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Norfolk to read in fiction series
Distinguished British novelist Lawrence Norfolk will conclude this year’s Exhibit X Fiction Series with a reading at 7 p.m. on Wednesday in Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, located in Babeville, formerly The Church, 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo.
The first international guest to participate in the Exhibit X series, Norfolk will read a selection from his novel-in-progress, which is set in 17th century England during the Civil War, as well as answer questions. A book signing will follow the reading.
The Exhibit X Fiction Series is presented by the Department of English, College of Arts and Scienes. Norfolk’s talk, as well as all others in the series, is free and open to the public.
Norfolk has been called “the most successful British novelist of his generation” by The Independent and “Britain’s brightest young writer” by The Guardian. He is the author of three historical novels—“Lemprière’s Dictionary,” “The Pope’s Rhinoceros” and “In the Shape of a Boar,” which together have sold more than a million copies and been translated into 34 languages.
Norfolk, who lives in London with his wife and two sons, is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Budapest Festival Prize for Literature. His work has been short-listed for the Impac Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Award and the Wingate/Jewish Quarterly Prize for Literature.
In 1992, he was listed as one of Granta magazine’s "Twenty Best Young British Writers."
Students to show work at Atelier ’08
At its annual atelier, the School of Architecture and Planning celebrates work completed throughout the year by undergraduate and graduate students in architecture and in urban and regional planning.
Atelier ’08 will open tomorrow with a reception from 7-9 p.m. on the first floor of Crosby Hall, South Campus.
Also on the first floor will be an exhibition of drawings, models and other work produced in freshman and sophomore architecture studios.
Junior, senior and graduate student architecture projects will be exhibited on the second floor and graduate work in architecture, urban and regional planning and environmental design will be shown on the third floor.
Both open house and reception are free and open to the public.
A second and related exhibition in UB’s Anderson Gallery will feature models of housing units for athletes that satisfy their domestic needs, as well as their requirements as performers. The show opened March 22 and will continue through April 21 in the gallery, 1 Martha Jackson Place, off Englewood Avenue in Buffalo. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and from 1-5 p.m. on Sunday.
The models were produced by freshman students in a studio taught by Joyce Hwang, assistant professor of architecture.
A third exhibition, “Architecture of Doubt,” will open tomorrow in the James Dyett Gallery in Hayes Hall and will run through April 28. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
It will be present the work of Spanish architect Eva Franch Gilabert, the school’s 2007-08 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow. Her research in Buffalo focuses on three operative fields: utopias (historic), metaphors (formal—cognoscitive) and atmospheres (experiential).
Weis to edit journal
Lois Weis, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School of Education, has been named editor of the American Educational Research Journal, widely considered to be the most prestigious research journal in the education field.
Weis’ appointment also means the nationally respected educational journal will be housed in the Graduate School of Education in Baldy Hall.
She will be joined by two associate editors: Jaekyung Lee, UB associate professor of counseling, school and educational psychology, and Philip G. Altbach, professor of higher education at Boston College and a former UB faculty member.
A past president of the American Educational Studies Association, Weis has co-authored or edited numerous books and articles that examine issues of race, class, gender, education and the economy. She has been on the editorial boards of several journals, including Educational Policy, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and Review of Educational Research. Weis and co-author Michelle Fine received the outstanding book award from the prestigious Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.
Lee is known for his critical attention to inequity in education and quantitative methodology. Altbach, director of Boston College’s Center for International Education, is considered an expert in globalization of higher education and other issues facing colleges looking to expand their presence in other parts of the world.
UB Women’s Club to elect officers
The UB Women’s Club will hold its annual election meeting at 10 a.m. Saturday in the Center for Tomorrow, North Campus.
All members are encouraged to attend to elect officers for the coming year.
Also at this time, a proposed change in the club’s constitution will be presented for a vote of the membership.
Three UB students—Renee Flor, Przemyslaw Garbaczewski and Bevano Liant—will be awarded $1,000 Anne P. Brody Scholarships. The students were selected to receive the scholarships in recognition of their exceptional scholarship, as well as their commitment to the university and community service.
For more information about the UB Women’s Club, call Joan Ryan at 662-9332.
Smolin to deliver Rustgi lecture
Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist and founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, will speak on “Using the Universe as a Microscope to Probe the Micro-Structure of Space and Time” at the 14th annual Moti Lal Rustgi Memorial Lecture at 4:30 p.m. April 4 in 225 Natural Sciences Complex, North Campus.
The Rustgi lecture, presented by the Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences, will be free and open to the public. The annual lecture is held to honor Moti Lal Rustgi, professor of physics at UB from 1966-92.
Smolin’s main contributions to the field of physics are in the area of quantum gravity. He was, with Abhay Ashtekar and Carlo Rovelli, a founder of the approach known as loop quantum gravity, but he also has contributed to other approaches, including string theory and causal dynamical triangulations.
He is known as well for proposing the notion of the landscape of theories, based on his application of Darwinian methods to cosmology. In addition, he has contributed to the foundations of quantum mechanics, elementary particle physics and theoretical biology.
He is the author of three books—“Life of the Cosmos,” “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity” and “The Trouble With Physics”—which are, in part, philosophical explorations of issues raised by contemporary physics.
A graduate of Hampshire College with a degree in physics and philosophy, Smolin received a doctorate in theoretical physics from Harvard University and held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now KITP) at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago.
He was a member of the faculty at Yale, Syracuse and Penn State universities, and helped found the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Penn State. He has been a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Waterloo since September 2001.
For more information about the Rustgi lecture, call 645-2017, or email Michael Fuda, professor of physics, at fuda@buffalo.edu.