This event is free and open to the public.

Miller is a cell biologist and the author of the most widely-used high school biology textbooks in America. In addition to Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, he is the author of Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. Both books present a lively cutting-edge analysis of the key issues that seem to divide science and religion.

After completing his undergraduate study at Brown University, Miller earned a Ph.D in 1974 at the University of Colorado. He spent six years as an assistant professor at Harvard University before returning to Brown in 1980. His research work on cell membrane structure and function has produced more than 50 scientific papers and reviews in leading journals, including CELL, Nature, and Scientific American.

Miller received the Presidential Citation of the American Institute for Biological Sciences for distinguished service to the field of biology and in 2006 he received the Public Service Award from the American Society for Cell Biology based on his work defending the integrity of science and science education. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science voted to give Miller their award for advancing the public understanding of science.

Miller is in the area to receive Villanova University’s Mendel Medal. His appearance at Bryn Mawr is sponsored by the President’s Office and the Brown Club of Philadelphia.

Senior Co-Captain Shanika Bridges-King

The Bryn Mawr basketball team’s 2009-10 season will get underway with a home game against Rosemont on Friday, Nov. 20, at 6 p.m. as part of a weekend tournament with local rivals Immaculata and Penn State-Abington.

In addition to being the season opener, the game and tournament are part of the Athletic Department’s “Fight For a Cure” fund-raising effort in support of breast-cancer research.

The weekend’s festivities begin on Friday morning when the Athletic Department hosts the Friday coffee hour in the campus center from 9:30-10:30 a.m., during which the community can buy “Fight for a Cure” t-shirts and rally towels and purchase raffle tickets for the chance to win an ipod shuffle, $20 gift cards to Starbucks and Borders, and a campus parking pass.

The tournament continues after the Owls game on Friday night with the Immaculata vs. Penn State-Abington game and concludes on Saturday at 2 p.m. with a consolation and championship game.

The raffle will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday in between games. Raffle winners must be present to claim their prizes. Raffle tickets will be available until just before the drawing, and t-shirts, rally towels, and concessions will be sold during the entire tournament. All proceeds for the two-day event will be donated to the Bryn Mawr Hospital Comprehensive Breast Center.

More “Fight for a Cure” Events

The tip-off tournament is one of many “Fight for a Cure” events sponsored by the Athletics department.

On Wednesday, Dec. 2, the swim team will host a Bryn Mawr community relay challenge before its 6 p.m. meet with Arcadia and Cabrini. The challenge will have one swimmer teamed up with three college community members in a 100-yard (four lengths of the pool) relay. To take part in the relay or sponsor a swimmer, contact Head Swim Team Coach Niki Whitlock.

Earlier this month, the swim team competed in the “Hour of Power” relay. The Owls joined with more than 6,000 athletes from 124 college, high-school, and club teams from across the world in this event, which has raised more than $112,000 for the Ted Mullin Fund for Pediatric Sarcoma Research at the University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital.

During the fall season, in conjunction with the Centennial Conference volleyball coaches’ “Dig for a Cure,” initiative the Bryn Mawr College volleyball team helped raise $1,300 for Living Beyond Breast Cancer, a nonprofit organization based in Haverford, dedicated to empowering all women affected by breast cancer.

For more information on the upcoming events, contact Jill Breslin. To make a donation please contact Athletic Director Kathy Tierney, Head Basketball Coach Deb Charamella or Head Swim Team Coach Nikki Whitlock.

International students in the Class of 2013

A joint initiative of the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education, International Education Week promotes programs that prepare Americans for a global environment and attract future leaders from abroad to study, learn, and exchange experiences in the United States.

International students compose just over a fifth of Bryn Mawr’s Class of 2013, continuing a long tradition of international exchange on the part of Bryn Mawr’s students, faculty, and staff.

According to Assistant Dean and Director of International Programs Theresa Cann, about 40 percent of Bryn Mawr’s junior class studies abroad each year; others participate in the College’s summer programs in Pisa, Avignon, and Russia or undertake summer research internships abroad. The College’s faculty and staff also include immigrants and visitors from abroad whose perspectives contribute to the rich educational environment on campus.

Associate Professor of Growth and Structure of Cities Carola Hein, who is the current co-director of the College’s Center for International Studies and a member of the steering committee that oversees the minor in international studies, helped organize some of the week’s events.

“In view of the continuing globalization process and the emergence of new international networks, anything we can do to bring the world to campus and take Bryn Mawr into the world is valuable,” Hein says.

A native of Germany, Hein is a founding member of the International Faculty Group, which hopes to serve as a resource for faculty and students from abroad as well as U.S. natives who study or do research abroad during their Bryn Mawr careers.

“I’ve gone through the process of finding my way in this culture, which is more different from Europe or Japan where I lived before than you might think,” she notes.

