Bryn Mawr College

In today’s increasingly technological world, math and science literacy is a prerequisite for success in many careers. How can educators help all students succeed in math and science and hence have equal access to the opportunities of our society?

Mathematicians, scientists, students, and educators from around the region will gather at Bryn Mawr to offer their answers to that question on Wednesday, March 19, at a symposium in Thomas Great Hall.

Author James Salter, whose collection Dusk and Other Stories was awarded the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award, will be reading his work at Bryn Mawr College’s Thomas Great Hall at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 20. The reading is free and open to the public.

A New York Times headline once referred to Salter as “The Fighter Pilot Who Aimed for Fiction but Lived on Film.” And while it’s true that Salter spent 12 years in the military (iincluding combat in the Korean War as a fighter pilot) and wrote several screenplays—the most successful being the Robert Redford vehicle Downhill Racer— it is his passion for the written word for which he clearly hopes to be remembered.

Mai Yamani '79, a leading expert on Saudi Arabia, will return to the College this month to give a talk titled "Initiative and Inertia: Saudi Politics at Home and Abroad." The lecture will take place Monday, March 17, at 7:30 p.m. in the Ely Room of Wyndham Alumnae House and is free and open to the public.

Yamani, who was the first Saudi woman to earn a doctorate from Oxford, is currently a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. A social anthropologist who has done extensive field research in Saudi Arabia, she is the author of Changed Identities: The Challenge of the New Generation in Saudi Arabia and Cradle of Islam: The Hijaz and the Quest for an Arabian Identity, the co-author of The Rule of Law in the Middle East and the Islamic World: Human Rights and the Judicial Process, and the editor of Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives.  

Does the spread of democracy really lead to international peace? On Thursday, March 20, Edward Mansfield, the University of Pennsylvania's Hum Rosen Professor of Political Science, will address the question in a talk titled "Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War." The lecture, hosted by Bryn Mawr's Center for the Social Sciences and the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, will be presented at 4:15 p.m. in Thomas 224; it is free and open to the public.