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Spring Distinguished Writers Series Begins February 2

WELLESLEY COLLEGE NEWHOUSE CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES WELCOMES SIX INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHORS FOR THE SPRING 2012 DISTINGUISHED WRITERS SERIES

WELLESLEY, Mass., January 30, 2012– Wellesley College will welcome six award-winning writers and poets to the Boston area this spring as part of the Susan and Donald Newhouse Center for the Humanities Distinguished Writers Series.  Authors Pico Iyer (Feb. 2), Jennifer Egan (Feb. 28), Leah Hager Cohen and Jim Shepard (March 13), and Nikky Finney and Tom Sleigh (April 10) will each read from their work, then engage in an open dialogue with their audience. All readings take place at 4:30 PM on the dates indicated and are free and open to the public.

“We are thrilled to announce a fabulous slate of writers for this spring’s Writers Series – including recent Pulitzer and National Book Award winners,” said Carol Dougherty, Professor of Classical Studies at Wellesley College and Director of The Susan and Donald Newhouse Center for the Humanities. “[The Series] is quickly becoming one of Wellesley College’s signature public programs.”

The Distinguished Writers Series offers a great way to discover new books, talk to authors about their work and meet fellow booklovers in a setting like no other. Wellesley College’s picturesque campus is located just 12 miles from Boston and is accessible by public transit. For more information about the Series visit http://www.wellesley.edu/academics/centers/newhousecenter or call 781.283.2698. For driving and public transit directions to the campus, please visit https://www.wellesley.edu/about/visit/directionsmaps .

ABOUT THE SPRING 2012 DISTINGUISHED WRITERS

Pico Iyer

Thursday, Feb. 2 | 4:30 pm | Newhouse Center for the Humanities - 237 Green Hall

Pico Iyer is one of the most revered and respected travel writers alive today. He was born in England, raised in California, and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. At Wellesley, he will read from his newly released book, The Man Within My Head , (Knopf, January 2012).

Iyer is the author of seven works of non-fiction, including  Video Night in Kathmandu  (cited on many lists of the best travel books),  The Lady and the Monk  (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award) and  The Global Soul  (subject of theatrical productions and websites around the globe). He has also written the novels  Cuba and the Night  and  Abandon .  For a quarter of a century, he has been an essayist for  Time magazine, written on literature for  The New York Review of Books , on globalism for  Harper's,  and on many other topics for The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, The New Yorker,   National Geographic, and Salon.com , among others. His 2008 book, The Open Road,  describing more than 30 years of talking and traveling with the fourteenth Dalai Lama was a bestseller in the United States.  Based for the past 20 years near Nara, in rural Japan, Iyer is still often to be found making stops everywhere from North Korea to Ethiopia, and from Bolivia to Easter Island.

Jennifer Egan  

Tuesday, Feb. 28 | 4:30 pm | Newhouse Center for the Humanities - 237 Green Hall

Jennifer Egan  is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  A Visit From the Goon Squad  (Knopf 2010) and the recipient of the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. A Visit From the Goon Squad  topped many “Best of 2010” lists (including The Washington Post, Time, Slate, Salon, and People) . It was also nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction and for the Pen/Faulkner award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. It has been tapped by HBO for series treatment.

Egan’s other books include Emerald City and Other Stories, The Invisible Circus (which was made into a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001),  Look at Me (a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award), and the bestselling  The Keep.  Her short stories have appeared in  The New Yorker , Harpers ,  Granta , and  McSweeney’s,  among other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her nonfiction articles appear frequently in Th e New York Times magazine. A 2002 story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and a recent article, ''The Bipolar Kid,'' received a 2009 Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. 

Leah Hager Cohen and Jim Shepard

Tuesday, March 13 | 4:30 pm | Newhouse Center for the Humanities - 237 Green Hall

Leah Hager Cohen  is the author of four novels, most recently  The Grief of Others , and four works of narrative nonfiction, which include  Train Go Sorry  and  Glass, Paper, Beans . She serves as the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross and on the faculty of Lesley University's low-residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing. After years of swearing she would never write criticism, she has also become a frequent contributor to the  New York Times Book Review .

Jim Shepard  is the author of six novels, including Project X, and four story collections, including Like You’d Understand , Anyway , winner of The Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and  You Think That’s Bad . His novel, Project X,  won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and the ALEX Award from the American Library Association. Shepard’s short fiction has appeared in  Harper’s ,  McSweeney’s ,  The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Tin House, the New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story , and  Playboy , and he was a columnist on film for the magazine  The Believer . Four of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He also won an Artists’ Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Shepard teaches at Williams College.  

Nikky Finney and Tom Sleigh

Tuesday, April 10 | 4:30 pm | Newhouse Center for the Humanities - 237 Green Hall

Nikky Finney is the winner of the 2011 National Book Award in Poetry for her recent work, Head Off & Split , an impassioned summation of African American history.  Finney has established herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today.

“As an artist and a daughter of the South, and as someone who honors my feelings as often as I can, I don’t have to acquiesce to the polite expectations of the moment,” Finney has said. “I have watched black people forgive and forget over and over again … I too forgive, but I don’t forget … My responsibility as a poet, as an artist is to not look away.” Finney is a professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky, and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets group that also includes Frank X Walker and Kelly Norman Ellis. 

Tom Sleigh  is the author of more than half a dozen volumes of poetry. Space Walk (2007) won the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Award and earned Sleigh considerable critical acclaim. Sleigh has also received the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, an Individual Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and an Academy Award from the Academy of American Poets.

As a dramatist, Sleigh has written several critically acclaimed plays, a multimedia opera, and a full-length translation of Euripides’ Herakles (2001). His prose collection Interview with a Ghost (2006) includes both literary and personal essays.  Sleigh has taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Iowa, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, and Hunter College.

