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The year Irving Rein first taught his now-famous course Persuasive Images: Rhetoric of Contemporary Culture, the nation was engrossed in Woodstock, the first moon landing and the first draft lottery for the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, Rein is still teaching the course.
“People have tried to classify personality types since Hippocrates’ time, but previous scientific literature has found that to be nonsense,” says William Revelle, professor of psychology and a self-proclaimed skeptic when it comes to personality types. So when his Northwestern colleagues Luís Amaral of the McCormick School of Engineering and Martin Gerlach, a postdoctoral fellow in Amaral’s lab, proposed a study to outline new personality types, Revelle, who specializes in personality measurement, theory and research, balked.
Five Northwestern students share their adventures from a summer abroad, including Shakespeare in marionettes, food culture in Italy, the effects of habitat degradation on Madagascar’s lemurs and assessing stress among Tsimané, an Indigenous group in lowland Bolivia.
It started off as just another hazy post-graduation idea: Two Northwestern alumni traveling in Amsterdam decided to quit their jobs in the U.S. and move to the Netherlands to start an improv group.
As they near the completion of their doctorates, Jennifer Ferrer and Arianne Rodriguez have faced their fair share of challenges. Lab work is rarely glamorous, and responding to carefully planned experiments gone awry can be difficult.
The Fourth Plinth, London: Northwestern artist Michael Rakowitz unveiled a 14-foot statue of the Lamassu, a winged Assyrian deity with the body of a bull and the head of a human, at the Fourth Plinth in London last March. Created from 9,000 steel cans of Iraqi date syrup, the piece is part of Rakowitz’s larger project The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, which uses ephemera to represent and commemorate lost Iraqi artifacts.
The typical Becoming a Man session includes a simple game: One young man tucks a small ball into his palm, while his partner has one minute to do whatever it takes to get it away from him. Often the young men start wrestling, trying to pry open their partner’s hand by force.
In the summer of 1988, Robert Kath ’88 and Paolo Mazzucato ’88 traveled to Moscow to initiate the first cinematic co-production between students in the United States and students in the Soviet Union. Envisioned as an opportunity for cultural exchange, “The Bridge Project” evolved from discussions between Kath, Mazzucato and students at Moscow’s All-Union State Institute of Cinematography.
When Mary Deeley ’89 PhD, pastoral associate at Sheil Catholic Center, read a spring 2016 Daily Northwestern story about students battling food insecurity, she was shocked. “Why are there students who are hungry on this campus, where food is seemingly everywhere?” Deeley asks.
Essi Rönkkö was exploring the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary’s resources on mummy portraits when she made a startling discovery: The seminary had in its collection a young girl mummy with an intact portrait. Rönkkö, curatorial associate for special projects at the Block Museum of Art, was researching mummy portraits, which feature a lifelike painting of the deceased person incorporated into the mummy wrappings and placed over the face.
