Susan B. Anthony was born in Massachusetts but settled in Rochester, New York, in 1849. In 1900, she led a successful campaign to have women admitted to the by raising $50,000 in pledges. This included the cash value of her life insurance policy.

Though Anthony did not live to see women gain the right to vote, her work with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in drafting and introducing the 19th Amendment, which prohibited the denial of a US citizen to vote based on sex, laid the foundation for its ratification fourteen years after her death.

Anthony is buried in ; during election season, people visit her gravesite and many place their “I Voted” stickers on her headstone. Her house on 17 Madison Street in the city of Rochester has been preserved and is now known as the .

Today, the University is a��collector, curator, and steward of Anthony’s legacy:

• The River Campus Library’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation is home to many important holdings related to Anthony’s role in women’s suffrage, including .
• �ճ������is dedicated to addressing curricular and scholarly issues throughout history and in contemporary society.
• The Susan B. Anthony Center works to bring awareness to—and advocate for—social justice and equality by translating research into policy through collaborations with the University community and partner organizations. The center pays tribute to Anthony’s efforts to win women admission to the University at their annual Legacy and Leadership Awards.

‘May their numbers increase…’

The University was founded in 1850 as an all-male institution. In the 1880s, women began to petition the University to open its doors to female students. Finally, in 1898 the board of trustees voted to allow women to enter the University if they defrayed expenses by raising $100,000 (approximately $2 million in today’s money).

A committee of women led by Helen Barrett Montgomery raised $40,000 over the next two years. In June 1900, the board agreed to admit women students that September if the women could secure another $10,000. During the summer of 1900, the committee was able to raise another $2,000, but the day before the deadline they were still $8,000 short.

At this crucial point, Anthony took charge of collecting the remaining money. She solicited the first $2,000 from her sister Mary, the second from Sarah Willis, and the third from Rev. and Mrs. William Channing Gannett. Still short $2,000, Anthony pledged her life insurance policy, thus guaranteeing the admission of women to the University in the fall of 1900.

• Read the full story of how Anthony worked to get women admitted to the University.

Celebrating a ‘heroic life’

The 1866 Woman’s Rights Convention was the first held since the beginning of the Civil War. The call to the convention reflects Stanton and Anthony’s concern that the proposed fourteenth amendment would extend suffrage to black males only. In an enclosed note to Amy Post, Anthony writes: “I hope you will be at the convention. We shall need every woman & man who really believes now is the hour for woman to demand the ballot.”

On November 1, 1872, Anthony, her three sisters, and ten other Rochester women registered to vote after persuading the election inspectors that the Fourteenth Amendment gave them that right. Four days later they cast their ballots, and on November 18, Anthony was arrested for voting illegally.

Ģ����ý voting in the election, :

Rochester Nov. 12th 1872 My Dear young Friend Yes you shall have the Autograph of the first woman who legally registered and voted in the state of New York under the 14th Amendment, which lifts the franchise of the citizen above the power of the states to deny, as did the 13th freedom of the person. All persons are citizens–and no state shall deny or abridge the citizen[’s] rights–Respectfully yours Susan B. Anthony

• Read more about Anthony’s background and life.

Mural graces campus tunnel system

In spring 2015, Rochester artist Sarah Rutherford created a University-themed mural, which includes an image of Susan B. Anthony as both a young and an old woman, an image of a present-day young woman, and the University’s official flower, the dandelion. The project is part of an ongoing initiative to bring more public art to the River Campus.

Center brings Susan B. Anthony into the 21st century with #SueBSays

“Failure is impossible,” Anthony proclaimed, creating a motto that carried the women’s suffrage movement to success. But while much is known about the famed suffragist’s stance on social equality and slavery, she also had lots to say on a variety of issues that still resonate today. In summer 2015, researchers from the Susan B. Anthony Center launched a Twitter campaign aimed at connecting social media users with her opinions on an array of social issues, under the hashtag #SueBSays.

“While reading through her personal letters, we saw that her insights are as relevant today as over 100 years ago,” says Catherine Cerulli, then-director of the Susan B. Anthony Center. “That is why we thought Twitter was the right channel to present her thoughts on issues we still struggle with today and a great way to bring her into the 21st century.”

The campaign, posted by the center’s Twitter account at��, coincided with the 95th anniversary of the signing of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

was relentless in her pursuit of justice and equality for all

— Susan B. Anthony Ctr (@UofR_SBAC)

This post was originally published on February 12, 2016, and has been updated.

