3/31/2009		Through April 21 Sculpture & Photography Show in Zug Hall
3/27/2009		College Receives $1.1 Millon Gift for Endowed Chair
3/27/2009		TONIGHT -- Percussion Ensemble of Ragtime, Brazilian Folk and Drumming
3/26/2009		April 2nd: Passover Seder Meal for Campus and Community
3/26/2009		April 6 -- Spring Student Recital of Solo and Chamber Music
3/25/2009		E-town Professor Wes McDonald Featured on WITF Smart Talk TV
3/25/2009		Elizabethtown Sponsors Event on Modern China with Leslie T. Chang Speaker
3/25/2009		TONIGHT -- Anime Masterpiece, Tekkonkinkreet, Screened
3/25/2009		4/16 Racism Among Evangelicals: Religion and Race Expert to Speak
3/25/2009		April 4 and 5 -- Student Dancers to Perform “In Motion”
3/10/2009		Harpsichord Performance to be Held at Elizabethtown College
3/9/2009		Critically Acclaimed Kafka Scholar Mark Harman to Read from "Amerika"
3/9/2009		Elizabethtown College Presents Spring Choral Showcase
3/9/2009		Elizabethtown College Presents Inaugural Campus New Playwright Fest
3/9/2009		"God Bless the Shadows" A New Play About Mark Twain's Daughter
3/9/2009		TONIGHT Nobel Laureate on Peace and Global Women's Rights
3/9/2009		"JOY LUCK CLUB" Star Speaks on Campus

Turnbull-Jamieson Endowed Chair Created

(ELIZABETHTOWN, PA – March 27, 2009) – Elizabethtown College has received a family estate gift of more than $1.1 million to fund the Turnbull-Jamieson Chair in memory of Craig J. Turnbull, Florence O. Turnbull, Katherine E. Jamieson, and Lorraine L. Jamieson. This endowed Chair provides funding for teaching in the accounting field at Elizabethtown College. The endowment was established from the remainder of the Turnbull-Jamieson Trust established by Craig & Florence Turnbull and Lorraine Jamieson, and by additional gifts from Lorraine Jamieson

Lorraine, who was Katherine’s daughter and Craig’s sister, attended, but did not graduate from Elizabethtown College.  Still, she returned often for activities and reunions with the Class of 1935. Lorraine supported the College throughout her lifetime.  She died September 27, 2005 at the age of 92.

“We are extremely grateful for this generous gift from Lorraine and her family,” said Theodore E. Long, President. “I always got a lift from her endearing spirit and I am saddened by her passing. Her great legacy will live on through the creation of this important fund and continue to benefit students for many years.”

Ragtime, Brazilian Folk Music, Drum and Dance

 to be Performed

On Wednesday, April 15 the Elizabethtown College Percussion Ensemble and E-town Congueros, both under the direction of James Armstrong, will present a spring percussion concert. Armstrong is an instructor in percussion in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts. This event will be held in the Brossman Commons Event Space starting at 7:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.

The percussion ensemble will present works by Grainger, GH Green, Rosauro and others, covering a wide range of styles including ragtime, Brazilian folk music, and standard western percussion ensemble literature. The E-town Congueros will perform traditional drumming and singing from the Haitian Vodou tradition, as well as traditional drum and dance from Ghana, West Africa.

The Department of Fine and Performing Arts plays a major role in fulfilling the College’s mission “to nurture sound intellectual judgment, keen moral sensitivity, and an appreciation for beauty in the world.” In the process of acquiring knowledge of the arts, students develop aesthetic judgment and an appreciation for the value of the arts to humanity. The Department encourages students to reach their highest potentials and to use their knowledge and their talents to benefit others.

