At a Glance

 

Bakr Ibrahim, CIBC Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship & Family Business, and Director, Centre for Small Business and Entrepreneurial Studies, spoke on March 12 to members of the Aurora Business Project, which was started by the YMCA to help entrepreneurs in the NDG area.

Calvin Kalman (Physics) was co-chair of Physics Teachers’ Day, held by the Canadian Association of Physicists on March 22 during a meeting of the American Physics Society in Montreal.

A book was recently launched by Ailie Cleghorn, who teaches in the Education Studies master’s program, and co-author Alan Peacock. Missing the Meaning is published by Palgrave-MacMillan. It draws on experiences in five continents to show that text is here to stay. In fact, they say developers of non-print materials should inform themselves about the challenges of writing for print to do their own work on the Web effectively.

Ira Robinson (Religion) presented a lecture on Al-Ghazali and Maimonides at the Baron Fund Symposium on Islamic-Jewish Relations: Syncretism and Separatism, sponsored by the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies, San Diego State University. He also presented a paper titled “Practically I am a Fundamentalist: Twentieth Century Orthodox Jews Contend With Evolution and Its Implications” at a conference on Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Evolution, held at Arizona State University.

Congratulations to two Concordia finalists in the 2004 Women of Distinction Awards, presented by the Y des Femmes/Women’s Y Foundation. Homa Hoodfar (Sociology and Anthropology), is nominated in the education category, and Evelyne Abitbol (Public Affairs) is nominated in the communications category. The winners will be announced at a benefit on May 12 at the Sheraton Centre Hotel, for which tickets are $150 each, and $2,000 for a table. Orders may be placed at www.ydesfemmesmtl.org.

Two students in the Sustainable Concordia Project were invited to give a presentation at McGill’s Rethink environmental conference on April 1. It was attended by Principal Heather Monroe-Blum, among others.

Karl Raudsepp (Music) will be given the Distinguished Service Award by the Royal Canadian College of Organists. He is the author of Organs of Montreal (Orel Press) and a consultant on historic pipe organs for the Quebec Ministry of Cultural Affairs. He was chief organizer of the fifth International Congress of Organists (Montreal 1993), and has co-ordinated the annual John Robb Organ Competition in Quebec. He is also the current president of the Montreal chapter of the Royal Canadian College of Organists and the editor of its newsletter. The presentation will be made at the annual convocation of the RCCO in Winnipeg in July.

Political economist Harold Chorney was invited to a conference at Harvard on the basis of published research on the economics of bilingualism. He did two studies for the Department of Canadian Heritage: “Bilingualism in Employee Recruitment and the Role of symbolic analysts in Leading Export-oriented Firms” in Albert Breton ed., Economic Approaches to Language and Bilingualism, and “The Economic Benefits of Linguistic Duality and Bilingualism: A Political Economy Approach” in New Canadian Perspectives: Official languages and the Economy, Canadian Heritage, 1997.

Watch for a profile of poet Stephanie Bolster (English) on the Bravo program The Writing Life on Thursday, May 6, at 8:30 p.m. A book she edited and introduced, The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems, by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, will be published in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press this fall.

William Buxton (Communication Studies) will be scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Archive Center, a division of Rockefeller University, for July and August. While there, he will pursue research on the educational radio projects of the Rockefeller Foundation/General Education Board and chair a workshop on American philanthropy for communication and culture.

Congratulations to Heather Thompson (Graduate Diploma in Journalism), one of three students selected for the 2004 EU-Canada Young Journalist Award, to be presented at the National Press Club in Ottawa on May 14. Part of her prize is a study trip this summer to look at European Union institutions in Brussels.