The Kalamazoo College Singers will present the Michigan premiere of Hymnody of Earth, a song cycle composed by musician and choral director Malcolm Dalglish, at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 20, at K’s Stetson Chapel, 1200 Academy St.
The composer himself will play the virtuosic hammered dulcimer and will be joined by International Percussion Ensemble Director Carolyn Koebel on percussion. Associate Professor of Music Chris Ludwa will be conducting the 45-voice college choir.
This 70-minute program features 19 songs, many of which are inspired by eco-poet Wendell Berry. This is the fourth time Ludwa has directed the piece, having previously led three performances in Indiana. He notes that the work is an all-time favorite among participating singers and audiences.
Hymnody features the hammered dulcimer, an ancient instrument, often considered an ancestor of the piano, that has been popular in various cultures, including in the Middle East and Europe. Dalglish and Koebel are performing the piece with several other choirs in the Midwest this spring.
While a music education student at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Dalglish designed and built more than 60 hammer dulcimers. He was a founding member of the popular folk trio Metamora and has nine albums, including solo offerings on the Windham Hill label. The American Boychoir, the St. Olaf Choir, the Indianapolis Children’s Choir and others have commissioned his folk-inspired music. In 1997, he formed the Oolites, an engaging young group of folk singers. Hymnody of Earth was their second CD; it is a spiritual celebration of nature that has been performed by choirs around the world.
The Kalamazoo College Singers are a mixed soprano, alto, tenor and bass choir.
Composer Malcolm Dalglish
Associate Professor of Music Chris Ludwa serves as the director of the Kalamazoo College Singers.
International Percussion Director Carolyn Koebel
“Dalglish’s songs are instantly accessible to anyone, yet somehow speak to the deepest part of our being on a soul level,” Ludwa said. “I’ve encountered few composers that can move both the skeptic and the most devout in the same way. His music is a balm to the weary human as he knits ancient musical traditions, texts that magically describe the magnificence of nature, and melodic and harmonic material that sends shivers up the spine and brings tears to the eyes.”
Tickets will be available at the door for a suggested donation of $15. For more information, contact Ludwa at 231-225-8877 or cludwa@kzoo.edu.
Something big, green and hungry is taking root at Kalamazoo College this week with Mo Silcott ’27 and Lee Zwart ’27 bringing it to life. The two will provide the puppetry behind the Audrey II, a giant plant with a taste for trouble, in the dark musical comedy Little Shop of Horrors, presented by the Festival Playhouse May 15–18.
In the play, Seymour—a wallflower of an assistant at Mr. Mushnik’s plant shop—desires Audrey, a beautiful co-worker who dates a sadistic dentist. After a sudden solar eclipse, Seymour finds a mysterious plant that looks like a Venus fly trap and names it the Audrey II.
Despite Seymour’s best efforts, Audrey II sickens until Seymour pricks his finger on a thorn, causing the plant to hungrily open its pod. Business begins to blossom for the shop as the bloodthirsty Audrey II grows like a weed. The situation, however, seeds problems, forcing Seymour to nip them in the bud. Max Goldner ’27 portrays Seymour, James Hauke ’26 plays Mr. Mushnik, Sophia Merchant ’25 performs as Audrey, and Drew Oss ’28 presents Orin the Dentist.
Sophia Merchant ’25 portrays Audrey and Max Goldner ’27 plays Seymour in “Little Shop of Horrors Thursday–Sunday at the Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College. Audrey II puppet provided by Cameron McEachern.
“Little Shop has always been one of my favorite shows, and I think the plot speaks to a lot of Americans’ current situation, whether that be in the same sense as Seymour or not,” Silcott said. “We might want to get out of a bad spot, to be somewhere that isn’t the harsh reality we find ourselves in during our day-to-day life. Little Shop gives the audience a chance to laugh at that a little bit and digest those realities in a show that manages to take itself seriously while also finding places for laughter.”
Bringing the botanical behemoth to life is no small feat, but Silcott and Zwart are up for the challenge. The Festival Playhouse is renting the puppets with Silcott performing as the smaller Audrey II in the first act and Zwart performing as the full-grown beast in the second act.
“One of the biggest challenges of performing the role of Audrey II is having to sit still on stage for about 25 minutes,” Silcott said. “Most of my acting consists of me sitting idly, and I didn’t realize how hard it is to actually just sit in one position with a full costume on, one that is stuffed with extremely warm materials. It’s very difficult to not move in a puppet that is a lot of fun to operate.”
