At a Glance

 

Congratulations to Radu Zmeureanu (Centre for Building Studies), who won a Concours Energia award from the Association Quebecoise pour la Maitrise de l'Energie (AQME ) in the category of research and development. At a banquet at the Hilton Hotel on Nov. 10, the team of Daniel Giguère and Ethel Zelaya (from Natural Resources Canada, CTEC-Varennes) and Zmeureanu received the award for the development of a computer model for the simulation of energy performance of ice skating rinks. The results were announced in Les Affaires.

David Pariser (Art Education) gave a lecture on Oct. 18 as part of the seventh annual Holocaust Education Series at the Gelber Center in conjunction with an exhibition of drawings from the Terezin Concentration Camp. His lecture, titled “Echoes from the Abyss,” illustrated the normality of the children whose lives were cut short, and the heroism of the art teachers who offered classes under terrible conditions.

Margaret MacPherson, formerly of Conference Services, is now Corporate and Group Training Co-ordinator of the TESL Centre at Saint Mary’s University, in Halifax. She passed on congratulations from Maureen Sargent, her director, to Concordia’s TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) Centre on its recent 30th anniversary, and commended it for its leadership in the field.

Suresh Goyal (Decision Sciences/MIS) was appointed associate editor of the International Journal of Operations Research (IJOR), to be published by the Operations Research Society of Taiwan. Goyal has also joined the editorial board of the Pacific-Asian Journal of Mathematical Sciences and the editorial team of OMEGA International Management Science Journal as an associate editor.

Martha Langford (Art History) gave a paper at the Politics of Cultural Memory Conference, held at Manchester Metropolitan University, held from Nov. 4 to 6.

Peter Stoett (Political Science) recently returned from two extensive trips while on a sabbatical year. The first was to Eastern Europe, where he spent two months researching regional environmental and security policies, mostly at the Human Rights and Conflict Prevention Center in Bihac, Bosnia, and the Regional Environmental Center in Budapest, Hungary. More recently, he was in Taiwan, where he delivered the keynote speech at a conference on Canadian politics sponsored by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy and the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei.

Michael von Grünau (Psychology, Science College) attended the recent Annual Meeting and Student Research Conference of the SIGMA XI Society in Montreal. His student Angela Vavassis received an award of superior rating for the poster "Intrusive processing is contingent upon the perceptual load of relevant stimuli in visual search," written by her and von Grünau.

Two children’s authors with Concordia connections have done well this literary season. Passepoil, written by Elaine Arsenault (Counselling & Development), was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award in the children’s illustration category.

Hélène Cossette, who worked for a number of years with the senior administration, is the author of Feuille de chou (Éditions Pierre Tisseyre), which won the Prix Cécile Gagnon at the Salon du Livre on Nov. 20 as a new and promising author. Hélène is doing a second novel in the series, called Souréal et le secret d'Augehym premier, and has another, unrelated novel called Le séducteur coming out in February with the same publisher.

John Graham, a 1986 graduate of Fine Arts, had an exhibition recently at the McClure Gallery of the Visual Arts Centre, in Westmount. Twenty Visions celebrated a decade of printmaking, 1994 to 2004. The works are on paper, including etchings, lithographs and screen prints, as well as excerpts from books. Of particular interest are the watercoloured woodcuts and screenprinted texts from Graham’s most recent book, Visions From the Tempest, inspired by the Shakespeare play.

Writers and publishers with Concordia connections are cleaning up in the awards sweepstakes. The Governor-General's Literary Award for Translation went to a publication by Véhicule Press's poetry imprint, the Signal Poetry Series, for Judith Cowan’s French-to-English translation of Pierre Nepveu's poetry collection, Mirabel. The co-publishers of Véhicule Press are Simon Dardick (Creative Writing) and Nancy Marrelli (Archives), and Concordia graduate Carmine Starnino is the series editor.

Starnino himself won the A.M. Klein Poetry Prize when the Quebec Writers Federation Awards were presented on Nov. 24, for With English Subtitles (Gaspereau Press). Véhicule was the publisher of Jaspreet Singh’s Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales From Kashmir, which took the McAuslan First Book Prize. Edeet Ravel (MA in creative writing, 1985) won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction for Look for Me (Random House), and will be the cover girl on the December issue of Concordia University Magazine.