While the name John Gower might not ring a bell for many current readers, he was a literary titan in fourteenth-century England, with wide-ranging influence that has lasted to the present day.

This past summer, the University’s Rossell Hope Robbins Library — one of the most comprehensive libraries of medieval studies in North America — added to its collection a rare copy of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, a late-medieval collection of narrative poems about love.

“The timing could not have been more perfect,” says Anna Siebach-Larsen, director of the Rossell Hope Robbins Library, in the latest issue of Tower Talk. “Acquiring such an important item while celebrating our thirtieth anniversary carries a wonderful symbolism.”

The copy acquired by the Robbins Library is of Thomas Berthelette’s 1554 edition of the Confessio. The accessibility and quality of Berthelette’s edition resulted in a Gower renaissance in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which, in many respects, still informs contemporary views of the poet. “The Gower that is revealed in Berthelette’s edition is a truly moral, ethical, and democratic Gower who is often paired with other great late medieval poets like Chaucer and Lydgate,” observes Siebach-Larsen.

“The Berthelette Confessio is of enormous value for Gower studies and literary studies in general throughout the English Renaissance,” says Russell Peck, Emeritus John Hall Professor of English. Part of what makes the Robbins copy particularly special is the fact that it was owned by Martyn Bowes, the Lord Mayor of London who served under Mary I’s (Bloody Mary) reign, when Protestant England was “reconverted” to Roman Catholicism. “Our copy has marginal markings and underlining that reflect upon the schism in those troubled times,” Peck notes.

Alan Lupack, Emeritus Director of the Rossell Hope Robbins Library and the Koller-Collins Graduate English Center, has been instrumental in the acquisition of the Gower edition. Adding it to the Robbins collection, he says, “will contribute to the reputation of the Robbins Library as a world-class collection of medieval literature and as a major resource for the study and research of Middle English.”

Gower’s text was a source of inspiration to important Early Modern authors, including Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson. By adding the Berthelette edition to its collection, Robbins Library has further solidified the network that connects its various holdings.

The Berthelette edition of Gower’s Confessio will be housed in the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation (RBSCP). This is the first purchase made by the Robbins Library that will be housed in RBSCP, as the two departments continue to increase their collaboration and partnership.

In a globalized world, English is now commonly considered to be the global language of academic journal publishing. The global push for scholars to write and publish in English originated more than three decades ago in Europe and Asia and has accelerated and spread around the world in the past 15 years. But the shift to English has created considerable pressure on many researchers around the globe to write in a foreign language. It has also meant that knowledge produced in those countries is not distributed in local languages for the benefit of local communities.
 
These issues are playing out in similar ways across disciplines and geographical boundaries. In their new book Global Academic Publishing: Policies, Perspectives, and Pedagogies (Multilingual Matters, November 2017), co-editors Mary Jane Curry, associate professor at the Warner School, and Theresa Lillis, professor of English language and applied linguistics at The Open University, United Kingdom, argue for a thorough critique of the notion that English has become the lingua franca of academic publishing and for a better understanding of the inequity that results from having one language as the dominant language.

“There are deep-seated problems with using one language for publishing,” says Curry. “Despite the belief that English is a global language, not everyone has access to it, either for reading or writing research, and there’s a fundamental critique that it’s unfair to accept English as the dominant language for academic publishing. More than the English language itself, it’s a question of uneven research investment around the world and having control of highly prestigious journals in the United States and other English-speaking countries.”

The book explores how English ideology has become embedded in all aspects of journal publishing. Curry and Lillis emphasize the effects of this trend on the real-world practices of academics who do not always have a full linguistic repertoire in academic English and who may not feel able to express their fullest selves in the profession because of the available tools and resources.

“The current neo-liberal economic moment creates a mindset in higher education that both institutions and individual researchers should always be doing more and aiming for higher rankings, but we need more conversations about why we are doing this and why we don’t make research publications available to everyone,” Curry adds.

Read more here.

