Nassau notes

Cory Booker

Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, N.J., will deliver the annual Toni Morrison Lectures on “The Unfinished Journey of America’s Spirit” at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, Oct. 1-3, in McCosh 50.

Booker will address the following topics: “The Past: A Testimony to the Impossible” on Oct. 1; “The Present: Through Cynicism, Negativity and Self-Doubt” on Oct. 2; and “The Future: Humble Hopes and Insane Idealism” on Oct. 3.

Booker has been mayor of New Jersey’s largest city since July 2006 and is the third person to lead Newark since 1970. He launched his political career in 1998 after serving as staff attorney for the Urban Justice Center and as a program coordinator of the Newark Youth Project. Booker spent four years as a Newark City Council member, helping to implement community programs such as increasing security at public housing facilities and building new playgrounds. He has been named one of the country’s “40 best and brightest” by Esquire magazine, one of the state’s “top 40 under 40” by New Jersey Monthly magazine and one of “America’s most powerful players under 40” by Black Enterprise magazine.

A graduate of Stanford University, Booker also earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received a law degree from Yale University.

Sponsored jointly by the Center for African American Studies and Princeton University Press, the Toni Morrison Lectures were inaugurated in 2006 to spotlight the work of prominent scholars and writers and to honor Morrison, Princeton’s Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities Emeritus. The lectures presented by Booker will be compiled with other Toni Morrison Lectures to be published in book form by Princeton University Press.

Previous lecturers in the series were Cornel West, Princeton’s Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies, and Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat.

Booker’s lectures will be simulcast live in McCosh 46. They also will be webcast live and archived online for later viewing at www.princeton.edu/webmedia.

PEI, Center for Human Values host lectures on ethics and climate change

An interdisciplinary group of scholars will examine the ethical dimensions of the challenge presented by climate change in a fall lecture series sponsored by the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the University Center for Human Values.

The five-part “Ethics and Climate Change” series will begin with a talk by Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values, at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 30, in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall. Singer’s lecture is titled “The Ethical Challenge of Climate Change.”

The other lectures in the series are:

• “Global Warming: What Do We Know and What Should We Do?” by Richard Somerville, the Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego, at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 7, in 101 McCormick Hall.
• “Prospicience (the Art and Science of Looking Ahead) and Geoengineering: What If We Can Dial Our Future?” by Robert Socolow, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton, at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14, in 10 Guyot Hall.
• “The Role of Ethics in the Legal Response to Climate Change: Perspectives From Environmental Law” by Jody Freeman, professor of law and director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School, at noon Wednesday, Nov. 19, in 10 Guyot Hall.
• “The Right to Development in a Climate-Constrained World: A ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ Approach to the Global Climate Regime” by Sivan Kartha, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 25, in 101 McCormick Hall.

Each speaker in the series will be paired with a discussant from a different discipline. The series was organized by Singer; Socolow; Pascale Poussart, assistant director for energy initiatives at PEI; and Sarah Fawcett, a graduate student in the Department of Geosciences. For more information, visit web.princeton.edu/sites/pei.

In addition to cosponsoring the fall lecture series, PEI and the Center for Human Values this spring will jointly host David Schlosberg, a leading scholar in environmental politics, as the Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities. At Princeton, he will teach an undergraduate course on climate ethics and present several lectures on the issue.

Schlosberg is a professor of politics and international affairs and director of the environmental studies program at Northern Arizona University, where he teaches political theory and environmental politics. His books include “Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism,” “Green States and Social Movements,” “Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader” and “Defining Environmental Justice.”

Pakistan’s foreign minister to speak

Transition in Pakistan and Its Impact on Modern Terrorism” is the subject of a lecture by Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, set for 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1, in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall.

Qureshi’s address comes in the wake of recent political and economic instability in Pakistan and strikes against alleged terrorists linked to al-Qaida in the country’s tribal areas by U.S.-led forces based in Afghanistan. Asif Ali Zardari was sworn in as Pakistan’s president Sept. 9 following the resignation of Gen. Pervez Musharraf in August.

Qureshi, who took office as foreign minister in March, is a senior leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, which had opposed Musharraf’s rule. He previously served as Pakistan’s federal minister of state for parliamentary affairs and federal parliamentary secretary of food and agriculture.

The lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination.

Festival features films from Latin America, Spain

Cutting-edge films from Latin America and Spain will be presented in the 2008 Princeton Documentary Festival Thursday through Saturday, Oct. 2-4, in 10 East Pyne.

This year’s festival is titled “Real Stories: Fact and Fiction in the Documentary” and will feature works by Edgardo Cozarinsky, José Luis Guerín, Luis Ospina and Eduardo Coutinho. Cozarinsky, Guerín, Ospina and Brazilian film critic Consuelo Lins will participate in lectures and discussions following the film screenings.

