Arts and Culture

With an assist from the National Science Foundation, an assistant professor of media study at the University at Buffalo is launching a unique software game that addresses the lack of computer educational activities oriented toward girls, particularly those from underrepresented groups.

International critics have called Nicholas Isherwood the uncontested darling of contemporary musicians and one of the greatest interpreters of new music in the world today. The world-renowned performer joined the UB faculty in January as an assistant professor of singing and musical theater, teaching voice and running the Music Theatre Workshop.

One of his favorite pulp writers might describe George Kelley as "just one dirty guy doing a seedy job in a miserable world." But Kelley's life-long pursuit of cheap -- sometimes even cheesy -- paperbacks has the librarians at the University at Buffalo doing handsprings. That's because Kelley has made a gift to the UB Libraries of 25,000 pulp-fiction titles.

The University at Buffalo will establish a Center for the Americas as an interdisciplinary teaching and research center in the College of Arts and Sciences to expand the university's curriculum and degree options in the field of American studies.

New degree programs related to issues and research on the human aspects of information transfer are being developed by the School of Information Studies (SIS) at the University at Buffalo. The school was formed July 1 when the School of Information and Library Studies (SILS) changed its name and merged with the Department of Communication.

Gov. George E. Pataki was the guest of honor Oct. 26 at the grand-opening ceremonies of the University at Buffalo's Center for Computational Research, one of the nation's leading supercomputing centers.

A University at Buffalo philosophy professor is sharing more than his teaching excellence with UB's College of Arts and Sciences. Peter H. Hare, Ph.D., SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Philosophy, has given two gifts totaling $1 million to support activities of the department.

The University at Buffalo has teamed up with Squeaky Wheel/Buffalo Media Resources to offer a unique, extracurricular arts-and-technology outreach program for disadvantaged, early-adolescent girls in grades 5-7 that is designed to help them overcome the technological gender gap. UB students majoring in computer art and media study will serve as staff assistants in the program.

Samuel R. "Chip" Delany, widely recognized as an intellectually gifted autodidact, literary iconoclast, memoirist and very likely the finest science-fiction novelist of our time, has joined the University at Buffalo faculty as an adjunct professor in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he is expected to make a prominent contribution to the department's Poetics Program. He will become a full professor in the Spring 2000 semester.

It's been more than 30 years since their predecessors threw verbal grenades at the military-industrial complex, and decades since environmentalists began wrapping themselves around endangered trees and laying down in front of bulldozers.