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The Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery has announced the opening of “Sanctuary,” a curated exhibition that unites the creative work of seven artists to explore definitions of home. Together, the images and objects of these New England-based artists examine the sanctuaries we construct, both real and imagined.

Curated by Beth Kantrowitz and Kathleen O’Hara of Drive-by Projects in Watertown, Massachusetts, “Sanctuary” will run through Wednesday, Nov. 1. An opening reception will be held from 5-7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5 in the gallery, with a talk by the curators at 6 p.m.

Is a house a sanctuary? Civilizations throughout history have constructed
 shelters to protect from the elements, invaders and predators, but at a certain point people craved more than mere refuge from physical discomfort and danger. Social and commercial issues such as privacy, family needs and status emerged and influenced the types of dwellings that were built and inhabited. As an ideology of “home” has taken shape over time, an elemental question prevails: When does a house provide the sanctuary of a home, and at what point does it lose its homey status?

Works in the exhibition include Emily Hass’ spare, poignant, architecture-based drawings, Kelly Sherman’s “Family House” floor plans and Kathleen O’Hara’s wallpaper/painting installation “Peep Show.” Fritz Hortsman’s small models taken from the formworks of buildings he has known intimately occupy wall and floor space, along with Linda Nagaoka’s bone white ceramic sculpture of resilient plant forms that emerged from the ruins of the Hiroshima bombing.

Photography in the exhibition includes Remi Thorton’s spooky nighttime photographs of abandoned buildings and Kelly Sherman’s “Sofas” series of the artist testing sofas in a Crate and Barrel store. Julia Hechtman’s video “A Man Out of Time (For CM)” documents a bearded, tattooed man’s experience of REM sleep. The inherent contradiction of this film with its cozy, serene bed and the slightly threatening bad-boy persona of the sleeping man ask the elemental question posed by the exhibition, “when is a home really a sanctuary?”

The gallery is handicap accessible with parking along Lawrence and Leroy avenues. Its exhibits are open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays and noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The gallery is closed on Mondays.

A biologist and a political scientist, both with expertise in the cybersecurity realm, will discuss career opportunities in technology and national security available to young people, hurdles women experience in the field and strategies for career success when they lead a “Warrior Women” panel discussion at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5 in the Bazarsky Lecture Hall.

Dr. Andrea Limbago, chief social scientist for Endgame, and Dr. Elizabeth Prescott, director of curriculum for science, technology and international affairs at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, will serve as the featured panelists in “Warrior Women: Science and Tech Edition.” The discussion will be moderated by Jennifer McArdle, assistant professor in the Department of Administration of Justice and a fellow in defense studies at the American Foreign Policy Council.

The panel discussion will focus specifically on science and technology careers in national security and is meant to appeal to people with traditional science and technology backgrounds, as well as those with classic liberal arts degrees.

Throughout history, cycles of technological innovation have fundamentally altered society, with profound implications for national security. From the rise of artificial intelligence and autonomy to bioengineering and the use of cyber and information weapons, new science and technologies change the national security landscape and raise interesting policy dilemmas that the defense and national security community must grapple with.

Limbago, who directs and contributes to Endgame’s technical content, has a background in quantitative social science and direct operational support, and writes extensively on the geopolitics of the cyber domain, policy and data science. She has previously worked in academia (New York University) and government (Joint Warfare Analysis Center).

Prescott has served in government at the Department of Defense, Department of State and the intelligence community as well as an American Association for the Advancement of Science science and technology policy congressional fellow with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

This is the second panel discussion in the Warrior Women series, which seeks to empower young people – particularly women – to pursue careers in national security.

Salve Regina’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force is inviting members of the University community to participate in its annual campus-wide read and book discussion, featuring Atwood lecturer Christina Sharpe’s second book, “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.”

The discussion will be held at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 18 in the McKillop Library. Copies of the book are available in the library for those interested in participating.

Published in 2016, “In the Wake” interrogates literary, visual, cinematic and quotidian representations of black life that comprise what Sharpe calls the “orthography of the wake.” Activating multiple registers of “wake” – the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness – Sharpe illustrates how black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.

Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of “the wake,” “the ship,” “the hold” and “the weather,” Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature black death as normative. Formulating the wake and “wake work” as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness and possibility for living in diaspora, “In the Wake” offers a way forward.

