Freund profiled in Waterbury Republican American and JWeekly, Anderson Featured in Mumbai Mirror, and More

Richard Freund, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the University’s Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, was recently profiled in two publications in advance of lectures he was scheduled to give. Freund, who was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Bible by the Bay conference in San Francisco, was featured in the Thursday, Nov. 11, edition of the Jweekly newspaper. In the interview, he talked about balancing science and religion. “The most important part of the discipline of biblical archaeology is we take the Bible seriously,” he says. “We don’t read it like a newspaper, but like an ancient serious text.” To read the JWeekly article; click here.

Freund was interviewed by the Waterbury Republican-American, for an article which was published on Friday, Nov. 12, in advance of his Thursday, Nov. 18, lecture at Fairfield University. Freund, who will be discussing his archeological excavations at the site of the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, called standing atop a site where so many people were executed a powerful experience. “I usually work in ancient archaeology, in Israel, on sites 2,500 years old. I feel much more comfortable dealing with something that’s 2,000 years removed from me personally,” he said. “Standing and working in a place where you know people died less than 70 years ago is very, very humbling, and in my case, but for the grace of God, if I had been in Europe at that time (it could have been me). That’s where it becomes personal.” To read the full article, click here.

Michael Anderson, an associate professor of computer science in the University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and his wife, Susan, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, were highlighted in an article in the Mumbai Mirror on Wednesday, Nov. 10, for their work in the emerging field of “machine ethics,” which combines artificial intelligence techniques with ethical theory, a branch of philosophy. Although their research is in its early stages, they say it’s important to think about ethics alongside developing artificial intelligence. “We should think about the things that robots could do for us if they had ethics inside them,” Michael Anderson said. “We’d allow them to do more things for us, and we’d trust them more.” To read the full article, click here.

Hartt School alum Sue Terry, a renowned jazz saxophone performer and composer, was the subject of the top story in the “Arts” section of the Hartford Courant on Sunday, Nov. 14. “Free jazz, bop, blues, ballads, classical, pop, Latin, funk and Haitian dance music are just some of the genres she’s fluent in on alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, clarinet and flutes, including wooden and clay flutes,” noted the Courant story on Terry, who was named The Hartt School’s Alumna of the Year in 2001. “Besides making her mark as a classically and jazz-trained multi-instrumentalist, Terry also has found success as a composer, arranger, lyricist, educator, bandleader, author of a series of saxophone instruction books, a sometime singer and columnist for Jazz Inside Magazine.” To read the full article, click here.

David Pritikin, a University alum who is a producer on the reality TV show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” was featured in a story about the show by Hartford Courant columnist Roger Catlin on Sunday, Nov. 14. The eight-episode show, which highlights the former governor showcasing her home state, was shot in the summer, and Pritikin and his crew have been busy shaping their footage into individual episodes, noted the Courant. “As supervising producer, the job includes everything from supervising stories to directing cameras to conducting interviews,” he said. To read the full story, click here

.