MOUNT VERNON — Western Iowa farmer Denise O’Brien will speak on “Women and the Politics of Food” at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 10, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell College. Admission is free.

O’Brien, who raises fruit, vegetables and poultry on a farm she and husband Larry Harris own near Atlantic, is involved in food, conservation, agricultural trade and rural women’s issues.

She helped organize the Women’s Task Force of the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition, directed the Rural Women’s Leadership Development Project of Prairie Fire Rural Action Inc. and served as president of the National Family Farm Coalition. She was appointed by the governor to the Iowa Food Policy Council, where she serves on the Institutional Food Purchasing Task Force. She is founder and coordinator of Women, Food and Agriculture. In 2000 she was inducted into Iowa’s Women’s Hall of Fame.

In 2001 she was appointed a Food and Society Policy Fellow, a national program that educates consumers, opinion leaders and policymakers on sustaining family farms and food systems in the United States that promote the environment, health and local ownership.

Internationally, O’Brien helped organize and participated in the Rural Women’s Workshop in Rome prior to the 1996 United Nations’ World Food Summit. She helped organize the Globalization of Agriculture workshop at the U.N.’s Fourth World Women’s Conference in Beijing and has addressed the U.N. General Assembly on behalf of the world’s farmers.

Her daughter, Caia Harris, is a senior at Cornell.

O’Brien is the final speaker this year in the annual lecture series Community, Agency, Action: Social Change in the New Century, sponsored by Cornell’s Office of Academic Affairs and the department of sociology and anthropology.

MOUNT VERNON — As a musical celebration of its sesquicentennial, Cornell College will host a concert featuring American works of the past 150 years.

“Beautiful Dreamer: 150 Years of American Music,” at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15, in King Chapel, presents baritone Jonathon Thull and soprano Nancy Hagen, with accompanists Lynda Hakken and Dan Knight on piano and Jama Stilwell on flute.

The free concert will feature a variety of musical styles and compositions representative of America’s diverse musical language — such as Stephen Foster’s folk song “Beautiful Dreamer,” art songs of Samuel Barber, cabaret songs by William Bolcom and torch songs by Linda Robbins Coleman. Also on tap are selections from familiar stage productions including Jerry Bock’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma” and Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate.”

The performance also will celebrate Cornell’s musical lineage, with works by Don Chamberlain and the late Julian Bern, both of Cornell’s music faculty.

Thull, a voice instructor at Cornell, is founder and artistic director of Cornell Lyric Theatre. He is chorus master for the Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre’s forthcoming productions of “La Traviata” and “Le nozze di Figaro” and will co-direct Iowa City Community Theatre’s spring production of “The Man of La Mancha.” His performing experience includes the title roles in “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Sweeney Todd.”

Hagen hosts the “Morning Program” on classical radio station KSUI-FM in Iowa City, produces the Cedar Rapids Symphony concert broadcasts and contributes to “Know the Score,” KSUI’s arts and humanities series. She has appeared with the Cedar Rapids Symphony Orchestra, Quad City Mozart Festival, Waterloo/Cedar Falls Metropolitan Chorale, La Fosse Baroque Ensemble, early music ensemble Fiocchi di Granturco, University of Iowa Opera Theatre and UI Symphony Orchestra.

MOUNT VERNON — A key negotiator in efforts to bring peace to Northern Ireland will speak on “Working for Peace in a World of Terror” on Thursday, March 20, at Cornell College and St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Cedar Rapids.

Sean Farren was a senior negotiator for the Good Friday Agreement signed April 10, 1998, establishing the peace process in Northern Ireland, where thousands have died in three decades of violence brought on by religious and social conflicts. Farren’s talks, during the week of St. Patrick’s Day, Ireland’s national holiday, are for the annual Small-Thomas Lecture, “Dreams of Peace: Visions of the Future.” The lecture series is a collaboration between Cornell, which is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, and St. Paul’s.

Farren’s Cornell lecture is at 11 a.m. in King Chapel. The lecture at St. Paul’s, which includes a program by a Cornell music ensemble, is at 7 p.m., followed by a reception. Admission is free at both sites.

