Seven Faculty Win Jesuit Grants
Seven faculty members were awarded Jesuit Foundation Awards ranging from $1,200 to $5,000 by the University of San Francisco’s Jesuit Foundation. This is the second year for the awards which are given twice a year to faculty pursuing projects in service to USF or the San Francisco community.
Three grants were given to faculty in the fine and performing arts. Lecturer Pamela Blotner won a grant for a visual arts exchange with Cambodia. She hopes to exhibit Cambodian art at USF or establish a student exchange program between the university and Cambodia. She traveled to Cambodia in December to study the ancient arts of the Khmer and how they are helping to piece together a country torn apart by civil war.
Assistant Professor Peter Novak won for his ongoing work producing a CD-ROM version of his sign language translation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. He will also use the money to bring nationally renowned deaf poet Peter Cook to campus, he said.
Tom Lucas, S.J., chair of the department, won for a proposed exhibit of 60 paintings by Holocaust survivor and San Francisco resident Fritz Hirschberger titled “Fritz Hirschberger’s ‘Indifference and the Fifth Horseman.’” The exhibit will be presented in the Thacher Gallery from March 4 through April 14. Part of the money will also fund a discussion in March between two experts on Catholic-Jewish relations—Rabbi Stephen S. Pearce, Temple Emanu-El and Dr. Eva Fleischner, U.S. Catholic conference committee on Catholic-Jewish dialogue—on the history and future of the relationship between the two religions.
A fourth grant will support on-campus, English language classes for non-English speaking USF staff. The classes, which began last year, attract approximately 22 students, said Johnnie Johnson Hafernik, class coordinator and ESL program director.
“It’s a real testament to the importance they place on the classes that they come every week,” Hafernik said.
The grant helps pay for three weekday classes and one on Saturdays. The program is also sponsored by Plant Services and the university’s contractor, Able Cleaning Service, which employ most of the non-English speaking staff.
Improving opportunities for education is also the aim of Sally Vance-Trembath, an assistant professor in theology, who won for her “Readings in Theology” series. Hoping to encourage budding theologians and lay participants alike, Vance-Trembath will hold weekly, public discussion groups on readings from America, a Catholic theological journal. The articles—which will address past and present events in the light of Catholic doctrine—will both illuminate the issues of the day and expose people to professional, theological argument, Vance-Trembath said. By inviting students she hopes to encourage them to enter academia as theologians.
Helping their students connect with other teachers interested in improving education is the goal of School of Education faculty Susan Katz and Patty Yancey’s project. They will use their award to integrate their students into the Bay Area Writing Project, a teacher-development and writing-skills workshop headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley. USF students will meet every two weeks to discuss their teaching and improvement projects at community schools and twice a semester with the larger Bay Area Writing Project network. The money will also allow Katz and Yancey to produce an anthology of the students’ research and written reflections on their projects.
“The successful applications represent creative and interesting initiatives in the areas of research, pedagogy, and community-in-conversation,” said Provost Jim Wiser. “As such they will enrich a broad spectrum of our community life and contribute directly to our vision and mission as a Jesuit university.”
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