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Dole Institute, Kennedy Institute launch initiative to strengthen US election infrastructure
LAWRENCE — The Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate have announced a collaborative initiative to promote investment in American electoral administration and processes. The partnership begins with an event at 7 p.m. Feb. 15 at the Dole Institute with Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab in conversation with Douglas County Clerk/Election Officer Jamie Shew.
Groundbreaking history of Adaptive Use Musical Instrument chronicled in new book
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas professor of American studies is one of the editors and contributors to a book titled “Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument.” It details the origins of the AUMI and spotlights its creator, Oliveros (1932-2016), an American composer considered a pioneer in the development of experimental and electronic music. The book was published by University of Michigan Press.
Distinguished professor lecture to explore history, limitations of American ‘Manifest Destiny’
LAWRENCE — An award-winning author and historian at the University of Kansas will share some of his multifaceted scholarship during his inaugural distinguished professor lecture, which will take place at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 15. Andrew Isenberg will present “The Age of the Borderlands: The Limits of American ‘Manifest Destiny,’ 1790-1845,” which will focus on the encounter between Indigenous people and settlers in North America.
Author creates fantastic fiction grounded in reality
LAWRENCE — At some level, you have to write what you know, and author Bogi Takács Perelmutter does that in their new collection of fantastical tales, titled “Power to Yield and Other Stories.” Some works, for instance, are inspired by the academic and scientific milieu in which the author moves as assistant teaching professor in the University of Kansas departments of Slavic, German & Eurasian Studies and Jewish Studies.
KJHK, KPR to celebrate local music, film, radio during Jazz in the Evening
LAWRENCE – KJHK, the University of Kansas’ student-run radio station, and Kansas Public Radio invite listeners to Jazz in the Evening, which begins at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 10 at the Kansas Union. America Patton and his jazz group are the featured musicians of the evening, and Patton’s efforts to celebrate the redlined Kansas City community of Quindaro through music are highlighted in the 13-minute documentary to be shown during the event.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Maria Fisher, Dole Institute of Politics, 785-864-4900, [email protected]
Dole Institute, Kennedy Institute launch initiative to strengthen US election infrastructure
LAWRENCE — The Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate have announced a collaborative initiative to promote investment in American electoral administration and processes.
The two institutes have assembled a team of policy experts and practitioners to examine why the study of funding election systems is so difficult as compared to other government services and to highlight models of success at the local level.
The institutes have selected Tammy Patrick, election expert and a former commissioner on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, to lead this process.
Policy experts involved in the working group include professors Mitchell Brown, Auburn University; Paul Gronke, Reed College; Kathleen Hale, Auburn University; Martha Kropf, University of North Carolina; Paul Mason, Reed College; and Zach Mohr, University of Kansas; as well as Rachel Orey, Bipartisan Policy Center; Charles Stewart, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Matt Weil, Bipartisan Policy Center.
For its first event, the institutes will co-host Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab in conversation with Douglas County Clerk/County Election Officer Jamie Shew at 7 p.m. Feb. 15 at the Dole Institute. Following the public event, the working group will convene local and regional practitioners to further research on this topic, with future sessions and products to be announced.
“Our goal is to support the tireless elections administrators who are the backbone of our democracy. We need a strong 21st century election system in America, and part of achieving that is understanding the range of funding sources and options today,” said Adam Hinds, CEO of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. “This partnership between the Dole and Kennedy institutes underscores that building a resilient election process is not a partisan issue but one our entire country must get behind.”
“In the tradition of our namesakes, both Dole and Kennedy institutes are dedicated to promoting qualities of service, leadership and engagement that fortify our democratic institutions and processes,” said Audrey Coleman, director of the Dole Institute of Politics. “This project focuses on the fundamental resources — human and financial — that are required to administer secure and trusted elections, the foundation of our democracy.”
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Groundbreaking history of Adaptive Use Musical Instrument chronicled in new book
LAWRENCE — How can you write a book about an app?
That was the question faced by Sherrie Tucker and her colleagues.
“But our project leader, composer Pauline Oliveros, always said that what was important about AUMI is not the app but how people use it,” said Tucker, professor of American studies at the University of Kansas.
The AUMI (Adaptive Use Musical Instrument) software allows individuals with limited mobility to play music. The free program is installed on any computer, tablet or smartphone that has a camera. Movement with whichever part of the body is selected (finger, nose, chest) triggers an array of sounds, from the melodious to the idiosyncratic.
Tucker is one of the editors and contributors to a book titled “Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument.” It details the origins of the AUMI and spotlights its creator, Oliveros (1932-2016), an American composer considered a pioneer in the development of experimental and electronic music. The book was published by University of Michigan Press.