Through integrated photonics, high-tech optical systems and high-tech electronics are joined together by transforming all needed optical components onto small chips.

“Our team will build chip-scale integrated silicon carbide quantum photonic processors for high-fidelity and energy-efficient quantum information processing, which interface seamlessly with fiber-optic links for secure communication and distribution of quantum information,” said Lin, principal investigator of the project and director of the University’s Laboratory for Quantum, Nonlinear and Mechanical Photonics, which studies the fundamental physics of light and its applications, including secure communication and advanced computing. Fiber optic links use powerful lights and extremely thin glass cables to transmit massive amounts data at very high speeds, often over long distances.

“We have a very strong, multidisciplinary, multi-university team of experts for this project, coming together in a shared vision,” said Lin.

Co-principal investigators are John Howell, professor of physics and optics, David Awschalom of the University of Chicago, Case Western Reserve University’s Philip Feng, and MIT’s Jurgen Michel—all global experts in chip-scale integrated SiC quantum photonic processors. Members of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Thomas Gerrits, Sae Woo Nam, and Richard Mirin, are also collaborating on this project.

The research is expected to result in a new class of device technologies with previously inaccessible attributes and merits that may eventually have profound commercial impact on the industrial sectors. SiC combines excellent linear optical, nonlinear optical, point defect, electrical, mechanical, and thermal characteristics into a single material with mature wafer processing and device fabrication capability, thus representing a promising material system for integrated quantum photonics.

Research such as this also feeds into the work of the AIM Photonics (American Institute for Manufacturing Photonics) consortium of the U.S. Department of Defense, of which the Ģ����ý is a partner.

Project findings are also intended to generate extraordinary educational materials and inspiration for students from K-12 to graduate students.

Visit the NSF website for more on this project, titled . ��Funding comes from NSF’s Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI), the signature program��for the within the Directorate of Engineering.

Hughes is a scholar and prolific author of Jewish philosophy, Islamic studies, and theory and method in the academic study of religion. He argues that the Sykes-Picot Agreement still underlies the discontent in the Middle East.

“The Sykes-Picot Agreement is instrumental to understanding the modern Middle East. It represents the framework of its colonial past and shows the potential for national fractures inherent to the region’s present and future.

When taken in the larger context of other agreements, declarations and promises to the players in the region over the years, we see how the agreement is at the root of so many contemporary problems.”

Chad Post, creator of and a founder of the awards program as publisher of the University’s Open Letter Books, announced the winners May 4 during a ceremony in New York City.

He says this year’s poetry winner, Rilke Shake, earned praise its “playfulness, and for its great shifts from irreverence to heartbreak and back again” while Signs Preceding the End of the World won for fiction “as a great book that’s also incredibly timely.”

Post says the idea for the award grew out of a program he started with the late Karl Pohrt, a former owner of Shaman Drum Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and other work he was doing to recognize international literature.

“I came up with the idea of starting an award as a way of bringing attention to the best titles that were published the previous year,” he says. “We had all the information about what had come out, and the connections with booksellers who wanted to promote international literature, so it seemed like a logical evolution of what I had been working on before.”

What does it take to become a best translated book author or translator?

The right book at the right time in the best possible translation. This award is really competitive. There were 500 eligible fiction works this year, and at least six that could’ve won, and might have in a different year. Since the jury changes most years, it’s hard to predict exactly what they’re going to lean toward, but one thing that never changes is the quality of the original work itself, and the quality of the translation. You have to have both to stand out from the rest of the field.

What is the selection process like?

For the fiction longlist, the nine judges vote on their top titles and agree, as a group, on 16 books. Then, each of the judges gets to add one personal pick. That allows additional diversity in the longlist, and gives some books one last shot to wow the jury. It’s worth noting that not every judge reads all 500 eligible titles, but they do read all of the longlisted ones. Then they vote this down to the shortlist, and then debate, discuss, vote, and argue on which title should win. The poetry process is pretty much the same, but without the individual picks from the judges. They usually do a 10 title longlist, six-book shortlist, and then the winner.

What are the biggest challenges in selecting the winners every year?

