Bryn Mawr College

MacArthur “genius” fellow and frequent New Yorker contributor George Saunders will read from his work at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 9, in  Ely Room at the Wyndham Alumnae House as part of the College's 2009-10 Creative Writing Program Reading Series. The Creative Writing Program’s Reading Series is free and open to the public. Best known for his satirical and often absurdly humorous fictional short stories, ... Read more »

The $7.5 million dollar renovation of Bern Schwartz Gymnasium, dubbed the Smart Women, Strong Women initiative, will soon be in full swing, and as of Monday, Nov. 23, the fitness center will be closed. The pool will be closed for all recreational swimming Friday, Dec. 4, at 2 p.m. The former Rhoads Hall dining space will serve as a temporary fitness center and will open for ... Read more »

Widely lauded for its attention to period-specific details, the AMC television series Mad Men has had its slips. The show's "most egregious stumble" according to Benjamin Schwarz's article in the November issue of The Atlantic, involves a lead character's college career at Bryn Mawr: "By far the brainiest of the Seven Sisters—cussed, straight-backed, high-minded, and feminist (its students, so the wags said, preferred the Ph.D. to the Mrs.)—Bryn Mawr was probably the least likely ... Read more »

UCLA Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a noted scholar of the history of South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and European expansion, will hold the 2009 Mary Flexner Lectureship at Bryn Mawr, which has been the proving ground for some of the most influential texts published in the humanities since its inception in 1928. Read more»

On Tuesday, Oct. 27, at 7:30 p.m., 2009 Hepburn Fellow Carol Rogers will discuss the challenges and issues that have most engaged her during her 29-year career in the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, and the insights her professional experience affords regarding the current crisis facing our nation’s health-care system. Her talk, to take place in Wyndham's Ely Room, is co-sponsored by the Katharine Houghton ... Read more »

Related stories about H1N1 (Swine) Flu and Seasonal Flu Seasonal flu vaccine now available for students Information about H1N1 (Swine) Flu for the Bryn Mawr College Community Prior to the fall break, a handful of Bryn Mawr students had been treated by the Student Health Center for mild flu-like symptoms. One student who lives off campus tested positive for H1N1 influenza. There has been no evidence of widespread transmission of seasonal or H1N1 influenza ... Read more »

The new exhibition Darwin’s Ancestors: Tracing the Origins of the "Origin of Species," will open on Thursday, Oct. 22, with a lecture by Swarthmore College Professor of Biology Scott Gilbert, titled “Disagreements among Friends: How T. H. Morgan and E. B. Wilson's Agreeing to Disagree Helped Establish Genetics and the Modern Synthesis.” Read more»

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks will perform her work at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 20, in Bryn Mawr College’s Goodhart Theater as part of the 2009-10 Creative Writing Program Reading Series. The Creative Writing Program’s Reading Series is free and open to the public. Named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Innovators for the Next New Wave,” Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most exciting and ... Read more »

Former Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Jenny Rickard has become the College's chief enrollment and communications officer. While the College conducts a national search for a new dean of admissions, seasoned college-admissions professional Chuck Rickard (the two Rickards are not related) has agreed to serve as interim dean of admissions. Read more»

Inventor Ying Pan ’13 of Guangzhou, China, won a major prize in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair last May and found herself in the heat of the media spotlight as she prepared to leave home for her first semester at Bryn Mawr. Read more»

Bryn Mawr College President Jane McAuliffe and members of the recently formed student services organization met in the Benham Gateway building Sept. 29 to hear from Chief Enrollment and Communications Officer Jenny Rickard and others about the latest progress in creating a new student-services structure at Bryn Mawr. Read more»

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Denise F. Su co-authored one of a suite of papers about Ardipithecus ramidus, the earliest known hominid skeleton, that were published today in Science. The study was featured in The New York Times, National Geographic News, the BBC News, and numerous other media outlets. Su's work focused on reconstructing the early hominid's habitat on the basis of ... Read more »

The Health Center now has seasonal flu vaccine available for students. The vaccine is available to any Bryn Mawr student and is highly recommended for students with asthma or other respiratory diseases Read more»

The Bryn Mawr Night Owls, a student a capella group, will be among the Bryn Mawr students performing at the WHYY Creative Campus Arts Festival on Friday, Oct. 2. The festival takes place from 5-9 p.m. at the WHYY Technology Center on Sixth Street in Philadelphia. This event is free and open to the public; refreshments will be served. Kiran Bhardwaj ’10 and other students of ... Read more »

Bryn Mawr's new Test Flexible policy is among the innovations taking place in the use of standardized testing by higher education institutions in admissions, writes the editor at Inside Higher Ed.

Bryn Mawr student Manal Zaher is among the students profiled in this article about the "Hope Fund," a scholarship program for Palestinian refugees.

