Bryn Mawr College

Author of Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul to Speak at Bryn Mawr College

Brown University Biology Professor Kenneth Miller, author of Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul will give a talk titled “From Darwin to Dover: Thought’s on America’s Continuing Problem with Evolution” from 2-4 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 21, at Bryn Mawr College’s Goodhart Hall in the Goodhart Music Room.

This event is free and open to the public.

Miller is a cell biologist and the author of the most widely-used high school biology textbooks in America. In addition to Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, he is the author of Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. Both books present a lively cutting-edge analysis of the key issues that seem to divide science and religion.

After completing his undergraduate study at Brown University, Miller earned a Ph.D in 1974 at the University of Colorado. He spent six years as an assistant professor at Harvard University before returning to Brown in 1980. His research work on cell membrane structure and function has produced more than 50 scientific papers and reviews in leading journals, including CELL, Nature, and Scientific American.

Miller received the Presidential Citation of the American Institute for Biological Sciences for distinguished service to the field of biology and in 2006 he received the Public Service Award from the American Society for Cell Biology based on his work defending the integrity of science and science education. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science voted to give Miller their award for advancing the public understanding of science.

Miller is in the area to receive Villanova University’s Mendel Medal. His appearance at Bryn Mawr is sponsored by the President’s Office and the Brown Club of Philadelphia.

Owls Tip Off Basketball Season with “Fight for a Cure” Tournament

The Bryn Mawr basketball team’s 2009-10 season will get underway with a home game against Rosemont on Friday, Nov. 20, at 6 p.m. as part of a weekend tournament with local rivals Immaculata and Penn State-Abington.

In addition to being the season opener, the game and tournament are part of the Athletic Department’s “Fight For a Cure” fund-raising effort in support of breast-cancer research.

The weekend’s festivities begin on Friday morning when the Athletic Department hosts the Friday coffee hour in the campus center from 9:30-10:30 a.m., during which the community can buy “Fight for a Cure” t-shirts and rally towels and purchase raffle tickets for the chance to win an ipod shuffle, $20 gift cards to Starbucks and Borders, and a campus parking pass.

The tournament continues after the Owls game on Friday night with the Immaculata vs. Penn State-Abington game and concludes on Saturday at 2 p.m. with a consolation and championship game.

The raffle will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday in between games. Raffle winners must be present to claim their prizes. Raffle tickets will be available until just before the drawing, and t-shirts, rally towels, and concessions will be sold during the entire tournament. All proceeds for the two-day event will be donated to the Bryn Mawr Hospital Comprehensive Breast Center.

More “Fight for a Cure” Events

The tip-off tournament is one of many “Fight for a Cure” events sponsored by the Athletics department.

On Wednesday, Dec. 2, the swim team will host a Bryn Mawr community relay challenge before its 6 p.m. meet with Arcadia and Cabrini. The challenge will have one swimmer teamed up with three college community members in a 100-yard (four lengths of the pool) relay. To take part in the relay or sponsor a swimmer, contact Head Swim Team Coach Niki Whitlock.

Earlier this month, the swim team competed in the “Hour of Power” relay. The Owls joined with more than 6,000 athletes from 124 college, high-school, and club teams from across the world in this event, which has raised more than $112,000 for the Ted Mullin Fund for Pediatric Sarcoma Research at the University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital.

During the fall season, in conjunction with the Centennial Conference volleyball coaches’ “Dig for a Cure,” initiative the Bryn Mawr College volleyball team helped raise $1,300 for Living Beyond Breast Cancer, a nonprofit organization based in Haverford, dedicated to empowering all women affected by breast cancer.

For more information on the upcoming events, contact Jill Breslin. To make a donation please contact Athletic Director Kathy Tierney, Head Basketball Coach Deb Charamella or Head Swim Team Coach Nikki Whitlock.

