Discimus ut serviamus:
We learn so that we may serve.
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MacArthur “Genius” to be Commencement Speaker
Cristina Jiménez Moreta ’07, who was named a 2017 MacArthur Fellow for her work on changing public perceptions of immigrant youth and for playing a critical role in shaping the debate around immigration policy, will be the featured speaker at Queens College’s 2018 Commencement on Thursday, May 31.
Moreta, who graduated cum laude with a BA in political science, was recognized by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for her work at United We Dream (UWD), an immigrant youth-led organization she co-founded. Under her leadership as executive director, UWD has supported and trained tens of thousands of immigrant youth leaders to find and express their voices. The organization provides scholarships to highly qualified Dreamers so that they are able to continue their higher education, a cause dear to Moreta, who arrived in New York from Ecuador at age 13, and completed her education at Queens College as an undocumented student.
Last spring while receiving the political science department’s Distinguished Service Award, Moreta remarked, “I would have never thought that the knowledge, encouragement, and mentorship I received from the faculty and the experiences that I had here at Queens College were shaping me to have an impact on immigration policy that will go down in history books. It is here that I really found my voice and grew as a student, as a thinker, as an organizer, and as a community leader.”
For more on Moreta,
click here
.
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Free On-Campus Immigration Assistance
CUNY Citizenship Now! provides free, high quality, and confidential immigration law services to help individuals and families on their path to U.S. citizenship. Its attorneys and paralegals offer one-on-one consultations to assess participants’ eligibility for legal benefits and assist them in applying when qualified.
Citizenship Now! Attorney Midori Hills visits Queens College the first Tuesday of every month. If you seek assistance with DACA or any other immigration related matter, please call 212-652-2071 to make an appointment.
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A Chance for Students to Go to Sea
Queens College students have an opportunity to participate in a National Science Foundation-funded initiative in which undergraduates sail on U.S. Research vessels for the purpose of exposing them to the geosciences and environmental sciences. Called STEMSEAS, the program focuses on getting non-STEM majors and students either leaning to STEM majors or in the early phases of their STEM majors to be part of these expeditions. STEMSEAS is also strongly recruiting students coming from underrepresented groups.
“I was a science instructor on one of the pilot voyages of STEMSEAS and I can confidently say that it was a life-changing and transformative experience for all the students," says Stephen Pekar ’86 (SEES), who will be one of the instructors for the voyage that leaves from Rhode Island and sails to Barbados (April 26–May 3). “The other voyages will also be staffed by great, enthusiastic educational instructors,” he says. “Just about all the costs to and from the ship as well as course expenses on the ship are covered by this program, so it is essentially free for students to have this once-in-a lifetime-experience.”
Interested students should visit
STEMSEAS.org
as soon as possible for program and schedule information and to submit an application. They may also contact Pekar at 718-915-6057 or
stephen.pekar@qc.cuny.edu
.
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Ackerman Papers Donated to QC
Former U.S. Congressman Gary Ackerman ’65 is donating his personal papers to the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library. The papers and material will be arranged and described by the college’s archivists and made available to researchers as one of the school’s growing number of Special Collections. A representative of the country’s most diverse constituencies in Queens and Long Island’s North Shore, Ackerman was reelected to Congress 15 times before retiring from public service in January 2013. By placing his papers in the Rosenthal Library, Ackerman hopes that they will be studied by generations of researchers in the context of his political career in the borough.
Read more.
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State of the College Address and
presentation of the President’s Awards for
Excellence in Teaching
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2018
3 PM • LEFRAK CONCERT HALL
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Twible Named Interim Director of Athletics
Rob Twible ’97 has been appointed the interim director of athletics, replacing China Jude, who recently joined the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Now in his twentieth year at Queens College, Twible has been serving as the associate athletics director for facilities and operations for the Knights. Under his custodianship, the college has undergone significant renovations to its facilities that have helped generate over $1 million dollars annually.
Read more.
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Black History Month Celebrates
Sankofa
Queens College is celebrating Black History Month through the theme of
Sankofa: Reclaiming Our Time
. Taken from a word from the Akan people of Ghana,
Sankofa
means,
“
We must go back and reclaim our past in order to move forward.
”
This is reflected in many of the planned events, including the scheduled appearance by Katrina Adams, Chairman of the Board and CEO and President of the United States Tennis Association. Adams is the first African-American, first former professional tennis player, and the youngest person to lead the organization in its 135-year history. You can find a listing of all Black History Month offerings
here
. All events are free and open to the public.