Bryn Mawr’s Bern Schwartz Gymnasium is set to undergo a $7.5 million renovation that will give students a better-equipped, more inviting contemporary fitness center and the Athletic Department a much-improved training facility. Read more»

The Society for Human Ecology has bestowed its Gerald Young International Book Award on Brussels: Perspectives on a European Capital, a book co-edited by Associate Professor of Growth and Structure of Cities Carola Hein and Beligan architect/planner Pierre Laconte. The award letter cites a nominator's commendation of the book for effectively bringing together "a group of political, administrative planning, and architectural leaders to ... Read more »

Main Line School Night, a local adult-education program, will continue its successful partnership with Bryn Mawr's faculty as it offers a series of six lectures on the Bryn Mawr campus this fall. "Scholarly Perspectives on Africa" features talks by four Bryn Mawr professors, as well as one Haverford and one Swarthmore scholar, on topics ranging from history and the social sciences to film ... Read more »

The Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series will partner with New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center to present the first Philadelphia-area performances by Australian dance group Lucy Guerin Inc. on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26, at 8 and 10 p.m. in Thomas Great Hall. Internationally renowned for the skill and audacity of its performers, Lucy Guerin Inc. is committed to challenging and extending the ... Read more »

Hepburn Fellow Sarah Schenck ’87 will visit the Bryn Mawr campus on Thursday, Sept. 24, for a screening of her comedy film Slippery Slope, which won the 2007 Best Feature award at the Broad Humor Film Festival in Los Angeles. Schenck will show the film at 7:30 p.m. in Carpenter B21 and respond to audience questions after the screening. The event ... Read more »

Bryn Mawr College President Jane McAuliffe recently returned from the Universities UK (UUK) Annual Conference in Edinburgh, where she gave a speech outlining the effect of the global economic crisis on U.S. colleges and universities. UUK is the membership organization for the heads of all the universities in England, Ireland, and Wales. She called on higher-education leaders on both sides of the Atlantic not to retreat to academic ... Read more »

Sherry Ortner ’62, who is widely regarded as a "founding mother" of feminist anthropology, will return to Bryn Mawr next week to deliver a public lecture and meet with undergraduates in two Bryn Mawr courses. Her lecture, scheduled for Monday, Sept. 21, at 4 p.m. in Dalton 300, relates to her current ethnographic study of independent filmmakers. Ortner, a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University ... Read more »

The article Colleges Helping Alumni Find Jobs quotes Alumnae Career Counselor Debbie Becker and notes that while some colleges and universities have had to limit their career services support of alumni, Bryn Mawr has a staff member dedicated solely to their support.

A reading by best-selling author Lorrie Moore from her new novel A Gate at the Stairs opens Bryn Mawr College’s yearlong Creative Writing Program Reading Series. This year’s series also features Dominican-American poet, fiction, and nonfiction writer Julia Alvarez; playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama; The Paris Review co-founder and literary icon Peter Matthiessen; and several other notable poets, essayists and authors. The Creative Writing ... Read more »

As reported in this USA Today article, Jenny Sawyer  ’02, a freelance book reviewer for The Christian Science Monitor, is the face of the new Web site 60secondrecap.com. The site provides one-minute video primers focused on the the most commonly assigned works of literature.

Washington Post Columnist Jay Mathews looks at Bryn Mawr's new "Test Flexible" policy and asks Will Advanced Placement Replace the SAT?

Filmmaker Sarah Schenck ’87 and Philadelphia public-health advocate Carol Rogers have been selected as Hepburn Fellows for the 2009-10 academic year, Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center Director Leslie Rescorla has announced. In addition, 2008-09 Fellow Maya Ajmera ’89 will be returning to campus on Oct. 22 to lead a workshop on social entrepeneurship, and 2008-09 Fellow Ana Maria Lopez ’82 will be chairing a campus conference on health-care disparities and access on March 19-20, 2010. ... Read more »

Bryn Mawr College ranks seventh among liberal-arts colleges in the Washington Monthly's annual ranking of colleges and universities that contribute most to society. To compile the list, the Monthly's editors gathered reams of publicly available data and settled on three criteria: social mobility, research and service. America's best colleges, the editors reasoned, are those that produce new scientific discoveries and highly trained Ph.D.s, help economically disadvantaged students earn ... Read more »

The 380 incoming students who arrived on Bryn Mawr's campus on Wednesday, Aug. 26, joined generations of young women who have come from all over the world each year to gather in Goodhart Hall after an arduous morning of hauling and unpacking luggage. But the newly arrived Class of 2013 ... Read more »

When she was growing up in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, Akua Nyame-Mensah ’10 often traveled to neighboring Ghana to visit her relatives. Although she loved seeing her family, Nyame-Mensah says, "I complained about the underdeveloped infrastructure." Why, she wondered, did Côte d'Ivoire have more and better roads than Ghana did? Why did access to running water and electricity seem so much more challenging in Ghana's capital city ... Read more »

Can’t figure out your kids? Chances are Bryn Mawr's Child Study Institute can, writes Main Line Today in this article about the Institute. Bryn Mawr Psychology Professor Leslie Rescorla and her staff provide psychological testing, therapy/counseling, educational support, and school consultation to children and families.

