February 14, 2003|Volume 31, Number 18

Visiting on Campus
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Acclaimed playwright to discuss the inspiration for her play

Playwright Amy Freed will discuss her play, "The Secret Life of Savages," on Friday, Feb. 14.

The discussion, which will take place at the Yale Repertory Theatre on 1120 Chapel St., is open to all members of Friday evening's audience at no additional cost. The Yale Repertory lounge opens at 7 p.m. and the discussion will begin at 7:20 p.m. Tickets for all performances of the play are $25$40 and are available at the Rep's box office, 1120 Chapel St.; by phone at (203) 432-1234; and online at www.yalerep.org.

"The Psychic Life of Savages" was inspired by the lives and writings of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. It was the 1995 recipient of the Joseph Kesselring Award, a national award presented each year by the New York Arts Club to an outstanding new play, and the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding Play. An earlier version of the play called "Poetomachia" received an Outstanding Achievement Award for an Original Script from the San Francisco's Bay Area Critics Circle and in 1994 was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Freed, whose play "Freedomland" was a 1998 Pulitzer Prize finalist, also wrote "Claustrophilia," "The Ghoul of Amherst" and "Still Warm."

Freed has worked as an acting teacher and director for the various training programs of the American Conservatory Theatre, VITA Shakespeare Festival and California Shakespeare Festival and has conducted playwriting workshops for ACT and San Francisco State University. Since 1997 she has taught acting at Stanford University.

Noted chemist will deliver Johnson lectures

Chi-Huey Wong, the Ernest W. Hahn Professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry at the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at The Scripps Research Institute, will deliver two lectures on campus as the Treat B. Johnson Lecturer on Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 19 and 20.

Both lectures will take place at 4 p.m. in Rm. 160 of the Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, 225 Prospect St. Wong will speak on "Programmable One-Pot Saccharide Synthesis" on Wednesday and "Enzymes for Synthesis and Inhibition" on Thursday. Both lectures are free and open to the public.

Wong began his career as an assistant professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University in 1983 and was promoted to a full professor in 1987. He has held an endowed chair in chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute since 1989 and has been a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology since 1996.

In addition to his academic positions, Wong serves as editor-in-chief of Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry; is a scientific adviser of the Max-Planck Institute; and is a founding scientist of Optimer Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Wong is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Sinica in Taipei.

The author or co-author of more than 450 publications, 60 patents and three books, Wong has won numerous awards for his research.

Treat Baldwin Johnson was a member of the chemistry faculty from 1902 until his retirement in 1943. It is in his memory that these lectures are held.

Author of Native American fiction to visit the campus

Leanne Howe, an author, playwright and scholar, will visit the campus on Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 19 and 20.

Howe will be the guest at a master's tea on Wednesday at 4:30 p.m. in the Calhoun College master's house, 434 College St. On Thursday, she will read from her works at 4 p.m. at the Beinecke Rare Book Library, 121 Wall St. Both events are free and open to the public.

An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Howe received fellowships and grants from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Newbury Library in Chicago to conduct historical research on the Choctaw tribe. Her first novel, "Shell Shaker," won an American Book Award in 2002 from the Before Columbus Foundation. Howe contributed a chapter to the 2001 book "Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies." Her chapter, "The Story of America: A Tribalography," argued that narratives, whether fictional or historical, have the ability to create truths and can alter the way cultural groups view their heritage and the world.

She was awarded an Iowa Artist-In-Residence grant for her fictional story "Indian Radio Days," which was included in a 1999 anthology and was later performed by the WagonBurner Theatre Troop, an American Indian theater company that was co-founded by Howe.

Howe's fiction has been published in 14 anthologies and she has been invited to lecture on her research and writings on American Indians in Japan, Jordan, The Netherlands and Romania.

Genomics will be topic of biotechnology talk

Dr. Edward Scolnick, president emeritus of Merck Research Laboratories, will deliver a lecture on Wednesday, Feb. 19.

Scolnick will speak on "Therapeutic Advances Through Genomics: Opportunities and Limitations" noon1 p.m., in the Hope Auditorium of the Jane Ellen Hope Building, 315 Cedar St. The talk is free and the public is welcome to attend. It is sponsored by the Yale Biotechnology Student Interest Group. For more information on the talk, e-mail victoria.ying@yale.edu. For more information on the Biotech SIG, visit the website at www.yale.edu/biotech.

