News

WORCESTER, Mass. – Victoria Rodrigue, a senior at the College of the Holy Cross, has received a Fulbright grant to work and study in Austria.

A music major with a German minor from Bolton, Conn., Rodrigue will research and study musicology at the University of Vienna as well as teach part time at a local high school.

Rodrigue has also been accepted to the Ph.D. program in musicology at the University of Michigan, which she will attend in the fall of 2008. Last year, Rodrigue spent the summer in Germany studying the country’s language and music culture after receiving a scholarship from the DAAD, the German Government’s Academic Exchange Service.

At Holy Cross, Rodrigue is a principal flutist in the Holy Cross Chamber Orchestra and helped found the executive board for the Orchestra in 2004. She is on the Student Advisory Committee for the music department, and a member of Alpha Sigma Nu, German Club, and Purple Key Society. She is also a student worker in the music department office. She has been a Dana Scholar for the last three academic years, an honor given to students of outstanding academic ability, strong character and leadership.

Each year about 1,000 college students are awarded grants through the Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship program in international educational exchange. Fulbright grants are made to U.S. citizens and nationals of other countries for a variety of educational activities, primarily university lecturing, advanced research, graduate study and teaching in elementary and secondary schools. Since the program’s inception in 1946, more than 250,000 participants — chosen for their leadership potential — have had the opportunity to observe each other’s political, economic and cultural institutions.

Mark Mathabane

Activist and best-selling author of “Kaffir Boy,” an autobiographical account of life under apartheid, Mark Mathabane will give a talk on Thursday, April14 at 7 p.m. in Seelos Theater at the College of the Holy Cross. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Born in a ghetto of Johannesburg, Mathabane spent the first 18 years of his life living in devastating poverty under apartheid.  His love of books and his dream of becoming a famous tennis player led him to excel in the classroom and on the tennis court, and eventually he earned a scholarship to attend Dowling College in Oakdale, New York.  Mathabane left South Africa in 1978 and graduated cum laude with a degree in economics in 1983.

Since then he has written several books, including “Kaffir Boy,” which was a New York Times Best-Seller and a recipient of the prestigious Christopher Award; “Love in Black and White,” a non-fiction book about interracial relationships and race relations in America; and most recently, “Miriam’s Song,” the true story of his sister Miriam’s coming of age during the violence that preceded the end of apartheid and Nelson Mandela’s election.

His provocative articles have been published in the New York Times, Newsday, U.S. News & World Report, and USA Today.  He has been featured in Time, Newsweek, and People and has appeared on the “Oprah Winfrey Show”, “Today,” CNN, NPR, and numerous other television and radio broadcasts. 

A celebrated lecturer, Mathabane was nominated for Speaker of the Year by the National Association for Campus Activities.  His lecture at Holy Cross is co-sponsored by the Teacher Education Program, the Student Government Association, the Campus Activities Board, Africana Studies, and Multicultural Education.

The Time of Your Life

The department of theatre at the College of the Holy Cross presents William Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life” April 7 – 9 and 14 – 16 at 8 p.m. in Fenwick Theatre (located on the second floor of O’Kane Hall). Tickets are $7 for members of the Holy Cross community and $10 for the general public. Group rates are available. For additional information contact the box office at 508-793-2496. 

William Saroyan wrote this gentle masterpiece in 1939.  It’s a one-of-a-kind comedy-drama set in a bar on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.  Regulars pass the time at Nick’s Saloon and strangers wander in, seeking refuge from lives wracked by the perils and deprivations of the Great Depression.  Through Nick’s kindness and the efforts of a mysterious wealthy patron named Joe, they find a magical arena in which they can be whoever they please—at least until the outside world intrudes.  Professor Steve Vineberg directs this rarely produced play with costumes designed by Kurt Hultgren and set and lights designed by Professor Barbara Craig.

The College of the Holy Cross will screen the 2010 documentary “Waiting for Superman,” a groundbreaking and controversial critique of American public education, on Wednesday, April 13 at 3 p.m. in Seelos Theater.  The film will be followed by a panel discussion on education reform and the state of American schools.  Both events are free and open to the public.  Seating is limited. 

