Professional Activities
Brian Quigley, Counseling Center, presented at the 66th Annual Conference for the Association for University and Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) in Salt Lake City, UT on “Creating a Service Model & Departmental Structure that Enables the Delivery of Services to the Largest Proportion of Students.”
Rosemary Gianno (Anthropology) presented a paper, “Landscape of Ghosts: A Semelai shaman’s cosmological map,” in a plenary session “Healing Practices in Ritual and Narrative” at the International Society for Academic Research on Shamanism Conference entitled “Sacred Landscapes and Conflict Transformation: History, Space, Place and Power in Shamanism,” in Delphi, Greece, October 9-13. The paper concerned a cosmological map sketched by Kak, a Semelai shaman, that brings together distinct narratives of sickness, healing and death. This paper interpreted the map through the lens of Semelai cultural models of healing and dying. Semelais are an Orang Asli group in the southern lowlands of Peninsular Malaysia. Analysis of the b-blyan, an all-night trance ritual in which the shaman’s soul searches for the patient’s soul, suggests that the ritual restricts the movements of the shaman’s soul while granting him exceptional spiritual and healing powers. This shamanic journey is one narrative indexed in the map; others include two Semelai magical incantations, their mortuary practices, categories of death, and finally, the question of divine reward and retribution. In the map, Kak attempts to reconcile these central, but somewhat disjunctive, cultural models.
Dr. Skye Stephenson, Director of the Global Education Office, chaired and presented a session about “Sacred Aspects of Study Away” at the NAFSA region XI Conference in Farmington, Connecticut on October 22.
Seelan Manickam (Music Department) is a featured performer on a new recording of Robert J. Bradshaw’s opera Deus ex Machina, with Cape Ann Opera. The recording received three awards (including two Gold Medals) from the 2015 Global Music Awards, which described the opera as “a singular and exceptional work.” For more information on Cape Ann Opera and Mr. Bradshaw’s award-winning “graphic novel steampunk opera,” visit http://www.capeannopera.org. Professor Manickam is also featured on a recent recording by Bala Brass, a professional quintet dedicated to furthering the art of brass music performance. Bala Brass’s debut CD, Revealed (2015), is under consideration for the 58th Grammy Awards. For more information on Bala Brass, visit http://www.balabrass.org.
Patricia Pedroza González, American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, was invited by Vermont Humanities Council to host and facilitate conversations on “Latino Americans: 500 Years of History” screenings and discussions. The series of films will be hosted by Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro from October 28 to November 18. This programming initiative is produced by the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of “The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square.” The events are free to the public at Brooks Memorial Library Brattleboro on Wednesdays at 7 p.m.