“Have you had thoughts about stopping the chemotherapy and focusing more on comfort and quality of life?” Patients who took part in honest discussions with their doctors, including questions like this one about prognosis and end-of-life care, rated their doctor-patient relationships more favorably than patients who had fewer such discussions, according to a study co-authored by the Wilmot Cancer Institute.

The results are somewhat surprising because other studies have shown the opposite — that talking about life expectancy can disrupt the doctor-patient relationship, said co-author Ronald Epstein, professor of family medicine, psychiatry, and oncology, and an expert on physician communications.

The findings were recently reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The study also suggests that to keep the relationship healthy, physicians may need to understand the patient’s hopes and emotions, apply tact and skill in sharing information, and be sensitive to timing.  High-quality communication delivers information accurately without undermining patients’ hopes for the future, the study said.

The investigation was conducted in collaboration with a team of scientists from the University of California, Davis. This study is one in a series in a Rochester-UC Davis partnership that uses consented audio recordings of real interactions between patients and doctors in western New York and in northern California. In this case, 265 patients seen by 38 oncologists agreed to participate in the research. All patients had advanced cancer, defined as either stage 4 disease or stage 3 cancers with a relatively short life expectancy.

Read the full study here. The National Cancer Institute funded the research with grants to Epstein and Rochester co-author Paul Duberstein, a professor of psychiatry, medicine, and family medicine who has a special interest in the role of anxiety in cancer care. Additional Rochester co-authors are Kevin Fiscella, professor of family medicine, and Supriya Mohile, associate professor of medicine (hematology/oncology).

Scientists at the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma Ray Observatory in Mexico have captured the first wide-angle view of high-energy photons emitted from two known pulsars close to us in the galaxy. Their observations, recently published in Science, show it is unlikely the pulsars are the cause of an unexpectedly large presence of high-energy positrons in our neighborhood of the galaxy.

Researchers had proposed several possible sources of the positrons, which are antimatter particles with the same mass as an electron but with a positive charge. They might be coming from pulsars—massive stars that have collapsed and exploded, spinning and throwing off electrons, positrons, and other matter. Or, they might be coming from something more complex and exotic: dark matter.

“Although this doesn’t prove that dark matter is the source of the excess, we have ruled out the two most obvious source candidates,” says Segev BenZvi, an assistant professor of physics and member of the HAWC collaboration. “This makes the excess an even bigger mystery.”

BenZvi has been a member of the HAWC collaboration since the observatory was constructed in 2011, at 13,500 feet above sea level on the side of the Sierra Negra volcano in Mexico. The observatory’s high elevation ensures that more cosmic radiation survives without being completely absorbed into the atmosphere. This allows the collaboration to work toward its mission of observing gamma and cosmic rays and exploring the enigma of dark matter.

If the pulsars aren’t the source—and if dark matter is—that’s an exciting development, BenZvi says.

“If these high levels of energy are instead due to dark matter particles annihilating, that’s amazing because we have huge amounts of astronomical evidence that dark matter exists, but we haven’t been able to directly measure it.”

Read more here.

The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma Ray Observatory in Mexico is composed of 300 massive tanks, each filled with more than 50,000 gallons of purified water. Photosensors at the bottom of each tank detect cascades of cosmic and gamma rays. (University of Rochester photo/Segev BenZvi)

Dan Watson, professor and chair of physics and astronomy, is part of a team of researchers developing new instrumentation for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Unlike typical observatories, SOFIA is situated on a Boeing 747SP jet airliner.

“SOFIA is NASA’s third-generation high-altitude airborne observatory,” Watson says. “The University of Rochester and airborne astronomy go way back. [Rochester] professors Judy Pipher and Bill Forrest observed on both the first and second generation airborne telescopes, and I used the second generation one for my PhD thesis.”