I’m not on the jury, but my sense of it is that there are usually a handful of books that deserve to win for different reasons. So trying to figure out which reasons to back a title in a particular year might come into play. For example, are you looking for something more political, a way of bringing attention to underrepresented parts of the world? Or is it purely based on the impressiveness of the translator’s and author’s artistic accomplishment? Should it be a book that will be more accessible to the common reader, or one that will change people’s lives? That’s the difficult part, I think, since all the perspectives are equally valid.

The award seems to grow with each year as well as interest from companies like Amazon and news outlets like the Associated Press. What is it about the award(s) that you think has captured people’s attention?

I think this is the culmination of a decade of various promotions for international literature. It no longer seems “scary” to readers or reviewers, and is instead an opportunity to encounter great books from different cultures and literary traditions. The fact that Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard—two very different writers—are both best-sellers, proves to me that people are aware that great literature can be written in languages other than English. I also think people like prizes, shortlists, trying to guess who is going to win and rooting for either their favorite book, or favorite underdog. It’s fun and helps take translated literature out of the “ivory tower” and helps combat the idea that reading books from abroad is like eating your vegetables.

What stood out about the winners?

For poetry, Rilke Shake by Angélica Fritas, translated from Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan won for its playfulness, and for its great shifts from irreverence to heartbreak and back again. It’s worth noting that Kaplan won a PEN/Heim Translation Award for this collection, and that this is the second year in a row that a book published by Phoneme Media has won the BTBA for poetry.

On the fiction side of things, Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera, translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman brought home the prize. This is a great book that’s also incredibly timely. It’s set on the U.S.-Mexico border and deals with borders—between countries and languages—throughout. It’s masterfully written, and wonderfully translated. Well deserved!

What is your favorite thing about the awards?

Finding out about a handful of books that I overlooked during the year and can catch up on. That and running the “” series on Three Percent.

As people around the world begin to mourn the untimely death of legendary musician and performer, Prince, rock historian John Covach remembers him as one of the “most important artists in American popular music during the last two decades of the twentieth century.”

Covach, a professor of music and director of the University’s Institute for Popular Music, expressed his sadness over the tragic news on April 21. “As a performer, he challenged the limits of sexuality, in many ways paralleling Madonna’s musical exploration of suggestive behaviors and taboo topics during the 1980s.�� He will be remembered as one of most significant artists in American popular music history.”

Covach and coauthor Andrew Flory documented Prince’s rise to fame in in their textbook, What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and its History (Third Edition, W.W. Norton, 2012), calling him one of the one of the most influential artists of the 1980s:

“These sixteen finalists represent an incredible array of writing styles and reputation,”��said Chad W. Post, publisher of the University’s Open Letter Books.���ճ����titles were selected from the nearly 570 works of fiction and poetry published in English translation in 2015.

The sixteen titles on these two shortlists are translated from nine different languages and from thirteen different countries.��Ten of the shortlisted titles are by women.

The winners will be announced on Wednesday, May 4th at 7 p.m., simultaneously on The Millions and at a live event at The Folly in New York City. There will also be a celebration during BookExpo America at 5 p.m. on May 11th at 57th St. Books in Chicago.

The 2016 BTBA Fiction Finalists (in alphabetical order by author):

��by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by��Daniel Hahn (Angola, Archipelago Books)

by Samuel Archibald, translated from the French by Donald Winkler (Canada, Biblioasis)

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein��(Italy, Europa Editions)

by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel��(Bulgaria, Open Letter)

by Yuri Herrera, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (Mexico, And Other Stories)

��by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole (Israel, New Directions)

by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson��(Brazil, New Directions)

by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Mexico, Coffee House Press)

by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño andMartha Tennent (Spain, Open Letter)

by Gabrielle Wittkop, translated from the French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie (France, Wakefield Press)

The 2016 BTBA Poetry Finalists (in alphabetical order by author):

by Angélica Freitas, translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan (Brazil, Phoneme Media)

��by Liu Xia, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern (China, Graywolf)

, edited and translated from the Persian by Farzana Marie (Afghanistan, Holy Cow! Press)

by Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss (Argentina, NYRB)

��by Abdourahman A. Waberi, translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson (Djibouti, Seagull Books)

��by Yi Lu, translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (China, Milkweed)

As in recent years, the Best Translated Book Awards are underwritten by Amazon.com’s Literary Partnership programs, which allow both winning authors and winning translators to receive $5,000 cash prizes. Thanks to this gift, Three Percent ��will have awarded $100,000 in cash prizes to international authors and translators since 2011.

