World Premiere
Composer David Schiff; pianist Larry Karush '68
June 6, 2008

This year, convocation at reunions was a concert—the world premier of Mountains & Rivers, an improvisational jazz piano concerto composed by David Schiff, R.P. Wollenberg Professor of Music, and performed by Los Angeles-based pianist Larry Karush '68 and Portland-based chamber ensemble Third Angle.

Listen to the performance.

Sarah D and the SGs
June 6, 2008

Sarah Dougher ’90,  Sarah Gottesdiener, and Steve Gevurtz form Sarah D and the SGs, a Portland-based band that juxtaposes post-punk angularity and classic song stylings.

Listen to selections from the performance.

 

Philip Williams '58 and Vivian Tomlinson Williams '59
June 6, 2008

Phil and Vivian Williams present a rare opportunity to hear the old time music of the Pacific Northwest played by people who grew up with it and are widely acclaimed as among its best performers. Hoedowns, reels, waltzes, dance tunes, and songs—many of which came to the Pacific Northwest with pioneers over the Oregon Trail—are played on a variety of acoustic instruments, including the fiddle, guitar, banjo, and mandolin.

Listen to selections from the performance.

 

Strawberry Rune
June 7, 2008

Lauren Sheehan ’81 and Elizabeth Nicholson ’98, together as Strawberry Rune, cover a repertoire of olde carols, Celtic winter songs, African American gospel, and folk songs. Vocal harmonies are highlighted by Sheehan on guitar, mandolin, and banjo and by Nicholson, who teaches Celtic harp at Reed, on the harp and guitar.

Listen to selections from the performance.

 

Portland Zoo Electric Band
June 7, 2008

The Portland Zoo Electric Band, a psychedelic rock band featuring Peter Langston '68 on guitar, reconvened for a 60s-style Reed social.

Listen to selections from the performance.

 

Colin Diver - President's Welcome
May 19, 2008

The president of Reed College welcomes and congratulates the class of ’08 and introduces speaker Michelle Nijhuis ’96.

Listen to the lecture.

Michelle Nijhuis '96 - In Weirdness Is the Preservation of the World
May 19, 2008

Michelle Nijhuis ’96 is an award-winning science and environment journalist who writes for newspapers, magazines, and public radio. Nijhuis is a contributing editor of High Country News, and her work also appears in publications including Smithsonian, The Christian Science Monitor, Audubon, and Orion. She is the winner of several national journalism honors, including the Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, an AAAS Science Journalism Award, and selection for the anthology Best American Science Writing. In 2006, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Nijhuis traveled to Southeast Alaska to gain first-hand perspective on climate change. She joined legendary glaciologist Maynard Miller and his research team for 10 days on the Juneau Icefield, where she reported on evidence of global warming. Nijhuis majored in biology at Reed. With her husband, Jackson Perrin, she lives off the electrical grid in Western Colorado.

Listen to the lecture.

Watch streaming video of the commencement ceremony

In February 1956, during a hitch-hiking trip from Berkeley to the Pacific Northwest with fellow-poet Gary Snyder ’51, Allen Ginsberg gave a poetry reading at Reed College at which he read “Howl” and seven other poems. (Read the story by writer John Suiter[link] in Reed magazine.) Ginsberg and Synder were on campus for two nights, February 13 and 14; the recording unearthed recently in the Reed archives includes Ginsberg's “Howl Part I,” the longest section of the poem published six months later by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books with the initial title “Howl for Carl Solomon.” The reel-to-reel tape held by Special Collections at Reed's Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library is the earliest-known recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl.” The recording is of high quality, and does not include the entire poem, as Ginsberg stopped reading soon after concluding Part I of “Howl.”

Listen to “Howl Part I” (edited version).

Listen to “Howl” and seven other poems (unedited version).

Listen to “Epithalamion.”

Listen to “Wild Orphan.”

Listen to “Over Kansas.”

Listen to “Dream Record: June 8, 1955.”

Listen to “Blessed be the Muses.”

Listen to “A Supermarket in California.”

Listen to “The Trembling of the Veil.”

February 7 

Reed professor of political science Darius Rejali's latest book Torture and Democracy is an unrelenting examination of the use of torture by democracies in the 20th century. As democracy, human rights, and the free press blossomed after World War II, so did the market for “clean” torture techniques that leave no evidentiary scars, such as the use of drugs, stress positions, and waterboarding. Rejali takes a comprehensive look at the historical use of torture to force false confessions, extract information, and keep prisoners compliant. He also questions its efficacy in gaining reliable intelligence and examines the residual effects that torture creates for those societies that use it.

Listen to the lecture.

