Hargett’s New Class Traveling to China
By Carol Olechowski
Five of China’s ancient capital cities will come to life later this spring for a group of University at Albany students.

China’s Ancient Capitals (EAC 389), a three-credit seminar offered for the first time ever by the Department of East Asian Studies, has attracted 15 participants, according to Professor Jim Hargett, who will accompany the group. The travelers will leave Albany May 31, arriving in Beijing the following day. They will study that city’s civilization and culture, along with those of Xi’an, Kaifeng, Nanjing, and Hangzhou.

“The basic idea,” said Hargett, “is to take the students to China and show them the famous sites they’ve heard and read about in our courses.” The group will learn, for instance, “how and why the Forbidden City is ‘forbidden.’ ”

In addition to seeing the Forbidden City in Beijing, the students will journey by boat along the city’s canal to the Summer Palace, where China’s emperors spent the warmest months of the year, and which only they, their families, and their closest advisers were permitted to enter. Other stops will include visits to Tien’anmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, and the opera. A daylong bus excursion will allow the group to view a part of the Great Wall of China rarely seen by tourists.

After a five-day stay in Beijing, the students will depart for Kaifeng, about 10 hours away by train. While there, they will visit the Dragon Pavilion, the Iron Pagoda, Xiangguo Temple, and other historic sites.

During the remainder of the three-week trip, the group will stay in Xi’an, Nanjing, and Shanghai. Walking tours; a cruise on the Huangpu River; and stops at museums, a monastery, Sun Yat-Sen’s mausoleum, and Fudan University - which conducts an exchange program with UAlbany - are among the items on the itinerary in those cities.

China’s Ancient Capitals is far more than a sightseeing tour, said Hargett, who designed the course himself. The class also includes a study component. “Each student will be required to keep a daily log of the sites visited and complete a number of reading assignments included in a ‘course reader,’ ” he explained. In addition, the group will attend lectures and discussions led by Hargett and local scholars in China. A research paper focusing on a particular aspect of one of the cities on the itinerary will be due approximately three weeks after the students’ June 21 return to the United States.

Each student selected for participation receives a Freeman Summer Seminar Scholarship. The scholarship covers round-trip airfare from Albany to China, all transportation and hotel costs during the student’s stay in China, and most of the expenses for meals. A trip of that duration would ordinarily cost $3,000 to $4,000, Hargett noted. Fifteen scholarships are available through the Freeman Foundation, which recently awarded the Department of East Asian Studies a $2 million grant.

Next September, Hargett, a UAlbany faculty member since 1990, will return to China for a year on a Fulbright fellowship. The award will allow him to continue working on a book “about a mountain in China that has Buddhist associations and is the scene of miraculous events that have taken place there in the past,” he said.

Hargett will meet with students the afternoon of May 9 to discuss what they should and shouldn’t take on the trip. Comfortable clothing and shoes are musts; so are cameras and film. Cell phones are not: “We’re not going to be sending e-mails; there are no Internet connections in our hotel rooms. We have to travel light because we’ll be moving around a lot.”

Besides, too many modern-day distractions would detract from the purpose of the trip: to “get the group asking questions about the things they see so that they’ll come away with an understanding of China and an appreciation of its culture and civilization.”

Kathyrn Lowery Named Interim Vice President for Finance and Business
By Greta Petry
Kathryn K. Lowery has been appointed to the position of Interim Vice President for Finance and Business, effective April 6. Lowery fills the position left vacant by the departure of Paul Stec, who has accepted the position of vice president for finance and administration at Siena College, his alma mater.

“Kathy possesses not only a deep and extensive understanding of all the many diverse operations in the division but also an invaluable perception of analogous operations and activities of the State University of New York System Administration,” said President Karen R. Hitchcock. “Her unflagging dedication to our mission, our values, our students, faculty, and staff - and, need I say, our financial health - is admired by all. Furthermore, having already displayed throughout her remarkable 23-year career at our University those characteristics that distinguish an accomplished senior officer, Kathy will provide the creative leadership and informed counsel that will help ensure that we are successful in addressing the aspirations, the opportunities, and the challenges that engage our University. And, I am confident, she will continue the Division of Finance and Business’s outstanding progress that was a hallmark of Paul’s stewardship.”