This year’s fiction jury is made up of: Amanda Bullock (), Heather Cleary, translator from the Spanish, co-founder of the ), Kevin Elliott (), Kate Garber (), Jason Grunebaum (translator, writer), Mark Haber (writer, ), Stacey Knecht (translator), Amanda Nelson (), and P.T. Smith (writer and reader).

The poetry jury includes: Jarrod Annis (), Katrine Øgaard Jensen (), Tess Lewis (writer and translator), Becka McKay (writer and translator), and Deborah Smith (writer, translator, founder of ).

For more information, visit the and the official .

The Department of English at the URochester named artist Nate Hodge as the recipient of the 2015 Lillian Fairchild Memorial Award, during a ceremony on Monday, Feb. 29.

The award is given annually to a local visual artist, writer, choreographer, or composer for his or her commitment to the arts in the Rochester community. In 2015, Hodge participated in WALL/THERAPY, a public art project that uses murals as a way to provide new life and energy to blank walls in downtown areas.

“We were particularly impressed with his mural ‘City and Sky’ on Atlantic Avenue and how it excels at��Wall Therapy’s goal – using ‘mural art as a vehicle to address our collective need for inspiration, ‘” said��Rosemary Kegl, chair of the English department and member of the Fairchild selection committee.

Hodge began working with WALL/THERAPY in 2015 after participating in several group shows at the 1975 Gallery in Rochester, which specialized in showcasing the work of up-and-coming local artists. He has a BFA from SUNY Brockport and an MFA from the University of Buffalo. Hodge currently lives and works in Brockport, N.Y., while he exhibits drawings and installations both locally and regionally.

“The most inspiring thing about public art is its ability to reach a wide spectrum of people,” said Hodge. “Outside of a gallery or museum there are few places you can encounter paintings or sculptures and I feel like only a small portion of the population is able to make time to visit these places. Public art exists on the periphery of��everyday activities and democratizes a field that unfortunately can come off as elitist and exclusive.”

In the spring, Hodge will begin working on a large-scale mural in the University’s Memorial Art Gallery as a way to provide museumgoers with an “immersive painting they can step into rather than observe on a wall.” Visitors will also have the opportunity to watch the painting develop on site. No sketches will be available prior to the start of the project, as the indoor environment will dictate the creation of the mural. To date, this will be the sixth collaboration between WALL/THERAPY artists and the University.

Established by Ģ����ý Professor Herman L. Fairchild in 1924, the Fairchild award is in memory of his daughter, an accomplished designer who died of tuberculosis at the age of 32. Previous awards have been given out to choreographer Garth Fagan, sculptor Albert Paley, and Pulitzer Prize- winning poet Anthony Hecht.

“I am honored to be included in a roster of distinguished artists and visionaries,” says Hodge. “It’s energizing and gratifying to have my efforts noticed and I’m channeling this energy to continue to move forward with my artistic explorations.”

For more information about WALL/THERAPY, including information on where to find Hodge’s murals in Rochester, visit

Art historian Joan Saab examines the relationship between seeing and believing.

By Kathleen McGarvey

“I saw it with my own eyes.”

It’s an often expressed guarantor of truth. But Joan Saab, an associate professor of art history and visual and cultural studies, suggests that assumptions about seeing and truth require a little more scrutiny.

During the mid-19th century, a series of grand hoaxes captured the American imagination: the Great Moon Hoax, the Cardiff Giant, and the fantastical creatures of P. T. Barnum.

“I’m interested in this moment in the 19th century when people are willing to suspend disbelief and see things—and even though they know they’re not true, to believe for that moment that they are,” she says.

In the summer of 1835, the New York Sun published a series of six articles describing the supposed discovery of life on the moon by famed astronomer Sir John Herschel. The inhabitants included winged people—a combination of humans and bats—unicorns, and other creatures.

Some people always knew the stories were a hoax, and most knew before the series finished.

“But it didn’t matter,” Saab says. People were captivated by the story, and the hoax was picked up by papers around the world. “And that’s what I think was interesting. It continued to resonate.”

Saab explores the hoaxes in a book that she is writing, Making Sense of What We See. It’s one volume in a multivolume series that’s part of what she calls a “new type of history that engages all of the senses.”