Zwart potentially faces an even bigger challenge, wearing a harness that allows him to operate an upper and a lower pod of the Audrey II plant: He faces a full-body workout while synching his movements with an offstage voice.
“It’s physically taxing,” Zwart said. “I have to maneuver all of myself around to move this puppet and it’s pretty heavy and hot.”
After weeks of such exertion, Zwart is looking forward to opening night.
“It’s always fun to practice a play just running through it, but hearing the audience laughing and clapping is really very rewarding, especially for a play that’s as over the top as Little Shop.”
The student-led production promises big vocals, bold costumes and plenty of leafy-green surprises, providing the cast and crew with ambitious challenges. The musical will be staged at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 15–Saturday, May 17, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, May 18, in the Festival Playhouse Theatre at 129 Thompson St. Thursday’s show will include a talkback with the cast after the performance. Tickets are available online or by calling the Festival Playhouse at 269.337.7333.
“I’m really looking forward to the audience’s reaction to the puppets,” Silcott said. “I can’t see too much, so all of my cues and understanding of how my performance is going, is through sound. The best part of a production like this is seeing the audience’s initial reaction to each of the puppets, and that gives me a lot of motivation to perform and to perform well. Working with this cast has been a truly incredible experience and I’m especially excited to perform with them in the coming week.”
Get ready: Kalamazoo College is holding its Day of Gracious Giving on Wednesday, May 7, 2025. The annual giving day is the college’s largest fundraising day of the year, and the entire K community is invited to come together to provide vital support for the student experience.
Contributions of all sizes support scholarships and financial aid, faculty resources and K’s highest priorities, empowering K students to explore the world in new and exciting ways and creating life-changing experiences. Last year’s Day of Gracious Giving raised more than $564,000 from 1,314 donors, not including the anonymous matching pool.
This year’s theme celebrates the Kalamazoo College journey—the unexpected discoveries, remarkable achievements and lifelong connections that come with being a K student.
The Day of Gracious Giving is inspired by another beloved K tradition, the Day of Gracious Living. That event falls on a date chosen by student representatives, a surprise that’s revealed when the campus-wide email goes out and the chapel bells begin to ring, signaling to all students: classes are canceled, gather up your friends and have an amazing day!
“The Day of Gracious Giving continues to signify the traditional spirit of the Day of Gracious Living, one of care, appreciation and gratitude for this amazing community,” said Laurel Palmer, director of the Kalamazoo College Fund.
Palmer encourages everyone to help illuminate paths for K students, igniting the spark of discovery—blazing trails for today’s explorers and tomorrow’s innovators with the warmth of your generosity. This day is about participation, and your engagement makes gifts and students go places!
On May 7, follow K on social media and check for updates in your email to start your adventure in giving!
Contributions of all sizes on the Day of Gracious Giving will help provide Kalamazoo College with funds for scholarships and financial aid, faculty resources and life-changing experiences. Make plans to participate and donate on Wednesday, May 7.
“Making a gift—of any size—on the Day of Gracious Giving helps launch new opportunities for students, creating ways of impact that inspire countless journeys at home and abroad,” Palmer said.
Kalamazoo College will mark the relaunch of its African studies concentration in May with Africa Month 2025, a vibrant celebration organized by Director of African Studies Dominique Somda and Assistant Professor of French Manfa Sanogo.
Africa Month will invite thoughtful and meaningful engagement with Africa and Afro-descendants worldwide thanks in part to support from a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Inclusive Excellence grant and the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. They will welcome visionary scholars, artists, curators and thinkers whose work challenges certitudes and expands horizons.
The events, all at the Arcus Center at 201 Monroe St. in Kalamazoo, include:
Africa Month 2025 will celebrate the relaunch of Kalamazoo College’s African studies concentration with events that welcome visionary scholars, artists, curators and thinkers whose work challenges certitudes and expands horizons.
Divine Fuh of the University of Cape Town in an opening lecture titled “Decolonizing Knowledges and Building Transformative Partnerships” on Friday, May 9, at 4:15 p.m.
The opening of an art exhibit titled Becoming of the Day: Refusing the Timeline, featuring artist Anthony Obayomi of the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign on Friday, May 9, at 6 p.m.
A faculty and staff workshop titled “Disobedient Pedagogies in Liberal Arts Education” on Saturday, May 10, at 9 a.m.
A roundtable discussion titled “Rethinking the Ethics of Knowledge with the Global South” featuring speakers Herimampita Rarivomanantsoa of Université d’Antananarivo, Madagascar, and Cyndy Garcia Weyandt of Kalamazoo College on Saturday, May 10, at 2 p.m.
