Global Health Studies hosts "Humanity, Equity, and Technology: The Right to Health in a Changing World"

December 11, 2018

Over 125 UI students attended the fall 2018 conference, "Humanity, Equity, and Technology: The Right to Health in a Changing World,” which was hosted by the Global Health Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences on November 2 - 4, 2018. 

Keynote speakers included Dr. Phaedra Henley, Professor at the University of Global Health Equity (Rwanda), and Brian Mutebi, award-winning journalist and Executive Director of Education & Development Opportunity (Uganda). UI faculty members from a variety of departments facilitated break-out session discussions. The conference was co-sponsored by the College of Public Health and International Programs.

The University of Iowa Global Health Studies Program offers a B.A. and B.S., a minor, and a certificate (which is available to both undergraduate and graduate/professional students). The academic curriculum builds upon the humanities, social sciences and health sciences to help students understand underlying forces—such as history, culture, gender and sexuality, economics, politics, race and ethnicity, the environment, law, and technology—that lead to health disparities worldwide.

The program offers experiential learning opportunities such as study abroad, internships, research, service learning, and capstone courses which allow students to develop real world skills related to major global health issues. These experiences help students define and achieve their post-graduation goals.

The UI Global Health Studies Program equips its students to:

• Identify the core areas of Global Health such as infectious and non-communicable diseases, maternal and child health, food sovereignty, environmental health, health inequalities, and interventions.

• Analyze biomedical, social, cultural, and environmental determinants of health and disease.

• Draw connections between significant health problems which affect both domestic and international communities.

• Recognize the ethical challenges involved in interventions designed to improve health and health equity across cultural and geographical boundaries.

Global Health Studies graduates find employment in a range of global health related sectors such as non-profit organizations, immigrant and refugee health, community-based health education, governmental agencies, health policy, and advocacy.   Global Health Studies alumni have also gone on to graduate and professional programs in public health, international development, medicine, pharmacy, nursing, law, urban and regional planning, sustainable agriculture, non-profit management, and public administration.

Sarah Bond earns prestigious award for Classics outreach

December 04, 2018

Sarah E. Bond, Associate Professor of Classics, has received the 2018 Society for Classical Studies Outreach Award.

We in CLAS could find all kinds of wonderful things to say about Professor Bond, but we'll let the award committee speak to her contributions to her discipline:

The individual we are honoring here is without question one of the most prolific, interesting, engaged, and courageous public voices in the field of classical studies today. She has found ways of making our discipline come alive to non-specialists and routinely addresses some of our most challenging social and moral issues. For these reasons, we are thrilled to award the 2018 SCS Outreach Prize to Prof. Sarah Bond.

Prof. Bond’s public scholarship can be found in a remarkable range of venues, through which she has been able to communicate her ideas with a large and diverse audience. Here is a small sampling: she published an op-ed piece on damnatio memoriae and the 2011 Egyptian revolution in the New York Times and another on ancient boxing in connection with the film Creed in Sports Illustrated for Kids. She also wrote a regular column for Forbes Magazine, through which she has provided a classicist’s insights into topics as wide-ranging as ancient music and modern listeners; pagan and Christian competition over New Year’s festivities; and Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Prof. After leaving Forbes in 2018 to run the SCS Blog, she now regularly contributes to Hyperallergic and blogs occasionally for Eidolon and other online publications. Bond also maintains an active presence on Twitter, where she has more than 25,000 followers, and is a prolific blogger on her personal website, History From Below.

Prof. Bond writes on an impressive array of subjects with the varied goals of inspiring curiosity and self-reflection; offering helpful advice; and sometimes stirring the pot. In each case, the work Prof. Bond does is highly intelligent—true public scholarship—and a tribute to our discipline.

