The Yale Anti-Gravity Society will
be among the featured entertainers during an annual May Day event on the New Haven Green on Friday, May 1, 3-9 p.m. The event is a benefit for the Interfaith Refugee Ministry, a nonprofit organization in New Haven which resettles refugees within the state of Connecticut. The rain date for the benefit is Sunday, May 3. For further information about the event, call Jeff Spalter at 776-2170.
Dr. Michael Rigsby, an assistant professor in internal medicine, is also a member of the New Haven-based early music ensemble PEGASUS, which will present its debut recital on Sunday, May 10,
at 2 p.m. at the Neighborhood Music School, 100 Audubon St. The program will feature performances on period instruments of 15th- to 18th-century works, including French chansons, Italian dances, English consorts and trio sonatas by J.S. Bach and Telemann. The performance is free with donations accepted for the Neighborhood Music School Scholarship Fund. Rigsby also is director of HIV/AIDS Care at the VA Medical Center and is assistant clinical professor in the adult nurse practitioner program (primary care) at the School of Nursing.
It's been a year of traveling and lecturing for Katepalli Sreenivasan, the Harold W. Cheel Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Physics and Applied Physics. In December, Sreenivasan gave the Hideki Yukawa Memorial Lecture for the Japan Physical Society in Nishinomia City and the P.-Y. Zhou Memorial Plenary Lecture at the Seventh Asian Congress of Fluid Mechanics in Madras, India. In February, he gave the Michael A. Sadowsky Lecture in Applied Mechanics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and he will be the Distinguished Lecturer at
the University of Maryland, College Park in April.
Wai Chee Dimock, professor of American studies and English, has received the first annual Dactyl Foundation award
for literary theory/criticism for her essay
"A Theory of Resonance." In the essay, which appeared in the October 1997 issue of PMLA, Dimock looks at the concept of "noise" as an analogy for interpretive contexts. She contends that noise should be viewed positively, as "a necessary feature
of a reader's meaning-making process." Victoria N. Alexander, Dactyl Foundation president, commented that understanding a reception theory such as Dimock's is
a prerequisite for understanding a theory of "phenomenal patterns," the topic suggested for the Dactyl Competition. Dimock donated her $3,000 prize to Oxfam America, a privately funded organization that works to "alleviate global poverty, hunger and social injustice."
President Richard C. Levin recently announced that Günter Wagner, professor of biology, has been reappointed chair of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology. His new term will be for three years beginning July 1.