In Review

An influential comic opera was given a full performance with its original score for the first time since the 18th century in a production organized this fall by the Department of English and colleagues from other universities.

Love in a Village, a 1762 English comic opera credited with introducing theatergoers to many conventions of modern musicals, was center stage as part of the annual meeting of the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies, hosted by Rochester.

In its day, Love in a Village, a collaboration between playwright Isaac Bickerstaff and composer Thomas Arne, was performed more often than Shakespeare’s tragedies and held the interest of audiences for longer than any of its comedy rivals from the period. Performed in cities around the globe until the mid-19th century, Love in a Village fell off the cultural map as audiences’ taste for the genre waned.

Katherine Mannheimer, an associate professor of English who specializes in 18th-century British literature, helped lead the production, which was also part of the University’s Humanities Projects for the 2018–19 year.

Rochester: National Center of Excellence for Parkinson’s Research

The University has been selected as a Morris K. Udall Center of Excellence in Parkinson’s Disease Research by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The $9.2 million award is designed to bring together researchers from industry and multiple academic institutions to develop digital tools to better understand the disease, engage broad populations in research, and accelerate the development of new treatments for Parkinson’s disease. Neurologist Ray Dorsey, the director of the Center for Health + Technology (CHeT) and the David M. Levy Professor in Neurology, is the principal investigator of the new center.

Taubman Reappointed as Medicine Dean

Mark Taubman, who has served as CEO of the Medical Center since 2015 and as dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry since 2010, has been reappointed as dean of the medical school.

Also the senior vice president for health sciences and CEO of UR Medicine, the University’s health care network, Taubman is the first person in the history of the Medical Center to serve as both dean and CEO.

The University’s Board of Trustees approved the reappointment during its October meeting.

New Director of Anthony Institute Named

Kristin Doughty, associate professor of anthropology, has been named director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She succeeds Nora Rubel, the Jane and Alan Batkin Professor of Jewish Studies and chair of the Department of Religion and Classics.

Doughty, who joined the faculty in 2012, has served for the past three years on the institute’s steering committee. The institute sponsors faculty research seminars, conferences, mentorship seminars, and annual public lecture series, along with offering undergraduate majors, minors, and clusters in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies in both the humanities and the social sciences.

Mt. Hope Family Center to Establish National Center

The University’s Mt. Hope Family Center, in conjunction with the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Translational Research in Children’s Mental Health, has received a multimillion-dollar grant to create a national center for child maltreatment studies, becoming one of only three academic institutional partnerships in the United States to receive the award from the National Institutes of Health.

NIH selected Rochester and Minnesota to receive an $8.39 million award over five years to support the center as a national resource for child maltreatment prevention research and training. The principal investigators are Sheree Toth, a Rochester professor of psychology and psychiatry, who is also the executive director of the Mt. Hope Family Center, and Dante Cicchetti, who was the founding director of Mt. Hope before joining Minnesota, where he is the McKnight Presidential Chair and William Harris Professor and research director of the Minnesota center.