At a Glance

 

From Simone de Beauvoir Institute principal Lillian Robinson: “I have a resident fellowship to work here in Italy at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center. I'm hard at work in beautiful surroundings on my next book, Mixed Company: Mythologies of Interracial Rape.”

Jeri Brown (Music) was nominated for Best Vocal Jazz Album of the year at the 2004 Juno Awards, her sixth Juno nomination. This year she was up against Ranee Lee, Denzal Sinclaire, Carol Welsman, and Holly Cole, who ended up with the award. Brown was nominated for her album Firm Roots (2003), her ninth recording for Justin Time, a label also shared by fellow nominee Lee.

John Buell, Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies and a successful novelist, has published Travelling Light: The Way and Life of Tony Walsh (Novalis). The subject was a committed Christian who led and taught in a First Nations community in British Columbia. Eventually, he founded Benedict Labre House for homeless men in Montreal, for which he was given the Order of Canada. Buell was a member of the group who worked with Walsh.

Congratulations to Brian Slack (Geography), who was presented with an honorary degree on April 2 from the University of Le Havre in France. The Canadian ambassador to France attended.

Elana Trager (Marketing Communications) recently co-chaired a conference on branding in Nashville, Tenn., for the University and College Designers Association. Elana has six years’ experience as a graphic designer. She and co-chair Pam Fogg, of Middlebury College in Vermont, had to “brand” the conference itself, recruiting speakers, organizing proceedings, and creating designs to market the event. About 125 designers took part.

Ted Stathopoulos (Building, Civil/Environmental Engineering) and Associate Dean (School of Graduate Studies) gave an invited lecture at the first International Symposium on Wind Effects on Buildings and Urban Environment, which took place in Tokyo, Japan on March 8 and 9. The title of the lecture was “Wind-induced Dispersion of Exhaust from Rooftop Stacks and Air-intake Contamination.” While in Japan, he was invited to participate in the meeting of the working group for CFD prediction of wind environment around buildings at the Architectural Institute of Japan.

Chris Hinton (Cinema) won the first prize at the Stuttgart Animated Film Festival with one of the two films he entered in competition. Alison (Reiko) Loader, FMAN alumni and now part-time for Digital Image and Sound, won the first prize at the Montreal Animated Film Festival, a new event, held at the AMC Theatre in April.

David Pariser (Art Education) and Enid Zimmerman of Indiana University recently co-authored a chapter on “Learning in the Visual Arts: Characteristics of Gifted and Talented Individuals.” This appears in the just-released Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education, published by Lawrence Earlbaum and edited by Elliot Eisner and Michael Day.

Gary Boyd and Educational Technology doctoral student Dai Zhang gave a presentation at the International Council for Distance Education Conference in Hong Kong on Feb. 18. Boyd was also invited to Hong Kong Baptist University by Jiming Liu (EdTech MA 1980), who is head of the Computer Science Department. Two Concordia graduates are full professors there. Boyd went to Chongqing University, which has about 60,000 on-campus students, and reports that their e-learning venture, though only two years old, already has 1,900 students. You can see their website at www.5any.com. “They plan very rapid growth for the next decade, and would like to exchange courses with Concordia,” he said in an e-mail.

On another trip in April, Boyd and philosophy professor Vladimir Zeman presented a paper on "Why and how to temporarily increase uncertainties in and for enhanced knowledge development" to the 17th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research in Vienna. Boyd was also invited to discuss further development of the UNESCO chair and doctoral program in educational technology at the Philosopher Constantine University at Nitra.

Steven Appelbaum (Management) was honoured by his high school on May 14 in Philadelphia. Overbrook High School has produced many well-known academics, physicians, politicians, athletes (including Wilt Chamberlain) and entertainers.

Jeremiah Hayes, Distinguished Professor Emeritus (Electrical and Computer Engineering) has published his third textbook in the area of telecommunications, Modeling and Analysis of Telecommunications Networks (John Wiley, 2004). His co-author, Thimma V.J. Ganesh Babu, is a Concordia PhD. The unique feature of the text is the extensive on-line supporting material.

Rebecca Blaikie, 25, who has been active with the People’s Potato food collective, will run against Prime Minister Paul Martin in the riding of LaSalle-Émard in the next federal election. The daughter of senior NDP MP Bill Blaikie, she plans to do a Master’s in Public Policy and Public Administration.

The recent production of Robinson Crusoe by Geordie Theatre got great reviews. This production by Geordie, which produces for children and young people in Concordia’s D.B. Clarke Theatre, includes Theatre Department alumni (director Dean Fleming & lighting designer Robin Paterson), current students (sound designer Kari Seekins and assistant stage manager/puppeteer Vincent Absi) and part-time faculty (stage manager Anne Clark).

Calvin Kalman and Mariana Frank, of the Physics Department, co-chaired the 26th annual MRST meeting at Concordia's Richard Renaud Science Pavilion on May 12-14. The conference, named for the four cities in which it takes place (Montreal, Rochester, Syracuse and Toronto) featured 30 speakers, including Kalman and Frank. The proceedings will be published as a special issue of the International Journal of Modern Physics B.

Steven Appelbaum has been recognized by Emerald Management Reviews as the author of one of the top 50 articles in the field for 2003. The article in question was “A Cross Method Analysis of the Impact of Culture and Communications Upon a Health Care Merger,” published in the Journal of Management Development, Vol 22, No 5.