For more than a year, UAlbany senior John England has been juggling his classwork as a full-time student and helping researchers better understand near-freezing winter storm events.

For three decades, the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany (CTG UAlbany) has been working with governments worldwide to transform public services through advances in technology, policy and management.

Our speaker, Dr. Mikhal Dekel, will present on The Tehran Children: To Whom Does History Belong? Mikhal Dekel is Professor of English and Director of the Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts at the CUNY Graduate Center and the City College of New York. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the Lady Davis Foundation, among others. She is the author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugees Odyssey (W. W. Norton, 2019); Oedipus in Kishinev (Bialik Institute, 2014); and The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Moment (Northwestern University Press, 2011). Her articles, translations, and blogs have appeared in Foreign Policy, Journal of Comparative Literature, English Literary History, Jewish Social Studies, Callaloo, Shofar, Guernica, and Cambridge Literary Review among others. In her lecture, Dr. Dekel will tell the story of her father and the odyssey from Poland to Iran at the core of his childhood—an experience which he never talked about, though it informed every aspect of his being. His wartime odyssey was also part of a larger chapter in the history of World War II, that of a quarter million Polish-Jewish refugees in Central Asia and the Middle East. The fact that most Polish Jews who survived the war had followed this path has been until now virtually unknown. Refreshments will be served. Parking will be available in the Dutch Student Lot: please advise us of any special mobility issues. For an interactive map with directions, go to www.albany.edu/map Contacts: 518-442-5300 and [email protected] The lecture is sponsored through the generosity and support of Malka and Eitan Evan.

Save the Date (Monday, April 10, 3-4:20 p.m.) for the History Department’s annual Fossieck Lecture. We welcome Prof. Chris Parsons from Northeastern University, who will be discussing his current research, which traces the spread of smallpox and other European illnesses in the northeast (New France, New England, and New Netherland) in the 17th and 18th centuries in order to understand how epidemic disease shaped colonial encounters and imperial rivalries. Specifically, he’ll be talking about the small pox epidemic of 1721. (See the attached flier.) If you’re interested in how people navigated past epidemics to understand our present predicament, this is the lecture for you. Please let me know if you have any questions.

The University hosted more than 450 science research students and teachers for the 38th annual Upstate New York Junior Science and Humanities Symposium earlier this month.