Hundreds of Niagara University students were honored for their achievements as undergraduates during the Day of Recognition, which was also the last that the Rev. Joseph L. Levesque, C.M., will preside over. It was Father Levesque who instituted the event while serving as the dean of the college in 1981. This summer, he will step down from the President’s Office after spending 13 years in the position.

The 2013 adaptation was also the last for Dr. Nancy McGlen, who is retiring after serving 15 years as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Along with the bestowment of numerous awards for academic excellence, the 2013 Day of Recognition featured remarks from Father Levesque and Dr. McGlen, as well as comments from Dr. Tim Downs, vice president for academic affairs; Dr. Henrik Borgstrom, associate professor of modern and classical languages, and Stephen Fuest, a senior majoring in biology.

To view more photos from the 2013 Day of Recognition, go to Niagara University’s Facebook page.

For more information on Niagara University’s College of Arts and Sciences, please visit www.niagara.edu/coas.

Dr. Ireland succeeds Dr. Nancy McGlen, who will retire in June after serving for 15 years in the position.

As dean, Dr. Ireland’s primary responsibility will be the general administration of the college, and also to foster and nurture the growth and academic excellence of the college in accordance with Niagara’s mission. He will accordingly be tasked with recruiting, evaluating, retaining and promoting quality faculty; offering leadership in curriculum innovation, development and assessment; monitoring the evaluation of students; supervising and distributing the allocation of college resources; and working with other sectors to sustain and increase enrollments, among other duties.

“We were very pleased to be able to identify the most qualified individual for this critical position from within our university community,” stated Dr. Timothy Downs, Niagara’s vice president for academic affairs. “Nancy has done an incredible job in bringing the College of Arts and Sciences to its current level of excellence, and the person succeeding her has some sizable shoes to fill. We are very confident that Tim, with his credentials and experience at Niagara, will be that person.”

A professor in NU’s department of criminology and criminal justice since 1996, Dr. Ireland earned a B.S. (English literature) from St. Bonaventure University, an M.S. (criminal justice) from Northeastern University and a Ph.D. (criminal justice) from SUNY Albany.

Dr. Ireland’s research interests are diverse. For a number of years, he has been affiliated with a longitudinal research project (The Rochester Youth Development Study), which has allowed him to explore the causes and consequences of exposure to family violence. He recently finished work as a co-principle investigator on a National Institute of Drug Abuse grant. An article Dr. Ireland coauthored on intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in intimate partner violence was selected as one of the 10 best violence research publications of 2011 by the Psychology of Violence multidisciplinary research journal.

To learn more about the programs offered through Niagara University’s College of Arts and Sciences, please call 716.286.8060 or visit www.niagara.edu/coas.

In this role, Dr. Chambers, currently chair of the university’s history department, will provide administrative leadership and strategic analyses to advance academic policy, faculty development and educational partnerships at NU. He will also serve as a member of the Dean’s Council, chair the Graduate Council and act as director of graduate studies.

Dr. Chambers has been a faculty member at Niagara University since 2003. He previously taught at Albion College, Siena College and Skidmore College.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in history from Middlebury College, Dr. Chambers obtained a master’s degree and doctorate from the College of William and Mary. He currently serves as chairman of the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area Commission, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Path Through History Task Force, and has been active in the 1812 Legacy Council. His most recent book is Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefield in the Early American Republic (Cornell University Press, 2012).

Within the last six weeks, the publication has been reviewed by The Buffalo News and The Weekly Standard.

In Memories of War, Dr. Chambers recounts America’s rediscovery of its early national history through the rise of battlefield tourism in the first half of the 19th century. Travelers in this period, Chambers finds, wanted more than recitations of regimental movements when they visited battlefields; they desired experiences that evoked strong emotions and lent meaning to the bleached bones and decaying fortifications of a past age. Chambers traces this impulse through efforts to commemorate Braddock’s Field and Ticonderoga, the cultivated landscapes masking the violent past of the Hudson River valley, the overgrown ramparts of Southern war sites, and the scenic vistas at War of 1812 battlefields along the Niagara River. Describing a progression from neglect to the Romantic embrace of the landscape and then to ritualized remembrance, Chambers brings his narrative up to the beginning of the Civil War, during and after which the memorialization of such sites became routine, assuming significant political and cultural power in the American imagination.

