold), Dineen Hall (Gold), Bowne Hall (Certified), the Carmelo K. Anthony Center (Certified) and the Green Data Center (Certified). The University is working toward certification for two other projects: (seeking Certified status) and the (seeking Gold status).

Fedrizzi co-founded USGBC while serving as the environmental marketing officer at UTC’s Carrier Corp., where he served for more than 25 years.��A ���ϲ����� native, he received an M.B.A. from ���ϲ����� in 1987 and was recipient of an Arents Award for Excellence in Sustainability Innovation in 2011.

He serves on numerous boards and advisory councils, including the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; View, Inc.; and Global Green.

His book (Disruption Books, 2015) won a prestigious EPPY award for Public Affairs in 2015.

Fedrizzi’s visit is co-sponsored by the , with media sponsor WAER.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu.

For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

About ���ϲ�����

Founded��in 1870, ���ϲ����� is a private international research university��dedicated to advancing knowledge and fostering student success through teaching��excellence,��rigorous scholarship and interdisciplinary research. Comprising 11��academic schools and colleges, the University has a long legacy of excellence��in the liberal arts, sciences and��professional disciplines that prepares��students for the complex challenges and emerging opportunities of a rapidly��changing world. Students enjoy the resources of a 270-acre main��campus and��extended campus venues in major national metropolitan hubs and across three��continents. ���ϲ�����’s student body is among the most diverse for an��institution of its��kind across multiple dimensions, and students typically represent��all 50 states and more than 100 countries. ���ϲ����� also has a long legacy of��supporting veterans and is home to��the nationally recognized Institute for��Veterans and Military Families, the first university-based institute in the��U.S. focused on addressing the unique needs of veterans and their��families.

The series is presented by the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing in the Department of English in the . The events are free and open to the public. Parking is available in SU pay lots.

Ada ������ó�� (photo by Jude Domski)

is the author of four books of poetry, including�� (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for��Poetry; a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award; and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by��The New York Times.

Her other books are (Autumn House Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize; (Pearl Editions, 2006), winner of the 2005 Pearl Prize; and (Milkweed Editions, 2010).

She serves on the faculty of the Queens��University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A. program and the 24Pearl Street��online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a��freelance writer, splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma,��California.

Other writers appearing this spring:

Mira Jacob
Wednesday, Feb. 14

Mira Jacob (photo by In Kim)

is the Spring 2018 Visiting Writer for the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. She is author of the critically acclaimed novel��“: A Novel” (Random House, 2014),��which was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize.

The book was also honored by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association and was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle and The Millions.

Jacob is the��co-founder of the much-loved����in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry to the city’s sweetest stage.

Her recent writing and��short stories have appeared��in��,��,��, the��, ��and��,��and her earlier work has appeared in various magazines and books, on television and across the internet.

Jacob has taught writing to students of all ages in New York, New Mexico and Barcelona, and she currently teaches fiction at NYU.

In September 2014, she was named the Emerging Novelist Honoree at Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, where she received a commendation from the U.S. Congress.

Jacob is currently��drawing and writing a graphic memoir,��“Good Talk: Conversations I’m Still Confused About,” to be published this year by Dial Press.

Tarfia Faizullah
Wednesday, Feb. 28

Tarfia Faizullah (photo by Jamaal May)

is recipient of multiple awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes and the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry.

Her debut poetry collection, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), won a VIDA Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Milton Kessler First Book Award and the Drake University Emerging Writers Award.

Faizullah’s next book of poems, will be published by Graywolf Press on March 6.

Her poems are published widely in periodicals and anthologies in the United States and abroad; have been translated into Bengali, Chinese, Persian, Spanish and Tamil; and have been featured at the Smithsonian and the Rubin Museum of Art.

She has collaborated with photographer Elizabeth Herman, emcee and producer Brooklyn Shanti and composer Jacob Cooper, and has served as an editor for Blackbird, Asian American Literary Review, Four Way Review, Orison Books, New England Review, Organic Weapon Arts and most recently, an issue of Poetry Magazine, guest-edited with Lawrence Minh-Bui Davis and Timothy Yu.

Faizullah teaches in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry.

T.J. Jarrett
Wednesday, March 21

T.J. Jarrett (photo by Dennis Wile)

is a writer and software developer in Nashville, Tennessee. She is author of (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition, and (New Issues Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2013 Balcones Prize.

She was awarded the 2017 George Garrett New Writing Award by the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Jarrett previously won VQR’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry 2014 and was a runner up for the 2012 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize and 2012 New Issues Poetry Prize. Her collection “The Moon Looks Down and Laughs” was selected as a finalist for the 2010 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry.

Her work has appeared in African American Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Callaloo, DIAGRAM, Poetry, Third Coast, VQR and West Branch.

She has earned scholarships from the Colrain Manuscript Conference and Vermont Studio Center and fellowships from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference (2014) and the Summer Literary Seminars (2012 and 2014).

Jarrett has been anthologized in “Language Lessons” by Third Man Books and “Best American Non-Required Reading 2015” from Houghton-Mifflin.

Yiyun Li
Wednesday, April 4

Yiyun Li (photo by Don Feria/Getty Images for The MacArthur Foundation Awards)

Yiyun��teaches at Princeton University. She is the 2018 Richard Elman Visiting Writer in the College of Arts and Sciences. She was selected by��Granta��as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35 and was named by��The New Yorker��as one of the top 20 writers under 40.

Yiyun grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection,�� (Random House, 2005), won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the California Book Award for first fiction.

Her novel�� (Random House, 2009) won the gold medal of the California Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award.�� (Random House, 2010), her second collection, was a finalist for the Story Prize and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.��Her latest novel, (Random House, 2014), was published to critical acclaim.

Yiyun has received numerous awards, including the Whiting Award, a Lannan Foundation Residency fellowship, a 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize.

She has served on the jury panel for the Man Booker International Prize, the National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Her books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Julie Otsuka
Wednesday, April 25

Julie Otsuka (photo by by Robert Bessoir)

is the Spring 2018 Don MacNaughton Reader in the College of Arts and Sciences. After studying art as an undergraduate at Yale University, she pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing at age 30. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

She is a recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Asian American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, France’s Prix Femina Étranger, an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the��Los Angeles Times��Book Prize and The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Her first novel,����(Knopf, 2002), is about the internment of a Japanese-American family during World War II. It has been translated into 11 languages and was a��New York Times��Notable Book, a��San Francisco Chronicle��Best Book of the Year and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers finalist, and was recently added to the National Endowment for the Arts’ “The Big Read” Library.

The book is based on Otsuka’s own family history: her grandfather was arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and her mother, uncle and grandmother spent three years in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah.

The New York Times��called the book “a resonant and beautifully nuanced achievement,” and��USA Today��described it as “A gem of a book and one of the most vivid history lessons you’ll ever learn.” It has been assigned to all incoming freshmen at more than 45 colleges and universities and is a regular “Community Reads” selection across the United States.

Her second novel,����(Knopf, 2011), is about a group of young Japanese “picture brides” who sailed to America in the early 1900s to become the wives of men they had never met and knew only by their photographs. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award, France’s Prix Femina Étranger and the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the��Los Angeles Times��Book Prize and The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

A��New York Times,��San Francisco Chronicle��and��Los Angeles Times��bestseller,��“The Buddha in the Attic”��has been translated into 22 languages. It was selected as a��New York Times��Notable Book, a��San Francisco Chronicle��and��Boston Globe��Best Book the Year, and was named a Top Ten Book by��Library Journal��and��Vogue.

Otsuka’s fiction has been published in��Granta,��Harper’s,��100 Years of The Best American Short Stories,��The Best American Short Stories 2012 and��The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and has been read aloud on PRI’s “Selected Shorts” and BBC Radio 4’s “Book at Bedtime.”

The Raymond Carver Reading Series is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, Stephen King, the Dr. Scholl Foundation, the Lynn & David Pleet ’53 Fund for Creative Writing, the Richard Elman Visiting Writer Fund, the Friends of Creative Writing, Chris Tennyson, Jerome Cohen, Jane and Daniel Present, Don McNaughton, and the Interdisciplinary Fund for the Humanities from Leonard and Elise Elman.