Bryn Mawr Featured in Associated Press Article on the Posse Foundation

Bryn Mawr is featured prominently in “College students find support in campus ‘posses,’” an Associated Press story about the Posse Foundation.  Posse has worked with the Bryn Mawr Admissions Office since 2001 to bring talented students from Boston-area public schools to Bryn Mawr. The article appeared in the print or online versions of hundreds of news outlets across the country.

Creative Writing Program Director Karl Kirchwey Featured on Poetry Daily

Director of Creative Writing Karl Kirchwey is the featured poet of the day on Poetry Daily for Tuesday, Nov. 17. The Web site will post a selection from Kirchwey’s long poem Mutabor, a work in progress.

Bryn Mawr Celebrates International Education Week

Bryn Mawr College will celebrate the extraordinary experiences of its students who study abroad and the innumerable contributions of its international students, faculty, and staff next week with a series of events marking International Education Week, Nov. 16-20.

A joint initiative of the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education, International Education Week promotes programs that prepare Americans for a global environment and attract future leaders from abroad to study, learn, and exchange experiences in the United States.

International students compose just over a fifth of Bryn Mawr’s Class of 2013, continuing a long tradition of international exchange on the part of Bryn Mawr’s students, faculty, and staff.

According to Assistant Dean and Director of International Programs Theresa Cann, about 40 percent of Bryn Mawr’s junior class studies abroad each year; others participate in the College’s summer programs in Pisa, Avignon, and Russia or undertake summer research internships abroad. The College’s faculty and staff also include immigrants and visitors from abroad whose perspectives contribute to the rich educational environment on campus.

Associate Professor of Growth and Structure of Cities Carola Hein, who is the current co-director of the College’s Center for International Studies and a member of the steering committee that oversees the minor in international studies, helped organize some of the week’s events.

“In view of the continuing globalization process and the emergence of new international networks, anything we can do to bring the world to campus and take Bryn Mawr into the world is valuable,” Hein says.

A native of Germany, Hein is a founding member of the International Faculty Group, which hopes to serve as a resource for faculty and students from abroad as well as U.S. natives who study or do research abroad during their Bryn Mawr careers.

“I’ve gone through the process of finding my way in this culture, which is more different from Europe or Japan where I lived before than you might think,” she notes.

Hein says that the contributions of international students to her classroom are invaluable. “In discussions, it is often the international student who will stand up and say, ‘Yes, but …’ They have an entirely different viewpoint that comes from growing up and being educated in another cultural context.”

Hein also points to the growth in Bryn Mawr’s population of international students as an indicator of “how much interest there is in the liberal-arts model, how much we have to offer to the world.”

Professor of Philosophy Christine Koggel, co-director with Carola Hein of the Center for International Studies, agrees.

“As a liberal arts institution and women’s college, Bryn Mawr is well positioned to play a significant role in a globalized world in which gender continues to make a difference to women’s access to health care, employment, and education,” Koggel says. “Education has a powerful effect in empowering women and enabling them to participate in social, economic, and political processes and to care for families and communities in ways that can promote human well-being more generally.”

To Inaugurate a Reconceived Goodhart, Bi-College Theater Production Probes Language, Space

As Mark Lord planned the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Theater Program’s 2009 fall production, he took into account a factor he hadn’t needed to consider in previous years: a beautifully renovated, state-of-the-art theater facility.

With a greatly expanded stage and all-new lighting and sound equipment, Marjorie Walter Goodhart Theater brings together historic architecture and modern technology. In addition to the new stage, the $19 million facelift brings renovated seating and new restrooms for patrons, new dressing rooms and rehearsal space for performers and a teaching theater and additional classroom space for students.

Goodhart Theater, dedicated in 1928, has always been a stunningly beautiful building, said Lord, who is Bryn Mawr’s director of theater and chair of the Bryn Mawr Arts Program. Now it is also a great working theater, capable of transforming space in myriad ways.

But Lord has chosen to inaugurate Goodhart’s new teaching theater with a text that resolutely resists the illusion of transformation. Peter Handke’s 1968 piece Offending the Audience cleverly and dispassionately dissects the theatrical experience, refusing to transport the audience to a fictional time and place. Its insistence on the here and now makes the play a superb vehicle for exploring and displaying the physical space of the theater.

