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UB to mark academic excellence
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
Jean Malaurie, one of the world’s pioneering Arctic explorers, will receive an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from SUNY at the 4th annual Celebration of Academic Excellence, to be held April 17 in the Center for the Arts, North Campus.
JEAN MALAURIE
The event is UB’s annual university-wide celebration of scholarly, research and creative excellence. It recognizes the university’s outstanding faculty and staff, while placing a special focus on undergraduate student excellence in research, scholarship and creative activities.
“In concert with the scholarly accomplishments of our faculty and the research mission of our university, it is important that UB provide opportunities for academic exploration and inquiry for our undergraduates,” says Michael Ryan, vice provost and dean of undergraduate education. “Undergraduate students in all disciplines are encouraged to engage in a rich variety of research and field experiences beyond the usual laboratory and classroom offerings.”
Ryan points out that the new Undergraduate Academies and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities are examples of initiatives designed to “facilitate mentoring relationships with faculty and to encourage participation of undergraduates in scholarship and research from the time that they enter as first-year students.”
As part of the Celebration of Academic Excellence, undergraduate student investigators will display posters detailing research projects. As of Monday, more than 180 faculty-mentored student projects have been submitted for inclusion in
this year's event, Ryan says, adding that among these presentations will be several that received funding through the Undergraduate Research Awards program sponsored by his office.
The student poster presentations will be on view in the Center for the Arts atrium beginning at 1 p.m. Exhibitions by student artists also will be on display in the ground-floor and first-floor galleries in the CFA.
At 1:30 p.m., a screening of “Drums of Winter: Uksuum Cauyai,” a 1988 documentary about Alaska's Yup'ik Eskimos co-directed by Sarah Elder, professor in the Department of Media Study, College of Arts and Sciences, will be held in the Screening Room of the CFA. The film, which documents the rich tradition of the Yup'iks' music, dance and spiritual world, has been added to the prestigious National Film Registry.
The formal celebration ceremony will begin at 3:30 p.m. in the Mainstage. President John B. Simpson and Satish K. Tripathi, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, will offer remarks.
Simpson and Tripathi will confer the SUNY honorary degree on Malaurie, founder and director of the Center for Arctic Studies at Paris’s School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. His work documenting the Inuits’ relationship with nature has led to the creation of a new field—anthropogeography, the study of man’s relationship to the earth. Moreover, his approach to recording Inuit culture through first-person accounts, rather than through more traditional scientific methods, has revolutionized the study of culture in general.
Malaurie is best known for his first major ethnographic work, “The Last Kings of Thule,” which documents his earliest encounters with the Eskimos and has become a classic in the field. The work has become the cornerstone for the groundbreaking “Terre Humaine” (Human Ground), considered by many to be the world’s most distinguished series of books of modern humanist social science, which Malaurie has overseen for more than 50 years. The series also includes Claude Lévi-Strauss’ “Tristes Tropiques” (Wretched Tropics) and James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” as well as three works by UB faculty members Diane Christian, Bruce Jackson and Barbara Tedlock.
Malaurie’s work has made him one of the Arctic region’s most dedicated and effective advocates. He has served as a policy advisor to four governments related to the Inuit people, and at the invitation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, founded the Polar Academy to train Siberian Inuits to manage their territory following the breakup of the Soviet Union. He organized an international congress that drafted legislation to protect the Arctic against the dangers of global warming, and is working to develop an international research, teaching, museum and conference facility devoted to Arctic ethnographic, cultural and environmental issues.
Malaurie’s work has earned him a number of prestigious merit and service-based awards from around the world, including the Order of the White Bear Club bestowed by Greenland’s prime minister, the Gold Medal of the French Arctic Society and the Patron Medal from the Royal Geographical Society.
The Celebration of Academic Excellence also will recognize a number of faculty and staff achievements, including the selection of “Drums of Winter: Uksuum Cauyai” to the prestigious National Film Registry, UB’s newly named SUNY Distinguished Professors, the recipients of the 2007 Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence, the new UB Distinguished Professor and the recipients of the UB Undergraduate Awards for Excellence in Research, Scholarship and Creativity, who will be announced at the ceremony.
The event will conclude with student performances, among them a selection from the Emerging Choreographers Showcase produced by the Department of Theatre and Dance.
A reception will follow the ceremony.
Members of the university community wishing to attend the Celebration of Academic Excellence should RSVP online by Monday. Click here for more details about the event.