Prior to joining Merck, Scolnick worked at the National Cancer Institute. His research led to the discovery of the cellular origin of the sarcoma virus oncogenes in mammals and defined specific genes that cause human cancer. Scolnick worked at the National Heart Institute and his research there focused on identifying the stop signals in the genetic code and the biochemical mechanism that produces the stops.

During his career at Merck, he served as president, executive vice president for science and technology, executive director and vice president of the Department of Virus and Cell Biology and senior vice president of basic research.

Skolnick has published almost 300 scientific articles and is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He holds appointments at the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Artist will explore creativity and loss in talk

Mindy Weisel, adjunct professor of painting at Corcoran College of Art and Design, will speak on campus on Thursday, Feb. 20, at 5 p.m.

Sponsored by the Program for Humanities in Medicine, Weisel will speak on "Beauty as Consolation: Creativity Out of Loss," at 5 p.m. in the Beaumont Rm. of the Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar St.

Weisel will read from her book "Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss" and will also show slides of art that represent an overview of her work dating from 1980.

As a holocaust survivor's only daughter, Weisel has used art as a means of expressing her search for beauty and strength. Weisel's talk will examine how one can find light out of darkness and how she has used the process of writing and painting to find beauty in her own life.

Lecture series continues with "Head Start and Child Welfare"

Patricia Doolan, director of Head Start at the Education Connection, and Melita Joiner, a social work supervisor at the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF), will deliver the next lecture in the Yale Center in Child Development and Social Policy lecture series on Friday, Feb. 21.

Doolan and Joiner will speak on "Head Start and Child Welfare: Collaboration for Children" at 11:30 a.m. in Rm. 211, Mason Laboratory, 9 Hillhouse Ave. The lecture is open to the public free of charge. For more information, call (203) 432-9935.

In addition to her current position, which she has held for the past nine years, Doolan serves as vice chair of the New England Head Start Association Regional Advisory Committee to DCF.

Joiner has worked at DCF since 1994, beginning her career there as a social worker. Her duties have included investigating cases of child abuse and neglect, formulating treatment plans for abused children and their families, preparing reports for juvenile courts and testifying as an expert witness. In 1997 she received the Governor's Service Award for Exceptional Social Work. Prior to joining DCF, Joiner worked at the Mental Health Association of Connecticut as a residential counselor and as a program director at the Northwest YMCA.

Political commentator and author to speak on campus

Arianna Huffington, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of nine books, will be on campus on Friday, Feb. 21.

Huffington will speak at a master's tea at 2 p.m. in the Calhoun College master's house, 434 College St. At 4 p.m. she will speak about her book "Pigs at the Trough, How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America," followed by a book signing, in Rm. 102 of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High St. Both talks are free and open to the public.

Huffington's third book, "Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend," which was published in 1981, became an international bestseller. "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer," her biography of Pablo Picasso published in 1988, was also an international bestseller and was made into a feature film.

Twice weekly, Huffington writes a syndicated column that has appeared in such papers as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News and the Boston Herald.

She has made numerous guest appearances on national television shows and serves on several boards that promote community solutions to social problems.

In the introduction to her latest book, Huffington states that "[i]t's not just that corporate America corrupted the watchdogs that were supposed to be guarding the public interest by feeding them under the table. While it is true that federal regulators, overseers, accountants, and the corporate boards were only too happy to lick the hands that fed them, corporate corruption will not just be chased away by a better-trained pack of Dobermans."

Political activist and former Yale chaplain to speak on war

The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., senior minister of the Riverside Church in New York City and former chaplain of Yale, will speak on campus on Monday, Feb. 24.

Coffin will speak on "War Is a Coward's Escape from the Problems of Peace," at 3:30 p.m. in the lecture hall of Sterling Memorial Library, 120 High St. His lecture coincides with the current exhibition "'Give Peace a Chance': Selected Documents from the Antiwar and Disarmament Movements," which is on display in the library's Memorabilia Room. The talk is free and open to the public.

Coffin was chaplain of the University from 1957 to 1975. During that time he was an activist in the civil rights, peace and disarmament movements. He gained national prominence for acts of civil disobedience against Southern segregation laws in the 1960s, and the military draft during the Vietnam era.

Coffin donated his personal papers to the University in 2000, and a significant portion of them are on display in the exhibition.

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Campus Notes