Forensic Anthropology in the Service of Human Rights, Talk February 8

Chestertown, MD, January 30, 2006 — Washington College's Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Goldstein Program in Public Affairs present "Forensic Anthropology and Human Rights in Peru," a lecture by Professor Elsa Tomasto, Wednesday, February 8, at 7:30 p.m. in the Litrenta Lecture Hall of the Toll Science Center.

Tomasto teaches Andean archaeology and biological anthropology at the Pontifical University in Lima, Peru, with which Washington College maintains a study-abroad exchange program.

A specialist in the analysis of human bone remains, Tomasto has performed valuable forensic work for Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, examining the remains from clandestine burials sites in the district of Lucanamarca where members of the Maoist guerilla group Shining Path massacred 62 local villagers in 1983.

The event is free and open to the public.

Paul Reed Smith Band to Play Prince Theatre, February 10

Chestertown, MD, January 30, 2006 — The Prince Theatre—in cooperation with Washington College's Student Events Board and SGA—presents the Paul Reed Smith Band in concert, Friday, February 10, at the historic Prince Theatre, 210 High Street, Chestertown. Show begins 8 p.m., doors open 7:30 p.m.

The first 100 Washington College students are admitted free with valid student I.D.

Tickets are $20 per person and benefit the fundraising efforts of the Prince Theatre Cultural Center and Foundation for the Arts. There will be a cash bar, but those 18 and under are welcomed. Tickets can be purchased at the Prince Theatre box office, 210 High Street, during business hours, Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., or by calling the box office at 410-810-2060 during business hours.

The Paul Reed Smith Band is guitar maven Paul Reed Smith's international touring band, showcasing the dynamic talents of seasoned, high-caliber musicians. With bassist Gary Grainger—whose seamless approach to virtually any style of music makes him one of the most sought after bass players in the world—guitarist Michael Ault, the showmanship of vocalist Derek St. Holmes, and the rhythms of drummer Greg Grainger—one of the best session drummers in the music business today—the Paul Reed Smith Band performs and records original rock and covers the classics as well.

The Band has performed throughout the U.S. at music industry events, tradeshows, music stores, and nightclubs for customers, artists, music industry peers, and diehard fans, in addition to playing for audiences in Canada, Japan, China, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and England. The Paul Reed Smith Band is currently working on a new CD project, with a probable May 2006 release date.

The Prince Theatre, located in historic Chestertown on Maryland's Eastern Shore, was built in 1926 as a vaudeville theatre and movie house. The meticulously restored theatre now presents a wide range of musical acts, special events, children's workshops and educational lectures. For more information about concerts and events at the Prince Theatre, visithttp://www.princetheatre.org.

From Segregation to Success: Surgeon LaSalle Leffall Tells of His Personal and Professional Odyssey, February 21

Chestertown, MD, January 24, 2006 — Washington College's Office of Diversity Affairs presents "No Boundaries: A Cancer Surgeon's Odyssey," a talk by LaSalle D. Leffall, Jr., M.D., F.A.C.S., the Charles Drew Professor of Surgery at the Howard University College of Medicine, Tuesday, February 21, 2006, at 7 p.m. in the college's Hynson Lounge. The event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Leffall's autobiography,No Boundaries: A Cancer Surgeon's Odyssey, was just released in September by Howard University Press. A book signing will be held immediately following the talk.

The first African-American president of the American Cancer Society and the American College of Surgeons, Dr. Leffall grew up in the Depression-era South and triumphed over segregation and discrimination to become a renowned surgeon, oncologist, educator, and medical spokesman. Graduating first in his class in 1952 from the Howard University College of Medicine, he has been the recipient of numerous professional and civic awards during a professional career that has spanned more than 50 years. His professional life has been devoted to the study of cancer, especially among African Americans, and, as president of the American Cancer Society, he worked to focus national attention on the disturbing disparities between blacks and whites in cancer prevalence, treatment, and mortality.

Dr. Leffall has taught thousands of medical students and has held numerous high-level positions in surgical and cancer-related organizations. In 2002, he was selected by President George W. Bush to chair the President's Cancer Panel, working with cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong. As the current board chair of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation-renowned for its "Race for the Cure" awareness campaign-he stresses the need for early detection and treatment of breast cancer. In addition to research and clinical work in oncology, Dr. Leffall's career has also focused on the ethical issues related to cancer survivorship. Along with his teaching and organizational duties, Dr. Leffall maintains a busy private practice, seeing hundreds of patients each month. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife Ruthie.

Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in historic Chestertown on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, it was the first college chartered in the new nation.

More Like Not Running Away: Novelist Paul Shepherd Reads from His Fiction, February 8

Chestertown, MD, January 19, 2006 — Washington College's Sophie Kerr Lecture Series presents Paul Shepherd, winner of the 2004 Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction, reading from his newly released novel More Like Not Running Away (Sarabande Books, 2005), Wednesday, February 8, at 4:30 p.m. in the Sophie Kerr Room of the Miller Library. The event is free and open to the public.

Shepherd is a Writer in Residence and former Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University, where he earned a Ph.D. with distinction. He attended the University of Virginia, UNC-Chapel Hill, and UNC-Greensboro. His work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Fiction, Omni, Prairie Schooner, William and Mary Review, Folio, Pacific Review, U.S. Catholic, St. Anthony Messenger, Portland Review, The Quarterly, Beloit Fiction,and Maryland Review. He has served as Senior Editor of International Quarterly and has taught college classes in creative writing, magazine and newspaper writing, and modern literature. He speaks on a variety of topics including faith in fiction and the imagination. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife Lois, and their three children.

A finalist for the Associated Writing Programs Award in the Novel, the Bakeless Prize, and twice for the James Jones prizes, More Like Not Running Away is the story of Levi Revel, a boy in danger of losing his family and maybe his mind. He is in awe of his father, Everest, a majestic dreamer, a master builder, and a man with a violent, secret past that still haunts the family. As the family moves from state to state, Levi hears solace in the voice of God, a voice that sends him to preach from treetops and roofs. But the family begins to fall apart, and as Levi enters adolescence, he hears more troubling things-other voices, terrifying sounds, warnings.

When Everest takes him on a high-speed cross-country chase to win back Levi's mother, by force if necessary, Levi realizes how much danger they all are in. From a boy lost in a world of imaginary voices and chilling destruction to a young man who can rebuild steeples, laugh, and climb, the story Levi tells is the triumph of persistence and reaching out over moments of isolation and despair.

The reading is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee, which works to carry on the legacy of the late Sophie Kerr, a writer from Denton, Md., whose generosity has done so much to enrich Washington College's literary culture. When she died in 1965, Kerr left the bulk of her estate to the College, specifying that one half of the income from her bequest be awarded every year to the senior showing the most "ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor" and the other half be used to bring visiting writers to campus, to fund scholarships, and to help defray the costs of student publications.

Genocide Ignored: Documentary Producer Peter Raymont Screens, Discusses His Film Shake Hands with the Devil, February 2

Chestertown, MD, January 19, 2006 — Washington College's Goldstein Program in Public Affairs invites the public to a special screening of the film Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire, Thursday, February 2, 2006, at 7:00 p.m. in the College's Norman James Theatre. The film will be followed by an open question-and-answer session with the documentary's producer, Peter Raymont.

A gut-wrenching indictment of the United Nation's and the world's lack of response to the horrors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide as witnessed by Canadian Armed Forces Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, the film has been screened at The White House and at the United Nations and has received the prestigious Audience Award for World Documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005. The event is free and open to all.

Documentary filmmaker, journalist, and writer Peter Raymont has produced and directed more than 100 documentary films during a 33-year career. His films have taken him to Ethiopia, Nicaragua, India, Rwanda, the High Arctic, and throughout North America and Europe. He is the recipient of 35 international awards including the Canadian Genie for Best Documentary for The World Is Watching (1988)—a critical examination of the role and responsibility of the international media reporting from Nicaragua—and Gemini Awards for his six-hour fly-on-the-wall series on the business of hockey, The New Ice Age (1998), Arctic Dreamer: The Lonely Quest of Vilhjalmur Stefansson(2003), and The World Stopped Watching (2004).

Raymont's films are often provocative investigations of the "hidden worlds" of politics, the media, and big business, as well as Native, social, and human rights issues. His career began in 1971 at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal where he worked as an editor, director, and producer for seven years. While at the NFB, he also taught film and video production in the Canadian Arctic. In 1978, Raymont moved to Toronto and established his own independent film and television production company, Investigative Productions.