Hein says that the contributions of international students to her classroom are invaluable. “In discussions, it is often the international student who will stand up and say, ‘Yes, but …’ They have an entirely different viewpoint that comes from growing up and being educated in another cultural context.”

Hein also points to the growth in Bryn Mawr’s population of international students as an indicator of “how much interest there is in the liberal-arts model, how much we have to offer to the world.”

Professor of Philosophy Christine Koggel, co-director with Carola Hein of the Center for International Studies, agrees.

“As a liberal arts institution and women’s college, Bryn Mawr is well positioned to play a significant role in a globalized world in which gender continues to make a difference to women’s access to health care, employment, and education,” Koggel says. “Education has a powerful effect in empowering women and enabling them to participate in social, economic, and political processes and to care for families and communities in ways that can promote human well-being more generally.”

With a greatly expanded stage and all-new lighting and sound equipment, Marjorie Walter Goodhart Theater brings together historic architecture and modern technology. In addition to the new stage, the $19 million facelift brings renovated seating and new restrooms for patrons, new dressing rooms and rehearsal space for performers and a teaching theater and additional classroom space for students.

Goodhart Theater, dedicated in 1928, has always been a stunningly beautiful building, said Lord, who is Bryn Mawr’s director of theater and chair of the Bryn Mawr Arts Program. Now it is also a great working theater, capable of transforming space in myriad ways.

But Lord has chosen to inaugurate Goodhart’s new teaching theater with a text that resolutely resists the illusion of transformation. Peter Handke’s 1968 piece Offending the Audience cleverly and dispassionately dissects the theatrical experience, refusing to transport the audience to a fictional time and place. Its insistence on the here and now makes the play a superb vehicle for exploring and displaying the physical space of the theater.

Offending the Audience offers a "topsy-turvy" view of theater and actors

The Bi-Co production of Handke’s work “asks the audience to think differently about theater—and, in particular, to think differently about this theater,” said Lord’s assistant director, Jessica Rizzo ’11.

As the actors strip their relationship with the audience to its bare essentials, explicitly repudiating the artifice of traditional drama, they show the audience the theater’s machinery and illuminate spaces that are usually concealed. Lord’s staging ultimately takes the actors to the far reaches of the building, revealing almost every corner that is visible from the small stage at the building’s heart.

By design, almost every corner is visible. When the right doors and curtains are opened, the view from the teaching theater extends through the scene shop to the main stage, the auditorium seats, the balcony, and even a bit of the entrance foyer.

Site Specificity and Design

In Philadelphia avant-garde theater circles, Lord is known as a pioneer of site-specific theater, which is often staged in “found spaces” not designed for theatrical productions.

That interest, he recently told students in a directing class, was partly motivated by the constraints imposed by the antiquated theater he found when he began working at Bryn Mawr in 1988. Until its renovation last year, the historic building retained its original utility systems; its stage was very small by contemporary standards, and its narrow proscenium arch often presented staging challenges.

With the help of designer Hiroshi Iwasaki, the College’s technical director, Lord began to approach Goodhart as a found space.

“I said, ‘Let’s not use it as a theater. It’s a great building, so let’s use it as a building,’” Lord said. “I worked often with Hiroshi to figure out how to use the spaces in this building to make events. I usually start with the space itself—I inventory the space and think about what kinds of events are possible in the space, what kinds of impulses I get from the space. Then I ask myself, ‘What are the texts that I care about that might work well in relationship to that space?’”

The renovation of Goodhart, Lord said, hasn’t changed his focus on space. But it has made a difference in his artistic process.

The College’s arts faculty consulted extensively with the architects who handled the renovation, over a period of several years, about its requirements for the building. Consequently, Lord said, “Hiroshi and I were pretty familiar with this space before it even existed. I knew all sorts of things it could do, and for this production I wanted to get to as many of them as I could.

“Offending the Audience was chosen partly because it was friendly to a set of ideas about space,” he explained.

Speeches and Spaces

Sitting in Goodhart’s splendid auditorium, Rizzo drew an analogy between the exploration of language in Handke’s text and the exploration of space in Lord’s staging of it.

“The piece exposes the pure elements of theatrical experience. Its language is clean, it’s stark; it isn’t intended to make itself into something different or refer to something outside itself,” she said.

Student director Jessica Rizzo demonstrates the hidden machinery of the theater

“Sometimes, that language is ugly—like the insults that are hurled at the audience at the end of the play—or very utilitarian.”

The current production, she said, applies a similar rigor to its examination of the new performance spaces in Goodhart. “For instance, the audience sees the scene shop, which is part of this amazing new complex. There’s nothing beautiful about the scene shop. It’s wonderful, because it allows us to do very practical things that Mark and Hiroshi hadn’t been able to do, but it doesn’t aspire to be beautiful.”