In Revisiting the Kate We Wanted to Be, Forward editor and former Hepburn Center Fellow Jane Eisner writes about Katharine Hepburn ’28.

The Philadelphia Inquirer quotes Bryn Mawr Chief Financial Officer John Griffith and Facilities Manager Glenn Smith in this article about how, along with Trustee Cynthia Archer and other college officials, they managed to save the College money by accelerating planned campus repair and restoration projects.

Bryn Mawr’s Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research’s Sandy Schram is partnering with the Women's Community Revitalization Project (WCRP) on an initiative that will involve both undergraduates as well as master's and doctoral students in social work in a continuing research agenda to develop information that helps promote more affordable housing for the poor in Philadelphia. “This project is uniquely Bryn ... Read more »

Update: Sept. 16, 2009 Information about Seasonal flu vaccines Information about seasonal flu vaccines for the Bryn Mawr College community is available on this Web page. The Student Health Center has registered with the Pennsylvania State Health Department to be a provider of the H1N1 vaccine when it becomes available. The Health Center will e-mail the community with more details and information regarding eligibility and distribution when the vaccine becomes available. At this time, the CDC ... Read more »

This summer, while many colleges and universities had seriously curtailed repair and restoration efforts, College officials took advantage of the weak economy to reap major savings on construction by accelerating the pace of planned repairs. Read more

At a time when donations to colleges and universities are down nationwide, Bryn Mawr’s class of 2009 set new benchmarks in showing its generous support of the College. Seventy-six percent of the class gave a total of $4,732, easily eclipsing marks of 61 percent participation and $3,794 raised by the class of 2007. The College received 251 gifts from members of the class, ranging in value from $1 to $500. As part of the ... Read more »

Bryn Mawr and other top women's colleges are highlighted in the Forbes.com article "Why Women's Colleges Are Still Relevant." "They offer an open, empowering atmosphere, leadership training and, yes, co-ed classes," says Forbes.

Psychologist A. Thomas McLellan, M.A. ’74 and Ph.D. ’76, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Until his appointment McLellan, an expert on addiction and treatment, was a professor at the university of Pennsylvania and executive director of the Treatment Research Institute, a Philadelphia nonprofit he cofounded.

A group of senior scholars, including Bryn Mawr President Jane McAuliffe, recently released a report advocating a number of ambitious initiatives to strengthen collaboration between the colleges and universities of the United States and United Kingdom and to foster the growth of an open, competitive, and accessible higher-education sector in other nations. Read more»

Professor Michelle M. Francl, chair of Bryn Mawr’s chemistry department, is among the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The ACS Fellows Program was created in December 2008 “to recognize members of the American Chemical Society for outstanding achievements in and contributions to Science, the Profession, and the Society.” The first fellows will be honored at the annual meeting of the ACS this ... Read more »

Bryn Mawr College was one of five schools to make a list of colleges and universities that most resemble Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from the Harry Potter series, reports the Chicago Tribune.

A photo of Isa He ’12 and another Bryn Mawr student waiting for a friend in their own unique way appeared in The New York Times’ Education Life supplement. The Times asked students to share their experiences "in their own words and pictures."

Environmental historian Ellen Stroud plans to complete “Dead as Dirt,” an environmental history of human remains in the 20th-century United States, as a fellow at the National Humanities Center next year. Read more»

Jo Ellen Parker '75 assumes the presidency of Sweet Briar College, reports the Kansas City Star. Parker taught and served as a dean at Bryn Mawr from 1984 to 1996.

President Jane McAuliffe and Human Resources Director Joe Bucci presented the 2009 McPherson Awards for Excellence and Service to staff members Nell Anderson, Beth Iushewitz, and Bryn Thompson at the staff-appreciation picnic. Read more»

Bryn Mawr President Jane McAuliffe was quoted by the Philadelphia Inquirer in an article about area colleges and universities that have signed up to participate in the VA's Yellow Ribbon Program.

President Barack Obama has asked Karen Kornbluh ’84 to serve as the United States' permanent representative to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the White House announced yesterday. The OECD's mission is to bring together governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy to "compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practice and coordinate domestic and international policies" on ... Read more »

Harp-playing indie singer-songwriter Gillian Grassie ’09, who was recently profiled by Bryn Mawr Now when she won a Watson Fellowship, performed on Philadelphia NBC-10's 10! Show. Hear more of Grassie's music on her MySpace page.