“We did an open call for chapters of all shapes and sizes by sending it out to everyone who had downloaded the instrument. So we have poems. We have videos of people dancing with it. There’s a whole section on music therapists, and even they all use it differently,” she said.
Other KU contributors to the 390-page project include KU faculty members Michelle Heffner Hayes, Ray Mizumura-Pence and Nicole Hodges Persley; graduate student Caleb Lázaro Moreno and student Kendall Conway.
Tucker helped found the AUMI-KU InterArts, an affiliate of the international research group dedicated to spreading usage of this instrument. (The KU branch focuses on “interdisciplinary arts and improvisation.”) She first met Oliveros in 2007 while working together on a grant project, right as the composer had started dabbling with the AUMI.
“Pauline thought that listening could heal the world. And she meant that really broadly. She wasn’t using a hearing definition of listening – she was also interested in compositions for deaf audiences,” Tucker said. “She felt improvisation was a way not only for people to listen to themselves but to learn how to listen to everyone and to the environment.”
As described in the book, the AUMI (pronounced like “ow-me”) was designed as a “liberating and affordable alternative to the constraints of instruments created only for normative bodies, thus opening a doorway for people of all ages, genders, abilities, races and socioeconomic backgrounds to access artistic practice with others.”
“It’s a way to create something together, and the goal is to have everybody affected,” Tucker said. “It’s everybody’s creation. The instrument is so flexible. I’ve played it in so many different settings, different aesthetics, different musical backgrounds and interests.”
She recalled performing a composition by recording all the distinctive sounds her car makes.
“One of our regular improvisers here in Lawrence is a serious bowler. So we’ve made sound-collecting trips to the bowling alley and uploaded those to create instruments,” she said. “You know what’s the coolest sound in the bowling alley? The ball return. You put a microphone inside that, and you can hear this sonic echo chamber.”
Ultimately, Tucker hopes readers not only embrace the societal and community benefits that the AUMI elicits but also learn of Oliveros’ influence on so many people.
“Pauline was very inclusive,” Tucker said.
“So she had a lifetime career of creating pieces and instruments for musicians and non-musicians to play together. She didn’t like passive relationships with music. Sure, she’s a pioneer of music technology. But she was never interested in making it more and more precise. She liked technology that made a difference in everyone’s ‘experience’ of music.”
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Contact: Elizabeth Barton, Office of Faculty Affairs, [email protected]
Distinguished professor lecture to explore history, limitations of American ‘Manifest Destiny’
LAWRENCE — An award-winning author and historian at the University of Kansas will share some of his multifaceted scholarship during his inaugural distinguished professor lecture later this month.
Andrew Isenberg will present “The Age of the Borderlands: The Limits of American ‘Manifest Destiny,’ 1790-1845,” which will focus on the encounter between Indigenous people and settlers in North America. The lecture will take place at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 15 in Alderson Auditorium of the Kansas Union.
Individuals can register to attend the lecture, which will also be livestreamed. Additional webinar details will be available upon registration. A recording of the lecture will be posted afterward on the Office of Faculty Affairs website.
Isenberg, the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, said the widely recognized view of Manifest Destiny limits the narrative. While researching other projects, including a book about the near extinction of the bison and an environmental history of the California gold rush, Isenberg came across details that did not fit into the paradigm of Manifest Destiny.
These included a U.S. effort to vaccinate Indigenous people against smallpox, an attempt to introduce camels into the Southwest and missionaries who tried to protect the culture and autonomy of Indigenous people, he said.
“At first, I thought of these as exceptions to Manifest Destiny’s story of unrelenting U.S. expansion,” Isenberg said. “Over time, I started to think that there were so many exceptions to the narrative that it was time to rethink the paradigm of Manifest Destiny. Indigenous people were more powerful than we often recognize. The U.S. was not the surpassing power on the continent and often had to seek accommodations and alliances with Indigenous people. The Manifest Destiny notion that the U.S. was foreordained to conquer the continent was an idea that only gained currency in the early 20th century.”
Isenberg’s diverse journey through his scholarship is represented in his numerous authored, co-authored, edited and co-edited books, journal publications and book chapters on American history and American environment. Some of these titles include “The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920,” “Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life,” “The California Gold Rush: A Brief History with Documents” and the forthcoming “The Age of the Borderlands: Indians and Slaves on North American Frontiers, 1790-1850.”
Student mentorship is at the forefront of Isenberg’s teaching history. In 2001, Princeton University recognized his instructional work with its President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Organization of American Historians appointed him as a distinguished lecturer from 2010 to 2013. He has mentored 18 graduate students through their dissertations. These advisees now hold positions at Southern Methodist University, Wellesley College, Marshall University, Texas Christian University, Pomona College, University of St. Thomas, University of Pittsburgh and St. Mary University, among other institutions.