Directed by Davis Guggenheim, the Academy Award-winning director of “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Waiting for Superman,” sheds light on a dysfunctional and failing public education system and its consequences for our nation’s children.  Called “a call to arms,” by the New York Times, the film weaves the stories of five children who are trying to gain admittance to charter or boarding schools because their parents and guardians are dissatisfied with the public system.  The film has sparked wide-spread debate about the state of public schools in the U.S.

The panel discussion following the screening will be moderated by Chris Anderson, president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council.  Panelists include: David Roach, visiting lecturer in the education department at Holy Cross; Ricardo Dobles, assistant professor of education at Holy Cross; Will Austin, co-director of the Roxbury Preparatory Charter School, and Susan Szachowicz , principal of Brockton High School.

The screening and panel are sponsored by the Department of Education at Holy Cross and the Worcester Regional Research Bureau.  For additional information call 508-793-3556.

Holy Cross Cares Day

More than 250 students, faculty, and staff from the College of the Holy Cross will participate in the 14th annual Holy Cross Cares Day on Saturday, March 26.  Volunteers will perform service-oriented activities, including painting, raking and picking up trash at schools, churches, and parks throughout the City of Worcester.  Holy Cross Cares Day is a completely student-organized event.

U.S. Representative Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Mayor Joseph O’Brien, will join City Manager Michael V. O’Brien and Holy Cross President Rev. Michael McFarland, S.J., (both of whom will also participate as volunteers) in addressing College volunteers at a kick-off breakfast at 9:15 a.m. in the Hart Recreation Center.

As part of Holy Cross Cares Day, a group of students will join Manager O’Brien, City Councilor Barbara Haller, Fr. McFarland and residents of South Worcester for a neighborhood clean-up as part of the City Manager’s “Clean Team” program from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m.  The volunteers will be based at the South Worcester Neighborhood Improvement Center, and will take shuttles to designated areas in South Worcester.

In addition, more than 250 Holy Cross alumni will participate in Holy Cross Cares Day through volunteer efforts in their local communities.  Alumni volunteer cities include Worcester, Boston, Hartford, Conn., New York City, Syracuse, N.Y., Chicago, and Naples, Fla.  This is the first year that Holy Cross Cares Day has been organized on a national scale.

Holy Cross students and alumni will be divided between the following Worcester sites from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.:

• Nativity School of Worcester (67 Lincoln Street)
• Cookson Park (entrance near Kendig Street, off College Street)
• St. Stephen School (355 Grafton Street)
• Sullivan Middle School (140 Apricot Street)
• South Worcester Neighborhood Improvement Center (47 Camp Street); until 12 p.m.
• Pernet Family Health Service (237 Millbury Street)
• Habitat for Humanity-MetroWest/Greater Worcester ReStore (11 Distributor Road)
• Rape Crisis Center of Central Mass. (588 Main Street)
• Elm Park (Park Avenue/Highland Street)

Hungarian concert organist Bálint Karosi will perform on Sunday, April 3, at 3 p.m. in St. Joseph Memorial Chapel at the College of the Holy Cross as part of the Holy Cross Chapel Artists’ Series. The concert, which is handicap accessible, is free and open to the public.

Karosi’s performance will feature a variety of notable pieces, including works from Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Bohm, Johann Kaspar Kerll and Dieterich Buxtehude. He will also perform three improvised versets. 

A versatile musician, Karosi is also an accomplished composer, harpsichordist, clarinetist and improviser who has made a specialty of historic performance practice. His impressive resume of triumphs at prestigious international performance competitions includes first prize at the 16th International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig, Germany, first prize and audience prize at the Dublin International Organ Competition, first prize at the Arthur Poister Organ Competition, and first prize and audience prize at the Miami International Organ Competition. He was also a winner of the Prague Spring International Clarinet Competition in 2002.   

