At Brown, first-year student Chance Emerson finds opportunity to explore wide-ranging academic interests and pursue musical collaborations while perfecting his first full-length album, “The Raspberry Men.”
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Chance Emerson had been at Brown for barely two weeks when he learned firsthand the power of the perfect sound mix. (more…)
Hee Oh joined Yale’s math department this year from Brown. Here she talks about absolute abstraction, the joy of walking — and missing math during her years as a social activist.
You received your doctorate in mathematics from Yale in 1997, then served on the faculties of Princeton, Cal Tech, and Brown, among others. What drew you back to Yale?
The math department at Yale has been well known for its strength in Lie groups, geometry, and dynamics for a long time. It was an honor and in itself a big draw for me to be asked to participate in continuing this tradition. In the end, however, I felt in my Christian faith that God was leading me this way, and I made the final decision accordingly. (more…)
A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the way carbon moves from within a planet to the surface plays a big role in the evolution of a planet’s atmosphere. If Mars released much of its carbon as methane, for example, it might have been warm enough to support liquid water.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study of how carbon is trapped and released by iron-rich volcanic magma offers clues about the early atmospheric evolution on Mars and other terrestrial bodies. (more…)
Space Station Commander Kevin Ford exchanged Valentine’s Day greetings with his adult kids Heidi and Anthony — he speeding by about 220 miles above Providence and they watching him fly past from Brown’s Ladd Observatory.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Rhode Islanders with their eyes skyward around 6 p.m. last Thursday might have noticed a curiously bright speck speeding across the evening sky. No, it wasn’t a UFO or an asteroid. It was the International Space Station, and for Providence resident Heidi Ford, it was dad’s office.
Heidi’s father Kevin Ford is currently the commander of the ISS. And with the help of Brown’s Ladd Observatory and astronomer Robert Horton, Heidi and her brother Anthony, who was visiting from Houston, got to see last week’s flyby close up while they talked to their dad on the phone. (more…)
Rick Benjamin, adjunct assistant professor of environmental studies and public humanities, was recently appointed state poet of Rhode Island by Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee. A five-year position, the state poet serves as principal advocate for poetry in Rhode Island. Benjamin has dedicated much of his career to the intersection of poetry and community service, a relationship he incorporates into “Poetry and Community Service,” a course he teaches at Brown and other schools. Courtney Coelho spoke with Benjamin about his poetry, his mission of service, and how he intends to incorporate the two in his new position.
Describe your poetry. What is your style? What are your influences?
I have a wide range of influences. I tend to learn everything through the ear. My early influences were always oral and musical, starting with poetry I probably didn’t really understand by Eliot that my mom was reading me. So she would say things like, “So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul should be resurrected only among friends some two or three, who will not touch the bloom that is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.” There’s not a lot of that that I would have understood when she said it, but I did hear it and I really loved the sound of it. And Langston Hughes is a poet I became acquainted with really early on and again it was the sound and the rhythm and the music in the poetry that I responded to first. In terms of poets that I read now: Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, Ruth Stone, Robert Hass, Kevin Young. (more…)
October marks the 50th anniversary of of the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis, when President John F. Kennedy discovered that the Soviet Union was building secret missile bases in Cuba. Forgoing the option of a Cuban invasion or air strikes, Kennedy asked Russian Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to remove all weapons from the island, and on Oct. 28, 1962, Khrushchev conceded, halting the standoff. Here, Khrushchev’s son, Sergei Khrushchev, visiting professor of Slavic languages at Brown, reflects on the diplomatic lessons.
The perspective of the crisis has changed over time and today the history of the crisis is more focused not on the confrontation, but on cooperation.
The Cuban Missile Crisis showed that two leaders decided not to shoot first, but to think and negotiate with each other. And today that is very unusual, because we think we can only negotiate with friends. Today, we impose unconditional surrender and nobody surrenders unconditionally until fully defeated. (more…)
Created on recommendation of the 2006 Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, the new Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice will expand upon the work of that committee, creating a space for student and faculty research and public discussion of the history and legacies of these issues. Here, inaugural director B. Anthony Bogues shares his vision for the Center.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In 2003, a University steering committee undertook a three-year project on slavery and justice. One of the committee’s recommendations was the creation of a center that would continue to expand upon that work. Earlier this year, Anthony Bogues was named director of the new center. He is hiring staff and finding the center a permanent home on campus, which he expects to have within the next two years. For now, the Center will be located in Alumnae Hall.
Part of the center’s mission will be to act as a public forum for the discussion of the history of slavery and its legacy. On Wednesday, Oct. 3, the center and the Office of the Dean of the College will sponsor the 2012 First Readings Lecture, which will take place at 5 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching. Author Charles Rappleye will discuss his book Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade and the American Revolution. (more…)
Greg Landsberg, professor of physics at Brown, is the physics coordinator for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at CERN in Switzerland, part of a Brown team that includes professors David Cutts, Ultich Heintz, and Meenakshi Narain. The giant instrument’s primary mission is finding the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would confirm the best guess physicists have made about why things have mass.
On July 4, Landsberg and his colleagues will reveal the latest results of their search. Anything could happen when Greg Landsberg and, including an announcement that the Higgs has been found or that it has been ruled out, sending theorists back to the whiteboard. Landsberg spoke by Skype with science news officer David Orenstein on June 26 as CERN physicists were preparing for their press conference. (more…)