Farren, a former teacher in Northern Ireland, Europe and Africa, was a lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland when he was elected in 1982 to the Northern Ireland Assembly. He has held government positions as Minister for Higher and Further Education, Training, and Employment, and Minister of Finance and Personnel.

A member of the predominantly Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party, Farren was a senior negotiator during the inter-party talks (1996-98) that led to the Good Friday Agreement. His 2000 book, “Paths to a Settlement in Northern Ireland,” co-authored with Robert F. Mulvihill, details the negotiations that led to the agreement.

The Small-Thomas Lecture, which addresses diversity and community from a faith perspective, is in its fourth year. It was conceived and funded by Richard Small, a past chair of the Cornell board of trustees and a 1950 graduate, and his wife, honorary alumna and trustee Norma Thomas Small. The lecture series honors Norma’s father, the late Cecil Thomas, who was Cornell buildings and grounds superintendent (1956-1973) and consultant (1979-1991), and her mother, the late June Thomas.

MOUNT VERNON — Leslie Loveless, who edited and compiled “A Bountiful Harvest: The Midwestern Farm Photographs of Pete Wettach, 1925-1965,” will talk about the book and give a slide presentation at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 12, in Room 108 of Cole Library on the Cornell College campus.

“A Bountiful Harvest,” published by the University of Iowa Press last summer, contains photos showing people at work and play, dining and sharing time together. The images were taken by A.M. “Pete” Wettach, who made home visits to farms around the state for his work with the Farm Security Administration. In 1949 he quit to become a full-time photographer. He died in 1976.

Loveless, currently living in St. Paul, Minn., discovered several Wettach photos when she was working at the U of I’s Institute for Rural and Environmental Health. Wettach’s son, a physician in Mount Pleasant, allowed Loveless access to thousands of negatives and prints stored in his basement. The collection has been donated to the State Historical Society.

Thirty photos are on exhibit in “Farm Life in Iowa: Photographs by A.M. Wettach,” one of three simultaneous exhibitions at the U of I Museum of Art from March 7 through May 4. The overview exhibit, “Celebrating the Farm: The Art of Living on the Land,” will have an opening reception at the U of I Museum of Art from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, March 9.

Wettach’s photos have appeared in Wallace’s Farmer, National Geographic and the Saturday Evening Post.

MOUNT VERNON — “The Laramie Project,” a play about the murder of a gay college student in Wyoming, is coming to eastern Iowa in a production featuring Cornell College students and professional actors from Riverside Theatre in Iowa City.

Performances in Cornell’s Kimmel Theatre are March 13 at 7 p.m. and March 14 and 15 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $8 for adults and $5 for students and senior citizens. For reservations, call 895-4293.

The play moves to Riverside Theatre, 213 N. Gilbert St., March 28-30, April 3-6 and 9-13. Performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays. For ticket prices and reservations, call (319) 338-7672.

“The Laramie Project,” which became a movie for HBO and another for network television, was the second-most produced play of the 2001-02 season, according to American Theater magazine. The production was sparked by a 1998 hate crime, when Matthew Shepard, 21, was beaten, tied to a fence and left to die by two local men his age whom he met in a Laramie bar. The reaction by local residents was captured in interviews with more than 200 people conducted by members of the Tectonic Theatre Project of New York. The play, edited from transcripts of the interviews, features more than 80 characters. They will be portrayed by 10 actors in the Cornell-Riverside version.

“The play intrigued us because of the issues it explores and the form in which it explores them — as a theatrical documentary,” said director Jody Hovland, Cornell artist-in-residence. “And it’s an actor’s dream with over 80 characters of diverse ages and types. Having a company of both more mature professional actors and young artists makes it possible to bring real variety to this landscape of characters.

“The material has great beauty and courage. It’s sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes wry, sometimes funny, too. So it’s a wonderfully human experience for the actors to share with each other,” she said.

Nearly 500 productions of “The Laramie Project” are taking place worldwide this year, Hovland said.

“It’s providing an opportunity for communities to really engage in the ideas of the play, particularly how we respond to difference in our culture and what it means to fit into a community,” she said. A post-performance discussion is scheduled March 15.

MOUNT VERNON — Athlete and author Leslie Heywood, whose upcoming book examines the rise of women in sports, will speak Thursday, March 6, at Cornell College on gender inequality, athletics and the current attack on Title IX.