About ���ϲ�����

Founded��in 1870, ���ϲ����� is a private international research university��dedicated to advancing knowledge and fostering student success through teaching��excellence,��rigorous scholarship and interdisciplinary research. Comprising 11��academic schools and colleges, the University has a long legacy of excellence��in the liberal arts, sciences and��professional disciplines that prepares��students for the complex challenges and emerging opportunities of a rapidly��changing world. Students enjoy the resources of a 270-acre main��campus and��extended campus venues in major national metropolitan hubs and across three��continents. ���ϲ�����’s student body is among the most diverse for an��institution of its��kind across multiple dimensions, and students typically represent��all 50 states and more than 100 countries. ���ϲ����� also has a long legacy of��supporting veterans and is home to��the nationally recognized Institute for��Veterans and Military Families, the first university-based institute in the��U.S. focused on addressing the unique needs of veterans and their��families.

Carlos Castañeda (left), assistant professor of biology and chemistry, in his lab with (from left) graduate student Brian Martyniak, postdoc Thuy Dao and grad student Tongyin Zheng.

, assistant professor of biology and chemistry in the , is the principal investigator on a pair of research projects studying the function of cellular proteins called ubiquilins and their ability to form protein-containing droplets inside neurons. A better understanding of��these proteins may lead to new treatments for various neurological disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) disease.

The first project is supported by a five-year, $830,000 National Science Foundation CAREER grant; it has both research and educational components and is focused on the full ubiquilin protein family. The second project—funded by a three-year, $300,000 grant from the ALS Association—concentrates solely on the ALS-linked protein ubiquilin-2.

For the NSF CAREER project, Castañeda and his lab are working with Dr. Heidi Hehnly from SUNY Upstate Medical University and Susan Krueger, research physicist in the Center for Neutron Research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The ALS Association project involves Hehnly and Dr. J. Paul Taylor at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. The ALS project has been spearheaded by postdoctoral scholar Thuy Dao. Also involved in the projects are two chemistry graduate students working in Castañeda’s lab, Brian Martyniak and Yiran Yang.

“Our lab has discovered that ubiquilin-2, a protein that is part of the cell’s protein quality control machinery, is able to reversibly form liquid-like droplets under physiological conditions,” Castañeda says. “The process is called liquid-liquid phase separation, and it is a common physical phenomenon for many ALS-linked proteins.

“The reason why this is so important to study is because it underlies how membraneless organelles are formed inside cells. Examples of membraneless organelles include stress granules, which are dynamic bodies that are formed under cellular stress conditions, but that can be disassembled when the stress is removed,” Castañeda says. “We want to ultimately understand what controls stress granule assembly and disassembly. We have found that ubiquilin-2 is an important component of those stress granules.”

The NSF CAREER grant focuses on finding the molecular basis for droplet formation and also determining the structure of ubiquilin-2 droplets using experimental and computational techniques, including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), small angle scattering and microscopy.

The ALS Association project focuses on understanding the effects of ALS-linked disease mutations on ubiquilin-2 function in the test tube and in cells. “We aim to figure out what causes these protein-containing droplets to morph into aggregates characteristic of neurological disorders like ALS,” Castañeda says. “We have hypothesized that ubiquilin-2 is integral to the machinery that regulates droplet assembly/disassembly and, hence, disease-linked neural inclusions. We hope to discover the physical basis by which ubiquilin-2 self-assembles into these protein-containing droplets.

Carlos Castañeda

“Additionally, we aim to determine if ALS-linked mutations of ubiquilin-2 impact its self-assembly process,” he says. “And we will investigate how specific interactions with other ALS-linked proteins, including TDP-43—a protein whose dysregulation is found in more than 90 percent of ALS cases—alter ubiquilin-2’s ability to self-assemble into droplets.”

Castañeda believes this research will improve understanding of ALS disease mechanisms involving ubiquilin-2 and the formation of neural inclusions characteristic of ALS. “In other words, we aim to find the molecular basis of the ALS disease, and determine how dysregulation of protein quality control contributes to that,” he says. “The hope is that this will provide a potential therapeutic avenue for treatment of ALS and other neurological disorders.”

As their research progresses, Castañeda and his colleagues will be sharing their knowledge in a series of mini-workshops for high school participants in the Summer Science Institute (SSI) at ���ϲ�����. SSI is a two-week summer science immersion program open to high school students from the Solvay Union Free School District. The NSF CAREER grant is funding the mini-workshops, one per year for five years.

Castañeda and SSI coordinator Melody Sweet, assistant professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, will design the sessions, with the students involved in experimentation about three hours each day over two to three days. Two of Castañeda’s graduate students will serve as workshop leaders.

“The students will learn protein purification and analyze how manipulation of physical and chemical parameters –e.g., changes in pH and temperature—promote droplet formation of our protein,” Castañeda says.

As many as 75 to 100 Solvay students are anticipated to take part in the mini-workshops over the course of the five years.

This past spring, Issak was awarded a prestigious American Fellowship by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) to help with preparations for her dissertation, “Rhetorical (Re)constructions: Ground Zero, Park51, and Muslim identity,” which she will defend this coming April.

Brainstorming solutions to address seniors’ needs and aspirations, left to right: Janet Wilmoth, director of the Aging Studies Institute; Dalton Stevens, Ph.D. candidate in sociology; and Mindy Stewart-Coffee, COO of Integrity Home Care and Hospice.

“In the U.S., the professional caregiver shortage is worsening as the number of single seniors, living alone without local family, rises. This is going to affect individuals and the healthcare system in ways that most Gen X and younger Baby Boomers haven’t anticipated,” says , assistant professor of industrial and interaction design in the School of Design. Miller put together the event, held at the Aging Studies Institute in Lyman Hall, along with Mindy Stewart-Coffee, chief operating officer of Kansas City-based Integrity Home Care and Hospice.

“Nearly three-quarters of the U.S. population over 70 has too many assets to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford assisted care for activities of daily living,” Stewart-Coffee says. “The healthcare and insurance industries call this group the ‘70 percent in the middle.’”

Miller adds, “Mindy and I��discovered��that we hold the same assumption: solutions will have to��come from communities themselves, beyond the regulated industry.��The question is, how best to empower��people to��help themselves in sustainable ways?”

Until recently, the larger design world has stayed away from the issue of senior care because industries like the tech sector didn’t see a value to funding it. This is changing as the health and wellness care sectors embrace practices like Design Thinking and Service Design. Industry experts have framed the problems associated with aging-in-place well, but there is still a need for quality-of-life solutions, the workshop organizers state. It is in this gap that the greatest opportunities lay. If the institutional resource gap cannot be resolved, then is a community-based approach possible?

VPA Council member Johanna Chehi discusses the aging experience with M.F.A. Design graduate students.

The workshop drew 35 participants, including graduate students and faculty from the , and the School of Design. Stewart-Coffee and Wendy Goidel, principal of the Long Island-based law firm Goidel Law Group, provided an assessment of current solutions and case studies��from��the field to inform the��group’s��thinking, and the participants applied a process of problem-framing, ideation, prototyping and testing employed by design and innovation teams.

“All of the insights and ideas we generated during the workshop were collected so we can carry these forward into our own initiatives,” Miller says. “And several attendees have expressed interest in forming a social media group to keep the conversation going.

“One of the greatest outcomes was simply meeting like-minded people from across campus and the community who are actively invested in working on this issue. We’ll need to��work across disciplines with one another to create viable solutions.”

Romita Ray

Participants are , professor of earth sciences in the (A&S); , professor of practice in the Department of Transmedia in the (VPA); , associate professor in the Department of Transmedia; and moderator , associate professor of art history and chair of the Department of Art and Music Histories in A&S.

“The goal is to bring together outstanding faculty members in the SU community whose research interests overlap, albeit in very different ways,” says Ray, who created the event. “In doing so, we will accentuate how humanistic discourse, artistic practice and scientific research are interwoven with each other.”

In this instance, the overlapping interests involve acclaimed scientist Karson, who has photographed the ocean floor and co-authored the book (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Morris and Sayler, husband and wife and founders of The Canary Project, an international arts collaborative, and co-directors of VPA’s , which develops research-based art and media focused on ecology.

Jeffrey Karson

Bringing them together in a conversation will “open up new ways of dialoguing about water, landscape, time, technology, photography and climate change across the humanities and sciences,” Ray says.

