Monthly Archives: September 2008

Human Rights in War and Peace: The Role and Process of Asylum

Professor James von Geldern

will speak on “Human Rights in War and Peace: The Role and Process of Asylum”

Wednesday, September 24

7:30 p.m.

Science Center 101

Swarthmore College

The Constitution of the Russian Federation includes powerful human rights protection – why has it failed in the case of Chechnya? What is the role of asylum, the last resort after other protections fail, in the general scheme of human rights protection? ?How do the individual stories that lie behind it fit into the strict standards lawyers strive to uphold in the asylum process?

Professor James von Geldern has taught since 1988 in the Department of German and Russian Studies at Macalaster College. Besides a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Dr. von Geldern holds a J.D. [or should I write this out?] from the University of Minnesota Law School and is a member of the Minnesota Bar Association. ?He is engaged in pro bono work as a volunteer attorney for the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights and the Volunteer Lawyers Network, representing some of the same ?people served by the Center for Victims of Torture. ?His work suggests powerful ways to combine scholarship with activism and turn specific knowledge to the service of social change.

For more information, please contact Professor Sibelan Forrester <sforres1@swarthmore.edu>, 610-328-8162.

Co-sponsored with Peace and Conflict Studies.

Students Prepare for Annual Clothesline Project

Every year along the front sidewalk of Parrish Hall, a line of shirts are pinned up along a clothesline. They will appear there again when the Clothesline Project returns next week in conjunction with a poetry and prose reading by students, faculty, and staff on Mon., Sept. 22, at 7 p.m. in Upper Tarble. The reading is open to the College community and the clothesline will remain until Sept. 25. … more.

Peace and Conflict Studies co-sponsored the Clothesline Project in 2008.

News from Andrew Herrmann ’08

Dear Classics people,

we love to hear from you! Here is what Andrew Hermann recently wrote us:

I am currently working in NY at Oxford University Press as an editorial assistant in the reference department (I can totally hook you up with dictionaries). Oddly enough, it is in the same building as the CUNY Graduate Center where I learned Greek last summer. Oxford is a great place to work and evidently I am sitting at the desk of a former employee who has just started to pursue graduate work in classics, making me the fresh new classicist of the group. You will be thrilled to know that I am currently working on an online bibliography for classics (kind of like a wikipedia with guidance and annotation of sources) which means l’annee will no longer have to be the only online resource! Rejoice! Coincidentally, I think mentioning the fact that I know how to navigate l’annee was one of my biggest selling points for this position.

I also wanted to thank you again for funding my course at Columbia. I completed it a few weeks ago and am now intimately acquainted with Plato’s Symposium. It was a fun class and a nice transition from academia to the work place (however I am glad I no longer have to be the guy reading Greek on the Long Island Rail Road, I cannot possibly handle receiving the comment “It’s all Greek to me!” ever again). The class of course was nowhere near Swarthmore depth and quality, but that is of course to be expected.