Karosi was commissioned to write a work for the new organ at the National Concert Hall in Budapest, Hungary, where he premiered this work, “Consonances,” a concerto for organ and symphony orchestra, as soloist in 2007. His performance was broadcast on American Public Media’s “Pipedreams” program. 

Karosi studied at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, the Conservatoire Superieure de Genève (Switzerland) with Lionel Rogg, and the Oberlin (Ohio) Conservatory of Music with James David Christie—the distinguished artist-in-residence at Holy Cross—earning two master’s degrees, two Prix de Virtuosité as well as both an Artist Diploma and a Master of Music degree in historical keyboard performance. In 2009, he received the Prima Primissima Junior Prize for music, which honors the most distinguished performers of his native Hungary.     

Karosi resides in Boston, where he is organist and director of music at the First Lutheran Church. He is also an active performer in chamber music circles and plays historical clarinet for Boston Baroque.
 
The 2010-11 season of the Chapel Artists’ Series will conclude with Jesuit Heritage Concert of Baroque Music on Sunday, May 1, at 3 p.m.

For more information about any of the performances in the Chapel Artists’ Series, please call the music department at (508) 793-2296, or visit the website at: academics.holycross.edu/music 

Roald Hoffmann

Chemist Roald Hoffmann will give a lecture, titled “Chemistry’s Essential Tensions: Three Views of a Science,” on Wednesday, April 6, at 8 p.m. in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom at the College of the Holy Cross. The talk will follow “Hogwarts High,” an event that will feature hands-on science demonstrations and experiments in biology, physics and chemistry. Hogwarts High, which is designed especially for high school students, is at 7 p.m. in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom. Both events are free, open to the public, and appropriate for a general audience high school-age and up.

Hoffmann, the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus at Cornell University, studied chemistry at Columbia University and Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1962. He is the recipient of many professional honors, most notably the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).

A self-described applied theoretical chemist, Hoffmann tries to understand the bonds that hold molecules together. His work examines the preferred three-dimensional shape of molecules and the energies by which these molecules resist change from this optimum arrangement. In his talk, he will discuss chemistry as an art, craft and business as well as its harms and benefits in a manner accessible to high school students.

An accomplished writer, poet and playwright, Hoffmann attempts to bridge the distance between the arts and science. He is known to many for his role as host of the television series on introductory chemistry “The World of Chemistry” and the more recent New York City cabaret series “Entertaining Science.”

Funding for this Jean Dreyfus Boissevain Lectureship in the Chemical Sciences for Undergraduate Institutions was provided by a grant from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc.

Now in its 13th year, the Hogwarts event relates science to magic and the character Harry Potter, making it easier for young people to understand and enjoy science. It is modeled after the “potions” classes offered at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter series. The event is orchestrated by the Holy Cross Science Ambassadors, a group of more than 60 Holy Cross students who work with Worcester-area children to develop an interest in the sciences. They put on science shows for children of all ages throughout the year, both at community schools and at Holy Cross. Hogwarts is the largest and most popular of the events.  A second Hogwarts event, aimed at a K-8 audience, will take place at 6 p.m. on May 1 in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom.

Malena Watrous

Award-winning author Malena Watrous will read from her work as part of the Visiting Writers Series at the College of the Holy Cross on Thursday, March 31 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library. The event, sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program, is free and open to the public.  

Watrous is a fiction writer whose stories and essays have appeared inThe Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, GlimmerTrain, The Massachusetts Review, Salon.com, StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Her first novel, If You Follow Me—a fish-out-of-water romance story—was published by Harper Perennial last year.  It is set in Shika-Machi, Japan, the nuclear power plant town where Watrous herself spent two years teaching English after graduating from college. Critics have described it as “fearlessly honest, occasionally heartbreaking, and extremely funny.”

If You Follow Mereceived both the Michener-Copernicus Award and a GlimmerTrain fiction award, and was a runner-up in the annual Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner contest.  Watrous’s writing has also been recognized with a Truman Capote Fellowship at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her M.F.A. in writing, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, where she currently teaches. 

Watrous lives in her home city of San Francisco with her husband, son, and two cats. She is currently working on a new novel.