Before joining the KU faculty, Isenberg taught at the University of Puget Sound, Brown University, Princeton University and Temple University.
Isenberg has held fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Foundation.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and his master’s and doctorate in history from Northwestern University, where he was mentored by one of the founders of the field of environmental history, Arthur McEvoy.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Author creates fantastic fiction grounded in reality
LAWRENCE — At some level, you have to write what you know, and Bogi Takács Perelmutter does that in their new collection of fantastical stories.
Some, for instance, are inspired by the academic, scientific milieu in which the author moves as assistant teaching professor in the University of Kansas departments of Slavic, German & Eurasian Studies and Jewish Studies. But “Power to Yield and Other Stories” (Broken Eye Books, 2024) is hardly just for nonbinary, neurodivergent Jewish immigrants from Hungary.
Rather, the author aspires to capture something universal about the human condition in extremis – whether that’s the Kafkaesque tale of a woman turned into a potted plant or a sadomasochistic, futuristic allegory about the sacrifices required to maintain life in a hostile environment.
Allusions to, for example, the yearlong traditional Jewish mourning ritual or a specific neighborhood in Budapest just add color of a particularly grounded sort within some pretty fantastical settings, Takács said.
“I sometimes get reader comments like, ‘I’m not Jewish, but was I supposed to relate to this?’ Of course, if you relate to this, that’s not a problem. But I also get people who say, ‘I didn’t necessarily understand everything, but I went and looked it up,’ which I think is also great. … I’m not going to police how much background knowledge is required. God forbid! I understand that readers come to the story with really different backgrounds,” Takács said.
“I really liked what Malka Older said on Twitter a few years ago: ‘I write for the people whose names are underlined in Word.’ I think that’s very relatable. When I write, the readers I have in mind are those who have some experience of being on the margins or being in the minority in some way. But it can be any minority or any type of situation,” Takács said.
There is pride, Takács said, in being recognized as a voice for such a population. For instance, they recently won the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Jewish Gender Studies Research Award for their work on gender nonconformity in Hungarian Jewish woman writer Zsuzsa Kántor’s oeuvre. They have won Hugo and Lambda awards in the categories of fan writing (for their book reviews) and transgender fiction, respectively, and were a finalist for Ignyte and Locus awards. A book they edited, “Rosalind’s Siblings: Fiction and Poetry Celebrating Scientists of Marginalized Genders,” is on the long list for 2024’s British Science Fiction Awards and the Locus Award in the category of Best Collection.
“I just had somebody tell me specifically about the intersex stories that are in the new book,” Takács said, “and as an intersex person, I was just super happy that somebody is seeing and noticing and realizing that. An intersex book club is going to be reading the book, so I’m excited about that, too.”
Takács earned their doctorate in Speech-Language Pathology from KU in 2022. They said some of their story ideas spring directly from scientific papers they’ve read.
“There was one in my previous collection, ‘The Trans Space Octopus Congregation,’ that especially had a lot of people say, ‘Oh, this is like a fantasy story set in the far future.’ And it was actually a science fiction story, inspired by very specific research papers,” Takács said. “I wanted to cite the research papers at the end of the original publication, but the editor was like, ‘We don’t do that, no.’ … That was also specifically about artificial intelligence and about adversarial inputs, where you give some kind of input to an AI system that wouldn’t throw off a typical human at all, but it’s very confusing to the AI system. And I feel like nowadays, there’s more discussion about this.”
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The official university Twitter account has changed to @UnivOfKansas.
Refollow @KUNews for KU News Service stories, discoveries and experts.
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Contact: Emily Fisher, Kansas Public Radio, 785-864-0190, [email protected], @kprnews
KJHK, KPR to celebrate local music, film, radio during Jazz in the Evening
LAWRENCE – KJHK, the University of Kansas’ student-run radio station, and Kansas Public Radio, northeast Kansas’ source for National Public Radio and other local programming, invite listeners to an evening celebrating jazz.
Join the staff of both stations at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 10 at the Kansas Union for music, a film screening and refreshments.
“Jazz in the Evening” will feature a variety of performers celebrating the genre of jazz, with a special highlight on local musician America Patton. Patton and his jazz group are the featured musicians of the evening, with an opening act composed of KU School of Music jazz students.
Patton is also the subject of a local documentary film, directed by Backer Hamada and Brandon Luck, which shines a light on Patton’s charitable work done in the redlined Kansas City community of Quindaro and his efforts to celebrate the area through music. The 13-minute film will premiere following Patton’s performance and will conclude with a Q&A moderated by KPR’s Kaye McIntyre.
This event is free and open to the public, and guests are welcome to come and go as they please throughout the evening’s activities.
Green Lady Lounge, Ken and Sallie Goertz, the Kansas Union and KU Dining are the event sponsors.
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