Dr. Kelcey Parker, Assistant Professor of English, has been selected as Artist of the Month for November 2009 in the well-regarded literary journal, Image. She has published two stories in Image, and her profile includes a link to her story, “Lent,” about a woman who gives up her family for Lent. “Lent” is also one of the stories in her forthcoming story collection, For Sale By Owner, which will be published by Kore Press in 2010.
Congratulations to Dr. Parker!!!

Frances Hwang
Author of Transparency

Monday, Nov. 23
7:30 p.m.
3rd Floor bridge of Wiekamp Hall
Light refreshments and book-signing to follow.

“All the grown-ups burst out laughing, and then my aunt turned to look at me. ‘So you think I’m not as pretty?’ she said. My fingers trailed along the sofa as I moved away from her. ‘You think your mom is prettier than me, hey?’ All at once, she lunged, squeezing me tight. When she suctioned my face with kisses, I could feel the hot steam of her emotion. She was a tyrant in that way, her passions swirled messily together, making me afraid. To love and to hate was the same, and even the dog was scared of her.”

Frances Hwang’s story collection, Transparency (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Company, 2007), received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a PEN/Beyond Margins Award.  She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Colgate University.  Her work has been read as part of the Selected Shorts series at Symphony Space and has appeared in Best New American Voices, Glimmer Train, Tin House, AGNI Online, and Subtropics.  She teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

More info available at: http://iusbcreativewriting.wordpress.com/

Elaine Roth (English) and her co-editors Heather Addison (Western Michigan University) and Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly (independent scholar) have published the first collection of essays on cinematic motherhood with SUNY Press.  In recent years, considerable public attention has been paid to mothers and motherhood.  Public debates about women “opting out” of careers for motherhood, the so-called “Mommy wars” between working and stay-at-home mothers, and intense public scrutiny of movie stars and singers as mothers led the authors to focus on the evolution of a cinematic discourse about motherhood.  Motherhood Misconceived:  Representing the Maternal in US Films draws on a variety of critical approaches to consider Hollywood’s portrayal of motherhood.  The thirteen contributions cover the spectacle of pregnancy; mother-daughter relationships; mothers as predators, narcissists, and absent victims; and the ways in which cultural anxieties are displaced and projected onto marginalized mothers in films such as Fargo; Transamerica; Gas, Food, Lodging; Ordinary People; and Scream.

For more information, go to Motherhood Misconceived

On Wednesday, November 18, 2009, Distinguished Professor Ellen Kossek of Michigan State University will deliver IU South Bend’s Gloria Kaufman Memorial Lecture for 2009.  Her talk “Managing Flexstyles: Women, Work and Family in a Flexible Job Age” will take place in Wiekamp Hall 1001, at 7:30 p.m. This talk is sponsored by the Women’s Studies Program at IU South Bend.

The presentation will focus on women and the economy at an historical moment:  this topic is at the top of the news, in part because of the recent “Shriver Report” on the status of women in the U.S.  Dr. Kossek, who teaches in MSU’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations, is the winner of many awards and the author of seven books and numerous scholarly articles.  She is currently the Associate Director of the Center for Work-Family Stress and Health, a virtual center with Portland State University as part of the National Institute of Health National Workplace Health and Family Network. She holds a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Yale University, an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan, and an A.B. from Mount Holyoke with honors in psychology.

Her talk at IU South Bend comes from her 2008 book, CEO of Me: Creating a Life that Works in the Flexible Job Age, and will take on the challenges women in particular face in the current job market. You can read more about her research at the following sites:
http://flex-work.lir.msu.edu/
http://wfsupport.psy.pdx.edu/
http://www.worklifeflexibility.msu.edu/

The talk is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception and a book signing. Questions? Contact Dr. Cathy Borshuk, Director of Women’s Studies at (574) 520-4122.

For several generations of American historiography it has been generally assumed that the Colonial American South did not have an intellectual history. How could it, since it had so few ideas?  Printing presses, sermons, political theorems abound in New England; from Maryland on South, these things were absent, until Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others, leaped from the red clay fully developed as intellectuals, with a little French fertilizer and Presbyterian watering.

This obviously cannot be the case, and in this talk Dr. Zambone will explain why it is not.  In part, the colonial South developed an intellectual culture through the transatlantic influence of the Church of England.  From hierarchy, to nature, to gambling and to the concept of moderation itself, Anglicanism provided an intellectual outlook that remained important to the American South long after Anglicanism itself had been become a marginal religious persuasion.

