2011—12 SCHOLARS AT HALLWALLS SCHEDULE

Scholars at Hallwalls features eight thought-provoking, award-winning lectures in the humanities, presented in the intellectual and inspiring setting of Hallwalls.

Friday September 23, 2011 marks the start of this new era for Humanities Institute.  The venue is new but the format continues the successful model established in three years at the Albright-Knox.  Faculty Fellows will present their cutting-edge humanities research in terms accessible to those in other disciplines and outside academia.  The events will continue to be social occasions as well, with complimentary hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar. All lectures are free and open to the public.

All members of Women of the Crooked Circle: Linda Drajem, Barbara Faust, Caroline Parrinello, & Kathy Shoemaker

Linda Drajem taught English for many years to secondary students in the Buffalo Public Schools (BPS), and then in the English Department at Buffalo State College. She holds a PhD from UB. She has been published in the Buffalo News, Trees of Surprise, In the Company of Women, Intuitions, The Plowman Anthology, Artvoice, and a volume of poetry, InnerSessions. She is a member of the Milkweed Collective, which provides programs combining art with creative writing, and part of the Writers Corps of Just Buffalo Literary Center. She has taught writing classes (with Shoemaker) for the Jung Center, at Just Buffalo, and elsewhere.

Barbara Q. Faust is a poet, an early childhood teacher in Buffalo (for 27 years), a long-time member of Women of the Crooked Circle, and, previously, Co-Director of the WNY Writing Project. Most recently, her poems have appeared in New York Quarterly. Her work has been published in the Buffalo News, Writers Who Cook, and The Reading Teacher. Her first volume of poetry, InnerSessions, is a shared book which also contains poems by Linda Drajem and Kathy Shoemaker. The three women are currently working with the founder of the Women of The Crooked Circle (and their muse), jimmie margaret gilliam, on a new book about writing poetry. Faust has read her work (with Drajem and Shoemaker) at Talking Leaves…Books, Wordflight at the Crane Branch Library, Indigo Gallery, and Dog Ears Books Fourth Friday. Her nonfiction work has been published in Workshop I & II, edited by Nancie Atwell.

Caroline Parrinello also teaches in the BPS. In 2011 she was one of 20 teachers from WNY to be named "Teacher of Merit" by Business First ... continue reading >>

Hadas Steiner
Associate Professor
Department of Architecture

Habitat and Home: a study in co-evolution

The projected manuscript will provide an historical analysis of the evolving use of the terms "habitat," and by extension "ecology," in architectural discourse, from the abortive "Charter of Habitat" proposed by Le Corbusier at the seventh meeting of CIAM in 1949, through the work of John McHale in the 1970's. It will show how the concepts of habitat and ecology entered the architectural discourse through the biological sciences, and how the understanding of these terms changed throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s as they were variously reinterpreted and employed by Peter and Alison Smithson, Cedric Price and John McHale respectively.

Today, discussions of habitat and ecology in architecture are largely circumscribed by guidelines for environmental sustainability that evince naîveté with respect to the conceptual evolution of these terms. In returning to the radical practices that originally addressed issues of habitat and ecology in the architectural context, this study will provide a theoretical foundation upon which contemporary experimental practices can build a more nuanced response to the environmental needs of today.

Steve McCaffery is the author of over 25 volumes of poetry, a single novel and three volumes of criticism, most recently Slightly Left of Thinking and Everyway Oakly (homolinguistic translations from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.)

Born in England and a long-time resident of Canada he now lives in Buffalo where he teaches at the State University of New York.

M.J.Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Her chapbook, As the Crow Flies was published by Foothills Publishing in 2008 and most recently, a second full collection, Within Reach, by Cherry Grove Collections (2010). She has recent and forthcoming poems in Grey Sparrow Journal, The Bryant Review, Tar River Poetry, The Apple Valley Review, 5923 Quarterly, tinfoildresses, The Chariton Review, The Raleigh Review, Victorian Violet Press, Le Mot Juste, 2009, Nova Scotia Review, Blueline, The Centrifugal Eye; in the following anthologies: From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright, edited by Bruce Hendrickson and Robert Johnson, (Lost Hills Books, 2007); Eating the Pure Light, Poems honoring Thomas McGrath, edited by John Bradley, (Backwaters Press, 2009); The Poets Guide to the Birds, edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, (Anhinga Press, 2009); Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer's Disease, edited by Holly Hughes, (Kent State UP, 2009); Eating her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems, edited by Vasiliki Katsarou, Ruth O'Toole and Ellen Foos, (Ragged Sky Press, 2009). Other publication include a lyrical essay in Gulf Coast, fiction in The Northville Review and Six Sentences.

She is Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Arts Minor Program at St. John Fisher College, and is currently serving as a poetry advisor for the New York Foundation for the Arts (2007-2011).

John Roche is an Associate Professor of English at Rochester Institute of Technology, and also the current President of the Just Poets organization. He earned his PhD from SUNY Buffalo, studying with Robert Creeley and John C. Clarke ... continue reading >>

Carole Maso is the author of ten books including the novels The Art Lover, AVA, and Defiance; prose poems, Beauty is Convulsive and Aureole; Break Every Rule, a book of essays and The Room Lit by Roses, a memoir. Her latest novel Mother and Child will be published in the spring by Counterpoint Press. She is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

Joan Murray is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and essayist, whose poetry volumes include Looking for the Parade (W. W. Norton); Dancing on the Edge and the novel-in-verse Queen of the Mist (both Beacon), and The Same Water (Wesleyan). Her poems have also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Ms., The Nation, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best American Poetry. She has been Poet in Residence at the New York State Writers Institute and a repeat guest on NPR's Morning Edition, and is the editor of The Pushcart Book of Poetry and the Poems to Live By anthologies from Beacon. She has won the National Poetry Series Open Competition; the Wesleyan New Poets Series Competition; Poetry Society of America's Gordon Barber Award; and two Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Old Chatham, NY.

Earth's Daughters Magazine—a feminist literary periodical published in Buffalo by a multi-generational "collective" editorial board consisting of Ansie Baird, Kastle Brill, Jennifer Campbell, Joyce Kessel, Janna Willoughby-Lohr, and ryki zuckerman—is in its 41st year. The Gray Hair Poetry Series, hosted by ryki zuckerman, is in its sixth season.