On Thursday, April 2 Elizabethtown College will hold a traditional Passover Seder meal at 6:30 p.m., sponsored by Hillel, Elizabethtown College's Jewish Student Union.  The group’s Model Passover Seder celebrates traditional Jewish customs during the Passover Seder meal. The Seder is an integral part of the Jewish faith, celebrating the liberation of the Jewish people during the Exodus from Egypt, thus it is a special occasion for praise and thanksgiving. Ms. Alison Cohen, president of E-town’s Hillel, invites the entire campus and members of local towns to join in the celebration, “Judaism is very much a "cultural" faith where specific cuisine, customs, and gatherings are essential. We welcome the opportunity to host students and our neighbors at our Seder meal.” The event is open to the public for $10. Campus members with a meal plan will be "swiped for one meal."

Hillel strives to create a warm, social, and educational environment to those who practice Judaism both culturally and religiously as well as educate those who do not practice Judaism, hosting events to celebrate holidays, hold social gatherings, perform community service, and extend awareness and cultural interest to the campus and surrounding community of projects involving the Holocaust and Jewish holidays. The event will be held at the Susquehanna Room in Myer Residence Hall.

On Monday, April 6 at 7:30 p.m., the Elizabethtown College Department of Fine and Performing Arts will present a student recital of solo and chamber music in Zug Recital Hall. The concert will feature a wide range of music for large and small groups by composers as diverse as 16th-century Italian composer Giovanni Gabrieli and 20th-century American composer Samuel Barber, a native of West Chester, PA. The performance will also feature favorite works by Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and others. The event is free and open to the public.

Twenty-three student performers will take part in the recital, including vocalists Laura Francis, David Hiddeman, Alena Lerch, Maggie Sabota, Elizabeth Shea, Nathan Shughart, and Michael Tschop. Pianists featured in the recital are Stephanie Baumann, Katelynn Olsavick and Alison Sailer. Guitarist Mike Sweeney will perform along with brass players Kristyn Algieri, Kyle Bauman, Danielle-Lynn Caggiano, Crystal Connelly, Austin DeMarco, Travis Lucas, Amanda Marfisi, Elizabeth Michel, Kayne Neugebauer, Charles Reppucci, Megan Thaler, and Joseph Zielinski.

On Friday, March 20, on channel WITF-TV’s award-winning Smart Talk, Dr. W. Wesley McDonald, political science, debated a local lawyer on the topic of academic freedom. In light of the recent controversy over Bill Ayers’ appearance at Millersville University, the show featured a lively debate on the merits and rights of colleges inviting controversial and possibly lawbreaking guests to speak on campus. 
 
Smart Talk is a part of WITF-TV's news and public affairs programming block titled Friday Night Insight hosted by Nell McCormack Abom. 

“Love and Money: The Many Lives of a Chinese Factory Girl”

Elizabethtown Sponsors Event on Modern China with Leslie T. Chang Speaker

Elizabethtown, PA – March 17, 2009 – On Wednesday, March 25, the Faculty International Scholarship Seminar will host author Leslie T. Chang at 7:00 p.m. in the College event space. The lecture is part of the Asian Studies program and he first in a series of events this spring at he Elizabethtown campus. Ms. Chang served as correspondent for The Wall Street Journal for a decade in China, specializing in stories detailing socioeconomic influences on the transformation of China’s institutions and its people. Her first book, in 2008,“Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China,” traces the lives of several young women from the countryside who work in a factory in South China, interwoven with her own family history of migrations within China and to the West. The publisher, Random House, introduced the publication as “a book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.” In addition, she has been published in "National Geographic Magazine and is a graduate of Harvard University with a degree in American History and Literature. Chang has also worked as a journalist in the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. 

Elizabethtown College Presents Anime Masterpiece, Tekkonkinkreet

Internationally Acclaimed Author, Frederik Schodt, to Discuss Journey of Anime

He recently won a prestigious Osamu Tezuka Culture award for his work on manga and is the author of The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom and The Manga/Anime Revolution as well as Manga! Manga! The film will be screened from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. in the Gibble Auditorium, at Elizabethtown College where Mr. Schodt will conduct the discussion on the film, the story of two young men surviving in the world of a post-apocalyptic “future world.” The film and discussion is free and open to the public.