Heather Yarbrough has always been drawn to the study of US history in the 1920s and 1930s.  It seemed to be a carefree, exciting and even unreal time, with the clashing contradictions of poverty and decadence, of innocence and lawlessness, idealism and corruption. Her love of this period in US history and especially her favorite city, New Orleans, led her first to create a French Quarter style coffee house in downtown South Bend, the Chicory Cafe. There she’s tried to bring a little piece of New Orleans to Indiana. 

She also decided to pursue her interest in this period in an independent research project with History Professor Lisa Zwicker.  She began with the question: Did the innocent and law-abiding citizens of Northwest Indiana have the same big city attitudes as the residents of Chicago, New York, and New Orleans?  As she delved into primary sources in archives and libraries in Northwest Indiana, she discovered that the South Benders DID, in fact, bootleg like crazy!  And surprisingly, no one had done a thorough investigation of this subject for South Bend, or even Northwest Indiana.  She uncovered dozens of newspaper articles in the libraries, court records in the St. Joseph county archives, and fascinating people who could provide first-person accounts of the time.  Police busts of more than one hundred people at a time included mayors and chiefs of police.  Small bootleggers also plied the trade, as it was the only way many could afford to feed their family.  She even discovered a local “legend” that is still bringing the blues to Mishawaka: Martha’s Midway Tavern had its beginnings during Prohibition and is still going strong.

To do justice to the treasure trove of sources she uncovered would require a book length study. So together with her advisor, Professor Lisa Zwicker (History), she decided on a final project of organizing the beginnings of a South Bend Prohibition archive. She gathered nearly one hundred sources and annotated them for future researchers.  Scott Shuler, Archivist at The Center for History for Northern Indiana, has taken an interest in her findings and would like to build on her research. Watch for more information on Prohibition in the planned display at the Center for History.  Find out why Al Capone, infamous gangster and customer at Martha’s Midway Tavern,said “Prohibition has made nothing but trouble!”

In the Fall issue of Research and Creative Activity, you can read about David Blouin’s (Sociology) research with Midwestern dog owners, see “What kind of owner are you?”

Kotlowitz grew up in New York City.  He has produced for The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour and reported for NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition. From 1984 to 1993, he was a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, writing on urban affairs and social policy.  His journalism honors include the George Foster Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the George Polk Award. He is the recipient of three honorary degrees and the John LaFarge Memorial Award for Interracial Justice given by New York’s Catholic Interracial Council.  Kotlowitz has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and public radio’s This American Life. Over the past three years, he has produced three collections of personal narratives for Chicago Public Radio: Stories of Home, Love Stories and Stories of Money.  He is a writer-in-residence at Northwestern University where he teaches every winter, and a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame as the Welch Chair in American Studies where he teaches every fall.  He has also been a writer-in-residence at the University of Chicago.

Kotlowitz’s second book, The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death and America’s Dilemma, focused on the death of Eric McGinnis, a black teenager from Benton Harbor, Michigan and the strained relations that developed between the residents of Benton Harbor and nearby St. Joseph as the investigation proceeded into his death.  The New York Times wrote: “Of all the many books written about race in America in the past couple of years, none has been quite like The Other Side of the River....it is the difference between the two towns, one white, one black, that anchors this story, give it its soul, and makes it important, essential even, for the rest of us to contemplate.” The book received The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction and the Great Lakes Booksellers Award for Non-Fiction.

For more information about this event, contact Dr. Steven Gerencser (574-520-4514) or Nancy Botkin (574-520-4886), the coordinators of the Campus Theme or go to the following website:  Campus Theme

Darrin Doyle’s Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story is a comic novel about love, memory, obesity, adjectives, top-ten lists, fish, and murder. A black comedy in the vein of A Confederacy of Dunces, Revenge follows two middle-agers as they struggle through life.

Doyle’s debut tells the story of Dale Portwit and Mary Ann Tucker, two fragile middle-aged teachers who feel that the peak of life has come and gone. After a failed suicide attempt, Mr. Portwit begins a whirlwind courtship with Mary Ann that leads to wedding bands, a house in the suburbs, and an indulgent love life—but not happiness. Perhaps all that this marriage needs to revitalize itself is a little revenge.

Featuring eccentric topics such as food fetishism and a leg funeral, Doyle’s Revenge is a fresh work of dark comedy. Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago, said, “Revenge is the kind of quirky, subversively off-center novel that page by page accumulates what becomes a sustained inner hilarity.” Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, raved, “Darrin Doyle’s startling first novel is dirty and sweet, funny and terrifying. I’ve never read a book that so daringly and empathetically depicts the sometimes messed up, sometimes beautiful things we do in the name of love.” Christine Schutt, National Book Award finalist, declared, “Revenge is a deftly made, raucous tale of love and its attendant hungers and humiliations.”

