CAS Communications Blog

The new issue of Salamander, a literary journal edited by English Professor Jennifer Barber and sponsored by Suffolk University’s College of Arts and Sciences, has been released.

Salamander is a journal for poetry, fiction, and memoirs. It combines the best new work by writers now reaching artistic maturity with exciting new work by established writers.

This issue of Salamander features:

• Fiction by David Crouse, Rachel Klein, Dana Kinstler and Kathryn Gahl
• Poetry by John F. Deane, Todd Hearon, Carol Moldaw, Eric Pankey, Christopher Siteman, Pam Bernard, and Jessica Greenbaum
• A portfolio of photographs, “Consider the Oyster,” by Emily Hiestan

Salamander took part in this year’s Associated Writing Programs Conference in New York City.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, the Government Department, in partnership with the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, welcomed Cynthia Enloe, activist, professor in the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment at Clark University, and Director of Clark University’s Women Studies program.  A prominent scholar, Enloe has written extensively on women and militarization. Her books include The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, and Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Enloe, whom Professor Judy Dushku described as “a modern day Simone de Beauvoir” for her ability to speak her mind even in the face of adversity, gave a lecture on Thursday, March 6th, on the role of globalization and its impact on women.

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Award-winning playwright, poet, essayist, critic, and theatre director Hugo Salcedo visited the College of Arts & Sciences as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar from March 3-14, 2008.

Salcedo, of the border city Tijuana, Mexico, is a professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California. With the assistance of student translators, he spoke in numerous classes during his visit.

Professor Moreno’s class studied the playwright’s most famous play, El viaje de los cantors/The Crossing, which earned Salcedo the “Tirso de Molina” for the best Spanish language play of the year. Students gave a dramatic public reading of the play on March 11, 2008 at the C. Walsh Theatre, directed by alumna Colleen Rua.

Students Alisa Cherkasova, Katiuska Cruz, Adrienne Fitzgerald, Margery Furman, Caitlin Greco, Steve McCreary, Kathleen Pena, Robert Terrero, Stanley Thermora and English professor Jeremy Solomons acted out the tragic story of 18 Mexicans trying to cross the U.S. border illegally only to meet with their death trapped in a railroad boxcar. Slides playing behind the actors on stage showed scenes of the border dangers: a barbed wire fence, a U.S. border patrol officer with rifle, a helicopter’s searchlights, a scorpion, a human skull in the desert, a map of the Mexico-U.S. border, a collection of crosses, a church. Continue Reading »

The Honorable Charles Fried, former associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, held a lecture on Modern Liberty, and open discussion for several classes in philosophy and human rights on March 6, 2008.

“Active liberty, as discussed with Justice Breyer earlier this week, is an exercise of joint authority in making government,” said Fried. “Modern liberty is a different concept. It is liberty before you get to government–who are we, what are our claims?”

Drawing on the examples of four different legal cases, including the Charter of the French Language in Quebec, which states that business in Quebec must be carried out in French, Fried raised a series of provocative questions. “Is liberty even possible in a modern administered democratic state?” Continue Reading »

The Honorable Stephen Breyer, US Supreme Court Justice, visited the College of Arts and Sciences on Tuesday, March 4, 2007 to speak to students, faculty and members of the Suffolk community. The webcast is available here.

He began his address with a poem by Tom Wayman, “Did I Miss Anything,” setting a humorous yet reflective tone for the event, then spoke on “active liberty”–the participation of citizens in the democratic process–and the reasons behind writing his book, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution (2005), which included showing students the connection between themselves and their government. “What’s the most important thing we want to teach students?” he asked. “Democracy.”

He continued, “The Constitution is not a document designed to solve the problems of the community at any level—local, state, or national. Rather it is a document that trusts people to solve those problems themselves. And it creates a framework for a government that will help them to do so. Continue Reading »