PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 8, Oct. 20, 2005

brief notes

Crafts and activities featured
Wednesday is for families at Spurlock
Spurlock Museum’s Lowe Learning Center will open its doors for children and parents to create and learn together every Wednesday from 9:30 a.m.-noon. During “Around the World Wednesdays,” Oct. 26 through Dec. 7, the museum will feature crafts and activities that complement the museum’s fall exhibition on Balinese culture and a special Day of the Dead craft day on Nov. 2.

A donation of $1 per participant is requested for each visit. For more information contact Julia Robinson at 217-265-0474.

WILL-TV
Festival celebrates storytelling
As part of its 50th anniversary celebration, WILL-TV will host a daylong storytelling festival Oct. 25 highlighted by an internationally acclaimed storyteller telling “Scary Stories” in the WILL-TV studios that evening.

Morning events feature stories for preschoolers at 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. at the Urbana Free Library. Elaine Bearden will tell engaging simple tales and active participatory stories.

Afternoon sessions at 1:15 p.m. feature stories for kindergarten through third-grade students at Champaign’s Douglass Branch Library with storytellers Janice Harrington, Kim Sheahan and others, and at the Urbana Free Library with storytellers Patricia Hruby Powell, Dan Keding and others.

Beginning at 7:30 p.m., “Scary Stories” features Syd Lieberman, an acclaimed storyteller, award-winning teacher and author. Some of his best-known tales are versions of literary tales, especially those of Edgar Allen Poe. His presentation is suitable for adults and teens, but not for young children. To reserve a seat for the free event in the WILL-TV studio, call 217-244-0025.

Japan House
Annual fall open house is Oct. 22
Japan House, a UI educational and cultural center focusing on Japanese tradition and art, will welcome visitors to its annual fall open house from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 22. The open house is free and the public is invited to tour the house and gardens.

Lee Gurga, the editor of “Modern Haiku,” a journal of haiku and haiku studies, will give talks at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., titled “Haiku East, Haiku West.” Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry.

Kokoro calligraphy by UI art students will be on display during the open house, and traditional Japanese tea ceremonies are planned throughout the day, conducted by members of the Urbana-Champaign Association of Chado Urasenke Tankokai.

More information on the open house and other Japan House events can be found at www.art.uiuc.edu/galleries/japanhouse/index.cfm or by calling 217-244-9934.

Personnel Services Office
Staff Service Recognition Program
Retiring staff members and those being recognized for long service (25, 30, 35 and 40 years) will be honored at the 2005 Staff Service Recognition Program at 6 p.m. Nov. 7 in the Illini Union Rooms A, B and C.

Those wishing to attend the recognition banquet should reserve online at www.pso.uiuc.edu/service by Oct. 24. Service-year honorees and retirees were sent a separate invitation with an RSVP card for themselves and one guest. The Web site form should be used by all others wishing to attend the banquet.

For more information about the service-recognition program, call Personnel Services Office at 217-333-3101.

Native American issues
Symposium covers ‘More Than the Chief’
What makes news in American Indian communities? What are the issues that affect them? How should those issues be covered?

Those are among the questions to be discussed at a symposium titled “More Than the Chief: Covering Native News,” at 7 p.m. on Oct. 25 at the Asian American Cultural Center, 1210 W. Nevada St., Urbana.
The goal of the event, according to journalism professor Kellee Weinhold, one of the organizers, is to look beyond the conflicts surrounding Chief Illiniwek and sports symbols, and explore the issues making news in Native American communities today.

Participating in the symposium will be a panel of Native American journalists and scholars, and local and state journalists have been invited to attend and join in the discussion. Faculty members, students and other members of the campus community also are encouraged to attend. The event is free of charge, but space is limited.

Featured on the panel: Margaret Holt, from the Chicago Tribune, and Rita Pyrillis, a freelance journalist who has written for the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and UPI.