Racism Among Evangelicals: Religion and Race Expert to Speak at Elizabethtown College

(ELIZABETHTOWN, PA, March 20, 2009) -- Elizabethtown College is presenting a workshop, “Divided by Faith: Racial Diversity and Anabaptists Today,” on Thursday, April 16, from 1:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., in the Young Center’s Bucher Meetinghouse. Sponsored by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies and the Sociology and Anthropology Department of the college, the workshop features Michael O. Emerson, Ph.D. Emerson is the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology and founding director of the Center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life at Rice University. The workshop is open to the public free of charge.

Emerson will discuss his research on racism among American evangelicals and share his stories and findings from multi-ethnic congregations in the U.S. Also included will be an overview of findings about race and racism from Church Member Profile 2006 (a study of Anabaptists in the U.S.) by Elizabethtown College professors Conrad Kanagy and Jeff Bach, and responses by several Mennonite and Church of the Brethren pastors.

At 7:00 p.m., students in Kanagy’s Sociological Theory course will host an “Author Meets Critics” discussion with Emerson, where they will critique his work and pose questions. This event will also be held in the Bucher Meetinghouse and is open to the public free of charge.

Emerson is the co-author of several books, including the award-winning “DIivided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America" and “People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States." The latter book won the 2007 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for making the most significant contribution to overcoming racism, awarded by the Racial and Ethnic Minorities section of the American Sociological Association.  His most recent books are “Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money” and the forthcoming “Religion Implicated: What Sociology Teaches Us about Religion in Our World.”

The Young Center, an integral part of academic life at Elizabethtown College, fosters
 and promotes the study of Anabaptist and Pietist groups. Scholarly and interpretive investigations of the life, culture and beliefs of Anabaptist and Pietist movements, primarily in their North American context, are conducted by Young Center staff, visiting scholars, and students s. Named for Galen S. Young, D.O., and Jessie M. Young, the Center interprets the cultural and religious heritage of Anabaptist and Pietist communities to the general public.

Elizabethtown Dancers to Perform “In Motion”

Each Dance Themed to a Verb And Choreographed By Students

(ELIZABETHTOWN, PA, March 20, 2009) – On Saturday, April 4^th (8:00 p.m.) and Sunday, April 5^th (3:00 p.m.), Elizabethtown College presents a dance performance titled “In Motion,” featuring performers from the college’s Fine and Performing Arts program. See a fresh take on the choreographers’ expressions of their vision through creating a “verb” for their dance.  Each dance possesses a unique feel, theme, and story, thus displaying the various ways a dancer can be “in motion”.  Prior to the show, there will also be choreographer tributes displayed for the audience affording a person insight into the inerpetations that the choreographers have of their creative pieces for this spring performance. Tickets, which may be purchased at the door the day of the performance, are $3 for students & $4 for general admission.  The public is welcome to attend this exciting event to take place in Leffler Chapel.

 For details contact:

Barry Freidly

Interim Director of Media Relations

Director of Alumni Relations

717-361-1495

freidlyb@etown.edu

The Elizabethtown College Department of Fine and Performing Arts presents harpsichordist Joseph Gascho in a survey of some of the greatest keyboard music before 1750, including works by Sweelinck, Frescobaldi, Rameau, Bach, and Scarlatti. The recital will take place in Zug Recital Hall at 7:30 pm on Monday, March 23. Generations before Steinway and Baldwin built pianos, Ruckers and Couchet built the most amazing keyboard instruments of their time. Constructed from the quills of birds’ feathers and the trunks of trees, the humble harpsichord became the most beloved instrument of kings and queens.

Conductor and harpsichordist Joseph Gascho has a varied career as a baroque keyboardist – performing as a soloist and collaborative artist; conducting opera, orchestra and choir; editing and arranging scores; and teaching and lecturing. He has won numerous grants and prizes, including first prize in the 2002 Jurow International Harpsichord Competition. He earned his master’s degree from the Peabody Conservatory, and will complete his doctorate from the University of Maryland later this year. In addition to numerous performances in the United States, he served as claveciniste repetiteur and directed a chamber music program at the Academie d’Art-Lyrique in Aix-en-Provence, France. He conducts regularly for Opera Vivente and the Magnolia Baroque Festival. This summer, he will teach figured bass at Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute. He also teaches at the George Washington University and directs the music program at the Towson Unitarian Universalist Church.