“Much of what I bring to the discussion will be about access to very difficult places and how our images from them inform the sciences, including geology, volcanology, biology and chemistry across a wide range of spatial scales,” Karson says. “This has interesting connections to automated systems, autonomous vehicles and extraterrestrial investigations. Going to the bottom of the ocean, far beyond the depths possible with scuba gear, is not unlike traveling to outer space to visit another planet that is utterly different from anything we humans normally experience.

“All universities highlight interests in cross-disciplinary studies that can explore the exciting areas of inquiry between the traditionally established disciplines,” Karson says. “There are many reasons why these are very difficult to develop and probably rarely achieved, but this does not diminish the value of mixing different modes of learning and perspectives on problem solving that are represented in, for example, initiatives under the umbrella of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics).

Susannah Sayler

“So many students come to SU with highly polarized views with respect to science and the humanities, and yet both of these areas are essential parts of any liberal arts education that is part of the core mission of the University.”

“We are artists who have addressed global risks such as climate change and the mass extinction crisis that really can only be identified through the measurements and analysis of science,” say Sayler and Morris in an email exchange. “As such, we are keen to discuss the relationship between the arts and sciences as two distinct ways of knowing that are in fact, complementary (and necessary complements at that), not antithetical or in any way opposed.��We like to quote Vine Deloria Jr. on this score:��‘It is not only by becoming more rational that you become more conscious.’

Edward Morris

“An issue like climate change must be identified with the measurements of science, but that sort of knowledge is just the beginning,” they continue. “We don’t fully understand it until we truly believe it.��And that belief is much more difficult to attain.��Belief requires access to emotional understanding, empathy and insight that are the province of art. We say: art makes a space for belief and belief makes a space for change.��We want to talk about that.��We want to talk about how art’s function is not to decorate science or to communicate it a more fun way.��It is, in fact, another form of knowledge.��We are not particularly interested in beauty or aesthetics divorced for this sort of intent.��Beauty, at any rate, is culturally contingent.”

While “Water + Photography” is a standalone event, Ray is considering future possibilities for pairing more scientists, artists and humanists in a “Creative Conversations” series.

“Water + Photography” is sponsored by A&S, the ���ϲ����� Humanities Center, the Renée Crown University Honors Program, the Department of Art and Music Histories, The Canary Lab, Light Work, the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies in VPA, the Department of Earth Sciences in A&S, the Department of Geography in the Maxwell School and A&S, the Department of Multimedia Photography and Design in the Newhouse School, the Department of Science Teaching in A&S, the Department of Art Education in VPA and the Newhouse Science Communications Program.

Lepore’s lecture is free and is co-sponsored by the . American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available. Requests for accessibility and accommodations may be made to the Equal Opportunity, Inclusion and Resolution Services (EOIRS) office at 315.443.4018.

Lepore is the at Harvard University. She teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry and American history. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence and of privacy. In her writing, Lepore explores topics involving American history, law, literature and politics.

Among her many books are “The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity” (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize; “New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan” (Knopf, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history; “The Story of America: Essays on Origins” (Princeton, 2012), which was short-listed for the PEN��Literary Award for the Art of the Essay; and “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin” (Knopf, 2013), TIME’s Best Nonfiction Book of the Year and a finalist for the National Book Award.

Her most recent book is (Knopf, 2016). She is currently working on a history of the United States.

Lepore is also well known for her articles in The New Yorker. Among her most recent essays:

• : Our mortuary conventions reveal a lot about our relation to the past.”
• : The fight for the First Amendment, on campuses and football fields, from the sixties to today.”
• : That ‘Wonder Woman,’ the film, has at last been made is a relief. And it’s a relief to watch a woman fight back.”
• : What to make of our new literature of radical pessimism.”
• : How arguments about nuclear weapons shaped the debate over global warming.”

In addition to The New Yorker, Lepore’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Journal of American History, Foreign Affairs, the Yale Law Journal, American Scholar and the American Quarterly. They have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish, and have also been widely anthologized, including in collections of the best legal writing and the best technology writing.

In 2014, Lepore was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the American Philosophical Society. She is a past president of the Society of American Historians and a former commissioner of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Lepore is the fourth speaker in the 2017-18 University Lectures season, following award-winning journalist/documentarian/news anchor Soledad O’Brien on Sept. 14, NPR “Morning Edition” anchor David Greene on Oct. 3, and comedian and “The Daily Show” correspondent Hasan Minhaj on Oct. 27. The spring lineup of speakers will be announced later this fall.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

George Saunders accepts the Man Booker Prize for his first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo.”

George Saunders, professor of English in ���ϲ�����’s College of Arts and Sciences, has won the , one of the world’s most distinguished literary awards, for his first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo” (Random House/Bloomsbury, 2017).

Saunders’ win was announced by Lola Young, Baroness Young of Hornsey, at a dinner Tuesday evening at London’s Guildhall. Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall presented a trophy to Saunders. He was also presented with a £50,000 (about $66,000) check. The was broadcast live on the BBC News Channel.

Royal Mail is issuing a congratulatory postmark that will be applied to millions of items of stamped mail across Great Britain on Wednesday, Oct. 18, and Friday, Oct. 20, that will say “Congratulations to George Saunders, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize.”

First awarded in 1969, the is recognized as the leading award for high-quality literary fiction written in English. The judges considered 144 submissions for this year’s prize. Saunders was one of six authors shortlisted, along with British writers Ali Smith (“Autumn,” Pantheon) and Fiona Mozley (“Elmet,” JM Originals), fellow Americans Paul Auster (“4 3 2 1,” Henry Holt and Co.) and Emily Fridlund (“History of Wolves,” Atlantic Monthly Press), and British-Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid (“Exit West,” Riverhead Books).

“Bardo” hit bookstore shelves last February to wide critical acclaim, and it debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times Bestseller List. The first full-length work of fiction by the acclaimed short story writer, the book combines actual historical quotes with Saunders-created anecdotes to describe the overwhelming grief of President Abraham Lincoln following the death of his beloved son Willie amid the backdrop of the height of the Civil War.

“The form and style of this utterly original novel, reveals a witty, intelligent, and deeply moving narrative,” says Chair of Judges Young. “This tale of the haunting and haunted souls in the afterlife of Abraham Lincoln’s young son paradoxically creates a vivid and lively evocation of the characters that populate this other world. ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ is both rooted in, and plays with history, and explores the meaning and experience of empathy.”

The book is being adapted to film by Saunders and two good friends—actor/producers Nick Offerman and Megan Mullalley.

Offerman and Mullally were part of the 166-person voice cast for the Bardo audiobook (seven hours, 25 minutes), which also included Don Cheadle, Lena Dunham, Keegan-Michael Key, Julianne Moore, David Sedaris and Ben Stiller.

Saunders has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Magazine Awards for fiction, the Story Prize, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Folio Prize and the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.

Among his most recent activities, along with an extensive “Bardo” book tour, Saunders completed the TV screenplay adaptation of his short story “Sea Oak” for Amazon. The pilot, starring Glenn Close and directed by Hiro Murai (“Atlanta”), was shot this past summer in Yonkers and Brooklyn.

Giancarlo Esposito

Festival tickets are available and at each venue 30 minutes prior to a program. Tickets are free for ���ϲ�������and Le Moyne College students with a festival wristband or college I.D. Single tickets are $10 per event or $8 for individuals 60 years of age or older and under 13. A weekend-only film pass, valid for all film screenings Oct. 21-22, is $25. A full festival pass—valid for all films, receptions and meet-and-greet opportunities—is $100 per person or $175 for two.

Screenings and other activities take place at The Palace Theatre, 2384 James St., ���ϲ�����, and at Shemin Auditorium in the Shaffer Art Building on the SU campus.

SYRFILMFEST 2017 begins with two films Wednesday night in Shemin Auditorium starting at 6:30 p.m.: “Hope I’m In the Frame” (2017, 58 mins.), focusing on Israeli director Michal Bat-Adam and winner of the 2017 Israeli Oscar for Best Documentary (Under 60 Minutes), followed by Bat-Adam’s film “The Road to Where” (2016, 96 mins.). A Skype conversation with Bat-Adam will take place after the screenings.