But the play does offer the occasional glimpse of a more poetic kind of language, Rizzo noted. “It provides an opportunity for reflection on language, on what it means to be addressed, on past experiences of plays and theatergoing, that may affect your experiences of plays you will see in the future.”

Similarly, the soaring Gothic-revival architecture of the historic auditorium is visible to the audience through the scene shop, which connects the old stage to the new.

“This space, the grand old traditional theater, is worked into the piece, but we’re looking at the theater topsy-turvy and inside out and from different angles,” Rizzo says. “It really is a space unlike any other.”

Offending the Audience will be presented on Nov. 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, and 21, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are free for Tri-Co students, faculty, and staff and $5 for the general public. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Reservations are strongly suggested. Visit www.youchuckleheads.com or e-mail theater@brynmawr.edu to reserve a space.

Photos by Paola Nogueras ’84

Bryn Mawr was one of a few institutions invited by the Congressional Bi-Partisan Robotics Caucus to a briefing on robots and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. As partners of the Institute for Personal Robotics in Education (IPRE), co-sponsored with Georgia Tech, Bryn Mawr computer scientists have developed software and curricula that are now used in more than 300 schools.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Douglas Blank, Professor of Computer Science Deepak Kumar, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Dianna Xu demonstrated “Scribblers,” the turtle-like, wheeled personal robots used in Bryn Mawr introductory computer science courses; Kumar’s introductory computer-science textbook, written to complement the robots; and Bryn Mawr’s mini-humanoid robot, which is used by several advanced students. All of the computers run on a multipurpose software platform developed by Blank, who is IPRE’s director.

The briefing focused primarily on robotics in elementary and secondary education, and the IPRE exhibit hosted not only members of Congress, their staffers, and assorted luminaries from the worlds of high technology and education, but also a number of young robot fanciers from D.C.-area schools.

Bryn Mawr computer scientist Doug Blank at the IPRE exhibit with D.C.-area students

Blank, Kumar, and Xu have supervised several Bryn Mawr undergraduates who have experimented with using robotics to teach computer science to younger students, including Ashley Gavin ’10, who is teaching a group of students at the Baldwin School through the College’s Praxis Program.

IPRE, now supported by the National Science Foundation, was started with a grant from Microsoft Corporation, which recognized Bryn Mawr’s computer-science department for its role in developing “the nation’s leading educational robotics platform” and for its record of using novel pedagogical approaches to attract women to computer science, thus bucking a national trend.

Computer science has suffered from a precipitous nationwide drop in enrollment since 2000. Declining interest in computer science in the United States is especially acute among women; in fact, it is the only STEM discipline in which the gender gap has actually widened over the last 25 years. IPRE uses robots to pique students’ interest in computer science.

According to IPRE’s founders, using robots to teach basic computer-science concepts helps students see computer science as a discipline focused on creative problem solving. The physical presence of a robot illustrates the discipline’s connection to real-world issues in a way that cold code does not, they argue.

The Bryn Mawr Computer Science Program has been using the IPRE course materials in its introductory course since the fall of 2006, and early indicators support the hypothesis that robotics engages students in computing and retains their interest better than traditional computer-science curricula.

An especially striking statistic is the sharp increase in enrollment in Computer Science 206, the course that follows the introduction to computer science: the number of students taking the course rose from nine in 2006 to 52 this year, while computer-science enrollments nationwide are still in decline. “Our 2009 enrollment is more than 10 times what it was in 2001,” Blank says. “All of our advanced courses have seen increased enrollments.”

Blank appreciated the caucus’ interest in educational robotics. “I was very glad to see our representatives engaged in activities  supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) …  I was especially excited to see their appreciation of the use of  educational personal robots towards these ends,” he says.

“I still think we have a  ways to go, though, to let people know that computing is about critical  thinking, general-purpose problem solving, and especially creativity,” Blank continues. “It  really is at the heart of a liberal-arts education. Some still see computing as something that only engineers can do, and we want to chip away at that stereotype.”

His lectures focus on the crucial role 16th- and 17th-century Eurasian courtly encounters played in shaping Muslim, Hindu, and Christian group perceptions of one another at that time and the historical influence and modern-day ramifications of those perceptions

Subrahmanyam sat down with Bryn Mawr Now after his first Flexner Lecture to share more about his research and the lectures.

Your series is titled “Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness in Early Modern Eurasia.” How did you decide upon this topic as the focus of your lectures?
I was looking for something within my academic expertise that is appropriate for this three lecture format. The topic can’t be so small that it can’t be expanded into three lectures or so large that it can’t be given a proper examination. I also knew I was going to be talking to an audience, many of whom won’t have a background in the subject. So I needed to make sure the topic would be of interest to a fairly wide audience.