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Evening Readings Return
The Evening Readings series
returns to Queens College this semester, kicking off on Tuesday, February 27 with Tony Award-winning playwright John Guare (
Six Degrees of Separation, House of Blue Leaves
) in conversation with Adam Feldman, the chief theatre critic at
Time Out New York.
The series takes place on select Tuesdays in LeFrak Concert Hall. Future readings will include Valeria Luiselli, members of the QC English Department, and others.
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Summer Session is Coming
They may still be forecasting snow, but it’s not too early to consider summer study at QC. Registration begins on Tuesday, February 13, the earliest it has ever been offered. Students can earn up to 15 credits and get a jump on completing their degree, or on meeting the requirements for the Excelsior Scholarship or on advancing in QC in 4--and still have time left over for a long vacation. The sessions feature:
- over 700 undergraduate and graduate courses, including 30 online courses
- choice of three sessions (each lasting four or six weeks)
- affordable tuition
- free on-campus parking
- inexpensive and exceptional on-campus housing
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Sing with the Choir
The Queens College Choral Society is seeking new members for its spring season, which will feature Benjamin Britten’s
War Requiem. Britten’s masterpiece combines traditional Latin requiem texts with the poems of Wilfred Owen, who died in World War I. Auditions for new members will take place on Wednesday, February 7, from 5:30 to 7:15 pm in Room 246 of the Music Building.
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Summer Camp Offers 30% Discount
From its beginning in 1989 as an all-day sports camp with an enrollment of 80 children, Queens College’s summer camp has grown to over 1,000 children and its programming has been expanded to include educational enrichment STEM, language arts, and computer coding classes; a theatre production program; a dance academy; and, of course, a wide variety of sports activities. As the program celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, it is offering all current faculty and staff a 30% discount off published tuition prices. Contact the camp office at 718-997-2777 for details, and visit
www.QCcamp.com
for camp offerings.
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Stanley Milgram ’55 was a social psychologist best known for his controversial experiments on obedience and his concept of Six Degrees of Separation, which John Guare used as a basis of his 1990 play of the same name. (Guare will be appearing on campus February 27 as part of the Evening Readings series.)
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What’s in a Building’s Name?
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Margaret Kiely Hall
A stucco-and-tile building was razed to make space for the 13-story tower completed in 1968, when it was called Academic II. Today the tallest building on campus is called Kiely Hall, after Margaret Kiely, QC’s first dean of faculty, who in addition to her first title served a decade as dean of students and two years as the college’s acting president. The building added some much-needed classroom and office space as enrollment at the college soared, reaching a peak of 31,143 students in 1973.
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Alexander Kouguell: Celebrating a “Long and Interesting Life” as a Cellist and Teacher
Cellist Alexander Kouguell is a man of the world. A Professor Emeritus of Music who speaks Russian, English, French and Arabic, he has performed in venues from Syria to South America, from France to Flushing. He is, in short, at home wherever music can be played and enjoyed.
“Music was my life from the day I was born,” says Kouguell, who notes that teaching music has also been his life—for 68 years at QC, in fact. He joined the college in 1949 when the music department was located in the current power plant building, retired in 1990 at age 70, and returned soon after as an adjunct, working until fall 2017.
Click here to read more
.
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Art of Enlightenment: Tibetan Thangka Paintings by Gyaltsen Jampa
celebrates the centuries-old Buddhist tradition of
thangka
painting with the work of contemporary Tibetan artist Gyaltsen Jampa. As sacred objects and the products of a highly skilled and spiritual practice,
thangka
scrolls depict a deity, scene, or
mandala
(a representation of the cosmos) from Tibetan Buddhism.
Art of Enlightenment
runs through March 30 in the QC Art Center.
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Godwin-Ternbach Exhibit Examines Power of Nonviolent Resistance
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Waging Peace: 100 Years of Action
, at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, showcases powerful stories of people standing up to injustice, overcoming oppression, creating opportunity, speaking truth to power, and preventing violence. This interactive travelling exhibition, organized by the American Friends Service Committee (afsc.org/100), uses provocative stories told by those who fought against injustice to demonstrate the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance. Included in the exhibition is an original print of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963
“Letter from Birmingham Jail.
”
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Student
Wing Yee Cheung
(FNES) recently received a scholarship from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals. She is pursuing a career in nutrition and dietetics . . .
Digital Journal
named QC alum
Fran Drescher
its 2017 Humanitarian of the Year for her work with the advocacy organization she founded, Cancer Shmancer . . .