February 5

Designer and artist Lucy Orta invented “Refuge Wear,” “Body Architecture,” and “Nexus Architecture” (1992–2002). She was a founding member of the “Man and Humanity” Master in Industrial Design for the Design Academy Eindhoven (2002), and was invested as the first Rootstein Hopkins Chair at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London (2002–07).In 1993, Lucy Orta and her partner, Jorge Orta, founded their studio in central Paris. Lucy + Jorge Orta have exhibited their results of their collaborations in major contemporary art museums, including the Barbican Art Gallery, London; Modern Art Museum, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Boijmans Museum Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; as well as at the Venice, Havana, and Johannesburg Biennales. The lecture was sponsored by the Cafferio Family Trust, the Reed College art department, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Listen to the lecture.

Harold Ford Jr.
February 2

Harold Ford Jr. served Tennessee in the United States Congress for 10 years. He is chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, visiting professor of public policy at Vanderbilt University, and vice chairman of Merrill Lynch and Co.

Listen to the lecture.

Mary Francis Berry
February 10

Professor Mary Frances Berry has been a pioneering intellectual, civil servant, and social critic for more than four decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, Berry served as assistant secretary for education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; she served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1980 to 2004, and was chair for 11 years. A co-founder of the Free South Africa Movement, Berry is the author of seven books, including Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (with co-author John W. Blassingame). She is currently Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Listen to the lecture.

Fall 2007

Yiyun Li
November 15

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China, and came to the United States in 1996. She began writing in her late twenties, and has published stories and essays inthe New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and Guardian First Book Prize, among many other awards. She received a Whiting Writers' Award and a residency fellowship from Lannan Foundation, and was recently chosen by Granta magazine as one of the best young American novelists. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and two sons, and teaches in the M.F.A. program at Mills College.

Listen to the lecture.

Ross Gay
November 15

Ross Gay's book, Against Which, was a finalist for ForeWord magazine's poetry book of the year. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, among other journals. He is also co-author of a number of artists’ books, made in collaboration with painter Kimberly Thomas. Ross is a Cave Canem fellow and editor with the chapbook press, Q Avenue. He is assistant professor of poetry at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Listen to the lecture.

Spring 2008

Shamus Roller
April 3

Shamus Roller is the executive director of the Sacramento Housing Alliance, and director of the Coalition on Regional Equality. Roller’s lecture details the use of regional planning to combat the spread of racial and socioeconomic inequality. A Reed graduate from 2000, he also received a Jurist Doctorate from Hastings Law.

Sponsored by the Twohy-Benezet Memorial Lecture Fund.

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Nancy Folbre
March 4

Nancy Folbre is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Folbre’s lecture explores the peculiar economic characteristics of the “care sector”—in which women provide a disproportionate share of the care for our children, sick, disabled, and elderly. How might we reorganize to improve quality of care and equality of opportunity? Folbre has worked as a consultant to the United Nations Human Development Office and the World Bank. Her forthcoming book is titled Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family.

Sponsored by the Elizabeth C. Ducey Political Science Lecture Fund.

Listen to the lecture.

Fall 2007

Kevin Bales
November 12, 2007

Kevin Bales is professor emeritus of sociology at Roehampton University as well as president of Free the Slaves, a nongovernmental organization working to eradicate slavery. He is author of Disposable People and the forthcoming Ending Slavery.
Sponsored by the David Robinson Memorial Fund for Human Rights.

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Frances Fox Piven
November 3, 2007

Frances Fox Piven is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York, as well as president of the American Sociological Association. She studies the development of the welfare state, political movements, and urban politics; her books include Challenging Authority and Why Americans Still Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want it That Way. Sponsored by the Elizabeth C. Ducey Political Science Lecture Fund.

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Peter Edelman
October 25, 2007

Peter Edelman served as an assistant secretary in the Health and Human Services Department during the Clinton Administration, and served as an adviser to senators Robert Kennedy and Edward Kennedy. He is on the faculty of the Georgetown Law Center.
Sponsored by the Elizabeth C. Ducey Political Science Lecture Fund.

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Fall 2007

Barbara Stafford
October 1st

Barbara Maria Stafford is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Chicago. On Monday, October 1 2007, Professor Stafford presented her most recent research and observations on cognitive image histories in a series of talks including: a public lecture entitled “The Remaining 10%: The Role of Sensory Understanding in the Age of the Self-Organizing Brain” for the Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors Program in the Visual Arts; two workshops, one on “Attention” and the other on “The significance of tight-figure formats;” and finally, a classroom teaching session (Art 426 Sites of Visual Modernity in China, the “senior seminar” in art history). Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain’s material realities.

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Philip J. Deloria
September 12, 2007

The distinguished historian Philip J. Deloria, son of Native American scholar and activist Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005), delivers the inaugural lecture. Philip Deloria (Ph.D., American Studies, Yale University), has chaired the program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and is president-elect of the American Studies Association. He is author of Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004) and Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998).

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Pancho Savery, Professor of English & Humanities
August 2, 2007

Pancho Savery, professor of English and humanities, delivered the annual Odyssey lecture, which kicked off the Humanities 110 curriculum for freshmen. His topic was: “‘Who’s that Lady?’: Looking for Penelope.”

Listen to the lecture.