As associate vice president for financial management and budget, Lowery has been the key management officer of the University’s $200 million budget.

Lowery, a 1997 Excellence Award Winner in Professional Service, joined the University in 1978 after leaving the world of corporate investment. After four years of service in the Computing Center, she joined the Office of Financial Management and Budget. Largely through her efforts, the office took on the traits of a business and program-analysis unit, focusing first on the needs of the client, and then working to identify fiscally sound solutions that make things happen for the University in the most positive ways. In the mid-1990s, she became an essential part of the campus’s financial plan, modeling and forecasting budget scenarios that she then discussed in consultation with the president and vice presidents.

Lowery took over budgetary oversight of EastNet, the SUNY-funded distance learning project. She also led discussions to revamp the residence halls to achieve additional revenue and much-needed physical improvements.

“As Vice President Stec prepares to leave the University at Albany, I wish to express our deep appreciation and gratitude for his many years of wonderful service and contributions to this institution and to the entire University family of faculty, students, and staff, ” said President Hitchcock. “I view his decision to share his invaluable talents and experience with Siena as a truly major boon to Siena . . .and a truly major loss to our campus.”

Throughout his distinguished career at UAlbany, Stec played a prominent leadership role in not only advancing the pivotal work of the many and diverse units of the Division of Finance and Business, but also in doing much to further, and in helping to provide the resources for, the work of the other University divisions. Concurrently, in a second demanding assignment, he has been an exceptional leader and steward of The University at Albany Foundation and its critical role in supporting the University’s educational and research goals, especially by expanding and directing its role in respect to real property development.

Sodalitas to Launch April 22
By Carol Olechowski
In Latin, “sodalitas” means “a community, a secret society and a company assembled for feasting,” notes the first issue of a new journal of Hispanophone and Francophone literary and cultural studies. And the name, Sodalitas, aptly reflects the philosophy of the University at Albany graduate students of French and Spanish who created the publication, said editor Lisa Nolan. “We did not want to pick a name that would favor one language over the other. We tried to find something that would express what we were about, in a secret sort of way,” she explained. And so Sodalitas was born.

Nolan, a Ph.D. candidate who “began taking 100-level Spanish courses part time at UAlbany about nine years ago,” noted: “Basically, the purpose of the journal is to get graduate students involved in the ‘secret’ of publishing. It is our intention to provide a place where graduate students can reflect upon these languages, literatures, and cultures; after all, that is what we are supposed to be doing, or will be doing, when we enter the teaching profession.”

Being a part of the French and Hispanic & Italian studies programs, and of the larger Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, affords graduate students “the opportunity to come together and ‘creatively evolve,’ rather than use our differences as an excuse to be aggressive or arrogant toward one another,” added Nolan. “As graduate students, we are in the best position to show how this can happen.”

Published for the first time in March, Sodalitas contains four scholarly articles and a book review submitted by students at UAlbany, Ohio State, and the University of Pittsburgh. Contributors to the first issue are D. Stringer (“‘One Dares to Blend with Fate and Mimic It’: Testimonio as Defacement”), Névine Demian (“Du Primitivisme au Sacré: Etude de la Violence Erotique Dans l’Oeuvre de Michel Leiris”), Jorge Barrueto (“Imagining Women: Women’s Biology, Colonial Idealogy and the Two Morality System in Jorge Isaacs’ María”), Dawn Duke (“Apariciones: Dimensiones de la Sexualidad y la Escritura en la Figura Femenina”), and Louis-Pascal Yapo (“Mark Twain in Post Colonial Africa”).

Nolan is joined on the journal staff by co-editor Robert Jones and associate editors Blanche Vellano and Rafael Madrid. Advisers are Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Chair David Wills and Assistant to the Chair Lynne Macko.

