Allison Singley, Director of Parent Relations

In our new Next Page column, Allison Singley, Director of Parent Relations, shares with us the three books she is currently reading and why it might take her a while to finish them, her two desert island books (one of which inspired her doctoral dissertation), how she maintains a habit of reading poetry daily, and why she doesn’t write in books anymore — or feel the need to finish one

Libraries + IRW = Big Read Success!

Jan Coates presents a case study of how Island Readers and Writers collaborated with local libraries in the Mt. Desert Island (Maine) area to encourage reading and community engagement through two Big Read” events

Exercises to develop skill in map reading in grade four

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Broadcasting personalities: the relationship between occupation and music preferences in the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs

This research examines the music choices of interviewees on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs over a 72-year period. In the programme, individuals with a public profile related to high achievement in their chosen occupation identify several pieces of their favourite music. Publicly stated music preferences offer insights into how individuals construct and wish to communicate crucial aspects their identities. We propose that, in this context, occupation is related to music preferences. We investigate this relationship within the framework of Holland’s RIASEC model of vocational personality types, previously ignored by research into music preferences. We consider music preferences in terms of the five-dimension MUSIC model of music preferences, and preference for acoustical attributes of chosen music. Results demonstrate several significant associations between RIASEC occupation types and MUSIC preference dimensions, and also a main effect for RIASEC type on acoustical music attributes such as tempo, energy and loudness. </jats:p

Islands within an almost island: History, myth, and aislamiento in Baja California, Mexico

This paper examines the persistent histories and lasting effects of the Baja California peninsula\u27s status as an almost island. The peninsula is almost an island in so many ways. Its reputation as an island-like entity has also ben strengthened by a longstanding myth that it was, in fact, an actual island. In many senses it was an island - isolated, remote, difficult to envision, understand, and control. Geography and climate played a vital role in all of this, but so, too, did human imagination. The author uses the concept of shima, along with discussions about the dual meanings of the Spanish word aislamiento as a way to explore these issues. Aislamiento can refer more concretely to the effects of being on a landform surrounded by water, on the one hand, or the deep social and psychological effects of isolation. Ultimately, the author argues that it is this sense of isolation that works to produce, regardless of geographic and cartographic reality, a powerful sense of islandness

Atomic Afterimage: Cold War Imagery in Contemporary Art

This is the catalogue of the exhibition "Atomic Afterimage" at Boston University Art Gallery

Representation of an absent space: construction of the United States and New York in 1950s and 1960s Czech travel writing

Early postwar Czech travel writing was mainly concerned with representations of countries from the newly emerging Soviet Bloc and former European colonies in the developing world. In this way, travel writing played a role in nation-building and the creation of new cultural identity. However, following the slow process of political liberalization, the United States became an increasingly visible feature of travel narratives, concomitant with interest and reception of American literature in the second part of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s. While focusing on the analysis of space and articulation of the identities of travelers/narrators, the article tracks the re-emergence of the image of America in various types of travel narratives in order to depict a trajectory from the representation of a strictly bipolar world in political reportage from the early 1950s, to its subversion in the travel writing of the 1960s

Unauthorized Migration and Border “Control”: Three Regional Views

This is a revised transcript of a talk given at the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, on February 29, 2008