News

WORCESTER, Mass. – Three outstanding women science students at Holy Cross are being recognized for their academic accomplishments with prestigious scholarships.  Two students will receive Avon Science Scholarships of $6,000 each for the current academic year.  The scholarships are made possible by a grant from the Avon Products Foundation, Inc.  The third student is a Clare Boothe Luce Scholar for the 1998-99 and 1999-00 academic years.  The scholarship is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, Inc.

Frances C. (Kitty) O’Hare, a senior from Weston, Mass., is one of the Avon Scholars.  She is a biology major with a 3.78 grade point average.  She is applying to medical school and plans to combine clinical practice in pediatrics with research and teaching.  Following graduation from Holy Cross she hopes to travel to Europe to focus on her other passion – music.  Kitty’s goal is to study the fractal nature of Gregorian chant.

Jennifer R. Paulhus, of Wheeling, W. Va., is also a senior and an Avon Scholar.  She is a mathematics major and maintains a 3.85 grade point average.  Jennifer plans to attend graduate school and become a researcher in industry or in academia.  Her passion for mathematics resulted in her participation last summer in a Research Experience for Undergraduates sponsored by the National Science Foundation.  Jennifer spent seven weeks at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology involved in math research.

Anne Marie March, the Luce Scholar, is a junior from Londonderry, N.H.  She is a physics major and pianist who loves and plays Chopin.  She is described by the chair of the physics department as among the finest majors in recent years.  Anne Marie’s passion for and achievements in science and the liberal arts are notable and she is expected to become a physicist of great accomplishment.  The Luce Scholarship provides $12,500 in each academic year.

WORCESTER, Mass. – A Holocaust Memorial Concert will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 8 p.m., in the Brooks Concert Hall at Holy Cross.  The concert, which is part of the Hiatt Commemorative Programs that have been in existence since 1979, is free and open to the public.

This event is held in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Kristallnächt in Cologne, Germany.  Kristallnächt, or “the Night of Broken Glass,” occurred on the nights of Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, and resulted in the mass destruction of Jewish synagogues, homes and businesses, as well as the death and deportation of many German Jews.

The concert will be introduced by Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J., president emeritus, and will include Osvaldo Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind.  Golijov, a world-renowned composer, is a member of the Holy Cross music department.  Max Bruch’s Kol Nidre and Ernest Bloch’s Nigun will also be featured.

The program will be performed by the following:

The Zamir Chorale of Boston, under the direction of Dr. Joshua Jacobson, is the chorus in residence at Hebrew College.  The group has performed in Israel, Great Britain, and throughout the United States, and has also released many recordings of music.

The St. Lawrence Quartet, which has recently been named as the Quartet in residence at Stanford University, has an international reputation.  It has toured extensively throughout North America and is also actively involved in the commissioning and performing of new works.

Carol Lieberman, a member of the Holy Cross music department and co-director of the Holy Cross Chamber Players, is one of the leading exponents of Baroque violin.

Mariana Minkin has studied piano and harpsichord extensively and has performed in Israel, the United States, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.

Todd Palmer is an award-winning clarinetist who has appeared extensively both in the United States and abroad.  He has served as the principal clarinetist of the Minnesota Orchestra and the Grand Teton Festival in Wyoming.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Kati Griffith, will give a public lecture entitled “Academics and Activism: Organizing Women in Sweatshops in Latin America” on Thursday, Nov. 5, 1998, at 4 p.m., in Room 304 of the Hogan Campus Center at Holy Cross.  It is free and open to the public.

Griffith will discuss her work with the American Friends Service Committee organizing industrial workers on the U.S.-Mexico border.

A member of the Holy Cross Class of 1997 and a Fulbright Scholar, she is scheduled to begin studying in El Salvador in January.

This event is sponsored by Latin American Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Women’s Studies, Graduate Studies, and the Office of the College Chaplains.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Organist Douglas E. Bush will give a concert on Sunday, November 1, 1998, at 3 p.m., in the St. Joseph Memorial Chapel at Holy Cross.

Bush is a professor of Organ and Music History at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.  He has performed in many locations throughout the United States and Europe.  He has recorded extensively and has recently released compact discs of J.S. Bach’s Orgelbuechlien and Historic Organs of Bach Country, featuring nine historic organs.

The performance is free and open to the public.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Thomas M. Finneran, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives will address the President’s Council dinner at Holy Cross in Kimball Dining Hall on Saturday, October 24, at approximately 9:30 p.m.