We particularly admire Prof. Bond’s ability to relate classical culture to pressing contemporary issues. For example, as her nominator points out, “Dr. Bond regularly uses her platform at Forbes to tackle ethical issues, particularly with the misuse of history” and mentions her article “A Short History of Regulating Female Dress”, in which burkini bans in the French Riviera serve as an entrée into a longer history the subject that runs from Athens through Rome, the Codex Justinianus, and the Middle Ages. Along the same lines, we could cite Prof. Bond’s articles on “What [Iowa Representative] Steve King Gets Wrong About the Dark Ages—And Western Civilization”; “Redrawing the Margins: Debating the Legalization of Prostitution”; and “Yes, Ancient Athletes Had Sponsorship Deals, Too”, among many others. We should also mention Prof. Bond’s well-known piece in Hyperallergic, “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color”, which became a target of white supremist attacks and a flashpoint in the current culture wars.

Prof. Bond has made several public calls for greater justice and equity in academe; for example, in her Forbes article, “Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account at Academia.edu”, which has received 350,000+ views. Prof. Bond also created the website Women of Ancient History (WOAH), a crowd-sourced digital map and catalog of women who specialize in classical and biblical history. The website serves both as a public testament to the presence of women in this field and as a corrective to a tendency to overlook women when filling academic panels and selecting keynote speakers.

In gratitude for her enormous efforts to bring classical culture to the general public in lively, engaging, and relevant ways, and for her powerful moral compass and strong sense of social justice, we are, again, delighted to award the 2018 SCS Outreach Prize to Prof. Sarah Bond.

Source: https://classicalstudies.org/scs-news/2019-outreach-prize-citations

Sarah E. Bond is an Associate Professor in Classics at the University of Iowa. She is interested in late Roman history, epigraphy, late antique law, Roman topography and GIS, Digital Humanities, and the socio-legal experience of ancient marginal peoples. She received her PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2011) and obtained a BA in Classics and History with a minor in Classical Archaeology from the University of Virginia (2005). Her book, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professionals in the Roman Mediterranean, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press (Fall, 2016). Follow her on Twitter @SarahEBond or read her Blog. (Please visit Professor Bond's personal website for current CV.)

CLAS mourns the passing of English Professor Linda Bolton

December 03, 2018

Linda Lorraine Bolton

November 26, 1955-November 30, 2018

Linda Lorraine Bolton

November 26, 1955-November 30, 2018

On November 30, 2018 at Iowa City’s Bird House Hospice Home, Linda Lorraine Bolton -- teacher, writer, activist, and beloved friend – came to the end of a life dedicated to the labor of art, ethics, and justice.  Her intent, like that of her collaborator the sculptor Barbara Grygutis, was “to repair the world in small pieces.”  As Linda’s students, colleagues, family, and friends can attest, that is exactly what she has done. 

Linda was born November 26, 1955 into a lineage of educators, artists, and theater people and with her brother Martin spent her childhood on the campus of Hampton Institute, where her mother, Lorraine Williams Bolton, and her father, Dowling Martin Bolton, were prominent members of the artistic community.

Linda’s grandmother on her mother’s side was the ceramicist Daisy Taitts, chair of the Art Department at DuSable High School in Chicago.  Her mother, Lorraine, taught for 25 years at Hampton Institute, where she too chaired the Art Department.  After earning a B.F.A. at the Art Institute of Chicago and an M.A. at Illinois Institute of Technology, she worked in acrylics, canvas, plexiglass, and silkscreen and exhibited in numerous galleries in the United States as well as France and Spain.  Linda’s father, Martin, studied at LeMoyne College in Memphis, where as a student he organized the first Little Theatre in the Memphis African American community.  He went on to receive his M.A. from Northwestern University’s Department of Speech and Drama and participate in Northwestern University’s Little Theatre and the Negro People’s Theatre of Chicago.  After serving in the armed forces, he joined Hampton Institute in 1947 where he continued to be an active playwright, director, and performer.  The dining table in Linda’s childhood home was a site of many lively and convivial gatherings of local, national, and international mid-century artists and intellectuals, among them the sculptor Lorraine Ubaldi and the poet Gwendolyn Brooks.  Linda carried on this tradition in her own home with culinary and intellectual flair.

