Celebrating the study of Italian
Nearly 100 graduate alumni of the Italian department returned to campus in late October for a reunion and celebratory conference on the Italian legacy at Yale. Department chair Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor of Italian, hosted the event, along with Dean Butler and Professor Millicent Marcus ’73PhD. Highlights included an exhibition of rare Italian manuscripts in the Beinecke, the screening of an Italian film, and dinners -- complete with arias from Italian operas. Panelists discussed a new philology in Italian, career issues, and the future of the teaching of Italian. The core of the celebration was a laudatio to Thomas Bergin, the late Sterling Professor of Romance Languages, who is widely considered the pioneer of the Italian scholarly heritage at Yale. One attendee, Emanuel L. Paparella ’90PhD, found the event extraordinary and wrote the university afterward expressing consensus that Italian studies should continue to be "promoted as an integral part of any interdisciplinary humanistic and/or liberal arts program."
Reunion marks 133 years of sociology
The Graduate School's spring alumni reunion gathered sociology graduate alumni from all years to celebrate the 133rd anniversary of Yale's Department of Sociology. Gala receptions, dinner at the Peabody Museum, a tour of the newly renovated University Art Gallery, and a bus tour of New Haven were on the agenda for the April 13-15 event, but the main focus was discussion of sociology in five scholarly panels: "Sociology and Public Conversations"; "The Histories of Sociology at Yale"; "Sociology and Comparative Perspectives"; "Sociology, Law and Justice" (dedicated to Albert J. Reiss Jr.); and "Sociology beyond the Academy." Presenters were Yale faculty members and alumni of the program who are now affiliated with prestigious universities around the world.
Dissertation support -- from workshops to boot camp
Writing a dissertation isn't easy, as all veterans of the process know. To help current students, the Graduate School offers a range of programs. This semester, Yale College Writing Center director Alfred Guy held a workshop on "Editing for a Crisper Style" and graduate writing consultant Steve Shoemaker ran a session titled "Dissertation Writing: Getting on a Writing Schedule." The McDougal Center academic writing fellows, Eben Rose (geology and geophysics) and Alice Ly (MCDB), organized several workshops on choosing a dissertation topic and offered an ongoing peer writing review service. Over the course of two weekends this winter, Rose ran an extraordinarily successful "Dissertation Boot Camp," during which participants, with their laptops and notes, holed up from morning to night in 119 HGS with plenty of food and no distractions: cell phones, visitors, newspapers, and television were banned. One happy student, Mary Barr (African American studies), said afterward, "I would attend Dissertation Boot Camp every weekend if it were offered. . . . There's something to be said for being around other people who are writing too. If everyone else is concentrating hard, you get caught up in your own work. It was an incredibly productive time for me."
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