Memories of War can be purchased at Cornell University Press, Amazon and other locations.

Dr. Giannetti is a published author, antiquarian bookseller and guest curator of the The Picturesque and War, as well as an adjunct professor at Niagara University.

By the time of the War of 1812, a cultural backlash to some of the excesses of tourism had already developed in England. The satiric reaction would come into full bloom in America at mid-century, when the Niagara area began a downward slide into crass commercialism. The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, first published in book form in England in 1812, takes aim at the new middle-class vogue of scenic travel and the guidebook industry that had developed around it.

This unique publication imaginatively married the biting satiric verses of George Combe to the rollicking illustrations of Thomas Rowlandson to make pointed statements about some of the absurd lengths to which devotees of the picturesque might go in their quest. These include Dr. Syntax, who is seeking to turn his travels through the countryside into a profitable book, falling off his horse as he sketches a ruined castle and the same good doctor seated in a field sketching a ragged assembly of barnyard animals that is anything but sublime. In America, Niagara Falls tourism had truly gone from the sublime to the ridiculous in the era just before the Civil War, as this selection of contemporary satiric images of tightrope walkers and various hucksters attests.

The Picturesque and War: Visual and Literary Aspects of 19th Century Niagara Tourism.  and related programming is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and is sponsored, in part, by the Niagara 1812 Bicentennial Legacy Council, the Canadian Consulate General and Old Glory Flag & Banner, a division of Cooper Sign Company, Niagara Falls, NY. The exhibition runs through February 24, 2013.

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, please visit www.castellaniartmuseum.org or call 716.286.8200.

Due to the national holiday falling on a Sunday this year, the Niagara University community celebrated Veterans Day on Monday, Nov. 12, with a program honoring those who have sacrificed to preserve the freedoms Americans hold dear.

The event also served as an opportunity for representatives from NU, the 1812 Bicentennial Legacy Council and the Binational Economic & Tourism Alliance to formally unveil and dedicate a commemorative plaque for the Niagara University 1812 Bicentennial Peace Garden, located between St. Vincent’s and Alumni halls. The garden commemorates the 200 years of peace between Canada and the United States following the War of 1812.

“We look as this garden as a contemplative place where students, faculty and community members can look across the border and ponder 200 years of peace,” said the Rev. Joseph L. Levesque, C.M., president of Niagara University.

The peace garden initiative has been undertaken as part of the 1812 Bicentennial Legacy Project, an overarching effort to commemorate the 200-year anniversary of the War of 1812. According to the Binational Economic & Tourism Alliance, the Peace Garden Trail is designed “to attract international visitors as well as residents of this historically significant crossborder region to experience and enjoy the natural beauty that a garden provides while commemorating the peace that has existed between Canada and the United States over the past 200 years.”

Arlene White, executive director of the Binational Economic & Tourism Alliance, added, ”This is the 24th of 24 peace gardens that we’ve dedicated this year throughout the Great Lakes area, and I can’t think of a more fitting spot for the final one to be dedicated than this binational location at Niagara University.”

Brian Merrett, C.E.O. of the 1812 Bicentennial Legacy Council, also spoke during the 30-minute event.

“We want to thank Niagara University for hosting this garden,” he said. “What a great resource we have here, so close to the international border.”

For more information on the Peace Garden Trail, please visit www.binationalheritagepeacegardentrail.com.

This history comes surging to life every time someone uses a nine-iron, as the remains of 300 of these soldiers are now interred in a mass grave in Delaware Park, where the residents of Buffalo jog, play soccer and golf. This close connection to our nations’ (the USA and Canada) past caught the attention of Stephanie Cole, a Buffalo resident, comic book fan and general counsel at Niagara University. She spent the summer researching the question, how does a soldier’s memorial become a golf course?

The answer is in the pages of Buffalo’s 300, the comic book she created to link the results of her research. As the pages go back and forth in time, they show how the war affected Buffalo’s early pioneers, the local tribe of Senecas and the soldiers who came from Virginia and Maryland to fight a war in the cold. They also show how a little political corruption can have a ripple effect over the course of a century.