Linda graduated from The Kent School in Connecticut and went on to earn a B.A. in Theatre Arts at Smith College, an M.A. in American Literature at Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in Comparative American Literatures at the University of Arizona.  Fiercely proud of her Indigenous, African American, and Irish “mixed-blood” heritage, she created her own Ph.D. curriculum, insistent upon honoring the diverse traditions that constitute American artistic and literary history.

In 1994, Linda joined the English Department at The University of Iowa, where she taught courses in Levinasian Ethics, Literature and Art, Native Literature, Literature and Trauma, and American Poetry and Poetics.  Recognition of her brilliant and generous teaching includes the English Department’s John C. Gerber Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000 as well as the National Society of Collegiate Scholars Inspire Integrity Award and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Collegiate Award for Exemplary Performance as a Teacher in 2007.  Her undergraduate and graduate students routinely testify to the life-changing impact of her rigorous and radiant presence in the classroom, her commitment to ethical thinking, and her kind, steady, and creative mentorship.

The centerpiece of Linda’s scholarly work is her book Facing the Other: Ethical Disruption and the American Mind, published in 2010.  Crossing generic boundaries and disciplines, this book identifies six moments in 18^th- and 19^th-century American history that expose the ethical challenges the treatment of Native and African persons presented to the new republic’s ideal of freedom.  Guided by the thinking of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the book provides the basis for her subsequent essays on art, ethics, and justice.

Born a few weeks before Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a public transit bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Linda’s commitments to activist art included her collaboration with Barbara Grygutis to create the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial in Columbia, Missouri, and with painter Chandra Cox and sculptor Marianetta Porter to create the exhibition “Memory and Oblivion: Legacies of Enslavement in the Americas” at The Harriet Tubman Museum in Macon, Georgia, and the Hampton University Museum. Linda also found profound meaning in her recent collaboration with neuroscientist and yogi Diana Gallegos, which focused on healing the physical body and repairing the mind-body connection through the integration of yoga and poetry.

As a third generation of women called to the mission of teaching and creative expression and as a child formed on the grounds of the historically significant Hampton Institute, Linda lived a life dedicated to a legacy her students, colleagues and friends will carry forward.  What will perhaps remain most vivid, however, for those who encountered her in any of her various communities—in the aisles of the New Pioneer Co-op, on the mat at Heartland Yoga, or in the classroom—is her inspiring and insightful presence in the world.

After a brief battle with pancreatic cancer, Linda leaves behind her brother, The Reverend Martin E. Bolton, D.D.; her partner, Stephen Vincent; a group of women whom she embraced as her chosen family; her dog and constant companion, Zooey; and a community of beloved friends, students, colleagues, yogis, and fellow seekers who will miss her deeply. 

A memorial service to celebrate Linda’s life will be held at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, December 9^th at the Unitarian Universalist Society, 2355 Oakdale Road, Coralville, Iowa.  Refreshments and an opportunity for story-telling will immediately follow in the Fellowship Hall. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be directed toward the following:

• Linda Bolton Memorial Fund, the UI Center for Advancement: Givetoiowa.org/Linda-Bolton
• The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition: https://boardingschoolhealing.org/about-us/donate/
• The Bird House - Hospice Home of Johnson County: http://www.hospicehomejc.org/donate.html
• The Crisis Center Food Bank: https://www.jccrisiscenter.org/financial-contributions/

The UI Department of English will also honor Linda’s legacy at its annual graduate student “Craft, Critique, Culture” conference, which will take place April 4-6, 2019.  Please see the Department website for more information: (https://english.uiowa.edu).

English & Creative Writing, Japanese major Austin Hughes named Rhodes Scholar

November 20, 2018