ABOUT THE NEWHOUSE CENTER
Founded in 2003 by a generous gift from Susan Marley Newhouse ’55 and Donald Newhouse, the Newhouse Center for the Humanities generates and supports innovative, world-class programming in the humanities and arts. The Newhouse Center’s mission is to create a dynamic and cosmopolitan intellectual community that extends from Wellesley College to the greater Boston-area community and beyond. For more information visit http://www.wellesley.edu/academics/centers/newhousecenter or call 781-283-2698. For driving and public transit directions to the campus, visit https://www.wellesley.edu/about/visit/directionsmaps .

ABOUT WELLESLEY COLLEGE & THE ARTS
The Wellesley College arts curriculum and the highly acclaimed Davis Museum and Cultural Center are integral components of the college’s liberal arts education. For decades, various departments and programs from across the campus have enlivened the community with world-class programming — classical and popular music, visual arts, theater, dance, author readings, symposia and lectures by some of today’s leading artists and creative thinkers — most of which are free and open to the public.  

Since 1875, Wellesley College has been a leader in providing an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world. Its 500-acre campus near Boston is home to 2,400 undergraduate students from 50 states and 75 countries.

PRESS CONTACTS

Anne Yu, Assistant Director, Media Relations, ayu@wellesley.edu , 781-283-3201
Sofiya Cabalquinto, Director, Media Relations, scabalqu@wellesley.edu , 781-283-3321

Alumna's Senior Thesis Inspires Timely Internet Piracy Study

A study coauthored by Brett Danaher , assistant professor in economics, Siwen Chen '11 , and researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, is stirring up controversy around a French copyright law. According to Danaher, Chen's senior thesis was what inspired the study. Chen presented her thesis,  Battle against Internet Piracy in France: Does “HADOPI” Affect Sales in the Media Industry?  at The 2011 Ruhlman Conference and won a Jerome A. Schiff Fellowship .

The law, known as HADOPI, was introduced in 2009 as a means to control and regulate internet access and encourage compliance with copyright laws. HADOPI is the acronym of the French government agency created to administer it (Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet). Violators of the law risk losing their access to the Internet.  

Danaher and Chen's study, titled " The Effect of Graduated Response Anti-Piracy Laws on Music Sales: Evidence from an Event Study in France ," found evidence that HADOPI has had a positive impact on iTunes sales in France. The analysis found that French iTunes sales saw a significant increase at exactly the period when awareness of HADOPI was at its highest. The study also found that the increase in sales was larger for more heavily-pirated genres, such as rap, and smaller for less-pirated genres, such as jazz. The "Digital Music Report 2012," a publication of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)   quoted the researchers as saying:

“We see sales in France for heavily pirated genres rise much faster than less pirated genres, which suggests that this sales increase is due to a reduction in French piracy levels,” say the authors. “Our results have important implications for other countries in Europe and abroad who are considering passing similar graduated response laws.... We also note that our study likely understates the true impact of HADOPI.”

Danaher and Chen's study has been discussed in the French publication Le Monde , the Spanish publication El Publico (links are in French and Spanish, respectively), and in Billboard Magazine .

Wellesley Alumna Leads 2012 World Development Report

Translations from World Literature Published by Wellesley College Students

Translations from World Literature is a compilation of English translations of literature from 17 different languages. The book includes the original language of the work and its English translation side by side, and includes works from languages rarely translated into English. The literary works are transated from Arabic, Chinese, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Latin, Malay, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Urdu, and Vietnamese. The book's introduction offers a basic background and cultural context for some of the more difficult-to-understand translations.

The book is available at the Wellesley Bookstore, Harvard Coop, Wellesley Booksmith, Porter Square Books, and Amazon . Author and editor Lela G. Jgerenaia is an international student at Wellesley College, and an alumna of Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX), a program run by the U.S. Department of State that allows high school students from Eastern European and neighboring Asian countries to live with a host family and attend high school in the United States for a year. Gjerenaia has been translating literature for four years; her work has been published in English language newspapers in the Republic of Georgia, her native country. Translations were contributed to this book by 23 other Wellesley College students who are either native or well proficient in the languages of their translated works.

Funding for the project came from several departments on campus, with the Russian Department the main donor. From the profits, the students will pay back the Russian Department; any further profits will go to a small fund to help Wellesley College students fund their creative ideas. "So, this book is a way to give back to Wellesley College," says Jgerenaia.

From the Preface to Translations from World Literature

The idea for this compilation was conceived, like many great ideas, over a cup of tea while discussing poetry with friends. As I shared my translations of Georgian poetry with my friends, which I did gradually as I feel that poetry is quite personal, I realized that these works were not meant for only Georgians or myself, but for everyone.

Vazha Pshavela's work had a significant impact on me. He lived in the mountainous region of Georgia during the 19th century, where war and revenge were the common rule of people's daily lives. He protested the brutality of what he saw. He appreciated the beauty of nature and it was his main inspiration, as well as life itself with its injustices. What struck me in reading other translated works were the eloquent illustrations of cultural differences as well as the profoundly universal nature of the common themes. Vazha Pshavela’s “Why Was I Made as a Human?” asks a question that has been echoed since the dawn of human consciousness. This work is as relevant today as it was in 19th-century Georgia.

As my friends and I shared more of our translated works with each other, I became more interested in international literary translations. Although collections of translated works from a single language or author abounded, there were few with works from different cultures and languages. There were certainly no such compilations available in my native Georgian language! Thus, this work was inspired by my own personal love of poetry, the enthusiasm of other literary translators in sharing their own works, and the joy of understanding and comparing different cultures through literature and poetry. I hope you enjoy reading this compilation as much as I enjoyed putting it together to share with you.

—Lela Jgerenaia