Finneran, a Democrat from Boston, represents the 12th Suffolk District, which includes sections of Dorchester, Mattapan, Hyde Park and Milton.  He has been a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives since 1979.  He was elected Speaker of the House in April 1996, and re-elected in January 1997.

Speaker Finneran and his wife, Donna, are the proud parents of  two daughters who both attend Holy Cross.  Kelley is a member of the Class of 1999, and Shannon is in her first year, in the Class of 2002.

The President’s Council dinner is held each year to thank major donors to Holy Cross.  Approximately 700 guests are expected for this year’s event.

WORCESTER, Mass. – The Holy Cross community is celebrating and participating in the canonization of Edith Stein, who will be made a saint by Pope John Paul II, in Rome on Sunday, October 11, 1998.

The event has special meaning for Holy Cross because the College is the first American educational institution to name a building for Edith Stein.  This is also the first time in the history of Holy Cross that a person for whom a campus building has been named, is being made a saint.  (Loyola Hall is named after St. Ignatius Loyola, however, the building was named long after his canonization.)

In celebration of the canonization, two banners have been hung in honor of Edith Stein.  One is suspended over the porch of O’Kane Hall, indicating that the College rejoices in the canonization.  The other hangs in the entrance to the Saint Joseph Memorial Chapel, asking for Saint Edith Stein’s intercession.

Holy Cross will be represented at the canonization in Rome by Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J., president emeritus, and Rev. Francis X. Miller, S.J., vice president emeritus.  Fr. Brooks was instrumental in the naming of the classroom building for Edith Stein.

Edith Stein was born in Breslau, Germany, on October 12, 1891, and died on August 9, 1942, at Auschwitz.  She was born of Jewish parents and converted to Catholicism on January 1, 1922.  Eleven years later, she entered the Carmelite Order and took the name Sister Benedicta of the Cross.

She lived the life of a scholar and teacher before she became a nun and continued to research and write even while living a contemplative life.  Circumstances in her native Germany forced her to seek refuge among the Carmelites in Holland, where she was arrested after the Catholic bishops of Holland had protested against the Nazi persecution of the Jews.  In retaliation for that protest, the Nazis arrested Catholics of Jewish background.  Edith Stein was arrested by the Nazis on August 2, 1942.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Anne Michael’s lecture, which was scheduled for October 19, 1998, has been cancelled due to health reasons.

To complete the Literary Octoberfest, author Agha Shahid Ali will speak at 7 p.m., in the Dinand Library Browsing Room.  Ali is the author of The Country Without a Post Office, A Nostaligist’s Map of America, and The Half-Inch Himalayas.  He is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

The Literary Octoberfest, which is funded by the Lannan Foundation, will feature a weeklong series of readings by some of the country’s most renowned writers.  All events are free and open to the public.

The revised schedule is as follows:

Monday, Oct. 19, 4 p.m.-Kurt Brown and Holy Cross faculty members will read from Verse & Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics.  Faculty members will include Robert Bertin (Biology), Timothy Curran (Chemistry), David Damiano (Mathematics), and Robert Garvey (Physics).  At 7 p.m.- Agha Shahid Ali, author of The Country Without a Post Office, A Nostaligist’s Map of America, and The Half- Inch Himalayas.  He is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Tuesday, Oct. 20, 7 p.m.-Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, professor of English at Princeton University, and author of Magic City, Dien Cai Dau, and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems.

Wednesday, Oct. 21, 4 p.m.– Emily Hiestand, senior literary editor of Orion Magazine and author of Angela the Upside-Down Girl: And Other Domestic Travels and The Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece will hold a nature writing workshop.  At 7 p.m. she will give a reading of her work.

Thursday, Oct. 22, 7 p.m.-Marilyn Hacker, author of Separations, Assumptions, and Selected Poems, 1965-1990.  Hacker is the winner of the National Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

Friday, Oct. 23, 4 p.m.-Janet Holmes, author of The Green Tuxedo and The Physicist at the Mall will give a workshop and reading.  Holmes is the winner of the Anhinga Prize.  At 7 p.m. in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom–Richard Wilbur, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, former Poet Laureate of the United States and author of Things of This World, Walking to Sleep, The Mind-Reader, and New and Collected Poems.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Holy Cross will host three authors as a part of its Fall Reading and Lecture Series in November.  The events are funded by the Lannan Foundation and are free and open to the public.

