MOUNT VERNON — The Cornell Jazz Combo and Cornell Jazz Ensemble will perform Wednesday, May 5, at 8 p.m. in Ringer Recital Studio of Armstrong Hall. Admission is free.

The Cornell Jazz Combo will perform a program including the jazz standards “Pennies from Heaven” and “Take Five,” plus a new blues called “Awesome Sauce” composed and arranged expressly for the combo by director Don Chamberlain. “Take Five” was written by alto saxophonist Paul Desmond and became one of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s best-known numbers. “Little Sunflower” (written by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard) and “Dealer Takes Four” (recorded by T.S. Monk in 1994) round out the combo’s concert.

The Cornell Jazz Ensemble will present a sendoff performance prior to its trip to New Orleans and Kansas City, which is part of a class exploring the origins and major performers of two important styles of early jazz. In keeping with the theme of the trip, the band will play a swinging rendition of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” arranged by Les Hooper. Other pieces are inspired by the big bands of the Kansas City jazz scene, especially the Count Basie and Benny Moten bands, including “The Red Bank Express” (Basie was born in Red Bank, N.J.) and the Basie favorite “Li’l Darlin’” composed by Neal Hefti.

Since many of the Kansas City bands were “riff” bands, the Jazz Ensemble will perform two “head charts” - arrangements created during the performance - based on the tunes “Moten Swing” and the Jazz Ensembles’ original blues called “A Cold One.” Members of the band learn the melody and chord changes for a tune and then play a variety of riffs and solos to create the arrangement.

MOUNT VERNON — The women’s studies program at Cornell College will mark 20 years with a commemorative lecture by program founder professor Diane Crowder on Thursday, April 22, at 11:10 a.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Crowder, professor of French and women’s studies, will talk about Monique Wittig, French writer, theorist and a founding leader of the French feminist and lesbian movements, in a lecture titled “Remembering Wittig: A Personal Memoire.”

Crowder has published numerous articles on Wittig’s works and was one of three American scholars invited to participate in an international conference in Paris in 2001 recognizing the publication of Wittig’s collected articles in her native France. The French newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur commented that Wittig was the most important philosopher in the global feminist movement since Simone de Beauvoir published “The Second Sex” in 1949. Wittig died in 2003 at the age of 68.

Crowder was instrumental in founding Cornell’s women’s studies program in 1984. She also developed each of the three core courses in the women’s studies major: Theory and Methodology of Women’s Studies, Feminist Theories and the Senior Seminar. Today Cornell’s women’s studies program is an interdisciplinary program that includes approximately 20 faculty who represent a wide range of disciplines at Cornell.

MOUNT VERNON — The eighth annual Cornell College Student Symposium will feature research by students Saturday, April 17, from 9 a.m. to 2:40 p.m. at The Commons. Admission is free to the event, which is open to the public.

“The Student Symposium serves as a venue for some of our most engaged and accomplished students to share their work with the broader campus community and others, and it demonstrates the remarkable range of interests being productively pursued in and beyond the classroom at Cornell,” said Dennis Damon Moore, dean of the college.

Topics include biodiesel fuel, capital punishment, fire coral, ornate box turtles, abortion and the Gulf wars.

The symposium, which originated as a way to spark intellectual conversation and growth on campus, is one of the premier events at Cornell. This year, 48 students worked with 27 faculty members in 16 different departments and programs. Presentations will take one of two formats: lectures of about 20 minutes apiece summarizing projects and their findings, at three sessions in Hedges Conference Room and Harlan Dining Room (9 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 1:15 p.m.) and one session in the Rathskeller (9 a.m.); and poster presentations offering visual displays of projects along with explanatory comments, at two sessions (9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 2:40 p.m.) on the Orange Carpet.

After the symposium, Cornell’s Delta of Iowa chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will hold its annual induction ceremony at 3 p.m. in Harlan Dining Room, followed by a reception. Sixteen students have been selected for membership based on academic potential, scholarship, creativity, professional attitude and character. Phi Beta Kappa considers members from the top 15 percent of the senior class and the top 5 percent of the junior class.

Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest and most widely respected academic honorary society in the United States. There are 270 Phi Beta Kappa chapters in the United States, including seven in Iowa. Cornell’s Delta of Iowa chapter was the fourth chartered in Iowa, in 1923.

MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College students will host “The Gumbo Project,” a performance festival featuring traditional theater, standup comedy and performance art, Friday and Saturday, April 23 and 24, at 8 p.m. in the Plumb-Fleming Studio Theatre, a 120-seat black box theater in Armstrong Hall. Free tickets are available at the door.

