Danforth professor of Religion Grover Zinn presented a paper, "Revision: A New 'Reading' of the Central Tympanum of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis," (near Paris) at the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, held in Boston, 30 March to 1 April 1995. In January he chaired a session at the winter meeting of the American Society of Church History in Chicago. The session was titled "The Friars and the Jews." The commentator for the session was Katherine Tachau '72, who is on the faculty of the University of Iowa.
The YWCA has named 10 Greater Cleveland Women of Achievement for 1995, including associate professor of African-American studies Adrienne Jones. They will be honored at a ceremony tomorrow. Jones gave the keynote address, "Reclaiming the Legacy," at the 83rd annual luncheon of the Phillis Wheatley Association 22 April. The association runs a settlement house that originally also served as the country's largest independent home for African-American women; since the 1960s it has been a settlement house and a home for senior citizens. In February Jones served on the National Endowment for the Arts panel on special exhibitions for museums. About eight people served on the panel; "I was the one lay person," she says.
Associate professor of economics Stephen Sheppard has won a Wolfram Research Visiting Scholar Grant. With it, he will develop software for student use in three courses: Environmental Economics; Land, Location, and the Environment; and Advanced Microeconomics. The software will, he says, be useful to "economists, political scientists, and policy analysts looking to explore the relation between environmental quality, political outcomes, housing markets, and the distribution of benefits." The grant includes a free copy of Wolfram's Mathematica program, technical support, and travel costs and expenses for consultation at Wolfram Research offices in Champaign, Illinois. Sheppard began developing the software program to use in his own research and in that of an honors student, Christopher Elmendorf '94.
FAVA (Firelands Association for the Visual Arts) is presenting a 10-year retrospective of the color woodblock prints of Paul Arnold, Eva and John Young-Hunter emeritus professor of art. The solo exhibition, titled "A Founder's Imprint," opens with a public reception Friday 19 May from 6 to 8 pm and continues through 16 July. On Saturday 20 May, from noon to 6 pm, Arnold will demonstrate his woodcut technique at FAVA as part of northeast Ohio's Artist Open Studio Days. On Wednesday 31 May he will give a gallery talk about his work.
Denitza Kostova '97, who studies with professor of violin Taras Gabora, recently won the $700 Bach Prize for strings at the Kingsville International Music Competition in Kingsville, Texas. More than one hundred string players submitted audition tapes for the competition; from them 30 musicians from 13 countries were chosen to perform in Kingsville. Kostova is a native of Bulgaria.
The kosher co-op and Oberlin College Hillel have won a William Haber Award for programming quality in the Jewish campus community. The kosher co-op, which provides kosher meals for the Oberlin Jewish community, is a student-run enterprise supervised by Hillel director Rabbi Shimon Brand. As a part of the Oberlin student co-operative association (OSCA), "it attracts many politically aware students who are committed to co-operative values," says Daniel Birnbaum, Hillel intern in the office of chaplains. It is "a model of diversity, pluralism and tolerance," he says. "It supports observant and liberal Jews and Muslims who want to follow religious dietary laws, as well as Christians who appreciate the cultural and spiritual environment."
Oberlin's Hillel has won two other William Haber awards (Observer 18 March 1993), which are made by the national Hillel Foundation.
