“I’ll take Research Skills for 2oo, Alex!” Jeopary aired for the first time on March 30th, 1964. While we can’t guarantee you’ll win thousands, you’ll definitely come out ahead by attending the Academic Skills Series this semester. Check out this week’s topic – The Ames Advantage: Research Skills for Success. The Divisions of Academic and Student Affairs collaborate each semester to present the Academic Skills Series, a series of 10 programs to assist students in the development of and/or strengthening of academic skills needed to be successful at IWU. Students can pick a specific topic to join us, or attend all sessions. (Free Papa John’s pizza provided for lunch!) These sessions are in CNS E101 (no reservation necessary) at noon. We hope to see you there!

Monday, 7:00pm, Beckman Auditorium –  “People’s Republic of China,1949-1989-2029-?: The Place of the 1989 Tiananmen Protests in Modern Chinese History” – This is the first of two lectures to be presented during a campus visit by Li Minqi, an economist from the University of Utah. In 1989, Li was a student at Peking University who participated in the Tiananmen protests; he was later arrested for his activism and spent two years in prison.

Tuesday, 4:00pm, Beckman Auditorium – “China, Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the 21st Century Crisis” – The second of two lectures to be delivered by Li Mingi, an economist from the University of Utah.

Thursday, 4-5:30pm, Welcome Center Auditorium – Kevin Smith, director of the Office of Scholarly Communications at Duke University, will share his expertise on how copyright is practiced internationally, provide some tools to help faculty assist our students — especially those from other countries — to avoid plagiarism, and consider a couple of assignments that help underscore the concepts of copyright. Refreshment will be available. An accomplished copyright attorney and librarian, Smith is well-versed in many aspects of copyright, including international copyright law and copyright in the digital age. His visit is supported by the Mellon grant on Writing in the Disciplines and Information Literacy.

Instruction Lab, Room 129

• Tuesday, 12:00pm – Moodle Gradebook Overview
• Tuesday, 1:10pm – English 258
• Wednesday, 12:00pm – JWP Student Orientation

Meeting Room, Room 214

• Monday, 9:30am – Network Meeting
• Monday, 10:30am – Disaster Recovery Meeting
• Tuesday, 1:00pm – Assessment Committee
• Tuesday, 4:30pm – Star Literacy
• Wednesday, 9:00am – Star Literacy
• Wednesday, 11:30am – Theatre Recruitment
• Wednesday, 2:00pm – CUPP
• Thursday, 1:00pm – CUPP
• Thursday, 4:30pm – Star Literacy
• Friday, 2:00pm – Portal Meeting

Beckman Auditorium, Lower Level

• Monday, 7:00pm – Lecture
• Tuesday, 10:50am – Sociology 305
• Tuesday, 4:00pm – Environmental Studies Speaker
• Tuesday, 6:00pm – Phi Beta Delta Induction Ceremony
• Wednesday, 12:00pm – JWP Student Orientation
• Thursday, 9:25am – International Politics
• Thursday, 10:50am – International Politics
• Thursday, 1:10pm – International Politics
• Thursday, 2:30pm – Theatre 372
• Thursday, 7:00pm – International Film Series – “Shall We Dance?” (1996, Japan), presented by Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese Ikuko Yuasa.
• Saturday, 1:00pm – National Society of Leadership and Success Leadership Training Day

Next week –

A play that imagines the dream-world of Abraham Lincoln’s mind from the time he was shot until he died the next morning will be staged April 6 at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Written by IWU Professor Emeritus and Lincoln scholar Robert W. Bray, Lincoln in Limbo will premiere April 4 at 10 a.m. at the Newberry Library in Chicago, followed by a performance April 6 at 7:30 p.m. at the Hansen Student Center at Illinois Wesleyan. Both are staged by the Shakespeare Project of Chicago, an equity company, and are free of charge and open to the public.

In what Bray calls “a remarkable coincidence,” the premiere of Lincoln in Limbo will occur 150 ‘Easters’ after Lincoln’s assassination on Easter weekend 1865.

Prior to the IWU staging, a conversation with Director Peter Garino, members of the cast, leading Lincoln scholar and author Michael Burlingame, author Guy Fraker, and Bray will be held April 6 at 2 p.m. at The Ames Library’s Beckman Auditorium.