Scheduled performances are:

- “Hold for Three,” a short comic play featuring freshmen Jess Dunne of Minneapolis, Haley Isaf of Bainbridge Island, Wash., and Parker Reynolds of Leawood, Kan.

- “Sisters,” a play about a conversation during a tennis match, featuring freshmen Colleen Metzger of Naperville, Ill., and Holli Gipson of Fort Worth, Texas, and sophomore Joe Foley of Mendota Heights, Minn.

- A standup comedy routine by Christopher Schlichting, senior from Davenport.

- A musical performance by Hannah Gansen, junior from Toddville.

- “What Are You Doing In There?,” a short drama, directed by freshman Joey Flinn of Naperville, Ill., and featuring Ryan Hitchon, junior from Jackson, Tenn.; Jackie Johnson, sophomore from Eden Prairie, Minn., and Parker Reynolds.

- A dance performance featuring seniors Amber Swenson of Brooklyn Park, Minn., Jenny Dowker of Niantic, Conn., and Lauren Bene of Fremont, Calif.; and juniors Sarah Gerencher of Joliet, Ill., Maureen Cook of Richland Center, Wis., and Stephanie Pisarik of Mount Vernon.

MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College music ensembles will perform in two spring concerts during April. Both concerts are in King Chapel and admission is free.

The Cornell Wind Ensemble, under the direction of Martin Hearne, performs at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 16. The concert will feature two chamber ensembles: the Cornell Woodwind Quintet will perform a movement of a quintet by Haydn, and the Cornell Brass Quintet will perform three spirituals by John Barnes Chance, “Go Down Moses,” “My Lord, What a Morning” and “Joshua.”

Two guest conductors — junior Andrew Buck of Highland, Ill., and junior John Feldman of Lisbon — will direct the Wind Ensemble in the two movements of “English Folk Song Suite” by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

The Cornell Concert Choir and Chamber Singers, under the direction of Lisa Hearne, perform at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 18.

The Concert Choir’s program will feature American folk songs “Shenandoah” and “Down in the Valley,” sung by men’s chorus, plus two opera choruses, “Neighbors’ Chorus” by Offenbach and “O pastorelle, addio” by Giordano, sung by women’s chorus. The program also includes “O Schöne Nacht” by Johannes Brahms, and the American spiritual “Great Day” with soloists Jim Thompson of Mount Pleasant and Amber Swenson of Brooklyn Park, Minn., both vocal music education majors.

The Chamber Singers will present jazz selections “Smile” and “When I Fall in Love,” as well as madrigals and motets from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Featured works include Hungarian composer Gyorgy Orban’s dramatic anthem “Daemon Irrepit Callidus,” Norman Dello Joio’s “Come to Me, My Love,” based on poetry by Christina Rossetti, and John Tavener’s “The Lamb,” based on the poem by William Blake. The finale, “Tangueando” by Argentinian composer Oscar Escalada, is a showpiece based on polyrhythms and nonsensical syllables created by the composer.

MOUNT VERNON — William Parsons, chief of staff of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and an award-winning graduate of Cornell College, will speak at Cornell on Thursday, April 15, at 11 a.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons.

Parsons will speak on “Holocaust Remembrance and Confronting Genocide.” He will deliver the same lecture that evening, at 7:30 p.m., at All Saints Catholic Church for the Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) service.

Parsons also will lecture at Mount Mercy College on Wednesday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m. in Cherry Heritage Hall, and at Coe College on April 15 at 3 p.m. in Hickok Hall’s Kesler Room. The title of these talks is “The Memory of the Holocaust Can Help Confront Injustice.”

All lectures are free and open to the public. Sponsors include the Thaler Holocaust Memorial Fund and Cedar Rapids’ Jewish-Christian Dialogue Group.

Parsons has served as the chief of staff for the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., since 1996. The museum’s mission is “to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy; to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.”

In 2002, Parsons received Cornell’s highest honor, the Distinguished Achievement Award, in recognition of his “passion for education and teaching.” The award cited Parsons as one who “embodies the mission of Cornell College to empower students for leadership through productive careers and humane service in the global community.”

Education has been Parsons’ primary passion. Prior to becoming chief of staff, he worked with the Holocaust museum’s director to develop an education program used by teachers throughout the United States. Parsons also co-founded the Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation Inc., where he directed curriculum programming that was taught to over half a million children nationwide annually. The foundation received exemplary marks from the U.S. Department of Education in 1980 and 1984. Parsons also has served as a consultant on such PBS series as “Africans in America” and “Eyes on the Prize.”

He began his educational career teaching social studies and English in Brookline, Mass., public schools after earning a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Wisconsin.

He has co-authored two books on genocide, “Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior” and “Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views.”