A public lecture titled “African Disobedient Feminism: Madness as an Approach to Emancipation” with writer Ken Bugul of Senegal on Saturday, May 10, at 5:30 p.m.
A conversation with artist and art professor Chido Johnson titled “Sadza Space: The Zimbabwe Cultural Centre in Detroit” on Sunday, May 11, at 11 a.m.
A luncheon and Haitian Flag Day lecture titled “Untimely Periodicals: Haiti and the Archives of Caribbean Thought” with speakers Medhi Chalmers and Carine Schermann of Florida State University on Sunday, May 11, at noon.
Somda said she is immensely grateful for an opportunity to welcome colleagues, guests and students to discussions about Africa. She added that the relaunched African studies concentration will offer students a wealth of enriching opportunities through an expanded curriculum and fresh perspective.
“Our new program deliberately extends beyond continental boundaries to embrace Africa’s full geographic and intellectual reach—including its edges, islands and diasporic extensions across the globe,” Somda said. “Beginning next fall, students can enroll in our new core course, Global Africa, which explores these interconnections. In winter term, our course Thinking Africa will centralize the continent’s deep historical connections with the world and its foundational role in critical intellectual traditions. Beyond coursework, the African studies program is planning year-round engagement through curated events, including film screenings, scholarly talks and unique forums for intellectual exchange. These dynamic encounters will create spaces for students to engage directly with diverse perspectives and cutting-edge scholarship. By taking this more expansive approach to African Studies, students will develop a sophisticated understanding of Africa’s global significance and participate in reimagining how we study, understand, and engage with Africa and its diasporas in the contemporary world.”
Sanogo, as a postcolonial scholar and language instructor, anticipates exciting opportunities for students inside and outside the classroom.
“By centering the diaspora, or rather by decentering the continent, the program deconstructs hierarchies of power and knowledge and invites students to reimagine the world from the perspectives of Africa and its diaspora while thinking critically about the global flow of knowledge, power and culture,” Sanogo said.
Divine Fuh
Herimampita Rarivomanantsoa
Ken Bugul
Mehdi Chalmers
Anthony Obayomi
Cyndy Garcia Weyandt
Chido Johnson
Carine Schermann
“This includes access to courses rooted in Black intellectual traditions; reevaluating what constitutes African languages, extending that privilege to French and Spanish, for example; and learning African languages, exploring study abroad programs in Black-majority regions such as Dakar and Nairobi.”
William Weber Chair of Social Science Amy Elman receives the 2025 Lux Esto Award from President Jorge G. Gonzalez during Founders Day events at Stetson Chapel on Friday, April 25.
Varney Assistant Professor of Chemistry Daniela Arias-Rotondo receives the Outstanding First-Year Advocate Award from President Gonzalez at Founders Day.
Dow Associate professor of Computer Science Sandino Vargas-Perez receives the Outstanding Advisor Award from President Gonzalez at Founders Day
Amy Elman, the William Weber Chair of Social Science, is this year’s recipient of the Lux Esto Award of Excellence as announced today during the College’s Founders Day celebration, marking K’s 192nd year.
The award recognizes an employee who has served the institution for at least 26 years and has contributed significantly to the campus. The recipient—chosen by a committee with student, faculty and staff representatives—is an employee who exemplifies the spirit of K through selfless dedication and goodwill.
At K, Elman has taught a variety of courses within the political science, women’s studies and Jewish studies departments. During her tenure, she has also been a visiting professor at Haifa University in Israel, Harvard University, SUNY Potsdam, Middlebury College, Uppsala University in Sweden and New York University.
Elman has received two Fulbright grants, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a grant from the Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Hebrew University. She has written three books: The European Union, Antisemitism and the Politics of Denial (2014); Sexual Equality in an Integrated Europe (2007); and Sexual Subordination and State Intervention: Comparing Sweden and the United States (1996). She also edited Sexual Politics and the European Union: The New Feminist Challenge (1996). In the 1997–98 academic year, she was awarded K’s Florence J. Lucasse Fellowship for outstanding scholarship.
In accordance with Founders Day traditions, two other employees received community awards. Dow Associate Professor of Computer Science Sandino Vargas–Pérez was given the Outstanding Advisor Award and Varney Assistant Professor of Chemistry Daniela Arias-Rotondo received the First-Year Advocate Award.
Before arriving at K, Vargas-Perez worked as an adjunct instructor at Western Michigan University, where he earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in computer science. He also holds a bachelor’s degree from Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic.