Siobhan Fallon-Hogan

Other festival highlights:

• “The Show” (2017, 104 mins.) starring Josh Duhamel, Famke Janssen and Giancarlo Esposito, followed by a Q&A with Esposito, Thursday, Oct. 19, 6:30 p.m., The Palace Theatre

• “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920, 67 mins.), a silent film classic accompanied by live music performed by The Society for New Music, Friday, Oct. 20, 6:30 p.m., The Palace Theatre

• “Dabka” (2017, 116 mins.) by ���ϲ����� alumnus Bryan Buckley ’85 and starring Al Pacino, Melanie Griffith, Evan Peters and Barkhad Abdi, Friday, Oct. 20, 8:45 p.m., The Palace Theatre

• Filmmakers’ forum, a presentation by SU alumnus Jerry Stoeffhaas ’74, G’80, deputy director of the New York State Governor’s Office of Motion Picture & Television Development, followed by a roundtable discussion, Saturday, Oct. 21, 10 a.m., The Palace Theatre

• “American Veteran” (2016, 75 mins.), about U.S. Army Sgt. Nick Mendes, who at age 21 was paralyzed from the neck down by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2011, Saturday, Oct. 21, 1 p.m., Shemin Auditorium
  

  Dan Silver

• The David and Carol North Schmuckler New Filmmakers Showcase, featuring some of the best films produced by students in the Film Program in 2017 along with a new film by Le Moyne College film students, Saturday, Oct. 21, 3 p.m., Shemin Auditorium

• Dan Silver Program: a discussion by Silver interspersed with film clips from Marvel Entertainment, ESPN Films and ABC News, Saturday, Oct. 21, 4:30 p.m., The Palace Theatre

• The Doug Biklen: Imaging Disability in Film Showcase, Saturday, Oct. 21, 5 p.m., Shemin Auditorium

• New Directions in Short Form Film featuring seven short films, Saturday, Oct. 21, 7 p.m., Shemin Auditorium

• New Russian Experimental Films featuring three films, Saturday, Oct. 21, 9 p.m., Shemin Auditorium

• “Freak Talks About Sex” (1999, 90 mins.) starring Steve Zahn and Josh Hamilton, Saturday, Oct. 21, 10:45 p.m., The Palace Theatre
  

  Michal Bat-Adam

• 20 Years of Siobhan Fallon-Hogan Program in which the actress and Le Moyne College graduate will reflect on her career in film, television and theater, Sunday, Oct. 22, 2 p.m., The Palace Theatre

• “Song of the Sea” (2017, 93 mins.), a family-friendly, Academy Award-nominated animated film from Ireland, Sunday, Oct. 22, 4 p.m., The Palace Theatre

For the full schedule of films and more information, visit . A portion of the ticket proceeds from SYRFILMFEST 2017 will benefit , which delivers nutritious meals, nutrition education and resource assistance to those in the ���ϲ����� community who are unable to do so themselves.

The event is co-sponsored by the , the ��and the with the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month Planning Committee.

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available. Requests for accessibility and accommodations may be made to the Equal Opportunity, Inclusion and Resolution Services (EOIRS) office at 315.443.4018.

Minhaj is an addition to the previously announced fall University Lectures lineup, which includes journalist/documentarian/news anchor on Sept. 14; , co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” on Oct. 3; and noted historian/author on Nov. 9.

Minhaj was Jon Stewart’s last hire when he joined “The Daily Show” as a full-time correspondent in November 2014. That same year, he was invited to be a part of the Sundance Institute’s prestigious , where he developed his solo show,�� The show then debuted off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre in winter 2015 to critical acclaim. His comedy special debuted on Netflix in May 2017.

Prior to his critically acclaimed role at the 2017 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Minhaj drew rave reviews for his presentation at the in June 2016. He was the keynote speaker at the 2013 Social Good Summit in New York City, speaking alongside such notables as Al Gore, JJ Abrams and Will.I.Am, and he had the honor of being chosen as a “New Face” at the 2014 Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal.

Minhaj is host of the documentary series Financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and filmed in South Africa, India and the United States, the series highlights economic problems throughout the world through the lens of stand-up comedians.

He also recently filmed the feature films “Rough Night” alongside Scarlett Johansson, Ty Burrell and Kate McKinnon, and mystery/comedy “Most Likely to Murder” with Rachel Bloom and Adam Pally.

Her debut novel, “We Love You, Charlie Freeman”��(Algonquin Books, 2017), was named one of the��New York Times��Critics’ Top 10 Books.

Kaitlyn Greenidge

In “We Love You, Charlie Freeman,” the Freeman family—Charles, Laurel and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie—have been invited to the Toneybee Institute to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member of their family. But when Charlotte discovers the truth about the institute’s history of questionable studies, the secrets of the past invade the present in devious ways.

USA Today writes of the book: “…witty and provocative … Greenidge deftly handles a host of complex themes and characters, exploring not just how (literally) institutionalized racism is, but the difficulty of an effective response to it. … Greenidge doesn’t march to a pat answer; the power of the book is in her understanding of how clarity wriggles out of reach. For all the seriousness of its themes, though, ‘Charlie Freeman’ is also caustically funny.”

Greenidge’s writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, the Believer, Buzzfeed, Elle.com, The New York Times, The��Wall Street Journal, Transition Magazine and Virginia��Quarterly Review. She is a contributing writer for LENNY Letter.

The Raymond Carver Reading Series is presented by the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing in the Department of English in the . All events are free and open to the public. Parking is available in SU pay lots.

Bat-Adam is a longtime friend of SYRFILMFEST Artistic Director Owen. Her impressive film credentials have earned her the status of a national treasure in her home country.

Michal Bat-Adam

As an actress, Bat-Adam has appeared in many films of her husband, Moshe Mizrahi. In 1972, she was cast in the title role in Mizrahi’s film “I Love You Rosa.” The part launched her film career, and the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and shown at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. Bat-Adam also appeared in Mizrahi’s Academy Award-winning 1977 French film “Madame Rosa.” In total, she has acted in 16 films.

Bat-Adam is also the first Israeli woman to direct a feature film, and she has 11 directing credits total.

She has won both Best Acting and Best Directing awards from the Israeli Film Institute.

Her 2016 film “The Road to Where” (96 mins.) is set in Jaffa in 1948, in a house by the sea, which was abandoned by its Arab inhabitants and now becomes the home of Holocaust survivors who fled for their lives from the inferno in Europe. Out of the turmoil of their existence, under the shadow of the unresolved conflict between Jews and Arabs, rises a desperate cry for love.

SYRFILMFEST is Oct. 18-22. To view the full list of films and other festival activities, and to purchase tickets, visit .

David Greene (Photo by David Gilkey NPR)

The free event is co-sponsored by the Maxwell School, with additional support by media partner WAER.

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available. Requests for accessibility and accommodations may be made to the Equal Opportunity, Inclusion and Resolution Services (EOIRS) office at 315.443.4018.

For two years prior to taking on his current responsibilities with NPR in 2012, Greene was an NPR foreign correspondent based in Moscow, covering the region from Ukraine and the Baltics east to Siberia. During that time, he brought listeners stories as wide ranging as Chernobyl 25 years later and Beatles-singing Russian Babushkas. He spent a month in Libya reporting riveting stories in the most difficult of circumstances as NATO bombs fell on Tripoli; he was honored with the 2011 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize from WBUR and Boston University for that coverage of the Arab Spring.

Greene’s voice first became familiar to NPR listeners during his four years covering the White House during the Bush administration. To report on former President George W. Bush’s second term, Greene spent hours in NPR’s spacious booth in the basement of the West Wing (it’s about the size of an average broom closet). He also spent time trekking across five continents, reporting on White House visits to Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Rwanda, Uruguay and, of course, Crawford, Texas.

Greene was an integral part of NPR’s coverage of the historic 2008 election, covering Hillary Clinton’s campaign from start to finish and focusing on how racial attitudes were playing into voters’ decisions. The White House Correspondents Association took special note of Greene’s report on a speech by then-candidate Barack Obama, addressing the nation’s racial divide. Greene was presented with the association’s 2008 Merriman Smith award for deadline coverage of the presidency.

After President Obama took office, Greene kept one eye trained on the White House and the other eye on the road. He spent three months driving across America—with a recorder, camera and lots of caffeine—to learn how the recession was touching Americans during Obama’s first 100 days in office. The series was titled “100 Days: On the Road in Troubled Times.”

Before joining NPR in 2005, Greene spent nearly seven years as a newspaper reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He covered the White House during the Bush administration’s first term and wrote about an array of other topics for the paper: why Oklahomans love the sport of cockfighting, why two Amish men in Pennsylvania were caught trafficking methamphetamine and how one woman brought Christmas back to a small town in Maryland.