Robert Engel
(Chemistry & Biochemistry) and his colleagues from Pace and LIU were awarded a U.S. patent for compounds that, when applied to certain surfaces, renders them antiviral, antifungal, antibacterial, and antimicrobial. These compounds have many practical applications across a variety of industries and sectors, such as healthcare, food, agriculture, construction, and the military. The researchers hope to bring their compounds to the market this year . . . Professor Emeritus of English
George Held
recently published his 20th collection of poems,
Dog Hill Poems
(Goldfish Press) . . .
Amy Hsin
’s (Sociology)
article
on how Dreamers could boost the American economy recently appeared in the
Chicago Tribune
. . .
Tarry Hum
(Urban Studies) recently delivered a paper at a Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) conference titled “
Minority Banks, Homeownership, and Prospects for New York City's Multi-Racial Immigrant Neighborhoods
.” It will be published by Harvard JCHS later this year . . . John Tytell (English) recently reviewed James Atlas’s
The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale
in the
Los Angeles Review of Books
. . .
Joseph A. Williams (MLS ’06) is the author of
The Sunken Gold: A Story of World War I, Espionage and the Greatest Treasure Salvage in History (Chicago Review Press), which tells the story of the
HMS Laurentic, sunk by German mines off the coast of Ireland during WWI . . .
Schiro Withanachchi
(Economics) was awarded the 2018 Global Learning Grant by NAFSA: Association of International Educators, and invited to be on the plenary panel at NAFSA’s Global Learning Colloquium in Philadelphia May 20 to present her work on “Innovative Approaches to Integrating Global Learning into the Curriculum” . . .
Ying Zhou
(Tech Talent Pipeline) has been promoted to program director of QC’s Tech Incubator, which now has 21 businesses in residence and a full schedule of workshops, forums, and crash courses.
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Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences David Speidel reports on the death of his former colleague,
David Krinsley
:
David Krinsley, 90, died suddenly in early November. At the time, he was Courtesy Professor at the University of Oregon. Dave was the founding faculty member for the Department of Geology and Geography at Queens College. He became associate dean of faculty and then acting dean of faculty (now called provost). He left Queens to be head of the Department of Geology at Arizona State University, and then moved to Eugene after retiring from ASU. Dave was well known for his study of surface structures and textures of geologic materials, especially quartz sand grains and rock varnish, and he was one of the first to use the electron microscope to produce images of these textures. He maintained an active research program throughout his life. On a personal note, he and his wife, Ann, provided lodging for me in their home when I visited Queens College in 1966 for a job interview.
Queens College SEEK alumna
Pamela Palanque-North
, a respected
innovator in the fields of organization psychology, development, training, and education and
the president of Palanque & Associates,
a firm that specialized in people resource management, died January 4 of heart-related issues.
In a career spanning decades, Pamela
forged partnerships and consulting relationships with numerous U.S. and international entities, including
the United Nations, Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories, and the Women
’
s International Leadership Program.
In addition, she appeared on ABC’s
20/20
as a panelist on social change, and was often cited as an authority on workforce diversity by
Business Week
.
She also was a professor at American University in Washington D.C., the New School for Social Research, the University of the North in Petersburg, South Africa, and other institutions. Pamela
received advanced degrees from the New School University for Social Research and a professional certificate
in Industrial and Organization Psychology from the Yale University School of Medicine, Division for Training and Consultation.
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Maestro Maurice Peress
, director of the QC Orchestra for more than 30 of his 87 years, died on December 31 after a long battle with leukemia. Maurice was a giant in both symphonic repertoire and jazz: He served as an assistant to Leonard Bernstein and went on to lead regional orchestras while also finding time to work with Duke Ellington. You can read more about his remarkable career in this
article in the New York Times
.
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Joyce Warren
, a longtime member of the Department of English, passed away in December. Joyce had been a valued teacher since 1981, first as an adjunct instructor, and since 2001 as a full-time professor, receiving tenure and promotion to full professor in 2006. Joyce also served as director of the Women and Gender Studies Program since 2001, a position she loved and which she filled with conviction and vigor. Joyce was a specialist in 19th-century American literature and women
’
s studies. Besides editing a number of scholarly works, Joyce is the author of three books:
Women, Money, and the Law: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gender, and the Courts
(University of Iowa Press, 2005),
Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman
(Rutgers University Press, 1992), and
The American Narcissus: Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
(Rutgers University Press, 1984). Joyce is survived by her children and her husband, Frank Warren, retired chair of the History Department.
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Q View
is produced by the
Office of Communications and Marketing.
Comments and suggestions for future news items
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are welcome.
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