Vargas-Perez has taught courses at K in data structures, algorithms, parallel computing, computing for environmental science, object-oriented programming, and programming in Java and web development. His research interests include high-performance computing, parallel and distributed algorithms, computational genomics, and data structures and compression.
Jazz quartet Liam McElroy (piano), Laura DeVilbiss (flute), Garrick Hohm (string bass) and Adam Cornier-Bridgeforth (drums) performed at the Founders Day celebration.
President’s Student Ambassadors Ava Williams ’26 and Madeline Hollander ’26 introduced President Gonzalez at the 192nd Founders Day celebration.
President Gonzalez recognized the students who served this year as President’s Student Ambassadors and shared the names of 13 more who will serve beginning this fall.
Nominators said Vargas–Pérez has consistently gone above and beyond his responsibilities as a professor to promote learning while finding opportunities for his advisees.
Arias-Rotondo has earned significant funding in support of her research and her commitment to engaging students in hands-on experiences in her lab. A $250,000 grant in 2023 from the National Science Foundation’s Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS) provided funding for student researchers, typically eight to 10 per term. In 2024, she received a $50,000 American Chemical Society (ACS) Petroleum Research Fund grant, which will support her and her students’ upcoming research regarding petroleum byproducts. H.
Arias-Rotondo teaches Introductory Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Molecular Structure and Reactivity, and commonly takes students to ACS conferences. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Nominators said she has been a dependable, inspirational and fierce advocate for students.
Gonzalez also recognized the students who served as President’s Student Ambassadors in the 2024–25 academic year and introduced those who will serve the College beginning this fall in 2025–26. As student leaders, President’s Student Ambassadors serve as an extension of the president’s hospitality at events and gatherings, welcoming alumni and guests of the College with a spirit of inclusion. About 15 students serve as ambassadors each academic year. The students selected show strong communication skills; demonstrate leadership through academic life, student life or community service; and maintain a minimum grade-point average.
The 2024-25 ambassadors have been:
Jaylen Bowles-Swain ’26
Christopher Cayton ’25
Kyle Cooper ’25
Blake Filkins ’26
James Hauke ’26
Maya Hester ’25
Madeline Hollander ’25
Gavin Houtkooper ’25
Katie Kraemer ’25
Isabelle Mason ’27
Alex Nam ’25
Tyrus Parnell, Jr. ’25
Isabella Pellegrom ’25
Addison Peter ’25
Maxwell Rhames ’25
Emiliano Alvarado Rescala ’27
Amelie Sack ’27
Dean Turpin ’25
Ava Williams ’25
The 2025-26 ambassadors succeeding this year’s seniors will be:
A local activist known for constructing the first legally built tiny house in the county will be a keynote speaker for the 2025 Sustainability Senior Integrated Project (SIP) Symposium at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 23, at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership.
Ben Brown will address the symposium in a lecture titled Rumors of Hope. A writer and international speaker, he will discuss his years of public engagement through social justice movements, urban farming, food sovereignty, energy sovereignty and economics.
Brown, who grew up on a family farm in Southwest Michigan, is also an expert in the affordable-housing movement and is a founding member of the Kalamazoo Electric Vehicle Association (KEVA). He continues to be involved in environmental and conservation work and is credited with helping to preserve several cultural resources.
In 2017, Brown provided WMUK Radio with a video tour around his tiny house, which measures less than 270 square feet. Kalamazoo Valley Habitat for Humanity assisted in the house’s construction.
The SIP Symposium will feature student presentations representing a variety of academic departments at K and include research on topics such as food access, marine eco-systems, sustainability transitions for public transportation in Kalamazoo, sheep grazing and soil health, carbon sequestration and more. K recently featured one of the SIPs, a project on coral reefs in the Philippines by Brooke Dolhay ’25, on its website.
Writer and international speaker Ben Brown will discuss his years of public engagement through social justice movements, urban farming, food sovereignty, energy sovereignty and economics at the 2025 Sustainability SIP Symposium at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership.
If you’ve ever played the game Spot it!, then you know it’s both disarmingly simple and endlessly replayable. Each card features eight symbols, and between any two cards in the game deck, there is always one—and only one—matching symbol. Several variations change the mechanics, but the goal always remains the same: Be the fastest player to spot and name the matches.
What is the secret to the game? How does it work? Well—it may come down to math.
