At a Glance

This column welcomes the submissions of all Concordia faculty and staff to promote and encourage individual and group activities in teaching and research, and to encourage work-related achievements.

Congratulations to graduate student Gary Chateram, who received a Jackie Robinson Scholarship when Montreal’s black community held its annual awards ceremonies in the spring at a downtown hotel.

William Curran, Director, Libraries, spoke in April at a Finding Our Future conference on succession planning. The conference, held in Ottawa at the Library and Archives of Canada, had the subtitle Facing the Challenges of Aging Workforce: Succession Planning Strategies for Libraries and Information Management Organizations.

Concordia was well represented at the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, held May 21-24 at the University of New Brunswick, in Fredericton. John Donahue (CMLL) gave a paper on “Teaching Irish to the World,” Michael Kenneally (English) on “Landscape, Exile and Identity in the Poetry of Thomas D’Arcy McGee,” Brad Kent, who is doing a PhD in Humanities, on “Shaw’s Everyday Emergency: Commodification in John Bull’s Other Island,” and Carole Zucker (Cinema), on “The Reception of Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins.”

Daniel Cross (Cinema) had a great spring. He and Mila Aung-Thwin, of EyeSteelFilm, won the top prize of $50,000 at BANFF, the CTV Canadian Documart held in Banff in June. Also, S.P.I.T., his documentary about street kids, made in Montreal, was held over in Toronto for several weeks. Geoff Pevere, of the Toronto Star, called it “enlightening, urgent and funny” and gave it four stars.

Roy Cross (Cinema) also screened his latest film, So Faraway and Blue, in Toronto. Matt Hays, of the Mirror, said it “plays out like a tormented David Lynch dreamscape.”

Kara Blake, a student in the MFA Studio Arts (Film Production Option), won a 2003 Carole Fielding Student Grant for work on her thesis film, Now Hear This. These grants are awarded by the U.S.-based University Film and Video Association, of which Concordia’s cinema school is a member. Kara will probably be featured in an article in the next Kodak Campus Beat magazine.

Karin Doerr (CMLL/Simone de Beauvoir Institute) was invited by the University of Vermont to deliver the 14th Harry H. Kahn Memorial Lecture. The event took place in March.

Palmer Acheson sent a fond farewell to his friends at Concordia, having retired from teaching on June 1. He added, “Now that the TESL Centre is part of the large, powerful Department of Education, under the able direction of a dynamic director, and with new faculty to reinvigorate it, I am more optimistic for its future than I was a few years ago.”

Vice-Rector Services Michael Di Grappa, Patricia Posius and Enza De Cubellis made a presentation at the eastern conference of the NACAS (National Association of College Auxiliary Services) on “Service 1: Bringing Service to the Organization,” and report that it was well received.

Several alumni of Concordia’s theatre program have been mentioned in the newsletter of ACTRA, the Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists. Maria Bircher has been a professional performer and active ACTRA member for more than 15 years. Vik Sahay has been in CBC TV’s Our Hero, YTV’s Radioactive and the film Good Will Hunting. He will be in a stage performance of Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink in a co-production by the Canadian Stage and National Arts Centre.

Jean-François Warren (Sociology/Anthropology) has written a book with Gilles Gagné, Sociologie et valeurs. Quatorze penseurs québécois du XXème siècle (Montréal, PUM).

Ira Robinson (Religion) was a member of the Canadian Scientific Committee for the exhibition Archaeology and the Bible: From King David to the Dead Sea Scrolls, seen this summer at the Musée d’archeologie et d’histoire de Montréal (Pointe à Callière).

Award-winning poet Stephanie Bolster (English) read from her work in Vancouver and at the Leacock Literary Festival in Orillia, Ontario. She will be featured in an episode of The Writing Life, to be aired on Bravo in 2004.

Donato Totaro (Cinema) made a presentation on Sept. 25 at the symposium on the aesthetic theories of 19th-century Swedish philosopher Henri Bergson at the Musée d’art contemporain.

Robert Tittler (History) delivered a paper in July at the National Portrait Gallery in London entitled “Civic Portraiture and Local Memory in Elizabethan Provincial Towns.” In addition, his edition of The Blackwells Companion to Tudor Britain, co-edited with Norman Jones, is now in press for publication by Blackwells of Oxford in June 2004.

The American Statistical Association has awarded Yogendra P. Chaubey (Mathematics and Statistics) the 2003 Chapter Service Recognition Award for his service and leadership to the Montreal Chapter of the Association and to the Montreal Regional Association of the Statistical Society of Canada.