Woods Lecture Series Presents Michael Mann
PUBLISHED ON Oct 21 2015
Michael Mann (“The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars”) will speak in the Atherton Union Reilly Room on October 27 at 7:30 PM as part of the J. James Woods Lectures on the Sciences and Mathematics.
All events in the series are free and open to the public without tickets.
For more information and to sign up for the series email list, visit https://www.butler.edu/woods-lectures. For accessibility information or to request disability-related accommodations, please visit www.butler.edu/event-accommodations/
Mann’s “Hockey Stick graph” presents understandable data that connects global warming to increased industrialization and fossil fuel use. Mann, the Director of Pennsylvania State University Earth System Science Center, pioneered statistical analysis of historic climate change. He actively defends climate science against “scamming” detractors.
He will be followed in the series by Penn State Professor of Anthropology Nina Jablonski (December 2, 7:30 p.m.) speaking on "Why Skin Color Matters."
Media contact:
Marc Allan
mallan@butler.edu
317-940-9822
Woods Lecture Series Presents Michael Mann
PUBLISHED ON Oct 06 2015
Author Laila Lalami will speak in the Atherton Union Reilly Room on Tuesday, October 13, at 7:30 PM as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series.
The event is free and open to the public without tickets. For more information, call 317-940-9861.
Lalami is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist, and The Moor’s Account, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year, a nominee for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, the Guardian, the New York Times, and in many anthologies. Her work has been translated into 10 languages. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. Lalami is a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.
Media contact:
Marc Allan
mallan@butler.edu
317-940-9822
Visiting Writers Series Presents NoViolet Bulawayo
PUBLISHED ON Feb 12 2015
Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner NoViolet Bulawayo will speak on February 23 at 7:30 p.m. in the Atherton Union Reilly Room as part of Butler University’s spring 2015 Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series.
All events in the series are free and open to the public without tickets. For more information, call 317-940-9861.
Bulawayo is the author of We Need New Names (May 2013), which has been recognized with the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Pen/Hemingway Award, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award (second place), as well as been selected for the National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” list .
We Need New Names was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award and selected to the New York Times Notable Books of 2013 list, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers list, and others. Her story “Hitting Budapest” won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.
She earned her MFA at Cornell University, where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she now teaches as a Jones Lecturer in Fiction. She grew up in Zimbabwe.
Media contact:
Marc Allan
mallan@butler.edu
317-940-9822
PUBLISHED ON Aug 25 2014
Lizzie Jacobs remembers the story of that day in 1997 when she left her suburban Chicago home for Williams College in Massachusetts.
“Arthur, my teddy bear, had fallen out of the minivan—or possibly been pushed,” she said. “It was like a cord cutting. I think I was nervous, but I also was excited because I felt like everything was ahead of me and I was on my own. I actually wasn’t on my own—my sister went there—but I felt like I was on my own in all the good ways.”
So when Jacobs, the Co-Executive Producer, Animation and Senior Editor for Print at StoryCorps, got in front of Butler University’s Class of 2018 on Monday at Clowes Memorial Hall, she understood how they might be feeling.
Jacobs was at Butler to talk about Ties That Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps, this year’s common reading for the incoming class. Jennifer Griggs, Director of Butler’s Learning Resource Center, said the University chose Ties That Bind as the common read because “it really had an angle on diversity that matched our common values.”
“I believe this book is a perfect book for this time in your lives,” Jacobs told the 974 first-year students. “It’s a book about relationships—the surprising ways they begin and the myriad ways they change our lives for the better. And, yes, you’re all here to learn. You come here to learn and to prepare for the working world, and you’ll be in labs and music rooms and classrooms and library carrels.
“But all that time, if you’re smart, you’ll be focusing just as much on the people around you—your professors, of course, but also the staff in the dining hall and the dean’s office, the people maybe at the pizza joint, and, most of all, each other. The people sitting to the left and the right of you and that you’ll be surrounded by every day of your time here. Your freshman roommate, your lab mate, classmate, teammate. And years from now, you’ll remember and lean on the things you learned from each other as much as what you learned in class. And if you’re lucky, there’ll be two or three whose friendship will change your life forever.”
Jacobs said being part of StoryCorps, the national project to inspire people to record each other’s stories, has taught her to ask questions that get meaningful answers and encourage loved ones to be open and honest.
Too often, she said, we smooth things over and keep the conversation light. But StoryCorps, which over the past 10 years has recorded the stories of more than 50,000 people, shows that asking the right questions and encouraging others to talk helps us understand each other.
“People actually want to be asked about their lives,” Jacobs said. “When you ask them to share something about themselves, it tells them they’re important to you. So in these coming months and years, as you spend time together … try asking them about their grandparents. Or what their dreams are. Why did they come here? What are they proudest of? These are the big questions we encourage you to ask. And you might get some surprising answers. You might actually get to know one another.”
Media contact:
Marc Allan
mallan@butler.edu
317-940-9822