1/26/2006		Internationally acclaimed pianist, educator to present concert, workshops
1/24/2006		Lititz artist to exhibit ceramics
1/16/2006		Student interns on Capitol Hill
1/12/2006		Polk photography in Lyet Gallery
1/9/2006		'Reading Lolita in Tehran' author to speak
1/4/2006		Cross country captain named top scholar-athlete
1/4/2006		Vote for E-town players, coach for 25th anniversary team

Dennis Maust, an artist from Lititz who teaches at Lebanon Valley College and Eastern Mennonite University’s Lancaster campus, will show his ceramics at Elizabethtown College’s Hess Gallery from Feb. 10 through March 10. The exhibit will open with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m., Feb. 10. Both the reception and exhibit are open to the public free of charge. Hours for Hess Gallery, which is located in Zug Hall, are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays and 1 to 5 p.m. on weekends.

Maust previously served as a ceramics instructor at Messiah College and Lancaster Mennonite High School’s Summer Program and as a visiting assistant professor of art at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y. He has also served as a product development consultant for Ten Thousand Villages, as a product designer for AMKA Registered Trust and as a design consultant for Mennonite Central Committee.

Maust has exhibited recently at the Lancaster Museum of Art, Eastern Mennonite University’s Hartzler Gallery, Harvest View Gallery at the Landis Homes Retirement Community in Lancaster, and as part of an exhibit titled “Voices; Exhibition for the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues” at the United Nations in New York City.

Valerie Reed of Robesonia, a junior English and political science major at Elizabethtown College, spent the fall semester as an intern at the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Subcommittee on Africa, Human Rights, and International Operations. Her duties included drafting colleague letters, managing hearings and editing transcripts. “I cannot emphasize enough what a valuable experience it was interacting with Capitol Hill staff members and gaining practical knowledge of American government and international studies,” she said.

Reed is currently studying at the Queens University International Study Centre at Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex, England. She has served as president of the Elizabethtown College Honors Program Council, student representative on the Honors Program Committee, secretary of the Political Science Club and Academic Integrity Committee, member of Residence Hall Association and staff writer for The Etownian. She has also participated in concert band, orchestra, flute choir and community chorus. In addition, Reed was a research assistant at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, a writing consultant and tutor for Learning Services, and she assisted Associate Professor of English and Modern Languages Mark Harman with manuscript revisions of his translation of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika.”

Reprints of 1930s and 1940s photographs of southern African-American life by renown artist P.H. Polk will be on display in Elizabethtown College’s Lyet Gallery from Feb. 1 through 28. An opening reception is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. on Feb. 1. The reception and exhibit are open to the public free of charge. Hours for Lyet Gallery, which is located in Leffler Chapel and Performance Center, are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends.

These reprints by Polk represent three fascinating themes: African-American rural farm workers; studio portraits of upper-middle class black families; and portraits of Tuskegee Institute school associates, such as George Washington Carver, where Polk was the official school photographer. This exhibit is made possible through the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Azar Nafisi, professor and author of the national bestseller “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,” will speak at Elizabethtown College at 7:30 p.m., Feb. 9, in Leffler Chapel and Performance Center. Nafisi’s book will be available for purchase prior to the talk, and she will sign copies afterward. Free tickets are required for admission and can be obtained by calling Elizabethtown’s Office of College Relations at 717-361-1410. This event is sold out.

Having spent many weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, “Reading Lolita in Tehran” is a portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected Nafisi and her students. The book has been translated in 32 languages and has won diverse literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense, the Frederic W. Ness Book Award, the 2004 Latifeh Yarsheter Book Award, an achievement award from the American Immigration Law Foundation, as well as being a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Memoir.

Nafisi is a visiting professor at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and director of the SAIS Dialogue Project. She previously held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai before her return to the United States in 1997, earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran’s intellectuals, youth and especially young women. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil in 1981 and did not resume teaching until 1987.

Nafisi has written for The New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Her cover story, “The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution’s Woman Problem” published in The New Republic in 1999 has been reprinted into several languages. She is the author of “Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels.” She is currently working on two books, one tentatively titled “The Republic of the Imagination,” which is about the power of literature to liberate minds and peoples, and the other, “Things I Have Been Silent About,” about culture, history and loss.