Dan Preston, editor of the Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington, was recently quoted in a Time Magazine article entitled 5 Solid Party Tips from Presidential History.
5 Solid Party Tips from Presidential History (Time)
4 Simple Resume Tweaks That Will Get You Noticed (NerdWallet.com)
Nomination Reform 2015 (Virginia Capital Connections)
David Long’s Composition Performed in France
Professor of Music and Composer-in-Residence David J. Long’s composition Homage to Normandy was performed on Jan. 24, 2014 by La Musique Saint-Romain de Reiningue. The performance celebrated the liberation of Reiningue during World War II. Homage to Normandy is a tribute to all the soldiers who lost their lives during the Battle of Normandy in the Second World War.
The first movement, ‘Elegy: For All of the Fallen,’ is a beautifully powerful chorale that builds to a glorious climax before calming again. The second movement, ‘In Resolution: Toward the Final Victory,’ captures the brute force of the battle and drives all the way to the end in this fitting homage.
National Security Lecture to be Broadcast in Fredericksburg (The Free Lance-Star)
Gaines Reads Poetry at Bridgewater International Conference
Emeritus Professor of French Jim Gaines recently read selections from his poetry at the 2nd Biennial Bridgewater International Poetry Conference hosted by Bridgewater College on Jan. 15-18, 2015. Approximately 60 poets from a variety of countries met for the gathering in the Shenandoah Valley, which had Skype links to poets in France and Japan. Gaines’s selections included samples of his original work and also from his translations of the French World War I poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
Denhere Presents at Joint Mathematics Meetings
Melody Denhere, assistant professor of mathematics, presented her work “Rank Estimation for the Functional Linear Model” in a session on Probability and Statistics at the Joint Mathematics Meetings which were held in San Antonio, Texas from Jan. 10 – 13. This work was a collaboration with Huybrechts Bindele from the University of South Alabama.
Earlier, Denhere also attended the 2014 Blackwell-Tapia Conference held in Los Angeles, California from Nov. 14 – 15. The conference and prize honors David Blackwell and Richard Tapia (who won the National Medal of Science in 2010), two seminal figures who inspired a generation of African-American, Native American and Latino/Latina students to pursue careers in mathematics. At the conference, Denhere presented a poster on work she carried out with her student, Victoria Moore, during the summer through the Jepson Summer Science Institute.
Farnsworth Gives Lecture on Virginia Politics
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, recently gave a lecture at Carter Hall in Boyce, Virginia, entitled, “The Ever-changing State of Virginia Politics,” as part of the Virginia Candidate Training Program. The nonpartisan program, sponsored by the Sorensen Institute of the University of Virginia, gives future political candidates information about campaigning for office and about key Virginia policy challenges.
Al-Tikriti Publishes Article on 16th Century Captives
The Turkish History Foundation [TTK: Türk Tarih Kurumu], recently published the conference proceedings from the “International Piri Reis and Turkish Maritime History Symposium” [“Uluslararası Piri Reis ve Türk Denizcilik Tarihi Sempozyumu”], which Professor of History and American Studies Nabil Al-Tikriti participated in at Istanbul in September, 2013. The title of this peer-reviewed volume is Findings in Turkish Maritime History [Türk Deniz Tarihi Bildiriler]. Al-Tikriti‘s contribution is entitled “Advocating for Release: the al-Dārānī Appeals,” and can be downloaded from this link: https://www.academia.edu/10447817/Advocating_for_Release_the_al-D%C4%81r%C4%81n%C4%AB_Appeals.In this submission, Al-Tikriti briefly summarizes and describes two letters written in the early 16th century by individuals identified separately as Abū Bakr al-Dārānī and Taḳīyüddīn Dārānī, who may have been the same person, and were at one time prisoner(s) of the Knights of St. John in Rhodes. The first letter, in Arabic, was translated into modern Turkish by İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı in 1954, and translated into French by Nicolas Vatin in 1994. The second letter was translated from Ottoman Turkish into French in 1994 by Nicolas Vatin, who described the letter, stating that the reverse side of the paper probably contained the original Arabic letter, and that it was probably written at some point after 1516. Al-Tikriti thinks it might have been written during Bayezid II’s (d. 1512) reign, but otherwise concurs with both Uzunçarşılı’s and Vatin’s earlier analyses.