Bray said Lincoln in Limbo is a “fantasy of imagination and emotion,” as if taking place in Lincoln’s shadow-mind between the time he was shot on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, and the time he was pronounced dead the next morning.

“Within the scenes, Lincoln is sometimes impersonating himself, sometimes having events control him, sometimes both at once,” said Bray. In the play, Lincoln is attempting to take care of “unfinished business” in his life. Although a work of fiction, Lincoln in Limbo features individuals who played prominent roles in Lincoln’s life, including Ann Rutledge, whom some historians believe to be Lincoln’s first love; Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a former slave who was Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker and confidante; and Francis Bicknell Carpenter, painter-in-residence at the White House while working on his painting The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Even though he is a professor of literature and not a historian, Bray’s Lincoln works has been widely praised. Bray is the author of Reading with Lincoln (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), the winner of the 2010-11 Illinois State Historical Society’s Russell P. Strange Memorial Book Award and runner-up for the Lincoln Prize. Another Bray book, Peter Cartwright: Legendary Frontier Preacher (University of Illinois Press, 2005), examines the dynamic relationship between Cartwright, a Methodist revivalist, and Lincoln as political rivals in a Congressional race in 1846. Bray also co-wrote the play Lincoln’s In Town! with Bloomington playwright and journalist Nancy Steele Brokaw ’71. Bray retired in 2014 after teaching at IWU for 44 years.

We now have a trial for Routledge Handbooks Online.

The collections covers a broad range of classic and current research and future trends in subject areas in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Available through May 12, 2015. This resource is available on campus only.

Routledge Handbooks Online brings together the world’s leading scholars to provide a cutting-edge overview of classic and current research and future trends in the Social Sciences and Humanities, while at the same time providing an authoritative guide to theory and method, the key sub-disciplines, and the primary debates of today. Every title within RHO is surrounded with meaningful metadata and abstracts at a chapter level, making it fully searchable and browsable, providing a functionality of greater value to the student and researcher.

Key Features:

• All chapters are accompanied by an abstract and rich metadata that make searching and research more efficient and effective
• Intuitive search tools enable users to find exactly the material they need across the Handbooks’ and Companions’ multiple subject areas
• Peer-reviewed content ensures quality of research
• Over 11,000 chapters from 320+ volumes available at launch
• Expansive coverage of 18 subject areas including Sociology, Linguistics, Education, and Asian Studies
• All titles DRM-free
• Content available as HTML and PDF
• Full text DOIs, OpenURL, and Usage Statistics to aid discoverability and help ensure library patrons are accessing the materials they need.

Routledge Handbooks Online features collections in the following areas:

• Archaeology & Classics
• Asian Studies
• Business & Economics
• Communication,  Journalism, Media & Culture
• Criminal Justice & Criminology
• Education
• Environment & Sustainability
• Health & Social Care
• History
• Law
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Politics
• Psychology
• Security Studies
• Sociology
• Sport & Leisure
• Tourism, Hospitality & Events Management

Ames Library has just signed up for a new database! The Kanopy streaming video database is available for use in classrooms and wherever else you need it.

Here’s your chance to watch entire films or preview many interesting titles!  Kanopy offers a broad selection of over 12,000 films and documentaries, featuring such producers as Media Education Foundation, Criterion Collection, PBS, California Newsreel, HBO, Kino Lorber, and more.

Search Tips

1. To look for an exact title or phrase, put your search terms in quotation marks (e.g. “Killing Us Softly”).
2. Include “AND” between search terms to view results that must contain both words (not just either word).
3. Having searched for keywords, use the filters on the left side of the search results page to narrow your search (by category, producer, year of production, etc)

The library welcomes your feedback on this resource.  Please send comments to Marcia Thomas, mthomas@iwu.edu.

On March 25th and 26th, we will be hosting acclaimed filmmaker John Sayles and producer Maggie Renzi on campus. In support of their visit, we will be sponsoring a John Sayles mini-film festival during the week prior to and during their visit. Sayles and Renzi will be attending classes, meeting with faculty, students, and staff during lunches and dinners, and will be giving a public talk after the screening of Amigo, one of their more recent films starring academy award winner Chris Cooper. In addition, Sayles, who in addition to having been nominated for two academy awards, is a MacArthur Award winner and a National Book Award finalist,  will be giving a public reading of some of his fiction. More about the film festival and their visit during our meeting.

