Arts and Culture

In a new book that scholars are calling one of the most important critical studies of Emily Dickinson ever written, Cristanne Miller, SUNY Distinguished Professor of English at the University at Buffalo and a noted Dickinson scholar, poses a significant challenge to popular and longstanding beliefs about the poet and her poetry.

Michael A. Smith, McCosh Professor of Ethics at Princeton University and one of America's leading moral philosophers, will deliver the 2012 George F. Hourani Lectures in Moral Philosophy presented by the Department of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo.

The Center for the Arts at the University at Buffalo will welcome Lily Tomlin on Saturday, April 28, at 7:30 p.m. in the Mainstage Theatre in the Center for the Arts, UB North Campus. The performance is presented by Beechwood Continuing Care. A question and answer period will follow the performance.

They're coming and there are a lot of them: lawyers, journalists, businessmen and -women, professors, poets, playwrights, teachers, literary scholars, moms, dads, grandmas and grandpas -- all of them among the more than 20,000 students who have graduated from the University at Buffalo's stellar Department of English with a BA, MA or PhD since UB was incorporated into the State University of New York in 1962.

The University at Buffalo Department of Visual Studies, in partnership with New York City's Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, will present a lecture by internationally acclaimed artist Ryan Trecartin, named one of the most influential young artists in the world, and his collaborator, Lizzie Fitch.

The University at Buffalo Department of Theatre and Dance will present Grease April 19-21 and 26-28 at 7:30 p.m. and April 22 and 29 at 2 p.m. in the Drama Theatre in the Center for the Arts, UB North Campus. The cast of Grease will be comprised of students from the UB Music Theatre and Dance programs.

Bruce Jackson is known in some circles as the dean of prison culture. Since the early 1960s he has been studying the little-known lives and culture of inmates in one of America's oldest penal institutions, the O.B. Ellis Unit, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison in the Walker County, Texas.

A paper by neuroscientists at the University at Buffalo and Buffalo State College suggests that ingestion of components of afterbirth or placenta -- placentophagia -- may offer benefits to human mothers and perhaps to non-mothers and males.

The Center for the Arts at the University at Buffalo will present Complexions Contemporary Ballet on Thursday, April 26, at 7:30 p.m. in the Mainstage Theatre in the Center for the Arts, UB North Campus. There will be a pre-performance talk at 6:45 p.m. The performance is sponsored by M&T Bank.

A team of four University at Buffalo trivia players will head to Chicago March 30 to take on other college teams in a national, invitation-only quiz bowl. Hands clenching buzzers, they'll field questions on topics including music, literature, mythology, philosophy, geography, astronomy, quantum mechanics and more.