The main floor of the O’Neill Library, known as Level Three, has undergone changes in the last year. A center for printing, copying, and scanning was created, with a service desk staffed by students who provide technical assistance. Adjacent to the circulation desk, the former reserves room has been expanded by roughly a third and turned into the O’Neill Reading Room, an open space for individual and group study. (Reserved materials have moved to the main circulation desk.) Along one wall of the new reading room, display cases exhibit rare books and artifacts from the Burns Library. The rest of the space is given over to what University Librarian Tom Wall calls “a mixed landscape”—traditional long wooden tables, upholstered chairs, and booths—that can accommodate approximately 125 people.

On February 2 (above), Louis Serafini ’13 was ensconced in the new O’Neill Reading Room.

Fourteen undergraduates took the stage at Robsham Theater on the nights of November 13 and 14 to describe their recent research projects for an audience of fellow students and faculty. The presentations constituted the first BCTalks, a program begun by Lisa Piccirillo ’13 and Conor Sullivan ’13 to provide a non-classroom forum for students engaging in original research. Topics on the two nights ranged from Italian Renaissance artists’ depictions of Old Testament scenes (“The Downfall of Synagoga,” a paper and PowerPoint delivered by Rosemary Chandler ’13) to community forestry (“saving our forests, one town at a time,” as presenter Margaret Lister ’12 put it). The event was co-sponsored by the Undergraduate Government of Boston College and Education for Students by Students, a new student-led organization that plans to publish the 20-minute lectures online in January and to host another BCTalks event in the spring semester.

On Monday November 14, Christopher Sheridan ’12 (above), a biochemistry and philosophy major and recent recipient of a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for study in the sciences, gave a talk titled, “Light It Up: The Way Forward in Psychiatry,” which examined the “political, commercial, and academic pressures” on research.

On October 26, bassist and Grammy-winning jazz composer John Clayton (standing) led a master class in the Shea Room with BC bOp!, the University’s jazz ensemble of 17 instrumentalists and eight vocalists. Since 2000, the band has made eight appearances at the Lionel Hampton International Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho, which Clayton directs. Shown are band members (front row, from left) Kyle Marra ’12, Patrick Andrea ’13, John Schettino ’15, Joe Caracappa ’13; (middle row) Josh King ’12, Katherine Giffune ’12; and (back row) Tim Leccese ’12. The ensemble is under the direction of Sebastian Bonaiuto.

From September 16 to October 14, the University marked Hispanic Heritage Month (HHM) with a campus-wide series of events, including musical and dance performances, a “Latin Food Night” at Carney, Corcoran, and Stuart dining halls, and the screening of Sin País and Letters From the Other Side, two films about migrant families and the U.S. immigration system. Victor Rios, associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, lectured September 20 on the topic of his book Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (2011). And Hispanic alumni returned to campus October 5 to take part in a panel discussion on career paths and professional networking. The four-week celebration was organized by the Office of AHANA Student Programs, Latino/as at Boston College, the Archbishop Oscar Romero Scholarship Committee, and the Hispanic Heritage Planning Committee.

Above, Señor Baldwin joins students, including Enrique Saldivar ’14 (right), on O’Neill Plaza September 16 for HHM’s opening event, the Latin Soul Arts festival.

Some 400 sophomore, junior, and senior volunteers helped members of the Class of 2015 move into residence halls on September 1, with industrial hampers supplied by the Office of Residential Life as part of its Welcome Wagon program. This year’s freshmen arrived from 43 states and 24 countries.

Above, Mark Ma ‘14 (left) and John Lambrecht ’14 join the wagon train outside the main entrance to Gonzaga and Fitzgerald halls on the upper campus.

On May 5, Allison Lantero ’11, an English and theater major who blogged during her senior year for the independent online magazine Her Campus, posted an entry titled “Who Is Ray LaHood?”—a reference to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation and the University’s 2011 Commencement speaker. After addressing the annual pre-announcement speculation as to the identity of this year’s speaker (guesses ran “from James Franco to Sarah Palin,” she wrote), Lantero went on to provide a few essential facts about LaHood: He is a former middle school teacher; he served in Congress as a Republican representative from Illinois; he is descended from Catholic Lebanese immigrants.