Harman—a  professor of German and English, as well as chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Elizabethtown College—previously has translated Kafka’s “The Castle.” His versions are praised for their faithfulness to Kafka’s voice and style, and reviews have been featured in papers such as the New York Times and L.A. Times. College Professor Mark Harman – who garnered critical acclaim for his edition of modern classic Franz Kafka’s masterpiece “Das Schloss” (“The Castle”), has crafted an elegant new translation of the author’s first novel, “Der Verschollene” (“The Missing Person”). 

Three year’s after Kafka’s early death from tuberculosis in 1924, Kurt Wolff Verlag published, under the title “Amerika,” a version of “The Missing Person” that was edited by the author’s friend and literary executor, Max Brod. Over the past 30 years, an international team of Kafka scholars has worked on restoring all of Kafka’s writings by consulting the original manuscripts and notes, correcting transcription errors, and removing Brod’s editorial interventions. Harman’s translation is based on the restored text of the resulting German-language critical edition.

With the same expert balance of precision and nuance that marked his award-winning translation of “The Castle,” Harman now restores Kafka’s dry humor and linguistic precision in his translation of “Der Verschollene.” “The Missing Person” tells the story of young Karl Rossmann, who is banished by his parents to America following an incident involving a housemaid. With unquenchable optimism and in the company of two comic-sinister companions, Rossmann throws himself into misadventure after misadventure, eventually heading toward Oklahoma, where a career in the theater beckons. Though we can never know how Kafka planned to end the novel, Harman’s translation allows us to appreciate, as closely as possible, what Kafka originally committed to the page.

Mark Harman – a native of Dublin, Ireland – is currently chair of the Department of Modern Languages and professor of German and English at Elizabethtown College. Harman did his doctoral work at Yale University and also has taught at Dartmouth College, Oberlin College, Franklin & Marshall College, and the University of Pennsylvania. 

Public Reading Features Nine Never-Before-Heard Plays

by the Next Generation of Theatrical Writers

The Theatre and Dance Division of Elizabethtown College’s Fine and Performing Arts Department will present its inaugural Etown New Playwrights Fest on Thursday, March 12 and Friday, March 13 at 8 p.m. The staged readings of the work of nine student playwrights will be offered in Tempest Theatre in Baugher Student Center. Tickets can be purchased for $3 by calling the College’s Theatre Box Office at (717) 361-1170 or sending a request via email to boxoffice@etown.edu.

During the event, audience will hear comedies, romances and dramas that have never been presented publicly. The plays were created for the College’s “Playwriting” course, which is taught by Michael Swanson, associate professor of theatre and coordinator of theatre and dance at Elizabethtown. The following works will be featured:

·         “Photographing Philadelphia,” written by Tammy Bateman and directed by Elyse Venturella, of Palmyra, Pa.

·         “Sit Tight,” written by Michael Fleming, of Ewing, N.J., and directed by Amanda Marfisi, of Bethlehem, Pa.

·         “An Egg for Your Thought,” written by Beth Lewis, of Lititz, Pa., and directed by Angela Wright, of Baltimore, Md.

·         “Letters to My Brother,” written by Spencer O’Dowd, of Methuen, Mass., and directed by Ian Pape, of Columbia, Pa.

·          “To Be Frank,” written by Ian Pape, of Columbia, Pa., and directed by Sam Gillam, of Glen Burnie, Md.

·          “Will She Dance Again?,” written by Kelly Tate, of Somerdale, N.J., and directed by Tammy Bateman

·          “Among Us,” written by Meghann Timney, of Middletown, Del., and directed by Alyssa Miller

·          “Musical Roommates,” written by Rachel Witkovsky, of Huntingdon, Pa., and directed by Natasha Threatts of Camden Wyoming, Del.

·         “Kelsey’s Game,” written by Angela Wright, of Baltimore, Md., and directed by Beth Lewis of Lititz, Pa.

      For more information, please call (717) 361-1212.

# # #