Heywood’s lecture, “Bodies, Babes, and the WNBA, or, Where’s Tiger Woods, Naked in a Cape, When You Really Need Him?” is at 11 a.m. in Kimmel Theatre. The lecture is free and open to the public. Two book signings will be held in Harlan Dining Room of The Commons, at 1 p.m. and 6 p.m., with the latter following Heywood’s reading from her 2000 memoir, “Pretty Good for a Girl: An Athlete’s Story.”

Heywood is a competitive powerlifter, vice president of the Women’s Sports Foundation and associate professor of English at the State University of New York in Binghamton. In addition to “Pretty Good for a Girl,” a book about the pressures she faced as an Arizona high school track and cross country star, Heywood has written “Bodymakers” (1998) and was coeditor of “Third Wave Agenda” (1997). “Built to Win,” her soon-to-be-released book with Shari L. Dworkin, examines the popular images vs. the real experiences of female athletes, through interviews with elementary- and high school-age girls and boys; advertising campaigns by Nike, Reebok and others; movies; and the authors’ sports experiences.

In her Cornell lecture, Heywood will discuss the debate over the representation of female athletes: second wave feminists condemn the sexualized images of athletes, but the athletes see this portrayal gaining them money and exposure for their sport and the bodies they have built. Heywood says the images are irrelevant; the corporate bottom line is the larger culprit. She says Title IX, the 1972 law requiring comparable opportunity for women in athletics, needs to remain unchanged in order to maintain or improve participation rates.

MOUNT VERNON — The work of two internationally recognized textile artists will be exhibited in “Textiles: Joan Schulze & Kelly Frigard” opening Sunday, Feb. 16, in the Peter Paul Luce Gallery at Cornell College’s McWethy Hall.

Gallery hours are 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. A closing reception will be Sunday, March 16. Admission to the gallery is free.

California artist Schulze is known worldwide as a major force in the field of contemporary textile art. Her quilts and collages have used common materials such as cotton, linen, silk and paper; plastic fabrics, lint and Velcro; traditional dyes and modern acrylics; hand stitchery, machine stitchery and photo transfer.

“I look at my quilts and collages and see journal entries. I can piece together the narrative of my life. Some events loom large and keep reappearing as a subject. Then a small moment can take over and send me on a different path,” she says.

Her coffee table book, “The Art of Joan Schulze,” won honorable mention last September in the reference books category of the 9th Annual Writer’s Digest National Self-Published Book Awards. To see her work, go to www.joan-of-arts.com.

Frigard works with many traditional techniques including weaving, spinning, embroidery and felting. An assistant professor of art at McPherson College in Kansas, she has shown her work nationally and in Scandinavia.

Cornell will exhibit her installation “Metal, Stone, Bed, Heart, Felt,” which includes 12 miniature beds with embroidery surrounding cast and clay miniature human hearts. Forty miniature knitted and felted dresses and outfits with human hearts form a ring around the beds.

The installation is “inspired by the idea of the human heart as the center of emotion and experience. I want to make a connection to the way we store emotions in the body, and our western association of the heart as the physical place for the soul,” says Frigard, who earned an MFA in intermedia art from the University of Iowa.

MOUNT VERNON — Pianist and saxophonist Deanna Bogart brings a boogie and blues show to Cornell College on Monday, March 3.

The performance is at 8 p.m. in King Chapel. General admission is $8 at the door. This is the final concert in Cornell’s 2002-2003 Music Mondays series.

Blending 1930s boogie piano blues with the contemporary blues of New Orleans, Chicago and Memphis, Bogart delivers a high-energy, piano-pounding performance reminiscent of Marcia Ball, who packed the house during Cornell’s first Music Mondays season in 1998. Bogart’s sixth CD, “Timing Is Everything,” was released last fall.

“Her band never sounds better than when she’s venting — and she vents a lot on ‘People Can Be Just Plain Wrong,’ ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ and ‘(I’d Rather Be Sad) in Las Vegas,’ arguably the finest blues she’s ever written,” said a Washington Post review of “Timing Is Everything.”

