T he B oston C ollege
Chronicle september 17, 2015
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Oct. 1 Dalsimer Lecture Honors Memory of Irish Studies Pioneer The Boston College Center for Irish Programs will inaugurate the Adele Dalsimer Memorial Lecture this fall, honoring a key architect of BC’s renowned Irish Studies Program – and featuring as its first speaker one of the program’s most accomplished graduates, Margaret Kelleher PhD’92, the first woman to hold the chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. Kelleher, who served as the Burns Library Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies in 2002-03, will present “Focla Déigheanacha (Dying Words): The Execution of Myles Joyce (Galway, 1882) and its Continuing Legacy,” on Oct. 1 at 6 p.m. in Devlin 101. A reception will follow in Connolly House. She is widely regarded as an innovator in Irish literary studies, through her work on 19th-century literature, women’s writings, and the historical relationship between literature in English and Irish. Her books include The Feminization of Famine and the landmark publication The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, co-edited with BC English Professor Philip O’Leary. Prior to joining University College Dublin, Kelleher was founding director of An Foras Feasa: The Institute for Research in Irish Historical and Cultural Traditions at the National University of IrelandMaynooth. The event Kelleher will help launch honors the memory of Adele Dalsimer, who co-founded the BC Irish Studies Program with Associate Professor of History Kevin O’Neill in 1978 and was its codirector until her death in 2000. Dalsimer received several honors for her work in the field of Irish studies, including honorary degrees from the University of Ulster and the National University of Ireland and was recognized as an honorary Irish-American by Irish America magazine in its “Top 100 Irish
Americans” issue of 1996. “I am honored to be invited to give this inaugural lecture in memory of Professor Adele Dalsimer, and to represent the myriad students and scholars inspired by her teaching, life and research,” said Kelleher, who first came to the University in 1985 as a graduate student via a scholarship that Dalsimer helped establish for Irish students to attend BC. “My time at BC, and all my later work, was crucially shaped by Adele’s vision for an Irish studies that would be outward in perspective, constructively critical in focus and rooted in a deep love for our distinctive literature and history,” she said. “This is a living legacy cherished and continued by her many students and colleagues.” “Adele Dalsimer was enormously important in Boston College’s rise to be the Irish studies leader in North America,” said Professor of History Oliver Rafferty, SJ, director of the Center for Irish Programs. “She was immensely well-respected throughout the field and beyond, to the extent that two leading Irish poets – Seamus Heaney and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill – wrote poems in her honor. It’s a testament to the high regard for her, not only in America but Ireland. “Adele is still very much talked about, her memory still venerated, and she is still very much loved.” Kelleher, added Fr. Rafferty, “is, from all points of view, the right person to give the first Adele Dalsimer Memorial Lecture. Margaret was a student of Adele, of course, but she has cultivated a very successful career in her own right and is a leading advocate for Irish studies internationally. It will be a delight to welcome her back to Boston College.” The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required; go to http://bit.ly/1XPFb8f. –Sean Smith
Author Eva Selhub, a clinical associate at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine who is on staff at Harvard Medical School, presented “Changing Your Health Destiny” on Sept. 9 as part of Boston College’s HEALTHY YOU program. The event was co-sponsored by the Women’s Collaborative and the BC Wellness Support Group. (Photo by Lee Pellegrini)
Boston College clubs and organizations were out in force Sept. 4 for the Student Involvement Fair, held on Stokes Lawn.
Photos by Lee Pellegrini
Committee Seeks Pilot Course Proposals Continued from page 1 the 2014 statement titled “The Vision Animating the Boston College Core Curriculum.” That document, along with the 2013 “Toward a Renewed Core” proposal, articulated the importance of intellectual engagement and interdisciplinary approaches, and the centrality of Jesuit principles, to the core. “This is an exciting time for the core renewal,” said Fr. Kalscheur in his introduction, citing the new pilot courses – which all have “healthy enrollments,” he added – as an important outgrowth of the work done by many administrators, faculty and staff across the University. “But these and other new courses to follow aren’t the only dimension of the core renewal process. It also will be important to foster innovation in existing core courses, so they more energetically follow the vision expressed in the core statement.” Bourg described the two categories for the 15 new pilot courses, which are open to first-year students only. Three are designated Complex Problems: teamtaught by two faculty from different disciplines and consisting of three lecture classes as well as weekly lab sections and evening reflection sessions. The other 12 are linked in six pairs through Enduring Questions, taught by faculty from different disciplines – who collaborate on readings and materials – and are taken by the same group of students, who meet for four evenings during the
semester to reflect on and integrate the classes’ content. The approximately 350 students enrolled in the pilot courses this year might constitute “a small footprint,” said Bourg, but a number of departments have reported significant increases in freshmen enrollments for core courses over last year, including Sociology (119 percent) and Earth and Environmental Sciences (59 percent). Yet this rise did not result, he said, in a drop in freshmen enrollment for established interdisciplinary programs like Cornerstone and Perspectives. Bourg encouraged faculty to submit pilot course applications for the 2016-17 academic year by the Oct. 5 deadline. The UCRC will hold luncheons today and Sept. 23 that he said would enable faculty members to meet and brainstorm on potential interdisciplinary collaborations. “One big challenge we face is that we tend not to know a lot of people in departments other than our own,” said Bourg. “The core provides the opportunity for us to seek one another out, and that is something we need to do. No discipline has a monopoly on knowledge. Liberal arts is at the center of all we do in the core, which is to model connections and integration between disciplines. It’s our job, not our students’ on their own, to make those connections.” Bourg said the UCRC will serve as a resource and means for faculty participation in the core,
outlining several areas the committee will focus on, such as evaluating proposals for new core classes and for changes to existing ones; tracking core courses and their status; processing student core substitution requests; and offering core pedagogical innovation grants to aid faculty in devising creative ways of teaching core classes. Core assessment also will be a major task for the UCRC, especially with the University set to undergo reaccreditation in 2017 – although he added that some aspects of assessment, such as of pilot courses, will be for internal program development and distinct from the reaccreditation process. Bourg said he and the UCRC are making every effort to ascertain, and fine-tune systems and procedures to meet, faculty members’ needs with respect to the core. But the committee also will take a big-picture approach to the core and its place at BC – something he said faulty members should do in dialogue with one another and with the Jesuit, Catholic mission of Boston College. “Through the core, we are attending to the context of our students’ lives,” he said. “We should always each make time to reflect on our role as teacher and mentor, and how the core can enable us to serve that role.” For information on the Boston College core curriculum, see www. bc.edu/core. Contact Sean Smith at sean.smith@bc.edu