News & Events
Recent News
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How do you make a poem?
Tue, 09 Apr 2019
Speakers of a language rely on its words to carry out even the most mundane acts of communication. But the same words are poets’ medium of creation. In his newest book, How Poems Get Made, James Longenbach asks how poets turn bare utterance into art.
Has the Renaissance warped our view of the Middle Ages?
Tue, 02 Apr 2019
The picture of the Middle Ages as "awful, smelly, stinky, [and] dangerous" is not accurate, says medievalist and University of Pennsylvania professor David Wallace, this year’s Ferrari Humanities Symposia visiting scholar.
Fairchild Award recognizes literature in translation
Thu, 28 Mar 2019
Kaija Straumanis ’12 (MA) has received the Lillian Fairchild Award—which recognizes artists for their commitment to the Rochester community—for her work bringing world literature to new audiences.
A national pastime must have a national presence
Thu, 28 Mar 2019
As the baseball season opens, the league is looking to change some rules to speed up the game. English lecturer and baseball authority Curt Smith presents his own five-point plan to save the sport he loves.
Saving the lost text of a Torah scroll
Tue, 19 Mar 2019
Professor Gregory Heyworth and his digital media students are using different wavelengths of light to reveal illegible text that could create a sacred, tangible link with Jewish congregations lost to the Holocaust.
Turning the gears of an early modern search engine
Mon, 18 Feb 2019
A collaboration between librarians and engineering students, the book wheel in Rossell Hope Robbins Library is a recreation of a 16th century design, solving the problem of needing access to multiple books at the same time.
Master of suspense: Thomas Perry ’74 (PhD) on the thrill of writing thrillers
Mon, 14 Jan 2019
Thomas Perry ’74 (PhD) is the acclaimed author of 26 suspense novels. His latest, The Burglar, follows The Bomb Maker, cited by The New York Times as one of 2018’s best thrillers.
What is belief in a secular age?
Wed, 05 Dec 2018
New books from Rochester scholars John Givens and John Michael examine the lives of iconic writers to ask what religious belief might look like in an age of science and secularism.
‘Brave, kind, and modest’: Senior speechwriter remembers George H. W. Bush
Sat, 01 Dec 2018
Curt Smith, senior lecturer in the Department of English and speechwriter for George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, remembers the former president as a man who "embodied the way the world has historically seen America."
Digital scholars rescue lost Japanese film
Thu, 29 Nov 2018
A 1929 Japanese silent film inspired by a classic O. Henry short story was long thought lost until Rochester researchers collaborated to bring it back to the big screen.