WATCH: Inaugural Nazerian Humanities Lectures, Joan Saab, “Making Sense of What We See,” March 2, 2016

Through examples that run a historical continuum from the Florentine Codex—a 16th century manuscript describing the conquest of Mexico and Montezuma’s defeat by Cortés—to the Rodney King video, Saab examines the correlation between seeing and knowledge.

Almost 30 years after the Great Moon Hoax, another trick was pulled off in Cardiff, New York, when men digging a well on the farm of William Newell unearthed a 10-foot-tall “petrified man.”

The “man” was in reality a sculpture that was created and placed there by a tobacconist from New York named George Hull, who got the idea after an argument with a Methodist preacher about taking the Bible literally.

After the giant went on display in Syracuse, purchased for nearly $40,000 by a group of businessmen, a paleontologist showed why it was a fake, and Hull confessed. But it remained a popular attraction.

Circus entrepreneur Barnum tried unsuccessfully to lease the giant, and so built a replica, which became even more popular.

Today, the original giant is on display at the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, New York.
Barnum exhibited other fantastical creatures, such as the “Feejee Mermaid,” actually “a monkey carcass with a fish tail sewn to the back of it,” says Saab.

Hoaxes—especially ones that relied on direct observation, like the giant, or new technologies such as the telescope, like the moon hoax—played a part in reconfiguring knowledge and establishing new boundaries for discernible truth, Saab says.

“I’m not arguing that they actually were duped. I’m saying that there’s something happening in this negotiation between seeing and believing that’s not as easy as we think it is.”

“I felt it was important for there to be a collection of essays that show how race, slavery, and its complex legacies have been addressed in American culture through artistic production from the 18^th century to the present day,” said Tawil, who came up with the idea in 2012 while preparing to teach a course about slavery in literature at the URochester.

“Most of us are familiar with novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but not many people are aware of how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book was countered by novels like Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, and the emergence of ��pro-slavery plantation literature,” said Tawil. “It’s important for students to realize that there are artists who used literature to argue against as well as to defend slavery.”

In order to bring these topics together in one place, Tawil solicited 16 articles from different contributors including Jeffrey Allen Tucker, associate professor of English, and Sharon Willis, professor of art and art history and visual cultural studies.

His goal was to provide readers with a collection of essays that show the persistence of slavery as a theme in literary art, not only in slave narratives and novels, but also in a wide range of genres that include poetry, public performance, and music.

For example, he points to Tucker’s essay on the theme of enslavement in recent science fiction and fantasy and to Willis’ essay on slavery in American cinema as indicators of how the topic continues to resurface in different areas in the arts.

“Throughout American history, artists have continued to revisit the history of slavery in their works because people need to confront it, understand it,” said Tawil. “Art provides an arena where people can do this. That’s how it can be so effective. You think you’re just watching a film, but the film is a way of working through history.”

In addition to serving as editor for the Companion and writing the book’s introduction, Tawil is currently completing a book titled Literature, American Style: Exceptionalism and Transatlantic Culture. He is also the author of The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (Cambridge, 2006) and of numerous essays in such journals as Novel, Early American Literature, and Diaspora.

The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature will be published in March 2016. For more information visit:

The main focus of the gathering was the president’s decision not to ban the social media app Yik Yak from the University’s servers.

“Freedom of expression must not be confused with hate speech,” said Sequoia Kemp ‘16, president of the Black Students’ Union, in response to Seligman’s statement that banning Yik Yak from the University’s WiFi networks would undercut the rights of both students and faculty.

During the 20-minute gathering, Simone Johnson ’17, vice president of the Black Students’ Union, read aloud the student’s previous list of demands in connection with Seligman’s subsequent responses. “Not all of our demands have been addressed,” said Johnson, who told the group that they are currently drafting an official response to the report.

The meeting ended with students taking a moment of silence to reflect on how far they have come on this issue, and how far they have yet to go.

The was established this past November by Seligman in response to a three-page petition and list of demands students felt addressed the racial climate on campus. One of the main topics of concern was the use of Yik Yak where people previously posted threatening and racist comments.

Seligman believes a ban would reduce the University’s ability to hold individuals “personally accountable for their hateful messages.”

In his statement that went out to the campus community on Feb. 3, Seligman accepted several of the Commission’s initial recommendations and stated that further recommendations will be made in a final report once all faculty, staff, and student surveys are completed.