Category: College of Arts and Sciences

Join the UMW Galleries for “Mysteries of The Night Café: Hidden Key to the Spirituality of Vincent Van Gogh,” presented in conjunction with the traveling exhibition Van Gogh, Lichtenstein, Whistler: Masterpieces of World Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The lecture will be held on Sunday, October 30 at 2 p.m. inside Combs Hall, Room 139. Admission is free. However, pre-registration is required to ensure proper seating.

Dr. Cliff Edwards, professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, explores the spirituality of one of the world’s most beloved artists, Vincent Van Gogh, through one of Western art’s most mysterious paintings, The Night Café. Enter the imagination of Van Gogh through the books he read, the art he admired, and the people with whom he identified, and arrive at startling conclusions that include a new and deeply spiritual understanding of a café after midnight and the “night prowlers” who inhabit it.

Please call the Galleries at (540) 654-1013 or e-mail Justine Geiger, Visitor Services Coordinator, at jgeiger@umw.edu to reserve your seats.

This program has been organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is supported by the Paul Mellon Endowment.

Jeff McClurken, chair and associate professor of history and American studies, had the article “Teaching and Learning with Omeka: Discomfort, Play, and Creating Public, Online, Digital Collections” published in the collection “Learning through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.”

The essay was released in electronic form at http://learningthroughdigitalmedia.net. In addition, it was issued in published form by The New School as part of Mobility Shifts, a project supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The article, which discusses the value of discomfort and open-source tools in teaching digital history, features a number of digital history projects by UMW students.

Read the article in its entirety.

Jess Rigelhaupt, assistant professor of history and American studies, and four UMW students served on a panel on “Oral History and Documenting James Farmer’s Legacy at the University of Mary Washington” at the 2010 meeting of the Oral History Association. Christiane Lauer ’11, Sadie Smith ’11, Justin Mattos ’10 and MacKenzie Murphy ’10, with Rigelhaupt, presented papers based on interviews the students conducted in Rigelhaupt’s course “Oral History and James Farmer,” which was taught in fall 2009. The interviews are available at farmeroralhistory.umwblogs.org, a website that documents Farmer’s contributions to UMW and was built as part of the course.  Lauer’s and Smith’s participation in the Oral History Association annual meeting was supported by an undergraduate research grant from the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office.

Associate Professors of Biology Andrew Dolby and Deborah O’Dell were awarded a $1,000 grant by the Virginia Society of Ornithology for their joint project Enzyme immunoassay quantification of Heat Shock Protein 60 and its application to avian conservation biology.

At the Virginia Academy of Science’s Fall Undergraduate Research Meeting, held at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond in October, O’Dell’s student, Anum Shaikh, was awarded funding for undergraduate research. Anum will study the “Effects of Combined Vitamin E and C Treatment on Plaque Formation in Alzheimer’s Disease.”