Greene is the second speaker in the 2017-18 University Lectures season. Award-winning journalist/documentarian/news anchor Soledad O’Brien spoke Sept. 14 in conjunction with the University’s Coming Back Together reunion of African American and Latino alumni. Also scheduled this semester is historian and The New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore, whose book “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” (Knopf, 2014) has received critical and public acclaim; Lepore will be speaking Thursday, Nov. 9, at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel. The spring lineup of speakers will be announced later this fall.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu. For up-to-date information on the series, visit the University Lectures and follow on .

“This comprehensive effort resulted in concrete recommendations that will enrich our learning, living and working environment,” says Chancellor Syverud. “I am grateful to the committee for its excellent work on this vital project. I also want to thank the many students, faculty and staff who shared their feedback throughout the assessment process.”

“Chancellor Syverud has been keenly interested in the committee’s work from the outset. We are grateful for his support,” says CAPC co-chair Rebecca Reed Kantrowitz, interim senior associate vice president and dean, Division of Enrollment and the Student Experience. “The climate assessment survey and all of the conversations that have occurred since its dissemination and evaluation have been invaluable in identifying issues that need to be addressed.”

The CAPC recommendations are the culmination of a research effort that began more than two years ago and included a campuswide survey by the committee and Rankin & Associates Consulting in February and March 2016. The survey was completed by nearly 6,000 students, faculty and staff.

Rankin & Associates analyzed the survey responses last summer and early fall, and then, in October 2016, consultant Susan Rankin led two public presentations on the survey findings. The full survey report and an executive summary were posted online. The campus community was invited to offer feedback on the survey findings via an online comments form and a series of small-group comment sessions.

The committee took into account information from the survey report and additional content offered during this feedback period to prepare its final recommendations. The complete text of the CAPC’s recommendations can be read at . Following are brief summaries of the recommendations and responsibility for their implementation:

Create a Shared First-Year Course for All Undergraduate Students

All first-year students will be required to complete a first-year course that introduces basic concepts of campus climate, including education about available campus resources, diversity and inclusion, sexual and relationship violence prevention, and fostering students’ sense of belonging.

Responsibility: Office of the Vice Chancellor and Provost; Office of the Senior Vice President for Enrollment and the Student Experience.

Create a Coordinated Education and Professional Development Strategy for Campus Climate-Related Issues

A comprehensive education and professional development strategy will be created to educate students, faculty and staff on climate-related issues. It will be delivered via multiple formats with specific audience needs in mind and assessed on an annual basis. Portions of this training could be mandatory (i.e., Title IX training for student leaders).

Responsibility: Office of the Vice Chancellor and Provost; Office of the Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer; Office of the Senior Vice President for Enrollment and the Student Experience in collaboration with the Student Association.

Establish an Advisory Work Group on Staff Climate Matters

An advisory work group will be formed, with broad-based representation of staff, to examine and form recommendations on staff-related issues identified in the climate assessment, including, but not limited to, staff morale, staff retention, career pathways and training opportunities, and the availability of avenues for addressing concerns.

Responsibility: Office of the Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer in partnership with major units across the University and the University Senate Committee on Services to the Faculty and Staff.

Develop Ongoing Proactive Communications Pertaining to Climate

The findings of the Climate Assessment Survey indicated a need for more proactive communications and transparency in strengthening the visibility of climate matters. An educational communications strategy will be developed to support ongoing improvements to the campus climate, including, but not limited to, periodic communications from the Chancellor and an online mechanism for better internal and external communications on campus climate matters.

Responsibility: Office of the Vice Chancellor and Provost; Office of the Senior Vice President and Chief Communications Officer; Office of the Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer.

Continue to Assess the ���ϲ����� Climate

Selected portions of the assessment survey will be repeated to monitor progress in the campus climate, particularly related to sexual and relationship violence, every other year. Other climate-related items will be reassessed in 3-4 years, when impact of the other recommendations resulting from this initial assessment have had time to take effect.��In addition, academic and non-academic leaders will be encouraged to conduct climate conversations of their own on a periodic basis.

Responsibility: CAPC co-chairs, with support from current and new committee members.

“These recommendations are the culmination of efforts by the CAPC, working groups, administrative offices and a few thousand individuals who told us about their experiences through the campus climate survey and listening sessions,” says committee member Mary Lovely, professor of economics and chair of the International Relations Program in the Maxwell School. “I am very excited to see where these efforts take us as a community. Chancellor Syverud’s acceptance of the CAPC recommendations, and the campuswide efforts they set in process, will make ���ϲ����� a better place to live, work and study for everyone.”

CAPC members who contributed to the construction of the climate survey, additional post-survey information gathering and preparation of the committee’s recommendations are:

• Libby Barlow, assistant vice president for institutional research and assessment (co-chair, principal investigator)
• Rebecca Reed Kantrowitz, interim senior associate vice president and dean, Division of Enrollment and the Student Experience (co-chair)
• Katelyn Cowen, director of the Office of Health Promotion
• Bea Gonzalez, vice president for community engagement
• Sheila Johnson-Willis, interim chief equal opportunity and Title IX officer
• Andrew S. London, professor of sociology and associate dean of finance and administration in the Maxwell School
• Mary E. Lovely, professor of economics and chair of the International Relations Program in the Maxwell School
• Kevin Morrow, executive director of public affairs strategic communications, Division of Communications and Marketing
• Daniel Moseson G’17
• Terra Peckskamp, director of the Office of Residence Life
• Jonathan Schmidt ’17
• Barry L. Wells, special assistant to the Chancellor

To learn more about the climate assessment process, visit .

Sammy Cueva

Cueva oversees the Fraud Detection Division�� of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (the largest transportation network in North America, covering 5,000 square miles in New York City, Long Island, southeastern New York state and Connecticut). He is also a highly successful entrepreneur with ownership stakes in three New York City restaurants (, and ), as well as the Soulatino marketing group and the branding and custom solutions company .

In the interview below he talks about his time at ���ϲ�����, his life and his diverse business interests.

La Casita’s “Fusion Caribe” exhibit includes photos, videos and memorabilia of artists who have propelled Latin music around the globe.

The Office of Cultural Engagement for the Hispanic Community in the College of Arts and Sciences, in partnership with various campus and local organizations, is gearing up for Hispanic Heritage Month 2017 (Sept. 15-Oct. 15) with several events.

LA CASITA CULTURAL CENTER
“Fusión Caribe: The History of Our Music” at����is an exhibition of historic photos, videos and memorabilia of the artists who propelled Latin music around the globe, along with dozens of traditional instruments used in this musical genre. The displays highlight the musical heritage of Latin music and its fusion of Spanish, African and Taíno roots. Guided tours are available in dual language (English and Spanish) by appointment (315.443.2151) Monday through Friday from noon to 6 p.m. at La Casita, 109 Otisco St., ���ϲ�����.

An opening reception will take place Friday, Sept. 15, from 6 to 8 p.m. at La Casita. The event features salsa music and dance performances, as well as classic recordings of son montuno, guaracha, guaguancó, cha cha chá, mambo, bolero, merengue, bomba and plena, and reguetón.

During the reception, the Hispanic ���ϲ����� coalition will recognize a dozen artists and scholars for their contributions to the enrichment of ���ϲ�����’s Hispanic community: Victor Antonetti and Jorge Colón (Orquesta Antonetti); Brian Bromka and Roberto Pérez (La Familia de la Salsa); Elisa and Joshua Dekaney (Samba Laranja); José Mora (Pleneros d’ Borikén); Edgar Pagán (Grupo Pagán); Sammy Avila; Edgar Paiewonsky; Henry González Rosado; and Setnor School of Music alumna Sara Silva G’07 (Symphoria).

Free transportation will be provided—courtesy of��—from campus to the reception and back via the Connective Corridor bus and the CBT Shuttle Bus, with departure from the Waverly Avenue entrance of the Schine Student Center at 5:55 p.m. and return from La Casita at 7:45 p.m.

Partnering with La Casita on the “Fusión Caribe” exhibition are ���ϲ����� Libraries’����(SCRC) and the����in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Musical instruments on display at La Casita

The project includes music from the Bell Brothers Collection of Latin American and Caribbean Recordings, a massive repository of 15,000 recordings—primarily 45-rpm discs—acquired by the University in 1963 from the Bell Music Box, a New York City record store. The collection includes examples of bolero, bomba, chachachá, charanga, danzón, guaguancó, guajira, guaracha, mambo, merecumbé, merengue, música jíbara, pachanga, plena, seis fajardeño and son montuno. This past spring, the SCRC began a major digitization project to preserve and make accessible this unique collection. To date, more than 900 discs have been digitized and 500 have been made available for streaming.

