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Accolades 

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Karl J. Raudsepp, of the Music Department, was awarded the Estonian-Canadian Medal of Merit by the Estonian Central Council of Canada at the 90th Anniversary Celebrations of Estonian Independence at the University of Toronto on Feb. 24. Raudsepp, current president of the Montreal Estonian Society, was one of 12 individuals recognized for outstanding contributions to preserving and enhancing Estonian heritage and culture in Canada. He is a past president of CUPFA and has sat on numerous university bodies.

“Postcolonial Borderlands: Orality and Irish Traveller Writing”, a recent Concordia Master’s thesis in English literature, is being published by Cambridge Scholars. Christine Walsh graduated in 2007, and was a recipient of several grants from the Centre for Canadian Irish Studies. Her thesis concerns the nomadic Roma of Ireland, who have a long history of marginalization and discrimination, and focuses on two works by Traveller writers, Nan Joyce’s My Life on the Road and Seán Maher’s The Road to God Knows Where.

How Mathematicians Think, (Princeton University Press), by William Byers (Mathematics and Statistics) has been chosen as one of the 39 best science and technology books of 2007 by the Library Journal (March 2008). “It's a great honour to be associated with other people on the list such as Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Preston and Natalie Angier,” Byers said. His book is the only selection in mathematics.

The Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations was featured at an event called Sharing Authority: Building Community-University Alliances through Oral History, Digital Storytelling and Collaboration, held at the Centre d’Histoire de Montréal from Feb. 7 to 10. The director of the research project is Canada Research Chair in Public History Steven High.

Creative young alumni continue to make films that turn heads. Erin Laing’s 13-minute first film, Birthday Girl, premiered at the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois on Feb. 21, and was described by The Gazette’s Bill Brownstein as “stylish and playfully subversive.” Laing financed it largely with the winnings from a screenwriting competition. Power Lines, an experimental film about the breakdown of digital data by Stephania Gambaroff, opened at the Village East Theatre in New York City. Gambaroff is a 2007 Fine Arts graduate, originally from St. Petersburg, Russia.

Rosemary Mountain (Music/Hexagram) presented her Interactive Playroom at UQAM as part of a symposium for International Women’s Day. She is shown setting up the Playroom below. “It is in some ways a rehearsal for a presentation we will be making in July in Bologna, Italy, at the International Society for Music Education World Conference 2008,” she said in an email. The Playroom will be exhibited at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Fabrica Ciencia Viva science museum in Aveiro, Portugal, later this year. Mountain will present a paper at the Electroacoustic Music Studies conference (EMS-08) in Paris in June, in which she will report on tests using the Playroom to help classify an array of electroacoustic music pieces.