The annual festival was created in 2002. It is sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, the Program in Latin American Studies, the University Center for Human Values, the Council of the Humanities, the Davis Center for Historical Studies and the British Arts and Humanities Research Council.

All films will be screened in their original language with English subtitles. A schedule is available at www.princeton.edu/spo/films.

Benefits Fairs set for Oct. 15-16

Have questions about your benefits? Want to learn more about the new MetLife dental plans or the new Aetna PPO medical plan? Interested in learning more about CNA’s long-term care plan? Come to a Benefits Fair sponsored by the Office of Human Resources.

The events will take place from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 15, in the Frist Campus Center Multipurpose Rooms and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 16, in the Spitzer Building at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Representatives from the various health, welfare and retirement vendors will be available.

The full story of benefit plan updates is published in this issue of the PWB.

150 Years of Political Cartoons

Courtesy of Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library

A collection of editorial cartoons focusing on U.S. presidential elections from 1828 to 1992 is currently on view in Firestone Library’s Milberg Gallery. The exhibition, titled “Sketching Their Characters: 150 Years of Political Cartoons from Andrew Jackson to George H.W. Bush,” runs through Jan. 4 and features primarily original pen and ink editorial cartoons. This example from 1940, “The King Can Do No Wrong,” skewers the ambitions of President Franklin Roosevelt as he decided whether to run for a third term, a choice that would violate the precedent established by George Washington in 1796. (Roosevelt ultimately was elected to four terms, and the 22nd Amendment setting a two-term limit passed in 1947.)

October events set at Labyrinth

Labyrinth Books will host the following University-related events in October. The events, which are free and open to the public, will be held at the bookstore, 122 Nassau St., and are scheduled for 5:30 p.m. unless otherwise noted:

• On Thursday, Oct. 2, Princeton religion professor Elaine Pagels will join Temple University scholar and rabbi Rebecca Alpert in examining what the Torah says about sex, war, poverty, the environment and other major contemporary issues. The event celebrates the publication of Alpert’s new book, “Whose Torah?”
• Civil War authority and Princeton historian James McPherson will discuss his new book, “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief,” on Wednesday, Oct. 8. McPherson’s new work explores how Lincoln worked with — and often against — his senior commanders to defeat the Confederacy and create the role of commander in chief as we know it.
• Marking the launch of The Review, a new Princeton student-run cultural publication, a panel of students and faculty members will discuss the genre of review writing at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10.
• A reading of “Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel,” a new biography of the visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud by Edmund White, is scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 15. White, a professor of creative writing at Princeton, delves into Rimbaud’s relationships with his family, his teachers and his notorious affair with the more established poet Paul Verlaine.
• Princeton professor emeritus Robert Hollander, one of the world’s foremost Dante scholars, will join his wife and collaborator Jean in reading from their recent translation of Dante’s “Paradiso” on Thursday, Oct. 16. The Hollanders’ translation is faithful to Dante’s text but provides the feeling necessary to give the English reader a sense of the work’s poetic greatness in Italian.
• On Monday, Oct. 20, Labyrinth and Princeton’s Department of English will host a talk by comic artist David Rees in honor of the publication of a collection of his notorious comic strips, “Get Your War On: The Definitive Account of the War on Terror, 2001-2008.”
• Poet and Princeton English professor Susan Stewart will read from her new collection, “Red Rover: Poems,” on Tuesday, Oct. 21. Stewart’s work ranges among traditional, open and newly invented forms and includes a series of free translations of medieval dream visions and love poems.

For more information about these and other events at Labyrinth, visit www.labyrinthbooks.com.

Art Museum exhibits Chinese art

Handscroll, “Ritual to Pray for Good Harvest,” by the famed calligrapher Wang Xizhi

A new exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum, “Strangers in a Strange Land: Chinese Art From the Imperial Palaces,” features 12 paintings and calligraphies from Qing dynasty (1655-1912) imperial collections that are now part of the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition — which includes the handscroll, “Ritual to Pray for Good Harvest,” by the famed calligrapher Wang Xizhi — examines the provenance of each object and considers it within its new context, far from its country of origin. The exhibition runs through Dec. 14.

Faculty, staff blood drive set

The American Red Cross Fall Faculty and Staff Blood Drive is set for 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1, and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 2, in Multipurpose Rooms A and B of the Frist Campus Center.

The drive is by appointment only, and times are available every 15 minutes. The blood donation takes only eight to 10 minutes, but the appointment lasts about 45 minutes.

To schedule a time, register at www.membersforlife.org/pennj/schedule/bdc_schools.php or call Employee Health Services at 258-5035.