Holt has been involved with the Freedom Forum’s American Indian Journalism Institute. Pyrillis teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and at the Native American Educational Services College in Chicago.

Pyrillis will be on campus Oct. 23-26 as a guest-in-residence with the “Intersections” Living/Learning Community in the Babcock residence hall.

Others participating on the panel include UI faculty and staff members D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark, professor of American Indian Studies; and John McKinn, assistant director of the Native American House.

Those planning to attend are encouraged to contact Weinhold at weinhold@illinois.edu or 217-265-0092

College of Veterinary Medicine
Integration of human, animal research
Theresa Fossum, director for cardiothoracic surgery and biomedical devices in the Michael E. DeBakey Institute and holder of the Tom and Joan Read Chair in veterinary surgery, both at Texas A&M University, will speak on “New Therapies for Heart Failure: Integrating Human and Veterinary Cardiac Research” at 2 p.m. Oct. 21 in Room 2271C of the Veterinary Medicine Basic Sciences Building.

The talk, sponsored by the Dr. Robert and Cynthia Pensinger Fund, is free and open to the public. The talk is part of the 86th Annual Fall Conference for Veterinarians hosted by the UI College of Veterinary Medicine. The conference is attended by more than 200 veterinarians and will feature three dozen presentations.

Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival
‘Ebertfest’ passes on sale Nov. 1
Festival passes will go on sale Nov. 1 for the eighth annual Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival scheduled for April 26-30 at the Virginia Theater in Champaign and on the UI campus.

The passes, which cover all screenings during the five-day event, are $85, the same price as for the 2005 festival. Passes can be purchased through the theater box office (phone 217-356-9063 or fax 217-356-5729) or through TicketWeb on the festival Web site.

Tickets for individual films will be $9 each and available April 3.

The 1,000 festival passes available for the 2005 “Ebertfest” sold out in February, according to Mary Susan Britt, the festival’s assistant director. The same number of passes will be available again this year.

Ebert, a 1964 Illinois journalism graduate, adjunct professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will again host the event and select the films that he believes have been overlooked by audiences, critics and distributors. The lineup of films, along with additional information on film-associated guests and other festival events, will be announced several weeks before the festival.

Updates on the festival, a special event of the College of Communications, will be posted on the festival Web site.
Sponsors and volunteers for the festival are being sought. Those interested should contact Britt, 217-244-0552 or marsue@illinois.edu.

Illini Union Bookstore
IUB features Illinois writers Oct. 21 & 24
The Illini Union Bookstore hosts two events this month featuring writers who have UI connections.

The UI Alumni Association and the Illini Union Bookstore will celebrate UI alumni authors from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Oct. 21.

Alumni authors featured during “Writers Come Home” and their recent works: Ray Elliott, “Wild Hands Toward the Sky”; Photographer Larry Kanfer, 2006 editions of “Prairiescapes” and “The Kanfer University of Illinois” calendars; Julie Larson, “The Dinette Set Vol. 3: Much To-Do About Nothing”; Teresa McCarthy, “Convenient Bride”; Frank Polancic, “Why Wait: Create Your Soul Mate Now”; Debra Schweiger, “The Power of ONE: Heroes Forging America’s Civic Reawakening From Sea to Shining Sea”; Helen Peterson, “Possessions,” a memoir about coping with the death of her husband Ted Peterson (former dean of the UI College of Communications); Carol Spindel, “Dancing At Halftime: Sports and the Controversy Over American Indian Mascots”; and Denise Swanson, “Murder of a Smart Cookie,” the latest in the “Scumble River Mystery” series.

On Oct. 24, the bookstore features authors from the UI department of history at 4 p.m. Featured authors: Richard Burkhardt, “Patterns of Behavior”; Antoinette Burton, “Postcolonial Studies and Beyond”; Augusto Espiritu, “Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals”; and David Roediger, “Working Toward Whiteness.”