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From Sayle’s website: “Sayles’ career as a storyteller BEGAN WITH HIS FICTION. HIS FIRST NOVEL WAS Pride of the Bimbos (1975), FOLLOWED BY Union Dues (1978, nominated for National Book Award and National Critics’ Circle Award)). Los Gusanos (1990) CAME NEXT AND THEN short story collections The Anarchists’ Convention (1979) and Dillinger in Hollywood (2004). THE epic historical novel A Moment in the Sun  IS HIS MOST RECENT NOVEL, PUBLISHED IN 2011 BY MCSWEENY’S.

Fiction brought him to the attention of legendary director/producer Roger Corman, for whom he wrote screenplays for such B classics as Piranha, Battle Beyond the Stars and The Lady In Red.  Continuing to work with directors who had developed in the Corman school, he penned The Howling and Alligator, two works that helped establish a new, more self-aware horror film tradition.

Screenwriting is still Sayles’ primary profession, and credited or not, he has been able to work in a myriad of genres- Western (The Quick and the Dead), techno-thriller (Apollo 13), action (Men of War), monster flick (Mimic), romance, historical epic, animated features- crafting over sixty screenplays-for-hire over the years.  The job has allowed him to work with directors such as John Frankenheimer, Steven Spielberg, Jonathan Demme, Sidney Pollack, Billie August, Ron Howard, Sam Raimi, Joe Dante, Rob Reiner, and James Cameron among others, and get a view of their storytelling process.

Secaucus 7 was a surprise success, one of a number of films in the early 80’s that began to be described as part of ‘the independent film movement’.  The Sundance Film Institute and its make-or-break Festival did not yet exist, but with each subsequent indie film Sayles and his collaborators found more company, and competition, at the theatrical box office.  Standing out from the crowd is always a challenge for a filmmaker, and Sayles’ work was notable not only for its rapid increase in technical mastery (breaking the $100,000 budget barrier didn’t hurt) but for the eclectic, ever-changing array of subject matter.  Lianna (1983) was a tight family drama about a wife and mother dealing with the realization that she is a lesbian, whileBaby It’s You (1983), Sayles’ first studio backed (and virtually abandoned) film, dealt with the life crisis of a Jewish girl catapulted from working-class Trenton to Sarah Lawrence college in the wild mid-60’s.  Cult classic Brother From Another Planet (1985) followed a three-toed alien stranded in Harlem attempting to ‘assimilate’.

During a lull in financing, he had the opportunity to direct three early rock videos for Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA, I’m on Fire and Glory Days.

Finally able to raise just enough money to shoot Matewan (1987) an extremely ambitious low-budget pseudo-Western about a bitter, violent coal miners’ strike of 1920, Sayles continued to explore different territory each time out.   Eight Men Out (1988), based on Eliot Asinof’s classic non-fiction account, explored the Black Sox Scandal of the 1919 World Series, while City of Hope (1990) is set in a decaying, eastern-urban city and features a complex web of politics and crime that foreshadows the HBO series The Wire.   Passion Fish (1992)a sad, romantic trip to Cajun country in Louisiana for a story of two women who help each other rebuild their lives, won Sayles his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Sayles’ first feature shot outside the U.S was The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), based on a children’s book about a young girl descended from a selkie (seal-woman).  Lone Star (1996),also garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, took place in a town on the Texas-Mexico border and dealt with race, memory and legend.   Even further afield was Men With Guns (Hombres Armados, 1997), a political parable set in a fictional Latin American country (nominated as Best Foreign Language Film for the Golden Globes).  With dialogue principally in Spanish, it remains one of the few instances where the long tradition of foreign directors coming to Hollywood and working in English has been reversed.

Limbo (1999), another studio-backed film, took Sayles to Alaska, ‘where Nature is big and people are small’ and provoked controversy everywhere it played with its 70’s-style open ending.  The next picture, Sunshine State (2000), took place at the extreme opposite end of the country in a multi-character tale of roots and real estate on a Florida tourist island.   As usual there were familiar faces from other of Sayles’ films as well as newcomers.  Over the years he has been able to work with excellent actors on several different stories, actors like David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, Joe Morton, Angela Bassett, Mary McDonnell, Gordon Clapp, Mary Steenbergen, Vanessa Martinez, Bill Cobbs, Susan Lynch-  the list goes on.