The Niagara University community is invited to attend a discussion on how this story came to light. The presentation will be held at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 15, in the Library Rare Book Room, which is located on the second floor of the library, to the left.

Scratch that. Sarah Page is a published Niagara University sophomore.

The Amulet, a novel that Page began writing during her freshman year at Frontier Central High School in Hamburg, hit bookshelves in late July. It is described by Page as a historical fantasy novel with “a little bit of romance.” It’s about a young girl named Fala, who lives in a corrupt Egyptian town. When she becomes tangled up in the lives of two gods, they discover that she is mistakenly in the possession of a divine item that’s been missing for nearly 50 years. Fala has to accompany the two back to the realm of the gods to find the amulet’s rightful owner before it’s too late.

“I got the idea from actual Egyptian mythology and, in a way, one of my best friends, Amanda,” said Page, who plans to teach history at the high school or collegiate level. “I had just finished reading a book about the pharaoh Tutankhamen, and we were having a discussion about curses. The idea just kind of sprang from that. It’s something I’ve always had a passion for; I honestly can’t remember when it first sparked my interest. Writing has always been a hobby, too, so I guess it’s only natural that the two collided eventually.”

Western New York-based No Frills Buffalo published The Amulet, which is available for $14.95 at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, and other popular websites.

Page said that she is considering publishing a second book, a collection of short stories.

In Memories of War, Dr. Chambers recounts America’s rediscovery of its early national history through the rise of battlefield tourism in the first half of the 19th century. Perhaps no other part of the United States saw more battles during the War of 1812 than the Niagara River borderland in western New York State. In later years, its decaying fortifications and overgrown battlefields provided reminders of the struggle’s bloodshed and indecisive conclusion. Tourists traveling to Niagara Falls visited nearby Fort Niagara, Queenston Heights or Lundy’s Lane, constructing the war’s memory in the process. As one visitor wrote during an 1821 trip to Niagara, “This beautiful country stimulates my patriotism.” Battlefields and monuments on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border became sites where Americans, and especially New Yorkers, came to understand why the War of 1812 mattered, and how they could remember its fallen heroes. Their emotional responses to place and history at Niagara’s battlefields both honored veterans and neglected the war’s causes. Memories of 1812 envisioned a peaceful border between two nations that had once shed each other’s blood.

Thomas A. Chambers is an associate professor of history and department chair at Niagara University. He took his Ph.D. and M.A. at the College of William and Mary, and earned his B.A. at Middlebury College. He currently serves as chairman of the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area Commission, and has been active in the 1812 Legacy Council.

The Picturesque and War: Visual and Literary Aspects of 19th Century Niagara Tourism and related programming is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and is sponsored, in part, by the Niagara 1812 Bicentennial Legacy Council, the Canadian Consulate General and Old Glory Flag & Banner, a division of Cooper Sign Company, Niagara Falls, N.Y. The exhibition runs through Feb. 24, 2013.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sept. 23, 2012: The History of Tourism in the Niagara Region, with Dr. Thomas Chambers, associate professor of history at Niagara University, and John Percy, president and C.E.O. of the Niagara Tourism & Convention Corporation.

Oct. 21, 2012: Reading and Interpretation of the poem, The Foresters by Alexander Wilson, which describes a journey by foot from the lower Niagara River to the Falls in the autumn of 1804. The guest speaker is Dr. Robert Giannetti, author and antiquarian bookseller, Niagara University adjunct professor and guest curator of The Picturesque and War: Visual and Literary Aspects of 19th Century Tourism.

Nov. 4, 2012: Memories of War: Visiting Battle Grounds in the Early American Republic, a lecture and book signing with Dr. Chambers.

Nov. 18, 2012: Reading and interpretation of the 19th century comic masterpiece: The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque by Dr. Giannetti.

The Picturesque and War: Visual and Literary Aspects of 19th Century Niagara Tourism and related programming is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and is sponsored in part by the Niagara 1812 Bicentennial Legacy Council, the Canadian Consulate General and Old Glory Flag & Banner, a division of Cooper Sign Company, Niagara Falls, N.Y. The exhibition runs through Feb. 24, 2013.

For more information, please visit our website or call Michael Beam, curator of collections and exhibitions, at 716.286.8286.