The schedule is as follows:

Thursday, Nov. 5, Richard Jackson, a UC Foundation Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, will give a lecture entitled “The Half-Life of Dreams: Visions and Version of Petrarch.” at 4 p.m., in the Cantor Art Gallery in O’Kane Hall.  Jackson is the author of five books of poetry and criticism, including Part of the Story, Worlds Apart, and Acts of the Mind.

Thursday, Nov. 12, Peter Matuck, a distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina State University, will speak at 4 p.m., in the Cantor Art Gallery in O’Kane Hall.  Matuck is the editor of Tar River Review and the author of five books of poetry and short fiction, including Where We Live, The Sunken Lightship, and Against Distance.

Tuesday, Nov. 17, Krzysztos Czyzewski, the director of the Borderland Center of the Arts, Cultures, and Nations in Sejny, Poland, will give a lecture entitled “Paul Celan’s U-Topia: the Culture of Dialogue in Bukovina.”  Czyzewski is a well-known writer and the editor of Krasnogruda.

WORCESTER, Mass. – RASA, the new chamber opera, is composed by Shirish Korde, chair of the Holy Cross music department, directed by Lynn Kremer, chair of the theater department at Holy Cross, and choreographed by Daniel McCusker, Holy Cross professor.  RASA opens for a limited run at Holy Cross on Thursday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m., in the Fenwick Theater.  Performances will be on Oct. 29, 30, 31 and Nov. 5 and 6.

Prior to its run at Holy Cross, RASA will be performed at the Sonic Boom Festival in the Miller Theater in New York on Oct. 25.  The American Record Guide  hails RASA as “remarkable in its beauty and subtlety.”

Inspired by the 1989 novel, Jasmine, by Bharati Mukherjee, the chamber opera follows a young woman on her journey from her native India to America, where she flees after the death of her fiancé.  The score is composed of music from many different elements of Vedic chant, Tuva throat-singing, and North Indian musical forms.  Korde has been praised by Musical America for “integrating and synthesizing music of diverse cultures into breathtaking works of complex expressive layers.”

Korde is the chair of the music department at Holy Cross.  He has studied in East Africa, where he focused on the traditions of Indian and African music.  He has also studied at the Berkeley College of Music, the New England Conservatory of Music and Brown University.  Korde directs a group for electronic music at Holy Cross.

Kremer is the chair of the theater department at Holy Cross.  Through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she produced and directed a video program on chant/dance traditions of Paluau in Micronesia.  In Boston, she has directed Crawl Space at the Mills Gallery, and The Separate Prison: A Jazz Opera at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Cyclorama.  Her Journeys Through Imaginary Landscapes was granted two monthlong residencies at the Smithsonian Institute.

McCusker is an independent choreographer who lives and works in Boston.  He teaches dance in the theater program at Holy Cross, is a guest artist at Tufts University, and teaches dance at the Dance Complex in Cambridge, Mass.  He was the artistic director of Ram Island Dance Company, in Portland, Maine, and has performed with the Lucinda Childs Dance Company in New York City.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Out Loud I, a public reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, will take place on Thursday, Oct. 22, at Holy Cross, in the lobby of the Hogan Campus Center, from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m.

Participants in the innovative program, who will read ten-minute sections of the classic, must obtain sponsors to support them for every minute.  The proceeds raised from this program will finance the publication of Sigma Tau Delta’s literary journal and its future issues.

Out Loud I will take place during the Literary Octoberfest, which is sponsored by the English department, with funding from the Lannan Foundation.

WORCESTER, Mass. – A section of the National AIDS Quilt will be displayed on Monday, Oct. 5, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom.

The AIDS Quilt project has received national attention for its efforts to raise awareness and support for people who are infected with the HIV/AIDS virus. Started in 1987, the NAMES Project Foundation has worked to create a memorial for those who have died of AIDS, and also help people understand the disease.

Since its inception, the NAMES Project Foundation has raised over $2.4 million for AIDS service organizations throughout the United States; it is the largest community art project in the world.

Jane Alexander, Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, stated: “The NAMES Project gives important and impressive testimony to a tragic blight.  What more poignant demonstration of the power of art can there be?”

The display is sponsored by the Holy Cross AIDS Peer Educators and is free and open to the public.