With his new company White Pine Pictures, in partnership with Lindalee Tracey, Raymont recently completed Bhopal: The Search for Justice and The Undefended Border, following the work of Canadian Immigration Officers post 9/11. With such films as Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire and Bhopal to his credit, Raymont has had a significant impact on shaping attitudes about personal and collective responsibility and in bringing to light the important stories the world needs to hear. Since its release, Shake Hands with the Devil has been broadcast in 18 countries and translated into 13 languages.

Raymont has written for the Toronto Globe and Mailand Canadian Business Magazine and has produced a number of radio documentaries for the flagship CBC Current Affairs radio program, Sunday Morning.He is a founding member of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus, a lobby group that argues for an independent voice in Canada's film and television industry.

The film screening and discussion are sponsored by Washington College's Goldstein Program in Public Affairs, established in honor of the late Louis L. Goldstein, 1935 alumnus and Maryland's longest serving elected official. The Goldstein Program sponsors lectures, symposia, visiting fellows, travel, and other projects that bring students and faculty together with leaders in public policy and the media.

I Question America: The Fannie Lou Hamer Legacy Onstage at Washington College, January 31

Chestertown, MD, January 18, 2006 — Washington College welcomes award-winning writer and performer E. P. McKnight portraying the life of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in the one-woman play, I Question America, on stage in the College's Tawes Theatre, Tuesday, January 31, 2006, at 7 p.m. This Martin Luther King Celebration event is free and open to the public.

Hamer (1917-1977), field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was an outspoken advocate for civil rights for African Americans. For more than half of Hamer's life, she was a rural agricultural worker who saw no end to the cycle of poverty and humiliation that was the plight of many southern African Americans.

I Question America begins with Hamer as a young girl living and working with her parents and siblings as sharecroppers. It depicts her years of grueling subsistence labor and her growing awareness of the inequality between the blacks and whites in America. As she becomes more aware of this inequality, she is provoked to seek a better way. Her determination takes her around the country, protesting and speaking against racism and distinguishing herself as a successful grassroots organizer from her rural Mississippi town to the Halls of Congress. Despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Hamer achieves her life's calling to change America through her work during the Civil Rights Movement to promote voting rights and farm worker's rights and to break the hold of white racism on the Southern Democratic Party.

E. P. McKnight is a graduate of Fordham University, where she received her master's degree in educational psychology. As an educational psychologist, she founded the Nikao Imani, Inc., a marketing and consulting firm for careers in the corporate industry and entertainment industry. She is a poet, actress, writer, and a member of the Screen Actors Guild, Actor's Equity, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

The performance of I Question America is presented by Washington College's Office of Diversity Affairs.

Senator Birch Bayh Discusses the Separation of Church and State in Principle and Politics, January 30

Chestertown, MD, January 17, 2006 — Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience will host retired Senator Birch Bayh, one of the nation's most respected elder statesmen, speaking on "Church and State: 18th-Century Principles, 21st-Century Politics," Monday, January 30, 2006, at 4:30 p.m. in the College's Tawes Theatre, Gibson Performing Arts Center.

The event is free and open to the public. A question-and-answer session will follow the talk.

During the spring semester of 2006, the C.V. Starr Center is honored to host Sen. Bayh as a visiting fellow who will teach a Senatorial Colloquy on American History and Politics for Washington College students. As U.S. Senator from Indiana between 1963 and 1981, Sen. Bayh won renown as a passionate champion of civil rights and a master of constitutional law, helping to draft the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. Civil rights leaders hailed his singular effort, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in defeating President Nixon's Supreme Court nominations of Judges Clement Haynesworth and G. Harrold Carswell, both having strong segregationist records. Sen. Bayh also authored two successful amendments to the U.S. Constitution—the 25th and the 26th—as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, which was not ratified. No other lawmaker since the Founders has authored two constitutional amendments.

In this, his first appearance at Washington College, Sen. Bayh will address a topic with both historic resonance and contemporary importance: the separation of church and state. From the principle's articulation by the Founders two centuries ago to its oft-contentious political role today, what was once a widely shared ideal has become a perennial battleground in America's local and national public square.

Sen. Bayh's talk is sponsored by the College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. Drawing on the special historical strengths of Washington College and Chestertown, the C.V. Starr Center is dedicated to exploring the early republic, the rise of democracy, and the manifold ways in which the founding era continues to shape American culture.

News about upcoming events sponsored by the Center is available online athttp://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.