Maryland-based Bogart won five Washington Area Music Awards — the “Wammies,” D.C.’s version of the Grammy Awards — on Feb. 9: musician of the year, songwriter of the year, song of the year (”Still the Girl in the Band,” from her latest CD), blues vocalist of the year and blues group of the year.

Bogart hit the scene more than 20 years ago with Cowboy Jazz, a group dedicated to the music of the 1940s western swing. She turned to R&B with another East Coast band, Root Boy Slim’s Capitol Offense, before forming her own band in 1988. Her current band is a well-traveled group. Bass player Eric Scott released his debut solo CD, “Let’s Hear It for the Fools,” in 2002 and a CD with the band Divine Static in 1998. Drummer Mike Aubin, who studied at Berklee College of Music and earned a degree in jazz performance from Towson State, has performed with a string of artists, including Little Feat, B.B. King, Robert Cray, Neville Brothers and James Brown. Kajun Kelley on guitar has two CDs to his credit: “StaleStories, FreshEars” and “Kajun Kelley Project - ‘Moods.’”

MOUNT VERNON — Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon will lecture on “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” at 11 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 13, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell College.

Glendon’s visit is for the annual Earhart-Cornell Lecture series, “The Liberal Arts and the Public Square,” funded by the Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Mich. Admission to the lecture is free.

Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University. She writes and teaches in the fields of human rights, comparative law, constitutional law and legal theory. Her most recent book, “A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” is the story of Mrs. Roosevelt’s proudest achievement: the framing of the United Nations’ declaration of rights so basic that they belong to everyone on earth simply by virtue of being human. The U.N. adopted the measure in 1948.

Named by the National Law Journal as one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America in 1998, Glendon was appointed in 1994 by Pope John Paul II to the newly created Pontifical Academy of Social Science. In 1995 she was chosen by the Vatican to lead its 22-member delegation to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

In 1988, Glendon won the Scribes Book Award from the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects for her comparative study “Abortion and Divorce in Western Law.” Another comparative study, “The Transformation of Family Law,” won the Legal Academy’s highest award, the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 1993.

After receiving bachelor’s, law and master of comparative law degrees from the University of Chicago, Glendon practiced law in Chicago and served as a volunteer civil rights attorney from 1963 to 1968. She taught at Boston College Law School from 1968 to 1986, became law professor at Harvard in 1986 and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School and the Gregorian University in Rome.

Hers is the fifth lecture in the annual Earhart-Cornell Lecture series, which previously has featured Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer; Stephen Carter, Yale University law professor and author; Walter Williams, economist, columnist and commentator; and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

MOUNT VERNON — Three internationally known ceramicists, whose work has been showcased in a monthlong exhibition at Cornell College, will discuss their utilitarian pottery during the exhibition’s closing reception Sunday, Feb. 9, at McWethy Hall.

The closing reception for “Guillermo Cuellar: Influences and Recent Work” is from 2-4 p.m. Cuellar, a 1976 Cornell graduate, Warren MacKenzie of Stillwater, Minn., and Clary Illian of Ely, Iowa, will hold an informal artists’ talk at 3 p.m. in the Peter Paul Luce Gallery.

The three potters met more than 20 years ago at workshops in Caracas, Venezuela. Cuellar has organized more than 20 shows in the past 12 years at his studio in Turgua, Venezuela. He has shown his work in numerous venues including the Venezuelan National Art Gallery, the Northern Clay Center in Minnesota, the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico, the Smithsonian Institution and private galleries in the United States, England, Venezuela and Chile. When he is not making pots, Cuellar leads wilderness trips in Venezuela, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.

MacKenzie, who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1940s, is considered one of America’s greatest living functional potters. His work is exhibited around the world, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and at his gallery in Japan. Illian, a Cedar Rapids native and University of Iowa graduate, has taught in countless venues in the United States and has working collections around the globe. MacKenzie and Illian are former students of famed English ceramicist Bernard Leach.

The Cornell exhibition also features works from the Rose and Angelo Garzio Ceramics and Ethnographic Collection, and the Joan Mannheimer Collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art (UIMA). Among the UIMA pieces are works by Shoji Hamada, Bernard Leach, Michael Leach, John Leach, Byron Temple, Illian, MacKenzie and selected Korean Yi Dynasty pieces. Regular gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free.