Presentations at both events will be followed by a book signing. The events will be at Illini Union Bookstore’s second-floor authors corner.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Israeli journalist to speak Oct. 27
Yossi Klein Halevi, a prominent Israeli journalist and author active in Middle East reconciliation efforts, will speak at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 27 in the auditorium at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Halevi’s talk, “Opportunities for Peace Between Israel and the Palestinians After Gaza,” is part of an 11-day visit to the Illinois campus that begins Oct. 24.

As part of that visit, he also will speak on other issues as they relate to Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including religion, rock music, media coverage and how the conflict has affected women and children.

All of the talks are free and open to the public. The Beckman talk will be followed by a reception.

Halevi, a native New Yorker who has lived in Israel since 1982, is the Israel correspondent for the New Republic magazine and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based think tank. He has been a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times.

Halevi also is the author of “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land” (2001), about his two-year journey as a religious Jew to find a common spiritual language with those of other faiths.

Other scheduled talks:

• Oct. 25: “From Oslo to Gaza,” brown bag lunch, noon, Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Languages Building.
• Oct. 26: “How the Second Intifada Has Changed the Lives of Israeli Women and Children,” brown bag lunch, noon, Women’s Studies, 911 S. Sixth St., Champaign.
• Nov. 1: “Understanding Israel Through Its Rock Music,” 6:30 p.m., Hillel Foundation, 503 E. John St., Champaign.
• Nov. 2: “Media Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” brown bag lunch, noon, 336 Gregory Hall.
• Nov. 3: “A Religious Jew’s Journey Into Christianity and Islam,” 8 p.m., Sinai Temple, 3104 W. Windsor Road, Champaign.
  

Halevi will be visiting the campus as a guest of the university’s Program in Jewish Culture and Society, with sponsorship from the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago’s Israel Studies Project.

College of Veterinary Medicine
Holiday pet portraits available Oct. 29
Get a professional portrait of your pet during the College of Veterinary Medicine’s “Pix With Pets” Oct. 29 in the atrium of the Veterinary Medicine Basic Sciences Building. The event is an annual fundraiser for the college to support the Humane Connection Fund and the CARE Pet Loss Helpline.

Tom Schaefges, companion animal photographer, will take a portrait of your pet – with you, with Santa, or with you and Santa – to be delivered in time for the holidays.

The sitting fee of $50 includes your choice of a basic photo package of 11 or 14 prints. Additional prints may be purchased. Portrait sittings will be scheduled between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. and space is limited. To schedule your pet’s portrait, call the Veterinary Medicine Advancement Office at 217-333-2760 or e-mail advancement@cvm.uiuc.edu.

Child development and learning
Forum focuses on raising children in C-U
Is the Champaign-Urbana community all that it can be for raising children and fostering their growth and education?
That will be the question for discussion at a public forum Nov. 5 in the auditorium of the Krannert Art Museum.

The program for “Healthy Communities for Child Development and Learning” will run from 9 a.m. to noon, with about half of that time devoted to presentations and about half to a town hall-style discussion. Prior to the program will be a continental breakfast at 8:30 a.m.

Parents, teachers and anyone interested in the environment and resources available for children in Champaign and Urbana are invited to attend.

“We feel there should be a discussion that says ‘Here’s where we are as a community in terms of what’s available, here’s where we’d like to be, and then here’s what it would take to get there,’ ” according to William Trent, a UI education professor.

Trent is the chair of a committee planning the event, the first of four forums sponsored by the College of Education and organized by the university’s chapter of Phi Delta Kappa, a professional association for educators.

The forum program will include a presentation of the findings from the 2004 Community Report Card of Project 18, a local consortium of community leaders and citizens working on issues related to children. The report card draws on various data to outline the physical, social, educational and economic status of children in Champaign County.

To round out the picture on local children and the resources that support them will be presentations from Reed Larson, Geraldine Peeples and Gary Laumann, all from the university’s department of human and community development, and from Jesse “Tony” Clements, director of the university’s Division of Campus Recreation.

