Month: October 2016

Brown’s J. Michael Kosterlitz wins Nobel Prize in Physics

News conference with the professor of physics will be live-streamed at 3:00 pm on Tuesday, October 4.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded Brown University Professor J. Michael Kosterlitz the Nobel Prize in Physics “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.”

[A news conference with Professor Kosterlitz will be live-streamed at http://www.brown.edu/web/livestream/ at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, October 4. Media who wish to attend in person or ask questions by telephone should email brian_clark@brown.edu with KOSTERLITZ as the subject line.]

Kosterlitz is the Harrison E. Farnsworth Professor of Physics at Brown, where he joined the faculty in 1982. He shares one half of the Nobel prize with F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton University, with the other half of the Nobel going to David J. Thouless of the University of Washington in Seattle.

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In new book, Neary examines urban race relations in northern U.S. cities

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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Mississippi Music Stories

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Dean of Liberal Arts Dan Cavicchi researched and wrote 400 artist and industry profiles for GRAMMY Museum Mississippi’s core exhibit.

Ever eager to share his belief that popular music deserves critical attention, Dean of Liberal Arts Daniel Cavicchi embraces the unique challenges posed by music history museums. “Sound isn’t contained easily,” says the historian, who was invited to help create two permanent exhibits for the Recording Academy’s new GRAMMY Museum Mississippi.

Having worked as a curator for the organization’s flagship GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles almost a decade ago, Cavicchi was pleased to expand on that earlier work and extend the reach of his research. “I love finding [audiences] I haven’t talked to before or had the opportunity to reach yet,” he says of bringing music scholarship to the general public. In fact, creating new ways to teach and understand how the arts intersect with American history and society is essential to both his own research and RISD’s approach to liberal arts education.

“You’re only getting part of the picture if you’re not looking at the arts in American history,” Cavicchi affirms. “They don’t just exist on the side. They are central to who we are and how we think about ourselves.”

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