One of Sayles’ short stories became the mico-budgeted Casa de los Babies (2003), shot in Acapulco with a knockout American/Mexican cast.  Silver City, rushed into production for the election year of 2004, was much more specific in its politics than previous outings, and marked his fourth collaboration with noted cinematographer Haskell Wexler.

Honeydripper (2007), about the origins of rock and roll in the deep South, was shot in Georgiana, Alabama, where country legend Hank Williams grew up. Danny Glover, Charles Dutton, Stacey Keach, R&B legend Mabel John, singer-songwriter Keb Mo and Austin guitar sensation Gary Clark Jr. combined their talents for a feel-good movie with a memorable soundtrack, winning an NAACP Image Award for best independent film.   His latest film,Amigo (2011) deals with a suppressed aspect of our history, the Philippine-American War, and was nominated for the Filipino equivalent of the Oscar in several categories.

Sayles continues his work for hire on features and television series, as well as writing original scripts.  He will be shooting his 18^th feature, currently titled Go for Sisters, this summer.

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Maggie Renzi has been John Sayles’ creative partner since 1978 and she has produced nearly all of his movies.

From Maggie Renzi’s page: She has also acted in many of them. Renzi and Sayles were students together at Williams College in the early 1970s, and have been together since 1973.

Before becoming a fulltime producer Renzi had worked as a bookstore clerk, a pediatric receptionist, a substitute teacher, a casting assistant, a talent agent’s assistant, and for two years as a salad chef in Southern California. She began her acting career as a child at the Williamstown Theater Festival, where she continued to perform into her twenties. Renzi began her professional association with Sayles when she played a leading role in his first film,The Return of the Secaucus Seven, where she was also Unit Manager and Assistant Editor.

For John Sayles, Maggie Renzi has produced Lianna, The Brother from Another Planet,Matewan, City of Hope, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, Men With Guns,Limbo, Sunshine State, Silver City, Honeydripper, and Amigo.

In addition to mastering the highly specialized craft of producing thematically ambitious films on small budgets, under often adverse conditions, Renzi has made key creative contributions to many of Sayles’ films-suggesting that Louisiana was the perfect location for Passion Fish, for example, and discovering the novel by Rosalie K. Fry that Sayles adapted as The Secret of Roan Inish.

Since her linchpin performance as Kate, who hosts the weekend gathering in The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Maggie Renzi has also played featured roles in many of the movies she has produced. She is especially memorable as Sheila the friendly neighbor in Lianna, as the social worker Noreen in The Brother From Another Planet, as the Italian immigrant wife Rosaria in Matewan, and as the American tourist glued to her guidebook in Men With Guns. She also appeared in Jonathan Demme’s film Swing Shift (1984) and in Key Exchange(1985).

“It’s pretty interesting to have a record of yourself aging on film.” Renzi says. “In Secaucus Seven I was 28 years old and I weighed 118 pounds. By the time I saw myself in Passion FishI thought, ‘I think I’m gonna wait until I’m a genuine old lady before I go in front of a camera again.’ Also, I really like producing. It’s where I am most fully myself at work, more than I am as an actress.”

In 2000 Renzi produced, in partnership with Sarah Green and Martha Griffin, Karyn Kusama’s acclaimed debut feature Girlfight. The film went on to win several international festival awards (including the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance) and the Independent Spirit award as Best First Feature. The film’s star, Michelle Rodriguez, also won critical acclaim and several awards for her performance as a young Latina pursuing a boxing career. Co-Executive Produced by Sayles and Jonathan Sehring of IFC Films, Girlfight featured Jaime Tirelli (Hector in The Brother From Another Planet) as the heroine’s show-me trainer.

According to director Karyn Kusama, “Maggie has a very dynamic personality,” “so she moves things through when most people couldn’t. She’s persuasive and charismatic. Those are very important qualities for someone who has to be diplomatic with a host of different people, and at times forceful with those same people.”

“Different producers have different styles,” Renzi asserts. “Mine is very hands on. Even now, I’ve been doing it for twenty years, I’m still up and on the set at morning call and I eat with everyone else and I wrap out the day with everyone else. My job is really about fulfilling the director’s vision. I think particularly as a woman it’s taken me a long time to really sit in my own chair. But also it doesn’t really suit the independent style to be too much of a show-off about being a producer.”