On April 29, at 7 p.m. in Dewing Hall Room 103, Sarah Koch will deliver a talk titled “Spotting the Math in Spot it!,” this year’s installment of the George Kitchen Memorial Lecture at Kalamazoo College. The lectureship provides an opportunity for mathematicians to speak about their work in a way that is accessible to high school students and math educators.
“We’ll play Spot it! and explore ways to answer various questions about the game,” promises the description for the talk. “We will discover that there is a remarkable amount of mathematics underlying this game, including a tantalizing mathematical mystery.”
Koch, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, researches complex dynamical systems, working to understand the infinitely complicated structure of beautiful fractals that emerge. She holds two Ph.D.s in mathematics, one from the Université de Provence in Marseille, and one from Cornell University. She is the director of the Math Corps at U(M), a summer camp for middle schoolers and high school mentors from Ypsilanti and Detroit, and the organizer of the Math Mondays in Ypsi Program, which has temporarily been replaced with Super Saturdays. In addition to doing math, she enjoys teaching, working with students and making kindness chains.
Stephen Oloo, associate professor of mathematics at Kalamazoo College, said Koch was suggested as a speaker by a visiting professor who had graduated from U of M.
“I did a bit of research and could see she loves doing this kind of talk,” Oloo said. “We don’t choose just any mathematician. Our speakers are always active research mathematicians, and they like to give math talks aimed at an early high school sort of student. They like outreach. They tend to have a few talks prepared that are pitched at just the right level.”
Sarah Koch, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, researches complex dynamical systems and will deliver the 2025 Kitchen Lecture through a game with math ties titled Spot It!
Spotting the Math in Spot It!
What: The 2025 George Kitchen Memorial Lecture at Kalamazoo College, given by Sarah Koch, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor
Oloo said the math department at K communicates the intent and audience of the lectures to the speaker, who chooses his or her own topic.
“I know this talk is going to be good,” Oloo said. “It strikes me as it will probably have a lot of combinatorics, what you can think of as advanced counting, which tends to have interesting results while being very accessible. From the nature of the game, there are all kinds of interesting questions you could ask. When you deal out a hand of Spot it! cards, how many possible different combinations are there? How big does the deck have to be? If you dealt two or three or four cards, what would they have in common and different? I’m sure she’ll have some surprising things for us. Probably she’ll talk about strategy. There are probably ways to approach the game that you could figure out by studying the math.”
The lecture’s target audience of high school students honors George Kitchen, who was a local mathematician and teacher and firmly believed that a love for mathematics and its applications could be cultivated in every student. In the 1980s, Kitchen helped start a regular gathering at K of college and high school math teachers called Calculus Connection, along with John Fink, Kalamazoo College professor emeritus of mathematics.
“George was a wonderful teacher, and he was really demanding, but he would always support his students in what he demanded of them,” Fink said.
When Kitchen died, members of Calculus Connection decided to fund an endowment to support a lecture series to honor Kitchen’s memory. The George Kitchen Memorial Lecture at Kalamazoo College was founded in 1999 and has taken place every spring since, excepting a hiatus from 2020-2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Obviously we think math is important, and math and science knowledge, education, literacy, are good things,” Oloo said. “This has been a good way to get students in the area excited about math, to show them that math is not just this dull thing.”
The talks also build local connections and help improve K’s visibility with area high schoolers. A whole community has developed over the years, with the audience often including not only math teachers and high school students and their parents, but also former students of George Kitchen as well as parents of long-grown children who first experienced the lectures when their children were in high school and continue to attend.
“I’ve seen how popular these can be, the surprising number of people intrigued by mathematical ideas,” Oloo said. “My hopes are good attendance, and that people would leave feeling like they’ve learned something—both that it was fun, and that they are now a little bit more knowledgeable.”
For example, the 2024 speaker brought a statistics and probability lens to, among other things, conspiracy theories such as the Lincoln–Kennedy coincidences urban legend that points out a large number of similarities between the two presidents, including the fact that their assassins were both known by three names composed of 15 letters.
“He was diving into the numbers, and things you encounter that seem almost spooky, but in this talk, you realize, ‘Oh, it’s not that weird.’ It’s just a function of doing the math, how many people we have on the planet,” Oloo said. “It was a great lecture where people in the audience who knew probability have thought about these things and know how the numbers work, while for many of us, it’s new, and you could learn something that actually alters how you view the world. I’m not a big statistics guy, and I left that talk armed with this new piece of knowledge. When I encounter people claiming, ‘Oh, this is a really spooky coincidence,’ now I can say, ‘No, it’s just the numbers. It’s not that weird.’”