In the town hall-style discussion, participants will be free to ask questions. Trent said that organizers are hoping for participants from local government, schools, health and social service agencies and community organizations.

The future Phi Delta Kappa forums: “Making ‘No Child Left Behind’ Workable for Parents, Children, Schools and Communities,” Jan. 28; “Early Childhood Education in Illinois: At the Crossroads,” Feb. 25; and “The Transition Into Adulthood.” April 1.

Center for Advanced Study
Upcoming lectures announced
A variety of topics will be explored in a series of November lectures at the UI – among them a journalist’s take on America at home and abroad, Homer’s lessons for the modern military, diploma mills, naturalists and their letters, and what bees can teach us about brains and behavior.

The lectures are sponsored by the university’s Center for Advanced Study, and three are part of its MillerComm series. All of the talks are free and open to the public. November lectures:

• Nov. 2, “Overachievers: What Honey Bees Teach Us About Genes, Brain and Social Behavior,” by Gene E. Robinson, UI professor of entomology, a professor in the Institute for Genomic Biology and director of the Neuroscience Program. The presentation is the inaugural Chancellor’s CAS Special Lecture. His lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Beckman Institute.
  
• Nov. 3, “The Slow-Motion Suicide of the American Empire,” by Ted Rall, a journalist, columnist and cartoonist for the Universal Press Syndicate and author of “Generalissimo El Busho: Essays & Cartoons on the Bush Years.” His MillerComm talk begins at 4 p.m. on the third floor of the Levis Faculty Center.
  
• Nov. 10, “Corresponding Naturalists,” by Janet Browne, a professor in The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, and currently a George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Professor at Illinois. Browne will discuss the role that letters played in natural history research in the 18th and 19th centuries, with particular emphasis on the correspondence of Charles Darwin and his contemporaries. Her MillerComm talk begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Knight Auditorium at the Spurlock Museum.
  
  The lecture also will serve as the opening keynote for a two-day symposium, “Naturalist Voyagers,” held in honor of Richard W. (Chip) Burkhardt, who recently retired from the UI department of history.
  
• Nov. 14, “Degree Mills – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” by Allen Ezell, co-author of “Degree Mills: The Billion-Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas.” His talk, part of the CAS “Age of Networks” series, begins at 4 p.m. on the third floor of the Levis Faculty Center.
  
• Nov. 17, “From Troy to Baghdad: Can the U.S. Military Learn From Homer’s Epics?” presented by Jonathan Shay, staff psychiatrist for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic, Boston, and author of “Achilles in Vietnam.”
  
  Shay will discuss what he has learned about military leadership and ethics from his treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and from the work of the ancient Greek poet Homer. His MillerComm lecture begins at 4 p.m. in Room 407 of the Levis Faculty Center.
  

For more information, check the events section of the CAS Web site.

benefits brief

Enrollment for Prudential LTD insurance open through Nov. 15
There will be an open enrollment period for the Prudential Long-Term Disability insurance program through Nov. 15. Employees are guaranteed acceptance into the plan when they enroll during this period as long as they are a benefits-eligible employee working at least 50 percent time, not currently disabled and have not been declined this coverage in the past.

Enrollment packets were sent through campus mail to employees who do not already have the Prudential LTD insurance coverage.

The packet contains an informational brochure and a personalized enrollment form showing what the monthly premium would be if the employee chooses to participate. Coverage will begin Dec. 1 for employees who enroll in the plan by Nov. 15. Return the completed enrollment form to the Benefits Center, 807 S. Wright Street, Champaign, MC-311.

For more information, employees may attend a short presentation about the LTD insurance program. Presentations are scheduled at 10 and 11 a.m. and 1 and 2 p.m. on Oct. 25 in Room 406 of the Illini Union. No reservation is required.

Back to Index