Co-curators of the show are Sydney Hutchinson, associate professor of music history and cultures in the Department of Art & Music Histories, and local artists Liamna Pestana and Daniel Yost, with assistance from faculty and staff from ���ϲ�����, Onondaga Community College and Hobart & William Smith Colleges.

Cuban-born Pestana is a string instrumentalist and singer who has been a member of performance groups in Argentina, Cuba and Mexico; she also formed and directed for 10 years the early music group Cantiga Armonica, with which she participated in national and international festivals and concerts in Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Sweden. Yost, from Argentina, is a multidisciplinary musician experienced in choral conducting and pedagogy and stringed-instrument making; he is the founder of Cultural Bridges—a space in which vocal and instrumental groups from various countries have the opportunity to communicate and interact—and he has directed choirs and opera choruses for more than 20 years.

Hutchinson has loaned 40 pieces from her private collection; many are antiques, and most are handcrafted musical instruments. Pestana and Yost also have loaned instruments from their collection, including instruments they have built, such as a Spanish guitar in the traditional style for baroque Latin American guitar music and a mayohuacán, a beautiful slit drum handcrafted in the native Taino (Indo-Caribbean) tradition. Other items have been provided by alumna Damaris Mercado ’92 and her family, including historic photos and documents from the famous RMM Records, founded by Ralph Mercado.

For more information on La Casita Cultural Center, visit��.

PUNTO DE CONTACTO-POINT OF CONTACT
The exhibition “ALEPH” by Argentine artist Pedro Roth is open through Oct. 6 at the����in the Nancy Cantor Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., ���ϲ�����. An artist talk and reception will be held Thursday, Sept. 28, from 5 to 8 p.m. at the gallery; the event is free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are Monday through Friday from noon to 5 p.m.

One of the works from the exhibition “Aleph”

Roth was born in Budapest, Hungary, and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he currently lives. He holds a degree in filmmaking from National University of La Plata in Buenos Aires; he also studied photography, specializing in portraits, and is a self-taught plastics artist. His work can be found in collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Latinoamericano, La Plata; Jewish Museum of Prague; Museo de Bellas Artes de Azul, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Museo Contemporaneo de Santa Fe; and the Jewish Museum of Buenos Aires.

The film “Icaros: A Journey Through the Peruvian Amazon,” presented in collaboration with the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF), will be shown Friday, Sept. 29, at 4 p.m. in the Gateway Center on the SUNY-ESF campus. The presentation will include a photography exhibit, plus a discussion and reception with the director of photography and co-producer of the film, Matías Roth, will follow the screening. Admission to this event is free.

“Icaros” explores the spiritual universe of the Shipibo indigenous people who live by the Ucayali River, one of the main tributaries of the Peruvian Amazon.

For more information on Point of Contact events, call 315.443.2169 or visit��.

LA CASITA CULTURAL CENTER

“Fusión Caribe: The History of Our Music” at , is an exhibition of historic photos, videos and memorabilia of the artists who propelled Latin music around the globe, along with dozens of traditional instruments used in this genre. The displays highlight the musical heritage of Latin music and its fusion of Spanish, African and Taíno roots. Guided tours are available in dual languages (English and Spanish) by appointment (315.443.2151) Monday through Friday from noon-6 p.m. at La Casita, 109 Otisco St., ���ϲ�����.

An opening reception will take place Friday, Sept. 15, from 6-8 p.m. at La Casita. The event features salsa music and dance performances, as well as classic recordings of son montuno, guaracha, guaguancó, cha cha chá, mambo, bolero, merengue, bomba and plena, and reguetón.

During the reception, the Hispanic ���ϲ����� coalition will recognize a dozen artists and scholars for their contributions to the enrichment of ���ϲ�����’s Hispanic community: Victor Antonetti and Jorge Colón (Orquesta Antonetti); Brian Bromka and Roberto Pérez (La Familia de la Salsa); Elisa and Joshua Dekaney (Samba Laranja); José Mora (Pleneros d’ Borikén); Edgar Pagán (Grupo Pagán); Sammy Avila; Edgar Paiewonsky; Henry González Rosado; and Setnor School of Music alumna Sara Silva G’07 (Symphoria).

Free transportation will be provided—courtesy of —from campus to the reception and back via the Connective Corridor bus and the CBT Shuttle Bus, with departure from the Waverly Avenue entrance of the Schine Student Center at 5:55 p.m. and return from La Casita at 7:45 p.m.

Partnering with La Casita on the “Fusión Caribe” exhibition are ���ϲ����� Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) and the Department of Art & Music Histories in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Classic vinyl covers from the Bell Brothers Collection.

The project includes music from the Bell Brothers Collection of Latin American and Caribbean Recordings, a massive repository of 15,000 recordings—primarily 45-rpm discs—acquired by the University in 1963 from the Bell Music Box, a New York City record store. The collection includes examples of bolero, bomba, chachachá, charanga, danzón, guaguancó, guajira, guaracha, mambo, merecumbé, merengue, música jíbara, pachanga, plena, seis fajardeño and son montuno. This past spring, the SCRC began a major digitization project to preserve and make accessible this unique collection. To date, more than 900 discs have been digitized and 500 have been made available for streaming.

Co-curators of the show are Sydney Hutchinson, associate professor of music history and cultures in the Department of Art & Music Histories, and local artists Liamna Pestana and Daniel Yost, with assistance from faculty and staff from ���ϲ�����, Onondaga Community College and Hobart & William Smith Colleges.

Cuban-born Pestana is a string instrumentalist and singer who has been a member of performance groups in Argentina, Cuba and Mexico; she also formed and directed for 10 years the early music group Cantiga Armonica, with which she participated in national and international festivals and concerts in Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Sweden. Yost, from Argentina, is a multidisciplinary musician experienced in choral conducting and pedagogy and stringed-instrument making; he is the founder of Cultural Bridges—a space in which vocal and instrumental groups from various countries have the opportunity to communicate and interact—and he has directed choirs and opera choruses for more than 20 years.

Daniel Yost and Liamna Pestana

Hutchinson has loaned 40 pieces from her private collection; many are antiques, and most are handcrafted musical instruments. Pestana and Yost also have loaned instruments from their collection, including instruments they have built, such as a Spanish guitar in the traditional style for baroque Latin American guitar music and a mayohuacán, a beautiful slit drum handcrafted in the native Taino (Indo-Caribbean) tradition. Other items have been provided by alumna Damaris Mercado ’92 and her family, including historic photos and documents from the famous RMM Records, founded by Ralph Mercado.

PUNTO DE CONTACTO-POINT OF CONTACT

Artwork from “ALEPH”

The exhibition “Aleph” by Argentine artist Pedro Roth is open through Oct. 6 at the Gallery in the Nancy Cantor Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., ���ϲ�����. An artist talk and reception will be held Thursday, Sept. 28, from 5-8 p.m. at the gallery; the event is free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are Monday through Friday from noon-5 p.m.

Roth was born in Budapest and raised in Buenos Aires, where he currently lives. He holds a degree in filmmaking from National University of La Plata in Buenos Aires; he also studied photography, specializing in portraits, and is a self-taught plastics artist. His work can be found in collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Latinoamericano, La Plata; Jewish Museum of Prague; Museo de Bellas Artes de Azul, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Museo Contemporaneo de Santa Fe; and the Jewish Museum of Buenos Aires.

The film “Icaros: A Journey Through the Peruvian Amazon,” presented in collaboration with the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF), will be shown Friday, Sept. 29, at 4 p.m. in the Gateway Center on the SUNY-ESF campus. The presentation will include a photography exhibit, plus a discussion and reception with the director of photography and co-producer of the film, Matías Roth, will follow the screening. Admission to this event is free.

“Icaros” explores the spiritual universe of the Shipibo indigenous people who live by the Ucayali River, one of the main tributaries of the Peruvian Amazon.

For more information on Point of Contact events, call 315.443.2169 or visit .

The series is presented by the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing in the Department of English in the . The events are free and open to the public. Parking is available in SU pay lots.

