MOUNT VERNON — The acting dean of Colorado College will become the new dean at Cornell College on July 1.

Brenda Tooley, acting dean of the faculty at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, has been named Cornell’s dean of the college and vice president for academic affairs, the chief academic officer and second-ranking administrator at Cornell.

She will replace Dennis Moore, who is retiring. Moore has been Cornell’s dean since 1987. He came to Cornell from Beloit College, where he was a faculty member in the English department.

Colorado College is a private, liberal arts college that operates on the Block Plan, an academic calendar similar to Cornell’s One-Course-At-A-Time. Students study a single subject for a three-and-a-half-week term, with nine terms in Cornell’s school year.

Tooley is in her sixth year in the Colorado College dean’s office, including five years as associate dean. She came to Colorado College in 1991 as a faculty member in the English department after earning a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Fort Hays State University.

“Her familiarity with the Block Plan, with grant support, and generally her experience with most aspects of our dean’s responsibilities were all important to us,” said Jim White, Cornell philosophy professor and chair of the dean search committee.

Tooley was one of four candidates who interviewed on campus for the position following a national search that began last summer.

At Colorado College, Tooley’s responsibilities have included coordinating a new-faculty mentoring program and associated faculty development initiatives, such as support for department chairs and interdisciplinary program directors; leading the First Year Experience program; working with grants officers to prioritize and design major proposals; developing international studies and interdisciplinary programs; working with the institutional research staff to develop and manage assessment practices at the college; implementing a new general education curriculum; and coordinating a $7.9 million gift from the Priddy Trust to strengthen admissions practices in the Southwest and to support student success initiatives at the college.

MOUNT VERNON — A former professor from Alaska who performs nationwide as a fiddling poet makes a stop at Cornell College on Wednesday, March 2, at 8 p.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Ken Waldman combines old-time fiddling, original poetry and storytelling. His two full-length poetry collections are “Nome Poems,” about his two years teaching writing courses by telephone to students in remote Alaska villages, and “To Live on this Earth,” featuring poems about Alaska plus old-time music and dance. His three CDs are “A Week in Eek,” “Burnt Down House” and “Music Party.”

Waldman’s appearance is part of Cornell’s ongoing Visiting Writer Series sponsored by the English department.

MOUNT VERNON — The female vocal ensemble Tapestry, whose trademark is combining medieval repertory and contemporary compositions , returns to Cornell College for a performance in King Chapel at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 21 .

This is the third of four concerts in Cornell’s Music Mondays series. General admission is $8 at the door.

Boston-based Tapestry made its Music Mondays debut in 2000. On their encore visit, Laurie Monahan (mezzo-soprano) and Cristi Catt (soprano), joined for the first time at Cornell by Carolann Buff (mezzo-soprano) and Elizabeth Anker (contralto), will perform a concert version of their CD “Sapphire Night.” Tapestry pairs the works of 12th-century German nun Hildegard von Bingen with a song cycle by contemporary composer Patricia Van Ness, “The Nine Orders of the Angels.”

This “vocal symphony” was tailored for the ensemble and is a favorite among their U.S. and international audiences. The cycle progresses through the nine ranks of angels from those closest to man, the guardian angels, to the Seraph Michael, the angel closest to God.

Gramophone magazine described Tapestry’s approach to the music of Hildegard von Bingen as “utter perfection.” The Boston Globe said, “The group is remarkable for beauty of sound, exact tuning and precision of ensemble. … The women can achieve an extraordinary blend, but the sound never dissolves into anonymity. Each individual voice has character, so the ensemble sound is prismatic and multifaceted.”

The remaining concert in the Music Mondays series is the saxophone group Prism Quartet on March 14.

MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College art faculty will exhibit their work in a show Feb. 20 through March 20 in the Peter Paul Luce Gallery of McWethy Hall on campus. A reception is Sunday, March 6, from 2 to 4 p.m.

Regular hours for the gallery are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free.

Featured artists are Susan Coleman, Doug Hanson, Janet Lauroesch, Tony Plaut and Maria Schutt of Mount Vernon and Sandra Dyas of Iowa City. Media choices include assemblage, ceramics, collage, drawing, fibers installation and photography.