The jet that currently houses SOFIA is modified to carry a 2.5-meter diameter telescope. It can fly at altitudes of 39-45,000 feet, slightly higher than a typical commercial airliner, and is usually aloft for about 900 hours per year. At these altitudes, the instruments on board can see celestial objects in infrared light that typically elude ground-based observatories: most infrared wavelengths are absorbed by water vapor in the earth’s atmosphere before reaching the ground.

As part of a team led by Harvey Moseley, a senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, Watson is helping to develop HIRMES, a high-resolution, mid-infrared spectrometer that will be part of SOFIA. HIRMES’s main goal is to measure the composition, location, and motions of gas and icy solids within disks orbiting very young stars, about a million years old. At this age, the disks are actively giving birth to planets, out of these ingredients.

“HIRMES will reveal key details of these protoplanetary disks—decisively important for the planet-formation process—that haven’t previously been possible to observe, even from space,” Watson says.

See a video here.

Mina Attin, an assistant professor at the School of Nursing, who has been honored by the American Heart Association (AHA) for her work to improve the odds of survival for patients with pacemakers and implantable defibrillators who suffer cardiac arrest while hospitalized. Attin recently received the Young Investigator Award from the AHA’s Resuscitation Science Symposium for her top-scoring abstract, “Paced electrocardiogram prior to in-hospital cardiac arrest.” Read more here.

Mary Kroeger has joined the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor after receiving her PhD from Princeton University. She studies the influence of non-legislative actors in legislative bodies at the state level in the US. She is working on papers about the differential use of model legislation across legislatures and legislators, and the prevalence of group-sponsored bills in the California state legislature. Another project examines the role of agencies in statutory drafting, which challenges the assumption that bureaucratic activity occurs subsequent to the legislative process. These projects show that groups play a large role in legislative drafting and bill advancement.

Today: “Data for Good.” Lecture by Jeannette M. Wing, director of the Data Science Institute and professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. 11 a.m., 1400 Wegmans Hall.

Today: “A Complex Dissonant Veil of Sound: Influence and Independence in Ruth Crawford’s Chants for Women’s Chorus (1930).” Symposium featuring Ellie Hisama, professor of music theory and historical musicology at Columbia University. 2:30-4 p.m. Messinger Hall, 10 Gibbs Street. Free and open to the public.

Dec. 13: Jesse L. Rosenberger Faculty Work-in-Progress Seminar. Matt BaileyShea, associate professor of music theory: “‘Close / in midst of this…’: Lines, Phrases, and Syntax in Song.” Humanities Center Conference Room D. Lunch is served.

Dec. 15: Deadline to apply for a post-doctoral cancer research fellowship from Wilmot Cancer Institute. Go to the Wilmot Cancer Institute website for additional information and application. Contact Pam Iadarola at Pamela_Iadarola@URMC.Rochester.edu or 585-275-1537 with any questions.

Jan. 31: Deadline to enter the fifth annual America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent Student Competition,  in which students from across the University compete for a chance to present their regulatory science ideas at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additional information, an entry form, and instructions on how to apply are on the America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent web page. Submit entry forms to Scott Steele by January 31, 2018.

Feb. 1: Deadline to submit initial abstracts for Public Health Science pilot projects to stimulate new collaborations with PHS faculty. Proposals are being solicited that support collaborative relationships between investigators who do not have a recent history (past 3 years) of joint funding or who want to expand their current collaborative efforts in new directions and for whom the pilot project would be catalytic in their effort to obtain extramural funding. More information can be found at the PHS website.

Feb. 8: “Deserts, Dust, and Iron Fertilization of the North Pacific Ocean: Cause or Consequence of Global Cooling?” Presented by Carmala Garzione, Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., Feldman Ballroom, Frederick Douglass Commons. Click here to register.

March 1: “Doing Better Next Time: Policy Lessons from the Great Recession and Not-So-Great Recovery.” Presented by Narayana Kocherlakota, Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., location TBD. Click here to register.

April 12: “The American Health Paradox: What’s Missing?” Presented by Nancy Bennett, professor of medicine and public health sciences, director of the Center for Community Health, and co-director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., location TBD. Click here to register.