The Bi-Co production of Handke’s work “asks the audience to think differently about theater—and, in particular, to think differently about this theater,” said Lord’s assistant director, Jessica Rizzo ’11.

As the actors strip their relationship with the audience to its bare essentials, explicitly repudiating the artifice of traditional drama, they show the audience the theater’s machinery and illuminate spaces that are usually concealed. Lord’s staging ultimately takes the actors to the far reaches of the building, revealing almost every corner that is visible from the small stage at the building’s heart.

By design, almost every corner is visible. When the right doors and curtains are opened, the view from the teaching theater extends through the scene shop to the main stage, the auditorium seats, the balcony, and even a bit of the entrance foyer.

Site Specificity and Design

In Philadelphia avant-garde theater circles, Lord is known as a pioneer of site-specific theater, which is often staged in “found spaces” not designed for theatrical productions.

That interest, he recently told students in a directing class, was partly motivated by the constraints imposed by the antiquated theater he found when he began working at Bryn Mawr in 1988. Until its renovation last year, the historic building retained its original utility systems; its stage was very small by contemporary standards, and its narrow proscenium arch often presented staging challenges.

With the help of designer Hiroshi Iwasaki, the College’s technical director, Lord began to approach Goodhart as a found space.

“I said, ‘Let’s not use it as a theater. It’s a great building, so let’s use it as a building,’” Lord said. “I worked often with Hiroshi to figure out how to use the spaces in this building to make events. I usually start with the space itself—I inventory the space and think about what kinds of events are possible in the space, what kinds of impulses I get from the space. Then I ask myself, ‘What are the texts that I care about that might work well in relationship to that space?’”

The renovation of Goodhart, Lord said, hasn’t changed his focus on space. But it has made a difference in his artistic process.

The College’s arts faculty consulted extensively with the architects who handled the renovation, over a period of several years, about its requirements for the building. Consequently, Lord said, “Hiroshi and I were pretty familiar with this space before it even existed. I knew all sorts of things it could do, and for this production I wanted to get to as many of them as I could.

“Offending the Audience was chosen partly because it was friendly to a set of ideas about space,” he explained.

Speeches and Spaces

Sitting in Goodhart’s splendid auditorium, Rizzo drew an analogy between the exploration of language in Handke’s text and the exploration of space in Lord’s staging of it.

“The piece exposes the pure elements of theatrical experience. Its language is clean, it’s stark; it isn’t intended to make itself into something different or refer to something outside itself,” she said.

“Sometimes, that language is ugly—like the insults that are hurled at the audience at the end of the play—or very utilitarian.”

The current production, she said, applies a similar rigor to its examination of the new performance spaces in Goodhart. “For instance, the audience sees the scene shop, which is part of this amazing new complex. There’s nothing beautiful about the scene shop. It’s wonderful, because it allows us to do very practical things that Mark and Hiroshi hadn’t been able to do, but it doesn’t aspire to be beautiful.”

But the play does offer the occasional glimpse of a more poetic kind of language, Rizzo noted. “It provides an opportunity for reflection on language, on what it means to be addressed, on past experiences of plays and theatergoing, that may affect your experiences of plays you will see in the future.”

Similarly, the soaring Gothic-revival architecture of the historic auditorium is visible to the audience through the scene shop, which connects the old stage to the new.

“This space, the grand old traditional theater, is worked into the piece, but we’re looking at the theater topsy-turvy and inside out and from different angles,” Rizzo says. “It really is a space unlike any other.”

Offending the Audience will be presented on Nov. 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, and 21, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are free for Tri-Co students, faculty, and staff and $5 for the general public. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Reservations are strongly suggested. Visit www.youchuckleheads.com or e-mail theater@brynmawr.edu to reserve a space.

Photos by Paola Nogueras ’84