Salve Regina University

Sean O’Callaghan, assistant professor in the Department of Religious and Theological Studies, will present a talk on “Redesigning Humans” as a featured speaker in TEDxNewport, the local version of the world-famous TED talks, which will be filmed before an invited audience on Saturday, Nov. 5 at the Jane Pickens Theater.

“The technology I will be talking about is technology which is still in its young phase, but which will explode in coming decades, and we need to be aware of where the technology revolution is bringing us,” O’Callaghan said. “Some of it may, indeed, turn out to be science fiction, but much of it will happen as predicted and we need to have plans in place both socially and ethically to embrace the opportunities and confront the challenges.”

O’Callaghan, dean of Salve Regina’s Class of 2019 and a Pell Center faculty fellow, is among the 13 speakers chosen from more than 60 who submitted topics. His proposal on human beings and bio-engineering was selected by TEDx organizers among their top 25 initially and then ultimately among their final 13.

“I have been fascinated by technology and its impact on the human body and mind for several years,” O’Callaghan said. “At first, it all seemed like science fiction; then I realized that places like MIT, Harvard and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were investing millions in research into the GRIN technologies – Genetics, Robotics, Information and Nanotechnology.”

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NEWPORT, R.I. (Oct. 3, 2016) – A new book by Dr. Timothy B. Neary, associate professor of history and coordinator of American studies at Salve Regina University, challenges many of our widely accepted understandings about U.S. race relations in northern cities during the mid-20th century.

“Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago, 1914-1954” (University of Chicago Press, Oct. 17, 2016), builds upon and complicates John T. McGreevy’s groundbreaking scholarship two decades ago on the subject of the Catholic encounter with race in the 20th century urban north.

Controversy erupted in spring 2001 when Chicago’s mostly white Southside Catholic Conference youth sports league rejected the application of the predominantly black St. Sabina grade school. Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, inter-racialism seemed stubbornly unattainable, and the national spotlight once again turned to the history of racial conflict in Catholic parishes. It’s widely understood that midcentury, working-class, white ethnic Catholics were among the most virulent racists, but, as “Crossing Parish Boundaries” shows, that’s not the whole story.

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NEWPORT, R.I. (Sept. 27, 2016) – Salve Regina faculty this fall are launching work on a three-year, grant-funded plan to intentionally infuse community engagement and civic learning into the university’s curriculum, a process enriched by community partners as co-educators.

The $173,800 grant from the Davis Educational Foundation supports the formation of Faculty Learning Communities that, over the next three years, will expand efforts to increase faculty investment in community engaged scholarship, deepen student learning across the curriculum, and strengthen academic outcomes by developing interdisciplinary learning with meaningful input from community partners.

The project is co-managed at Salve Regina by Dr. Laura O’Toole, Senior Faculty Fellow for Community Engagement and Professor of Sociology, and Dr. Scott Zeman, Provost/Vice President for Academic Affairs.

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NEWPORT, R.I. (Sept. 22, 2016) – On the next two Saturdays, 22 Salve Regina University students will be meeting and interviewing clients from Providence’s Refugee Dream Center, after which they will transcribe and edit their interviews, and send the finished product back to the Center for its use as part of a class project designed to expand students’ understanding of cultural diversity.

The project blends tenets of the university’s mission with experiential learning and community engagement. The students are enrolled in Dr. Chad Raymond’s UNV 101, a university seminar designed for first-semester students in which Raymond is inspiring them to take a broader look at immigration, which is one of the Mercy critical concerns. Salve Regina is a Mercy institution and the university seminar is a core requirement designed to refine students’ skills of inquiry, analysis and communication.

“The purpose of the project is to get first-semester students interacting in the community with people whose cultural backgrounds and life experiences are very different from their own,” said Raymond, who is chairman of the Department of Cultural, Environmental and Global Studies. “This interaction benefits the Refugee Dream Center by providing it with documentation that it can use to inform others about its services.”

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