Solmaz Sharif

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from UC-Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her debut collection, “LOOK” (Graywolf Press, 2016), was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award and 2017 PEN Open Book Award.

In��“LOOK,” she recounts some of her family’s experience with exile and immigration in the aftermath of warfare—including living under surveillance and in detention in the United States—while also pointing to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout, she draws on the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, the language used by the American military to define and code its objectives, policies and actions. The Publishers Weekly Starred Review said of “LOOK”: “Sharif defies power, silence and categorization in this stunning suite of poems and lyric sequences. … In form, content, and execution,��‘LOOK’��is arguably the most noteworthy book of poetry yet about recent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the greater Middle East.”

Sharif has published poetry and essays in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Poetry, Volta and Witness.

Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, the 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.

Other writers appearing this fall:

Noy Holland
Wednesday, Sept. 27

Noy Holland

Holland’s books include “I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories” (Counterpoint, 2017),��“Bird”��(Counterpoint, 2016),��“Swim for the Little One First”��(Fiction Collective Two, 2012), “What Begins with Bird”��(Fiction Collective Two, 2005) and “Spectacle of the Body”��( 1994).

She has published work in��Antioch, The Believer, Conjunctions, Glimmer Train, The Kenyon Review, New York Tyrant,��NOON, The Quarterly and Western Humanities Review, among others.

Holland was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

She has taught for many years in the M.F.A. Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as at Phillips Andover and the University of Florida.��She serves on the board of directors at Fiction Collective Two.

Kaitlyn Greenidge
Wednesday, Oct. 11

Kaitlyn Greenidge

Greenidge’s debut novel, “We Love You, Charlie Freeman”��(Algonquin Books, 2017), was named one of the��New York Times��Critics’ Top 10 Books.

In “We Love You, Charlie Freeman,” the Freeman family—Charles, Laurel and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie—have been invited to the Toneybee Institute to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member of their family. But when Charlotte discovers the truth about the institute’s history of questionable studies, the secrets of the past invade the present in devious ways.

USA Today writes of the book: “…witty and provocative … Greenidge deftly handles a host of complex themes and characters, exploring not just how (literally) institutionalized racism is, but the difficulty of an effective response to it. … Greenidge doesn’t march to a pat answer; the power of the book is in her understanding of how clarity wriggles out of reach. For all the seriousness of its themes, though, ‘Charlie Freeman’ is also caustically funny.”

Greenidge’s writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, the Believer, Buzzfeed, Elle.com, The New York Times, The��Wall Street Journal, Transition Magazine and Virginia��Quarterly Review. She is a contributing writer for LENNY Letter.

She is the Fall 2017 Visiting Writer for the ��M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing.

Carl Phillips
Wednesday, Oct. 25

Carl Phillips

Phillips is the Leonard and Elise Elman Visiting Writer in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a professor of English and of African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the creative writing program.

Phillips is the author of numerous books of poetry, including��“Reconnaissance”��(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015),��“Silverchest”��(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013),��“Double Shadow”��(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012),��“Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006”��(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and��“Riding Westward”��(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). His collection��“The Rest of Love”��(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

His other books include��“Rock Harbor”��(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002);��“The Tether”��(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award;��“Pastoral”��(Graywolf Press, 2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award;��“From the Devotions”��(Graywolf Press, 1998), finalist for the National Book Award;��“Cortége” (Graywolf Press, 1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and��“In the Blood” (Northeastern University Press, 1992), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

Phillips’ work has been anthologized in��“The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry” (Vintage Books, 2003), edited by��;��“Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology”��(St. Martin’s Press, 2002), edited by Helen Vendler;��“”��(St. Martin’s Press, 1988);��“”��(Houghton Mifflin, 2001); and��“”��(Vintage Books, 2000). His poems have also been chosen eight times for the annual��Best American Poetry��series.

Phillips is also the author of a book of prose,��“Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry” (Graywolf Press, 2004), and the translator of Sophocles’ “Philoctetes”��(Oxford University Press, 2003).

His honors include the 2006��, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.

Phillips served as a ��of the Academy of American Poets (2006-12).

Reginald Dwayne Betts
Wednesday, Nov. 8

Reginald Dwayne Betts

A poet and memoirist, Betts is the author of three books: “Bastards of the Reagan Era” (Four Way Books, 2015), winner of the PEN New England prize for poetry; the poetry collection��“Shahid Reads His Own Palm” (Alice James Books, 2010); and the 2010 NAACP Image Award-winning memoir��“A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison” (Avery, 2009).

The New York Times writes of Betts: “Fierce, lyrical and unsparing, the poems in ‘Bastards of the Reagan Era.’ This is a haunting and harrowing book that addresses, through the power of poetry, the trials of coming of age during an era in which unarmed black men and boys are dying at the hands of police officers, and millions are incarcerated by a justice system that turns people into statistics and warps their lives and hopes.”

Publishers Weekly says of “Bastards of the Reagan Era”: “Poet and memoirist Betts presents elegy after elegy in a devastatingly beautiful collection that calls out to young black men lost to the pitfalls of urban America. In ‘Elegy with a City in It,’ he flips the same handful of words and their homonyms over and over to meticulously depict the violence—systematic and individual—experienced by black people in Washington, D.C., during the 1980s. These poems are aimed at readers willing to be moved and to be schooled, who appreciate poetry’s ability to cull beauty and hope from despair and desolation.”

Betts is enrolled in the Ph.D. in Law Program at the Yale Law School. He received a B.A. from the University of Maryland, an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College’s M.F.A. Program for Writers and a juris doctor degree from the Yale Law School.

Angela Flournoy
Wednesday, Dec. 6

Angela Flournoy

Angela Flournoy is the Jane and Daniel Present Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of “The Turner House” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award and a��New York Times��notable book of the year. The novel was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize,��the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and an NAACP Image Award.

“Flournoy’s spare, headstrong style enables her to lay bare, without pretensions, a story about the black American diaspora in which slavery, segregation and gentrification are all joined in a single narrative,” writes The Nation in its review of “The Turner House.”

Says Entertainment Weekly: “Flournoy’s richly wrought prose and intimate, vivid dialogue make this novel feel like settling deeply into the family armchair.”

Flournoy was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree for 2015.��Her fiction has appeared in the��Paris Review, and she has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic and The New York Times.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California. She has taught at the University of Iowa, The New School and Columbia University.

Flournoy is currently the Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the New York Public Library Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

The Raymond Carver Reading Series is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, the ���ϲ����� Library Associates, Stephen King, the Dr. Scholl Foundation, the Lynn & David Pleet ’53 Fund for Creative Writing, the Richard Elman Visiting Writer Fund, the Friends of Creative Writing, Chris Tennyson, Jerome Cohen, the Jane and Daniel Present Fund, Don McNaughton and the Interdisciplinary Fund for the Humanities from Leonard and Elise Elman.

Nancy Weatherly Sharp with the charter mace at the 2017 New Student Convocation

Thursday’s New Student Convocation marked the start of an exciting adventure for thousands of ���ϲ����� newcomers and the end of one University community member’s valuable service in a time-honored role.

The event was the last for Nancy Weatherly Sharp, professor emerita of newspaper journalism in the , in her capacity as ���ϲ�����’s mace bearer. Since 2004, Sharp has carried the charter mace at the head of the academic procession at major University ceremonies—most notably the New Student Convocation in August, the Winter Convocation in January and Commencement in May.

Sharp was the first woman to serve as mace bearer, elected during the administration of Chancellor Kenneth A. Shaw. The tradition of the charter mace began in June 1949, with University Registrar Keith Kennedy leading graduates into Archbold Stadium for Commencement. Through the years, mace bearers have been professors, deans, administrators and one chairman of the Board of Trustees.

“The role of the mace bearer really speaks to the significance we place on those ceremonial milestones that historically define the seasons of the academic year,” says Vice Chancellor and Provost Michele Wheatly. “Nancy has embraced the role with dignity and grace, and she has set a high standard for her successor. I thank her for her loyal service and for her continued devotion to the University.”

“Nancy is a joy to work with. Her long and distinguished faculty career gives her the needed perspective to see beyond the pomp and circumstance to the core mission of SU: continuous and unbroken scholarship in service to society,” says University marshal Shiu-Kai Chin, Meredith Professor and professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the . “As mace bearer, she carries the symbol that represents the power and importance of our mission as a university,” Chin says. “As a person, she is an example to all of us who are privileged to do our part in fulfilling our enduring mission as an educational institution over multiple generations of students, staff and faculty.”