Sodalitas was in the planning stages for “around four years,” according to Nolan, who co-founded the journal with Vellano and Jones. To launch the first issue, the editor recalled, “we sent out a brief announcement of our interest in receiving academic journal articles; got responses; and then divided them between who could read French, Spanish, or English. After three calls - about two years - 15 papers came, some from UAlbany and some from various other schools. We read the papers, then contacted potential contributors to see if some of them would be willing to make changes to their articles. When we got them all, we began thinking about a format. We were able to print four good articles and one review. I hope next time, the students find they have enough quality articles to print more, or that they will want to write more reviews or other things that we didn’t think of for the first issue.”

Wills lauded the efforts of the graduate students in Spanish and French. “When the former departments combined and brought students in the two disciplines into closer contact, they realized how important it was to work together on intellectual questions they had in common. Certain currents in literary and postcolonial theory are very important in both fields. Starting a new journal is a very bold move in the current climate, and the students, in particular Lisa Nolan, are to be congratulated for their efforts and for what they are doing to enhance the visibility of the programs at UAlbany,” he observed.

For now, Sodalitas will be published once annually; LLC and the Graduate Student Organization (GSO) have provided funds for printing and distribution this semester. (The journal will soon be available online at www.albany.edu/ ~sodalita.) Nolan is grateful to both entities and pointed out that GSO “was really helpful and deserves praise for its efforts to fund graduate students.” She hopes that future “financial and professional support by the students and faculty” will eventually make possible the publication of more than one edition per year. Sodalitas “was not something that we did overnight. It was a lot of work. What I would like to do now is encourage other students to get involved because I think it is good for them, and it is a positive thing that resulted from the formation of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.”

Nolan, who is continuing to concentrate on her dissertation, is still deciding what to do after earning her doctorate. After receiving a master’s in public administration at the University of Vermont, she went to work for the New York State Legislature, only to conclude that “I was not in the right profession” and return to school. Wherever life leads her later, “I only hope that it will always remain as interesting and exciting as it is here at UAlbany,” Nolan said.

Sodalitas will be launched officially April 22 at a wine-and-cheese reception. LLC Advisory Board members Liz Bishop (of WRGB-TV); Eloise Brière; Francine Frank; Rita Glavin; Robert Greene; Mary Grondahl; Maria Keyes; Luz Molina Malaret; Mary Nicholaou; Charles Rougle; and Kay Wilkie are supporting the inaugural event. University at Albany Provost Carlos Santiago, Wills, and Nolan will speak at the reception, which will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the Standish Room of the new library.

Tom Brokaw at Tech Valley Summit
By Dan Kinne
Tom Brokaw, anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, will be the moderator of panel discussions that include UAlbany President Karen R. Hitchcock at the second annual Summit in Tech Valley on Tuesday, April 30, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Albany Marriott Hotel.

An estimated 300 to 350 CEOs from the technology sector are expected to attend the summit, which will focus on the expansion of the technology sector since last year, as well as a continued strategy for the future.

President Hitchcock is scheduled to appear on the panel “Tech Valley Tomorrow,” at 11 a.m., with Lawrence S. Sturman, director of the New York State Health Department’s Wadsworth Center, which is affiliated with UAlbany’s School of Public Health; James J. Barba, president of Albany Medical Center; Scott C. Donnelly, senior vice president with GE Global Research Center; and Arthur C. Sanderson, RPI’s vice president for research.

This portion of the program will be preceded by a 10 a.m. panel, “Tech Valley Today,” featuring Mark Cattini, president of MapInfo Corp.; Thomas E. D’Ambra, chair and CEO of Albany Molecular Research, Inc.; Glenn H. Epstein, president of Intermagnetics General Corp.; and George C. McNamee, chair of First Albany Companies, Inc.

“Assured that harnessing the power of technology is the key to this region’s long-term prosperity, the second summit will build on that strong foundation in charting a course for the future,” said Ann Wendth, vice president of special projects for the Albany-Colonie Regional Chamber of Commerce and a leading organizer of the summit.

Brokaw recently hosted similar meetings in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley.

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