WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2002 AT 4 PM
FORMAL LOUNGE, WOMEN’S BUILDING, HILLTOP CAMPUS

With the support of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the IWC announces a new colloquium series to promote the latest publications of WU faculty and students. Entitled “Celebrating Our Books, Recognizing Our Authors”, the sessions focus on books from across the disciplines of Arts and Sciences, acknowledging our colleagues’ encounters with the act and the art of writing. This will be an excellent opportunity to learn about, read, and study what we ourselves are doing. Seventy books by sixty-three WU authors will be displayed at this year’s Colloquium. Our 2002 theme, “Understanding Body, Mind, and Country,” features four faculty members discussing about their most recent books.

I. Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries by Stanley Finger, Professor, Department of Psychology
Attractively illustrated with over a hundred halftones and drawings, this volume presents a series of vibrant profiles that trace the evolution of our knowledge about the brain. Beginning almost 5000 years ago, with the ancient Egyptian study of “the marrow of the skull,” Stanley Finger takes us on a fascinating journey from the classical world of Hippocrates, to the time of Descartes and the era of Broca and Ramon y Cajal, to the lives of modern researchers such as Sperry. As noted by the Journal of History of Neurosciences: “Stanley Finger succeeds admirably in providing what students wanted to know about the ‘real people’ who pioneered Western knowledge of the brain. What has resulted is a most interesting and well-written account of how we have come to understand the brain and its workings.”

II. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land by Conevery Bolton Valencius, Assistant Professor, Department of History
Many scholars have written about the settling of the American frontier, but Valencius is the first to make sense of homesteaders’ intimate relationship with new and uncharted land. In doing so she has contributed a dynamic new perspective to our understanding of the Western migration and to the history of American medicine. Her research focuses on the period from the Louisiana Purchase to the Civil War, studying accounts by politicians and geologists, farm families, visiting Europeans, former slaves, and slave owners, uncovering widely shared notions about the interaction of terrain and human body. Her book won the 1999 Allan Nevins Prize for best-written dissertation in American History.

III. Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China by Robert Hegel, Professor, Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures
Winner of the 2000 Stanislaus Julien Prize from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres of the Institut de France, Hegel’s work explores physical aspects of the printed book in late imperial China to reconstruct the changing assumptions with which Chinese popular novels were originally read from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the previously neglected areas of book format, varieties of illustrations and their significance, and the theory and practice of reading illustrated narratives. Hegel traces the standardization of printing techniques and how fiction was circulated. Finally, using commentaries, prefaces, and other contemporary references as guides he attempts to gauge how readers during those centuries read these books with pictures.

IV. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India by Priya Joshi, Assistant Professor, Department of English
In a work of stunning archival recovery and interpretive virtuosity that was named one of Choice magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2002, Joshi illuminates the cultural work performed by two kinds of English novels in India during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she vividly explores a process by which first readers and then writers of the English novel indigenized the once imperial form and put it to their own uses. By analyzing the eventual rise of the English novel in India, she demonstrates how Indian novelists, from Krupa Satthianadhan to Salman Rushdie, took an alien form in an alien language and used it to address local needs.

Our first annual “Celebrating Our Books, Recognizing Our Authors” colloquium will be Wednesday, December 11, 2002, at 4:00 pm in the Formal Lounge of the Woman’s Building. The four featured authors will briefly talk about their books and will take questions and comments from the audience. The WU Campus Bookstore will display all of the 63 participating WU authors’ books, which will be available for purchase. All of the authors who present will be available to sign their books at the reception that will follow the colloquium. The entire WU community is invited, as are people from outside the university. Admission is free.

Herbert Lottman will be the third author in the International Writers Center’s Writers Series: The Art of Biography. Mr. Lottman will read from and discuss his work on Monday evening (Dec. 2nd) at 7:00 pm at the West Campus Conference Center, and give a presentation and answer questions on the art of biography on Tuesday afternoon (Dec. 3rd) at 4:00 pm. at the McMillan Café, in the Old McMillan Hall, Washington University. Mr. Lottman’s most famous work is his definitive Albert Camus: A Biography, published in 1979. His most recent work is entitled Man Ray’s Montparnasse.

Herbert Lottman was born and raised in New York City, but he has lived most of his adult life in France. He first came to Paris as a Fulbright fellow in 1949; when he returned it was to open a European office for an American book publisher. Over the years Lottman has contributed to a number of American newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and Harper’s; he is now international correspondent of the book trade journal Publishers Weekly, which has taken him to Asia, Africa, Latin America, nearly everywhere in Europe, and even at times to the United States. In 1991 Lottman was appointed Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and was promoted to Officer in 1996.

Lottman has published a dozen books in the U.S., most of them also published in the U.K. and translated into French and Spanish; a number have also appeared in German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Czech. Aside from Camus’ biography, his best-known works include The Left Bank (in 1982), and biographies of Philippe Pétain, Gustave Flaubert, Colette, and Jules Verne.