Chancellor Kent Syverud and Vice Chancellor Wheatly are developing a protocol for nominating a new mace bearer, which they will share with the University community in October.

A mace was originally a weapon of war. It has also been used by royalty as an insignia of authority and has long been an important element of ceremony. ���ϲ�����’s original charter mace was carved of wood. It was replaced in 1959 by the one currently in use, which is made of sterling silver and precious stones—a gift to the University by mace bearer Gordon Hoople. The original mace is preserved in the University Archives. When not in use, the current mace is housed with the Department of Public Safety.

Sharp concluded her long and accomplished career as a faculty member and academic administrator following the 2009-10 academic year. She came to the Newhouse School in 1976 after more than a decade as a newspaper reporter. Initially an adjunct instructor, she became a full-time assistant professor in 1980 and was promoted to full professor in 1993.

She was the Newhouse School’s first assistant dean for graduate and professional studies, from 1991-2001. Also during her Newhouse career, she managed the Leaders in Communications Lecture Series and founded the Newhouse Fellows Program, which annually awards two minority journalism graduate students full scholarships, internships and one-year full-time jobs in the media.

Among her scholarly pursuits, Sharp was the editor of “Communications Research: The Challenge of the Information Age” (���ϲ����� Press, 1988), as well as the editor (with her husband, James Roger Sharp, professor emeritus of history in the ) of a four-volume series by Greenwood Press: “American Legislative Leaders in the Northeast, 1911-1994” (2000), “American Legislative Leaders in the South, 1911-1994 (1999), “American Legislative Leaders in the West, 1911-1994” (1997) and “American Legislative Leaders in the Midwest, 1911-1994” (1997).

The University Lectures series will host three prominent speakers this fall: an award-winning journalist, documentarian and network news anchor; the co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition;” and a celebrated historian and author of “The Secret History of Wonder Woman.”

The 17^th season of ���ϲ�����’s premier speaker series begins Sept. 14 with Soledad O’Brien and continues Oct. 3 with David Greene, followed Nov. 9 by Jill Lepore.

Tickets for O’Brien’s lecture in the Schine Student Center’s Goldstein Auditorium are beginning Monday, Aug. 28, and are $5 for SU-SUNY-ESF students with I.D., $10 for the public and free to Coming Back Together registrants. Greene’s and Lepore’s lectures will be in Hendricks Chapel and are free.

The spring lineup of speakers is still being finalized and will be announced in late fall.

The University Lectures was created through, and is supported by, the generosity of alumnus Robert B. Menschel ’51. The cross-disciplinary series brings to ���ϲ����� notable guest speakers of exceptional accomplishment who share their diverse global experiences and perspectives. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are available at each lecture.

Appearing this fall

Soledad O’Brien
Thursday, Sept. 14
6:30 p.m., Goldstein Auditorium, Schine Student Center
as part of

O’Brien has established herself as one of the most recognized names in broadcasting by telling the stories behind the most important issues, people and events of the day. In 2013, O’Brien launched (SMG), a multi-platform media production and distribution company dedicated to uncovering and producing empowering stories that take a challenging look at the often divisive issues of race, class, wealth, poverty and opportunity through personal narratives.

O’Brien was the originator of the highly successful CNN documentary series “Black in America” and “Latino in America.” Through SMG, O’Brien produces additional programming for CNN as well as for Al Jazeera America in the form of documentaries and feature stories. She also is a correspondent for HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” and hosts specials for the National Geographic Channel.

Earlier in her career, O’Brien co-anchored “Weekend Today”��on NBC and contributed segments to the “Today” show and “NBC Nightly News.” In 2003, she joined CNN, where she anchored the morning news program. O’Brien’s coverage of race issues has won her two Emmy Awards, and she earned a third for her reporting on the 2012 presidential election. Her coverage of Hurricane Katrina for CNN earned her and the network a George Foster Peabody Award. She also won a Peabody for her coverage of the BP Gulf Coast oil spill, and her reporting on the Southeast Asia tsunami helped CNN win an Alfred I. DuPont Award.

O’Brien was named journalist of the year in 2010 by the National Association of Black Journalists and was one of Newsweek’s “10 People who Make America Great”��in 2006. In 2013, Harvard University, her alma mater, named O’Brien a Distinguished Fellow. That same year, she was also appointed to the board of directors of the Foundation for the National Archives.

O’Brien’s visit is sponsored in cooperation with ���ϲ�����’s Office of Program Development.

David Greene
Tuesday, Oct. 3
7:30 p.m., Hendricks Chapel

Greene is host of NPR’s “Morning Edition”—as well as NPR’s morning news podcast, “Up First”—with Steve Inskeep and Rachel Martin. For two years prior to taking on his current role in 2012, Greene was an NPR foreign correspondent based in Moscow, covering the region from Ukraine and the Baltics east to Siberia. During that time, he brought listeners stories as wide ranging as Chernobyl 25 years later and Beatles-singing Russian babushkas. He spent a month in Libya reporting riveting stories in the most difficult of circumstances as NATO bombs fell on Tripoli; he was honored with the 2011 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize from WBUR and Boston University for that coverage of the Arab Spring.

Greene’s voice became familiar to NPR listeners from his four years covering the White House. To report on former President George W. Bush’s second term, Greene spent hours in NPR’s spacious booth in the basement of the West Wing (it’s about the size of an average broom closet). He also spent time trekking across five continents, reporting on White House visits to Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Rwanda, Uruguay and Crawford, Texas.

Greene was an integral part of NPR’s coverage of the 2008 election, covering Hillary Clinton’s campaign from start to finish and focusing on how racial attitudes were playing into voters’ decisions. The White House Correspondents Association took special note of Greene’s report on a speech by then-candidate Barack Obama, addressing the nation’s racial divide. Greene was presented with the association’s 2008 Merriman Smith award for deadline coverage of the presidency.

After President Obama took office, Greene kept one eye trained on the White House and the other eye on the road. He spent three months driving across America to learn how the recession was touching Americans during Obama’s first 100 days in office. The series was titled “100 Days: On the Road in Troubled Times.”

Before joining NPR in 2005, Greene spent nearly seven years as a newspaper reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He covered the White House during the Bush administration’s first term and wrote about an array of other topics for the paper: why Oklahomans love the sport of cockfighting, why two Amish men in Pennsylvania were caught trafficking methamphetamine and how one woman brought Christmas back to a small town in Maryland.

Greene’s visit is sponsored in cooperation with the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Jill Lepore
Thursday, Nov. 9
7:30 p.m., Hendricks Chapel

Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at the New Yorker. Among her publications is the New York Times Best Seller “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” (Knopf, 2014), winner of the 2015 American History Book Prize. Her most recent book is “Joe Gould’s Teeth” (Knopf, 2016). She is currently writing a history of the United States.

Lepore has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2005, writing about American history, law, literature and politics. Three of her books derive from her New Yorker essays: “The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death” (Knopf, 2012), a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction; “The Story of America: Essays on Origins” (Princeton, 2012), shortlisted for the PEN Literary Award for the Art of the Essay; and “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle for American History” (Princeton, 2010), a Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

��Her earlier work includes a trilogy of books that together constitute a political history of early America: “The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity” (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and the Berkshire Prize; “New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan” (Knopf, 2005), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best nonfiction book on race and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin” (Knopf, 2013), TIME’s Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

In addition to The New Yorker, Lepore’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Journal of American History, Foreign Affairs, the Yale Law Journal, American Scholar and the American Quarterly. They have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish, and have also been widely anthologized, including in collections of the best legal writing and the best technology writing.

Lepore joined Harvard’s history department in 2003 and was chair of the history and literature program in 2005-10, 2012 and 2014. In 2012, she was named Harvard College Professor, a recognition of distinction in undergraduate teaching. Since 2015, she has been an affiliated faculty member at the Harvard Law School. Much of Lepore’s scholarship explores absences and asymmetries of evidence in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence and of privacy. A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, the humanities and American political history.

In 2014, Lepore was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the American Philosophical Society. She is a past president of the Society of American Historians and a former commissioner of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

��Lepore’s visit is sponsored in cooperation with the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

The University Lectures welcomes suggestions for future speakers. To recommend a speaker, or to obtain additional information about the series, write to��lectures@syr.edu.

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