Noteworthy Spring 2015

Mark Conway is a recipient of the Established Artist Award from the Central Minnesota Arts Board/McKnight. The distinction, which includes a $5,000 prize, recognizes artists with a history of exhibition, performances, publications or other notable contributions to their local arts community through personal creative output. Conway is an award-winning poet and executive director of the Literary Arts Institute at CSB. 

Kaarin S. Johnston, professor of theater at CSB/SJU, gave a presentation, "Environmental Inspiration: Creativity from Trash," at the Practice/Production Symposium at the Mid America Theatre Conference March 21 in Kansas City, Missouri. The presentation was a case study of the CSB/SJU theater department's environmentally sustainable production "Bourgeois Gentleman."

Wendy Sterba, professor of languages/culture at CSB/SJU, has published her new book entitled "Reel Photos: Balancing Art and Truth in Contemporary Film." The publication puts forth a novel approach to the study of cinematic arts in which the author examines the functionality of photographs in movies in contrast with the functionality of film photography as an art.

Fr. Columba Stewart gave a talk, "Outracing ignorance: Rescuing the Christian Manuscripts and Culture of Syria and Iraq," on March 5, at Princeton University. Stewart is executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at SJU. His presentation was sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Deborah Pembleton, assistant professor of global business leadership at CSB/SJU, was invited by the PhD Project to be a guest panelist at the Forum on Workplace Inclusion held March 17-19 at the Minneapolis Convention Center.  The PhD Project was founded to increase the diversity of business school faculty. The Forum on Workplace Inclusion hosted more than 1,200 attendees committed to increasing diversity and inclusion within their organizations. The panel presentation was entitled "Meet Us At The Intersection of Business and Academe! Creating Workforce Diversity through The PhD Project!"

Mark Conway, executive director of CSB Literary Arts Institute, has poems in the fall/winter 2014 issues of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Field and Water~Stone Review as well as other work forthcoming in the spring 2015 editions of the Southwest Review, Poetry Northwest and Provincetown Arts.

Yvette Piggush, assistant professor of English at CSB/SJU, is one of 27 collegiate faculty members around the country who have been selected to participate in an interdisciplinary seminar on Slave Narratives.  This seminar will be led by David Blight, professor of American history at Yale University, and will be held this June on the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut.  The competition for participation was rigorous, with three times as many applicants as there were available spaces.

Kaarin S. Johnston, CSB/SJU professor of theater, presented “Becoming Human: An Exegetical Space for the Development of Liminal Humans"; a paper for the Working Group titled Childhood, Performance, and the Post-Human: Youth as a Human Conduit, at The American Society for Theatre Research Conference held Nov. 20, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Michael Hemmesch, SJU executive director of communications and marketing, was elected to a two-year term on the executive committee of Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Counselors to Higher Education section. The executive committee is the governing leadership group of the 465-member professional interest section providing programming, professional development and networking support among PR practitioners serving the higher education sector in the U.S. and abroad.

Troy Fritz, executive director of major giving at SJU, and Raj Chaphalka, director of annual giving at SJU, co-presented “Using Your Technology,” with Andrew Reeher, president and CEO, Reeher LLC at the 40th annual CASE District V Conference Dec. 15 in Chicago.

The CSB/SJU Department of Chemistry congratulates Emma Bonglack, FoCuS Scholar, CSB '17. She won a presentation award at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students. She is one of 20 award winners (out of about 3,000 people) for cancer research work she did last summer at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Nathaniel Dubin, CSB/SJU professor emeritus of modern and classical languages, is the recipient to the Modern Language Association’s 10th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for an Outstanding Translation of a Literary Work for his translation of The Fabliaux, published by Liveright.