An author and scholar of Islam in South Asia will deliver the 2025 Thompson Lecture, sponsored by Kalamazoo College’s religion department, at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, April 17, in the Olmsted Room.
Ayesha Irani is an associate professor of Asian studies at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She specializes in Islam in South Asia, the literature and history of Bengal and Bangladesh, Sufism, Islamic art, translation studies and Middle Bangla codicology.
Irani’s lecture, titled “The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam,” will draw from her book of the same name and examine the Nabivamsa of Saiyad Sultan, the first Bangla language biography of the Prophet Muhammad, revealing the power of vernacular transition in the Islamization of Bengal.
The Paul Lamont Thompson Lecture, named for the K president who served from 1938–49, brings in speakers who enrich the ethical understanding of the College’s position in society. The lecture was established by a gift from Thompson’s sons and daughters-in-law to recognize the crucial role he played in guiding the College through the Depression and World War II.
Author and scholar of Islam Ayesha Irani will deliver the 2025 Thompson Lecture at Kalamazoo College.
Starting today, Kalamazoo College will be one of about 100 educational institutions taking part in global efforts to spur international conversations about the climate crisis through Climate Education Week.
Many K faculty will discuss climate issues in their classes regardless of whether the environment is a regular theme in their disciplines. In addition, several events will be open to students, faculty, staff and anyone interested in climate action, no matter their fields of study. The events include:
A Climate Connection Series conversation with the Climate Action Plan (CAP) Committee at 11 a.m. Wednesday in Dewing Commons. CAP will address its learning goal, which strives to help students study issues related to climate change and strengthen K graduates’ climate literacy.
A group trip to the Lillian Anderson Arboretum. Meet at Red Square at 4 p.m. Wednesday to take a bus to the arboretum and explore the trails. Participants can explore on their own or with students who work with the Environmental Stewardship Center.
A Climate Anxiety Café at 6 p.m. Thursday in the Bissell Theatre. Discuss climate anxiety with students and become agents of meaningful change. Discover how to channel anxiety into positive action and contribute to a more sustainable future.
Kalamazoo College will observe Climate Education Week with classroom conversations and activities on campus.
Environmental Stewardship will also collect EPS foam (Styrofoam) for recycling at the beginning of each Community Reflection this term. That includes from 10:30–11:30 a.m. this Friday at Stetson Chapel. Collections will be transported to City of Kalamazoo EPS foam recycling events.
Your voice and desire for action can help inspire others to pursue climate action, too. By encouraging faculty, staff and academic departments to participate, you’re helping the College fulfill its Climate Action Plan while showing that K wants its curriculum to be climate-conscious.
Update: The in-person lecture has been canceled, but the livestream will still be available.
Scott Aalgaard, an associate professor of East Asian studies at Wesleyan University, will discuss folk and protest music through the lens of Japanese performers such as Takada Wataru and Kagawa Ryō in this year’s Kafu Lecture at Kalamazoo College.
Aalgaard will present “Folk Music Revolutionaries: Protest Music in Modern Japan” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 10, in Room 103 of Dewing Hall, 1219 Academy St. A livestream will be available.
The discussion will challenge attendees to step away from thinking about American musical storytellers in the 1960s when they think of protest music to consider what it involves elsewhere. The talk will explore how Japanese folk singers performed amid Japan’s political circumstances in the turbulent 1960s and developed musical projects that challenged limited notions of what “protest” is or can be in the first place.
Aalgaard works on cultural production in modern and contemporary Japan with particular emphases on popular music and literature. His work addresses geopolitics, political economy, regional and social histories, nationalism, fascism and disparate modes of protest and critique, among other topics. His first book, titled Homesick Blues: Politics, Protest and Musical Storytelling in Modern Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023), explores the interplay between music and everyday life and how music is used by artists, fans and others to imagine and re-imagine social, political and cultural life in modern Japan. It is oriented toward understanding the ways in which artists, authors and individual social actors use music to understand the world and envision different possibilities for living in it.
The Kafu Lecture was established in 1982 by an anonymous donor in honor of Nagai Kafu, an acclaimed 20th century Japanese writer. Kafu studied at Kalamazoo College during the 1904-05 academic year. The free, public event is co-sponsored by Kalamazoo College and the departments of East Asian Studies and Music at K. For more information, contact Professor of Japanese Noriko Sugimori at sugimori@kzoo.edu.
Kafu Lecture speaker Scott Aalgaard is an associate professor of East Asian studies at Wesleyan University.