In his Commencement speech on May 23, LaHood admitted to having seen the post, and asked Lantero to stand (above) as he read from her entry, in which she had expressed the hope on behalf of her classmates “that his speech is short.” Lantero was a good sport, shrugging and smiling as LaHood introduced himself: “Well, Allison, I’m Ray LaHood, and I promise I’ll be brief.” He went on to speak about the value of “strong community and active civility.”

Following the ceremony, Lantero was invited to meet LaHood and had her photograph taken with him and University President William P. Leahy, SJ. In a June 6 blog post, which was picked up by the Huffington Post, she wrote, “I’d like to thank Mr. LaHood: Not only did he give a short speech, but he made my graduation completely unforgettable.”

Senior chemistry major Anne Kornahrens, pictured above in a Merkert Chemistry Center laboratory, has won the Skaggs-Oxford Scholarship, providing for joint Ph.D./D.Phil. studies at the University of Oxford and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The scholarship is a five-year award offered to at most two students annually. Kornahrens is the University’s first-ever Skaggs-Oxford scholar. She received a Goldwater Scholarship (given to promising undergraduates in mathematics, engineering, or the sciences) as a junior. Earlier this year she earned a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship with a proposal to explore anti-bacterial properties of the organic molecule carolacton. The Skaggs-Oxford Scholarship is intended for students “whose research will help to develop drugs and treatments to alleviate human suffering.”

A Presidential Scholar at Boston College who grew up in Florida and Minnesota, Kornahrens is a four-year member of the Liturgy Arts Group and a volunteer at the Campus School and the Italian Home for Children, in Boston. She will begin her graduate studies in organic chemistry with two years at Oxford, then spend three years at Scripps’s Kellogg School of Science and Technology.

In 2005, English professor Joseph Nugent launched a reading group devoted to James Joyce’s final novel, the half-million-word, stream-of-consciousness Finnegans Wake (1939). Called “Raidin the Wake” (a nod to the Irish pronunciation of “reading” and to the work of invaders), the group of a dozen or more students, faculty, and friends meets weekly to savor and dissect “some dozen lines or two” of what Nugent terms “this notoriously complex work” that “makes use of every piece of knowledge you’ve ever collected.” On Saturday, April 16, the University will host a conference on James Joyce featuring Danis Rose, editor of the controversial 2010 edition of Finnegans Wake.

Raidin the Wake (above) met at 10 Stone Avenue, home of the University’s Institute for the Liberal Arts, on March 30. In addition to Nugent (center, wearing tie) and Joyce fan Bruce Teague (to Nugent’s right), the week’s attendees included (clockwise from lower right), English master’s student Kerri Farrell (obscured), and English Ph.D. students Trista Doyle, Kelly Sullivan, and Andrew Kuhn.

Upstream damming, resource extraction (oil, gas, or water), and rising sea levels are some of the factors threatening the world’s river deltas, biologically rich ecosystems that provide a buffer against storm surges and are home to some 500 million people. Douglas Edmonds, assistant professor of earth and environmental science at Boston College, has been mapping the elaborate channel frameworks of 12 deltas, including those of the Mississippi, Atchafalaya, and Saskatchewan rivers, and creating computer models to test the effects of variables such as sediment composition, water speed, and channel profile. According to Edmonds, researchers are “at the very beginning of understanding delta design and development.”

On March 30, Edmonds (above) discussed his delta studies at the University’s Weston Observatory.

Memoirists Amy Boesky, Suzanne Berne, and Joan Wickersham shared their experiences of the costs and virtues of setting down a life on paper during a panel discussion titled “Why Memoir?” on March 23 in Devlin 101. Boesky, an associate professor of English, is the author of What We Have (2010), about her family’s hereditary history of breast and ovarian cancer. Berne, an adjunct faculty member in the English department, wrote Missing Lucile (2010), the story of the grandmother whose early death haunted her son, Berne’s father, throughout his life. Wickersham, a fiction writer and essayist, wrote The Suicide Index, a 2008 National Book Award finalist, in which she broached the trauma of her father’s suicide.

All three writers were asked what drove them from their preferred practice of fiction and toward memoir. “Writers struggle until they find the right form for that story,” said Wickersham, who spent eight years on a novel about her father before scrapping it. Berne said that since her grandmother was virtually unknown to the family, fictionalization would be a disservice: “This woman was already fiction.” Boesky set out to tell her family’s particular story, but said she made a decision to employ novelistic techniques, such as thinking of her family members as characters and using exemplary episodes from a single year in their life.

Pictured, from left, are Boesky, Berne, and Wickersham.