The art of “painting” with light
Trevor Norton’s lighting designs have taken the stage at the Shakespeare Center Los Angeles, San Diego Repertory Theatre and South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.
Over the past two years, Trevor Norton’s lighting designs have impressed audiences in many of the major playhouses across Southern California. One of his impressive performances incorporated hundreds of lighting instruments designed to manipulate the intensity, angle, color, contrast, texture and movement of the light, eventually “painting” with light. Recent productions have included “Charlotte’s Web” at South Coast Repertory Theatre, which Norton, the director of production for Redlands’ theatre arts department, co-designed with his University of Redlands colleague Nephelie Andonyadis. “Not only was it a beautiful design, but it was a great collaboration within the University spilling out into the professional world,” he said.
Higher education through the lens of popular culture
Pauline Reynolds explores the ways in which pop culture and media represent higher education.
In her new book, Representing ‘U’: Popular Culture, Media, and Higher Education, School of Education Associate Professor Pauline Reynolds takes a close look at a topic rarely discussed in academia. According to Barbara Tobolowsky of the University of Texas at Arlington, who is working with Reynolds on a different book project, Representing U argues that “artifacts of popular culture are pedagogic texts capable of (mis)educating viewers and consumers regarding the purpose, values and people of higher education.” It’s an important topic, she said, because “professors, administrators and students negotiate the influence of pop culture and media every day, from the trustee boardroom to classroom to the residential hall. Many people randomly blame pop culture and media for influencing values towards and behaviors within higher education, but few people have actually examined specifically how popular culture and media represent higher education and the ways in which this changes (or not) over time.”
Spatial discoveries in early California missions
James Sandos teaches the history of California, and a recent article explores the tribal disruption of “Indians caught in the snare of the mission process.”
In 2012, James Sandos received a KECK Foundation LENS (LEarNing Spatially) Fellowship to promote spatial analysis into teaching and research. Sandos used it to incorporate information from California missions into a mapping project. “The resultant life stories of individual Indians caught in the snare of the mission process, combined with our ability to locate the villages of their origin on a map, allowed us to understand the tribal disruption caused by the illegal incursions of American trapper and explorer Jedediah Smith into Mexican California in 1826-1827 and its impact on Mexican/American relationships in a completely new way,” said Sandos, Farquhar Professor of the American Southwest. The result was an article he penned with Patricia Sandos for Pacific Historical Review, “Early California Reconsidered: Mexicans, Anglos, and Indians at Mission San José.”
An examination of the global digital divide
Avijit Sarkar looks at the impact of various information and communications technologies within emerging economies.
In several journal articles, chapters and a new book, associate professor in the School of Business Avijit Sarkar examines the digital divide—the difference in adoption, diffusion and use of information and communications technologies, especially the Internet, within emerging economies like India and high-tech developed nations like the U.S. Sarkar’s recent book with School of Business Professor James Pick, The Global Digital Divides: Explaining Change, is the culmination of more than two years of work in this area. Sarkar, along with Pick and School of Business Professor Monica Perry, also recently completed work as part of a grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, conducting extensive GIS analysis to investigate economic development potential in the Coachella Valley in advanced manufacturing, renewable energy and medical device manufacturing. Their case studies are now being examined by city managers in nine cities across the valley.
Commissions and celebratory compositions
Anthony Suter’s music, from compositions for chamber operas to works for wind ensembles, has been heard around the world.
Associate Professor of Music Anthony Suter was commissioned by the San Francisco-based Friction Quartet to pen “Frictive Grit” for the Utah Symphony’s Deer Valley Music Festival in Park City. His subsequent project is closer to home: Suter wrote a saxophone and piano work for a CD by a University of Redlands alumnus featuring works by University composers. Suter’s music also filled Memorial Chapel at the “R Story, History in the Making” event during Homecoming and Parents’ Weekend 2014. His work, “Unbounded,” was written in celebration of the $35 million scholarship gift that Rich ’52 and Ginnie ’52 Hunsaker gave to the University.