Coleman’s drawings focus on a spiritual dimension found in nature. “Despite its long history in western art, I feel that the subject of landscape can serve as a fresh and relevant path for interpreting the human condition,” she says. “Landscape can make reference to a larger journey.”

Hanson’s ceramic forms are deeply grounded in the utilitarian pottery traditions of England and Japan. “…Those Western and Eastern influences come together in the earthiness of the soda fumed skin on bare clay exteriors, but with a smooth functional glaze covering the interior surfaces,” he says. “All these elements are put together to hopefully form a cohesive whole, but equally important in my work is the consideration of the function of each as it is to be used in our eating and drinking.”

Lauroesch’s series of photographic images reflect her recent travels in Australia and Hawaii. The collection is called “Still Life II: White Crosses and Leis.” She says, “Although burial grounds are conceived as final resting places for those memorialized there, by capturing the effects of gravity, weather, season, time, even neglect upon the tombs, the photographs maintain that change is still taking place and is very much a life force there.”

Plaut’s recent assemblages are primarily “found” materials with a mechanical aspect, which is activated by winding a spring-driven motor. “The inherent beauty of collage and assemblage work is that it takes items from the ‘ordinary world’ and allows them to retain their individual associations, yet at the same time creates a new set of unexpected and unpredictable associations,” he says.

Schutt’s recent work, titled “Widows of 9/11,” explores the themes of death and remembrance. Her colorful hand-cut paper veils bring to mind Mexican motifs surrounding the Day of the Dead.

Dyas presents a series of photographic collages, “All You Can Eat,” where the viewer encounters abundance for the visual plate. “My interest in photography lies in the people and the visual ambience of an environment,” she says. “After photographing the East Village, I created 13 rather large collages using my images, text and mixed media. I enjoy using multiple photographs in a piece. It reminds me of how films and videos are made.”

MOUNT VERNON — Social philosopher and author Michael Novak will speak on “Islam and Democracy” at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 16, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell College.

Novak’s visit is for the 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.

Novak, a prolific author who once intended to join the priesthood, currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., where he is director of social and political studies. His books include “On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding,” “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism” and “The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations is not Inevitable,” published last fall. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including the National Review, the New Republic and the Atlantic.

During his career, he has been a college professor at Stanford, the State University of New York College at Old Westbury and Syracuse; an adviser and speechwriter for Democratic candidates including R. Sargent Shriver, Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; and chief of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva in 1981 and 1982. He joined the American Enterprise Institute in 1978.

In 1994 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, a nearly $1 million award at the time. Other Templeton honorees have been Mother Teresa and the Rev. Billy Graham.

Novak’s is the sixth lecture in the Earhart-Cornell series, which previously has featured U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; evolutionary biologist and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould; Yale University law professor and author Stephen Carter; Harvard University legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon; and Walter Williams, economist, columnist and commentator.

MOUNT VERNON — Mount Vernon resident Gretchen Sutherland will speak on “The History of Women at Cornell College” at 11 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 17, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell. Admission is free.

Women have played a significant role throughout Cornell’s history. Cornell, founded in 1853, was the first college west of the Mississippi to grant women the same rights and privileges as men and the first college in Iowa to confer a baccalaureate degree on a woman, Mary Fellows in 1858. Cornell was the first U.S. college to grant a full professorship to a woman, Harriette J. Cooke in 1871, with a salary equal to her male colleagues.

Sutherland’s doctoral dissertation focuses on the history of women at Cornell. Her talk is one of many events during the second half of the academic year that will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the women’s studies program at Cornell.

MOUNT VERNON — Marvin Bell, former poet laureate of Iowa and a professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, will read from his work at Cornell College on Tuesday, Feb. 15, at 7 p.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Bell has published more than 15 collections of poetry, including “Iris of Creation,” “The Book of the Dead Man,” “Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000” and his most recent, “Rampant.” He has taught at the Writers’ Workshop since 1965 and served two terms (2000-2004) as Iowa poet laureate. Robert Dana, Cornell professor of English and poet-in-residence emeritus, succeeded Bell as Iowa poet laureate.

Following the reading, Bell will answer questions about his work.

The reading is part of Cornell’s ongoing Visiting Writer Series sponsored by the English department.