Bowling
Green, Ky. - Western Kentucky University’s Cultural Enhancement Series will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2006-07 with two lectures and a concert.
In its 10-year history, the series has brought more than 30 well-known scientists, journalists, historians and performance groups to the WKU campus.
This year’s lineup features author and doctor Abraham Verghese on Nov. 14, author Azar Nafisi on Feb. 13 and Grammy Award-winning band Los Lobos on March 14. All events will begin at 7:30 p.m. at Van Meter Auditorium. Admission is free.
Information on each presentation in the 2006-2007 Cultural Enhancement Series follows:
Dr. Abraham Verghese: “The Search for Meaning in a Medical Life”
Few books address concerns of health care and society more powerfully than Dr. Abraham Verghese’s “My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS,” the autobiographical account of Verghese’s encounter with the emergence of AIDS in Johnson City, Tenn. His second book, “The Tennis Partner,” is an equally compelling memoir exploring the power and limitations of friendship, and the dynamics of addiction. In 2002, after a stint as a professor of medicine and chief of infectious diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas, Dr. Verghese became the founding director of Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics, located on the campus of The University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Granta, TALK, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic Monthly. More information on Dr. Verghese is available online at http://www.saja.org/verghese.html
His lecture is co-sponsored by the College of Health and Human Services Dean’s Office and the South Central Kentucky Area Health Education Center.
Azar Nafisi, author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”
Azar Nafisi’s national bestseller, “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,” electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran.
Nafisi taught literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai where she conducted workshops for women students on the relationship between culture and human rights. These workshops in turn formed the basis of a new human rights curriculum in Iran.
Nafisi left Iran in 1997 and is a visiting professor and the director of the SAIS Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., where she teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. Nafisi has written for The New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. More information on Nafisi is available online at http://dialogueproject.sais-jhu.edu/anafisi.php
Her lecture is co-sponsored by the Women’s Studies Program’s Catherine Coogan Ward Visiting Professorship.
Los Lobos in concert
Grammy Award-winning band Los Lobos has stretched musical definitions for more than a quarter of a century. Their innovative blending of Mexican traditional music with Tejano, rock, folk, blues and R&B has enthralled critics and fans from every background. Cesar Rosas, Conrad Lozano, David Hidalgo and Louie Perez have been friends and musical collaborators since their teen years in East Los Angeles, giving their sound a coherence and depth born of long association. Saxophonist-keyboardist Steve Berlin joined the band in 1983. Their contribution to the soundtracks of the films “La Bamba” and “Desperado” brought the band to the attention of the public, but from their important first release, “Just Another Band from East LA,” to their most recent CD, “The Town and the City,” Los Lobos has always been a major force in American popular music. More information on Los Lobos is available online at http://www.loslobos.org/site/
The concert is co-sponsored by WKU’s Campus Activities Board.
More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.
For information, contact Mina Doerner at (270) 745-5204.