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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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Chefs prepare regionally authentic dishes featuring fresh produce, fish and meat exclusively sourced from New England farms and vendors.

BRISTOL, R.I. – With a bounty of delectable, fresh food growing at farms all around campus, Roger Williams University joins together today to celebrate the Annual Eat Local Challenge – a day on which the campus community comes together to sample local foods at the farmer’s market and feast on regionally authentic dishes in the dining commons, all to celebrate the importance of environmentally responsible food sourcing.

For this year’s Eat Local Challenge, the chefs will highlight Rhode Island’s best with dishes – grilled swordfish steaks, root vegetable stew with homemade cornbread, and grilled prosciutto and queso fresco pizza, among other items. The dining commons will also feature a chilled raw bar of Narragansett Bay littleneck clams, Onset oysters and scallop ceviche sourced from Cape Cod. Other specialty dishes will include potato leek soup, cheese ravioli and eggplant roulades with autumn squash and goat cheese. All of the ingredients are harvested within 150 miles of the campus.

The Eat Local Challenge is in its 12th year and was created when Bon Appétit launched its Farm to Fork program, in which all Bon Appétit chefs have been required to source at least 20 percent of their ingredients from small, owner-operated farms within that radius.

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An interdisciplinary research team of Brown undergraduates led by Assistant Professor of Anthropology Parker VanValkenburgh developed a bilingual, tablet-based app for field and laboratory use.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —Over three seasons excavating reducciones, or colonial planned towns, in Peru, Parker VanValkenburgh and his international research team collected tens of thousands of small ceramic sherds. Those tiny pieces of pottery, dating back hundreds of years, could shed light on the lives and habits of the indigenous populations forcibly resettled into towns by Spanish colonialists — what they ate, how they organized their living spaces and how they were connected to the rest of the world.

In such an endeavor, critical mass is both a key and an obstacle.

“A single sherd on its own is often mute, but with 80,000 sherds you notice patterns and establish lines of evidence that enable you to tell really interesting stories,” said VanValkenburgh, an assistant professor of anthropology at Brown University.

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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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