Darren Doyle’s fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Long Story, Cottonwood, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. He has received the Border Tuition Scholarship for the New York Summer Writers’ Institute and the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is an assistant professor of English at Central Michigan University and lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan with his wife and two sons.

This event is part of the Creative Writing Program’s “Fiction Reading Series”.  For more information, contact Dr. Kelcey Parker, (574) 520-4503;

Lydia Garver, Doctoral Candidate in Archaeology and Social Context at IU Bloomington, will speak on “Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania Germans:  Ethnic Identity in an Early Consumer Society.”

When people think about diversity in the British American colonies, the division is typically along color lines.  However, the 18th century European-American population was also very heterogenous.  People of German ancestry were, and continue to be, a significant part of the Pennsylvania cultural landscape.  Contemporary religious sects, including the Mennonites and Amish, have shaped our views of ancestral populations resulting in an image of colonial German Americans as insular, economically conservative, and uninterested in the consumer society that was developing in the 18th century.  This understanding of German Americans has been challenged by some recent archaeological findings resulting in new questions about how German identity impacted people’s engagement in transatlantic markets.  At this talk, we will focus on the Fahnestock family, German immigrants who became members of the influential Ephrata Cloister community, and consider the role consumer goods played in their ethnic and religious identity.

The MoNA Collaboration has been successful at measuring a number of neutron unbound ground states and excited states of exotic nuclei, but such experiments have been restricted to cases where the decay energy associated with a resonant state was relatively low.  With this project a number of additional important measurements will be accessible.  The MoNA Collaboration will expand on its past success and measure additional unbound excited states in light neutron-dripline nuclei.

A large number of undergraduate researchers will benefit from the actual construction, testing and commissioning of the array, as well as participation in experiments at a world-class facility. In the past, this participation has included responsibility for analysis and paper authorship.  A large fraction of the students involved have continued on to graduate work and ultimately enhance the nation’s scientific infrastructure.  Since the future Facility for Rare Isotope Beams will be built at Michigan State University, LISA will serve as a “day one” device there.  Students who have worked on this project could be part of the workforce at this future facility and future undergraduates will also have access to this new facility.

For more information about MoNA, go to the following:  MoNA

It is known through a large number of independent astronomical measurements that about 90% of the mass of the universe is in some exotic form yet to be discovered called ‘“dark matter.” COUPP (Chicagoland Observatory of Underground Particle Physics), an experiment being conducted by the University of Chicago, Fermilab and IU South Bend, is a bubble chamber-based detection technique searching for dark matter candidate particles called WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.) WIMPS are predicted to exist by several classes of extensions of our current understanding of the basic constituents of our universe. WIMPS (if they exist) might be the dark matter. Because they interact so feebly with ordinary matter, researchers have only observed their joint gravitational effects. COUPP is meant to be able to directly see these rare and feeble interactions with ordinary atoms. In order to do so, the experiment has to be sited deep underground to shield the detector from cosmic rays which could create signals similar to those created by WIMPs.

After a year spent writing grants in Sedona, Arizona, Karen knew she was ready to start her writing career.  She was even admitted to the graduate program in English here at IU South Bend in order to hone her craft.  Before starting the program, however, she realized she wanted more....she wanted to study what she didn’t know, to find out why things are as they are.  So she is coming back this fall as a “freshperson” to study Philosophy and History and earn two more bachelor’s degrees.  To hear more from Karen about why she has made this choice, listen to her radio piece at WVPE. 

Carville received his PhD in 1989 from the University of Ulster in Belfast.  He worked as Director of Cardiovascular Research at American Biogenetic Sciences from 1989-1997.  While working on a post-doc at University of Notre Dame, Carville started his association with IU South Bend, using office space from the Department of Chemistry, where he and Kirk Guyer eventually developed “Plateletworks,” a blood test performed in the operating room during surgery, in 2000.  The test was crucial for patients undergoing bypass or angioplasty surgery because it allowed physicians to have immediate, accurate information about the patient’s platelet function so that they could monitor and administer appropriate dosages of platelet-inhibiting drugs during surgery.  Carville and Guyer developed courses for the department and mentored students through a summer internship program, hiring students for hands-on experience in their laboratory.  He co-founded Clinical Solutions and Innovations (South Bend), where he also served as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer and was President of Causeway Scientific (Mishawaka).  Arrangements are pending.