The 2011 Visiting Writers Series will also include the following readings and performances:

• Thursday, April 7– Sydney Lea; poet, novelist, nonfiction writer, and founder of the New England Review
• Thursday, May 5– Robert Cording; poet and professor of English and creative writing at Holy Cross

Andrew Krivak

Novelist and memoirist Andrew Krivak will give a talk about the vocation of the writer on Wednesday, March 16 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross.  The event, which is cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Center for Religion, Ethics, and Culture, is free and open to the public.

Andrew Krivak is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction whose work has appeared in The New York Times, DoubleTake, Commonweal, and elsewhere.  A graduate of St. John’s College, Annapolis, and the Writing Program at Columbia University, he also holds a Ph.D. in Modern Literature from Rutgers University.

His 2008 memoir, The Long Retreat, tells the story of his journey through eight years of contemporary religious life as a Jesuit, a journey that ended when he left the order.  Pondering the search for God as well as the search for self, Krivak discovers the deep connections between the solitude of the spiritual life and the solitude of the writer’s life.  Patricia Hampl, author of Virgin Time, remarks: “Andrew Krivak conveys his own ardent search while also capturing the fragmented spirit of our times, making his ‘long retreat’ the occasion for a wise, tough and sometimes refreshingly comic meditation on faith. I read it like a detective story, unable to put it down–and then unable (and unwilling) to stop thinking about its lingering questions.”

Krivak’s first novel, The Sojourn, which recounts one soldier’s experiences during World War One, will be published by Bellevue Literary Press this spring.

Alex Zequeira

The Nativity School of Worcester has announced the hiring of its next president Alex Zequeira, an experienced educator, administrator and coach.  Zequeira, who served as the school’s founding principal from 2003-04, will return in his new role this July.  He succeeds Matthew Brunell, president since 2006, who has been named Chief Operating Officer for Building Excellent Schools (BES), a national organization committed to improving the academic achievement of students in urban areas.

“We are delighted to have Alex back at Nativity-Worcester,” says Charles “Chick” Weiss, a founding trustee of the school, chairman of the board of trustees, and director of grants, foundation and corporate giving at the College of the Holy Cross.  “He is a very talented teacher, highly effective administrator and strong leader who will work to solidify the school’s record of financial stability and help its students reach for the stars.”

A 1994 graduate of Holy Cross, Zequeira is currently the Dean of Upper School at Wooster School in Danbury, Conn., where he has also taught Spanish and history and coached several athletic teams since 2008.  From 2004-08, he served as the executive director of the alumni association, as well as a teacher, advisor and coach at Belen Jesuit Preparatory in Miami, where he completed his own middle and high school education.

“Jesuit education has been the cornerstone of my personal life and professional career, and it is truly an honor for me to be rejoining the Nativity School of Worcester community,” says Zequeira.  “In a time of immense challenges for both educators and children, Nativity-Worcester continues to succeed in inspiring young men to strive for the best and become life-long learners.  I am thrilled to join a truly dedicated board, administration, and faculty who work in a strong partnership with the families of the school.”

Prior to becoming the first principal of the Nativity School of Worcester in 2003, Zequeira was the assistant director of admission at Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, Conn., where he worked in several capacities for nine years.

Zequeira is a native of Miami and the son of Cuban immigrants.  He will be relocating to Worcester this summer, with his wife Jessika and their son Zakary.

The Nativity School of Worcester (www.nativityworcester.org) is a tuition-free, accredited, independent, Jesuit middle school that offers a high quality education focused on academic, physical, social, moral and spiritual development to students from Worcester’s low-income urban families who would not otherwise have access to such an education.  Founded in 2003, through the efforts of Holy Cross President Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J., the Jesuit Community at Holy Cross and the Society of Jesus of New England, the school is modeled upon the Jesuit-based Nativity Network, which opened its first school in 1971 on the Lower East Side of New York City.  Nativity School of Worcester is supported solely through the generous contributions of individuals, organizations, corporations and foundations.