What are the lectures like?
I use a mixture of textual and visual materials in each lecture. As one learns as a teacher, visual materials do a much better job of holding people’s attention than simply presenting a lecture. Also, for about 10 or 12 years I’ve been looking at visual materials—not as an art historian, but as an historian. It turns out a lot of the visual materials that come out of South Asia are tied to courts.

These lectures provide a broad-ranging reflection on the worlds of early modern Islam, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Protestantism and a newly emergent Hindu sphere. I argue that debates on a variety of matters and concepts of pressing interest for the contemporary world—including secularism and cosmopolitanism—can be illuminated by turning to this earlier phase of interactions and conflicts.

What do you mean by courtly encounters and why are they significant in examining history?
What is sometimes lost sight of by historians is the fact that cultural encounters don’t often take place between societies or cultural systems as such, but between subcultures or segments of societies, in many cases courts. In these lectures, it is my intention to focus on how courtly encounters were the crucial site for the forging of mutual perceptions and representations in Eurasia.

Your lectures involve several groups that came into contact with one another in early modern Eurasia—Muslim states, Christian states, and Hindus. How were the courts from these very different groups able to interact with one another?
In order for these encounters to take place, there has to be a prior recognition of at least a crude parallel morphology, where the societal agents involved in the encounter saw each others’ societies as possessing somewhat similar political systems, dominated by rulers with courts, which in turn possessed systematic rules and conventions.

So was there in some respects greater tolerance for difference among these groups during this time than what we often see today?
There are some who like to portray these times as much more inclusive and tolerant than today, and then there’s the other extreme position that sees this as a time of great oppression and uses that view to justify their current actions. The reality is that there were all kinds of peculiar and difficult problems among these groups, including violence, in the period I’m dealing with but people’s reactions weren’t always what we might expect.

For instance, I researched an incident in which a Hindu temple was torn down and a mosque erected in its place during this period. About 20 years ago in India a gang tore down another similar mosque, that in turn led to riots and lots of people got killed. But when I researched the original incident, I found out that a lot of people at the time said, “Well, they tore down the temple, they put a mosque in its place; it used to be a place of worship, it’s still a place of worship.” So this act did occur, but the modern day reaction was more oriented to retribution and an idea of grievance than the reaction at the time.

How was the first lecture and what are your initial impressions of Bryn Mawr?
It’s a lovely campus which naturally reminds me of Oxford, though the undergraduates are far better behaved than in England. We shall see if that impression survives the weekend, though! I am also enjoying the baseball games amongst the big Philly fans we have here.

The first lecture went fairly well, I thought. There was an excellent turnout, of a wide diversity of people. I was particularly happy to see a number of colleagues and friends who made the trip from Penn. I look forward to the other lectures very much.

Visit the Mary Flexner Lectureship Web site for more details about the 2009 Flexner Lectureship, including a complete calendar of events for faculty, staff, students, and the general public.

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, Saunders is a four-time National Magazine Award winner. In addition to The New Yorker, Saunders’ work regularly appears in Harper’s , McSweeney’s, and GQ.

His short story collection, In Persuasion Nation, was a finalist for the 2007 The Story Prize. His other books and collections include CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil.

His latest book, 2007’s The Braindead Megaphone, was called “a Mark Twain-syle shot in the arm for Americans, an antidote to the dumbing-down virus plaguing our country,” by Vanity Fair.

The former Rhoads Hall dining space will serve as a temporary fitness center and will open for students, faculty and staff on Monday, Nov. 30, at 7 a.m.

Rhoads will have a variety of cardiovascular machines, including treadmills, elliptical trainers, ergs and an upright and a recumbent bicycle. Strength equipment will include a full complement of dumbbells, weighted bars, leg-press machine, lat pull-down and functional trainer machine. Stretching mats and bands will also be available. There are no changing areas or shower facilities.

From 11 a.m-2 p.m. and 4-7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 17, an open house and moving sale will be held at Schwartz Gym, where the community can view the schematic drawings and plans for the renovation, learn more about the options for new strength and cardiovascular equipment, complete a survey about equipment options and programming changes, and purchase selected fitness equipment and Bryn Mawr athletic gear. The sale will continue through Nov. 19.

The Smart Women, Strong Women initiative seeks to ensure that students have a state-of-the-art, attractively designed, and fully equipped facility where they can engage in a wide range of sports and fitness programs. Highlights of the renovation include the construction of a large glass atrium to be built around the current entrance that will reach into and open up the second-floor fitness area; equipment upgrades and additions including state-of-the art cardio and strength equipment; new office spaces for physical-education faculty and coaches; and a revamped pool and locker rooms.

For more details about the renovation, see this earlier story from Bryn Mawr Now.

The Athletics Department will soon be announcing the launch of the Smart Women, Strong Women Web site, where the community can track the progress of the renovation, get the latest news on the project, make a contribution, and more.