Global
Crossing the Sahara Desert from the 8th to the 16th centuries, caravans with hundreds of camels carried gold, textiles, jewelry and other goods across the desert. To share this little-known story, the Block Museum of Art has put together Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time — a first-of-its-kind show that celebrates West Africa’s historic and under-recognized global significance and showcases the objects and ideas that were exchanged at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Five floors up from the cacophony that is Chicago’s West Loop, inside a stone-still hearing room at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Chicago Immigration Court, where the ratcheted-up nerves and quickened breaths make for the sort of place you do not want to be, Uzoamaka Emeka Nzelibe ’96 is there to get the job done.
For nearly five decades, fog artist Fujiko Nakaya ’57 has presented her ethereal, shape-shifting installations of pure water vapor in an effort to connect humans to nature.
Since returning home to China seven years ago, Bozhong Xue has revitalized the NU Club of Beijing, interviewed prospective students as a member of the Alumni Admission Council, recruited high school students to volunteer for the Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra concert last spring and supported international student scholarships at the Bienen School of Music. For his efforts, Xue received the inaugural Northwestern Alumni Association President’s Award in September.
Three Northwestern professors break down the most important factors in the rise of China’s global influence and the implications for the United States and its standing in the world.
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.
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.
In summer 2005, between his freshman and sophomore years at Northwestern, Alexander Pancoe ’08 decided he could no longer tough it out after months of suffering from excruciating headaches. He went to Children’s Memorial Hospital (now the Ann & Robert H.
Each year, international travelers return stateside with an average of $34.82 in unused foreign cash — that is, if they haven’t already spent it on useless airport trinkets. The total discarded foreign currency in the United States amounts to an astounding $1.56 billion, with $96 million passing through the city of Chicago alone. What if someone collected all that money and put it to good use?
Northwestern University alumna Maura Sullivan reflects on her 2004 visit to Iwo Jima, site of one of World War II’s bloodiest battles, for a U.S. Marine Corps re-enlistment ceremony atop Mount Suribachi, a tour of the east side of the island and a ceremony with both U.S.