Most recently, Renzi was an Executive Producer with Sayles on the Alejandro Springall movie, entitled Morirse esta en Hebreo or My Mexican Shivah.

Originally appearing on the Ames Library Tate Archives Blog – Here’s an excerpt from some advice given by students in the 19th Century: “The aim of all college students should be to gain knowledge…We are here as a body of students to cultivate our minds, so that we may be able to cope with the outside world….”

From Amazon.com –

“At its optimistic best, America has embraced its identity as the world’s melting pot. Today it is on the cusp of becoming a country with no racial majority, and new minorities are poised to exert a profound impact on U.S. society, economy, and politics. The concept of a “minority white” may instill fear among some Americans, but William H. Frey, the man behind the demographic research, points out that demography is destiny, and the fear of a more racially diverse nation will almost certainly dissipate over time.

Through a compelling narrative and eye-catching charts and maps, eminent demographer Frey interprets and expounds on the dramatic growth of minority populations in the United States. He finds that without these expanding groups, America could face a bleak future: this new generation of young minorities, who are having children at a faster rate than whites, is infusing our aging labor force with vitality and innovation. In contrast with the labor force-age population of Japan, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, the U.S. labor force-age population is set to grow 5 percent by 2030.

Diversity Explosion shares the good news about diversity in the coming decades, and the more globalized, multiracial country that the U.S. is becoming.”

Check out this new edition to The Ames Library collection. Interested in other similar titles? Browse through the E184s on the 2nd floor to get in touch with a librarian.

The Ames Library has several trial databases running. Trialing a database is the best way to determine (for free) if a particular databasse will be useful to you. As such, we need your input. Check out these databases and send any feedback to Marcia Thomas, Collections Librarians.

Trial for Reader’s Guide Retrospective (1890-1982) – through May 25.  You can discover materials from this resource throug the A-Z Resources list and Megasearch. Readers’ Guide Retrospective contains comprehensive indexing of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and reflects the history of 20th century America.

Trial for America: History & Life w/ Full Text – through June 2. You can discover materials from this resource throug the A-Z Resources list and Megasearch. Database of literature covering history and culture of the United States & Canada, from prehistory to present.

Trial for Historical Abstracts w/ Full Text – through June 2. You can discover materials from this resource throug the A-Z Resources list and Megasearch. Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to present, including world history, military history, women’s history, history of education and more.

Welcome back Titans! Spring has come at last! We hope everyone had a great spring break and is now ready for the rest of the semester.

So what do you really need in order to succeed for the rest of the summer?

• Space to study? Ames Library has all sorts of spaces for you!
• Scholarly resources? Oh yeah, we’ve got lots of those.
• Computers to work on? Yup, got those too.

So what else could you need? Coffee, snacks, and sodas? Hey! We’ve got those now too! We installed a new vending area on the entry level over spring break (head straight back from the front doors). We’ve got three new machines that accept cash or credit (sorry, no munch money), all fully stocked and ready to go! Our coffee machine is brand new and serves up some great brew.

Starting today, we’ve also got an exhibit of East German comic books on display by the Circulation Desk. “Atze and Mosaik: History and Politics in East German Comics: 1914-1989”

Are you on your way out of town for Spring Break? Going somewhere warm and sandy? Traveling by plane, train, or automobile? What better to do during those long travel hours and on warm sandy beaches than indulging in a little recreational reading? Ames Library has a whole collection of titles that are a welcome break from all that studying you’ve been doing!

The Ames Library’s Popular Reading Collection consists of more than 400 recently published books covering a wide range of interests and topics.

If you’re looking for a way to escape from your daily routine, stop by and browse the collection.  You’ll find mysteries, suspense, romance, science fiction, and fantasy novels, as well as non-fiction books covering current issues and people in the news.

To see a list of current titles, click here.

The collection is located on the entry level – east of the Circulation Desk.  Books are available to faculty, students and staff and can be checked out for three weeks; there is no limit to the number of books you can check out and the items can be renewed.

Items are added to the collection on a regular basis, so be sure to stop by often and see what’s new.

Do you have suggestions for book titles to include?  Contact Gloria Redinger at gredinge@iwu.edu or 309-556-3526.