WORCESTER, Mass. – The third annual Presidential Convocation was held at Holy Cross on September 15, 1998.  The event honored the winner of the 1997-98 Holy Cross Distinguished Teaching Award and the recipients of the Raymond J. Swords, S.J., Faculty Medal.

Professor Helen Whall of the English department was this year’s distinguished teacher.  A member of the Holy Cross faculty since 1976, she has served on numerous committees and worked with many student groups.  Whall is a past director of the College’s Honors Program and is currently the director of the First-Year Program.

The award was established to recognize the dedicated faculty members at the College and carries with it a $1,000 honorarium.

The Raymond J. Swords, S.J., Faculty Medal, named after the twenty-eighth president of the College, was designed to honor members of the faculty who have served at Holy Cross for twenty-five years.  Three members of the Holy Cross faculty were recognized: Caren Dubnoff of the political science department, Theresa McBride of the history department, and John Reboli, S.J., of the visual arts department.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Critically acclaimed author and well-known member of the death penalty abolition movement, Sr. Helen Prejean, C.S.J., will speak at Holy Cross on Oct. 7 at 7 p.m. in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom about her views on capital punishment.

Prejean is the author of Dead Man Walking, which was the inspiration for the 1994 movie starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.  The book was on the New York Times best seller list for over thirty weeks and has been translated into eight languages.

A member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille since 1957, Prejean has served as a teacher, religious educator, and formation director for her community.  Currently, she continues her ministry to death row inmates and murder victims’ families and is working on a book about women’s struggles for equality in the Roman Catholic Church.

The lecture is free and open to the public.  It is sponsored by the Holy Cross Peace and Conflict Studies Program.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Holy Cross will host two authors during its Fall Reading and Lecture Series. All events are free and open to the public.

The schedule is as follows:

Tuesday, Sept. 17, at 4 p.m. in the Cantor Art Gallery in O’Kane Hall – Roger Weingarten, author of eight collections of poetry, including Ghost Wrestling and Infant Bonds of Joy, and editor of New American Poets of the 90s.

Weingarten is a professor in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Vermont College.

Monday, Sept. 21, at 7 p.m. in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom-Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard, for which he won the National Book Award, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Indian Country, Men’s Lives, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, The Tree Where Man was Born, and Far Tortuga, will speak about Buddhist saint Maura O’Halloran’s Zen journal, Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind and his own journey into Buddhist thought.

O’Halloran left Boston in 1979 to become a student of Zen in Japan and became the first woman and first foreigner to enter Toshoji Temple.  After her sudden death, she became a Buddhist saint and has a statue dedicated to her in front of the monastery in which she lived.  Her mother created the journal from her collected letters and writings, composed while she was at the monastery.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Holy Cross will host its second annual Literary Octoberfest during the week of Oct. 19, 1998.  Funded by the Lannan Foundation, the program will feature a weeklong series of readings by some of the country’s most renowned writers.  The readings will take place in the Dinand Library Browsing Room, with the exception of Richard Wilbur’s, which will take place in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom.  All events are free and open to the public.

The schedule runs as follows:

Monday, Oct. 19, 4 p.m.-Kurt Brown and Holy Cross faculty members will read from Verse & Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics.  Faculty members will include Robert Bertin (Biology), Timothy Curran (Chemistry), David Damiano (Mathematics), and Robert Garvey (Physics).  At 7 p.m.-Anne Michaels, winner of the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas and author of the novel,  Fugitive Pieces, and two books of poetry, Miner’s Pond and The Weight of Oranges.

Tuesday, Oct. 20, 7 p.m.-Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, professor of English at Princeton University, and author of Magic City, Dien Cai Dau, and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems.

Wednesday, Oct. 21, 4 p.m.– Emily Hiestand, senior literary editor of Orion Magazine and author of Angela the Upside-Down Girl: And Other Domestic Travels and The Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece will hold a nature writing workshop.  At 7 p.m. she will give a reading of her work.

Thursday, Oct. 22, 7 p.m.-Marilyn Hacker, author of Separations, Assumptions, and Selected Poems, 1965-1990.  Hacker is the winner of the National Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

Friday, Oct. 23, 4 p.m.-Janet Holmes, author of The Green Tuxedo and The Physicist at the Mall will give a workshop and reading.  Holmes is the winner of the Anhinga Prize.  At 7 p.m. in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom–Richard Wilbur, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, former Poet Laureate of the United States and author of Things of This World, Walking to Sleep, The Mind-Reader, and New and Collected Poems.