Sharpe is a professor at Tufts University in the Department of English and the programs in Africana and women’s, gender and sexuality studies. Her first book, “Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects,” was published in 2010. Sharpe’s research interests include black visual studies, mid-19th century to contemporary African-American literature and culture, black queer studies and black diaspora studies.

User Support Services will sponsor a series of Microsoft workshops for members of the Salve Regina community throughout the month of October. Dan Titus, associate director of User Support Services, will conduct the workshops in the McKillop Library, Room 005.

Participants may attend any or all of the sessions. For more information on any of the offerings listed below, contact Titus at (401) 341-2451 or titusd@salve.edu.

Tech Tuesdays

• 11 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 10: Excel. Does Excel scare you? Conquer that fear and learn the basics along with some advanced features of Excel. The workshop will cover formatting, tables, conditionals, formulas and more.
• 11 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 17: OneNote. This workshop will explore the features of the digital note-taking program OneNote, a type of free-form information collecting that can even be used collaboratively.
• 11 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 24: Word. Learn both basic and advanced skills for the king of word processors. Designed for any community member – both new and seasoned, with or without Word experience.
• 11 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 31: PowerPoint. Participants will look at most of the program, from text and images to animations, transitions, Back Stage View and a lot in between.

Office365 Thursdays

Become acquainted with Salve Regina’s cloud-based Office suite. Look at some familiar programs like mail, Word and Excel and see what’s new, including Sway, Yammer, Delve and OneDrive. Harness the power of the cloud to collaborate with others and extend your reach.

Workshops will be held at 11 a.m. on the following Thursdays: Oct. 5, 12, 19 and 26.

Self-Study Office Certification

Advance your skills with the new Microsoft Office Specialist certification from the comfort and convenience of your desk or couch. This offering will use the new Microsoft Office learning management system. As always, the instructor is available for reviewing any questions you might have.

Individual and Department-Based Training

User Support Services offers individual or department-based training on a wide variety of programs, including Colleague, WebAdvisor and portal, Office 2016, Office 365, video teleconferencing, Windows 10, iOS and OSX, video and audio editing. They can also scan pictures, slides, negatives/positive and video transfer from older formats.

Led by an interdepartmental steering committee of faculty and staff, Salve Regina is implementing a civic action plan, which seeks to strengthen the University’s commitment to living out its mercy mission and vision in increasingly tangible and measurable ways.

Through curricular and co-curricular programming, the plan envisions a transformation of the University by focusing on the critical concerns of the Sisters of Mercy – earth, immigration, women, racism and nonviolence – as the basis for social action.

The civic action plan follows a four-year cycle, with each year focused on one of the critical concerns and a baseline of nonviolence. The focus of the current academic year is race.

“The plan aims to prepare students to be active promoters of democracy in their lives and to engage our entire community on how we might address the mercy critical concerns on campus and beyond,” said Dr. Laura O’Toole, chair of the community engagement steering committee, which is guiding and monitoring the plan’s implementation. “This plan follows a larger trend to bring civic engagement and democratic participation back to U.S. campuses.”

The plan is also supported by the Davis Educational Foundation, from which the University received a grant last year. The three-year grant enhances Salve Regina’s efforts to intentionally infuse community engagement and civic learning into the curriculum, with community partners as co-educators and community needs driving those partners’ collaborative projects with faculty and students.

“The model of course development that the grant is supporting is specifically aligned with what the civic action plan compels us to do, which is to have our campus community learn about these critical concerns and issues related to them,” O’Toole said.

The Davis grant and the civic action plan are creating opportunities for faculty to collaborate with partners to put students’ skills to work for the public good and for the whole community to engage with the mercy concerns.

“We already have many ways for students to be involved as volunteers in their communities, but this plan asks us all to be sensitive to the problems that confront our democracy and to be change agents,” O’Toole said. “We’ve talked about aligning curricular and co-curricular programs for a long time at Salve, but now we have the structure to accomplish it.”

Members of the University community who want to engage with co-curricular programming related to the plan are encouraged to check the event listings on the civic action plan webpage.

The framework for the plan was provided by Campus Compact, a national coalition of more than 1,000 colleges and universities dedicated solely to campus-based civic engagement. Two years ago, in recognition of its 30th anniversary, Campus Compact asked its members to declare their shared commitment to the public purposes of higher education and develop civic action plans to more fully realize those purposes.

Salve Regina and Rhode Island native Ann Hood – the best-selling author of 14 novels, three memoirs and books for young adults – have teamed up to launch The Newport MFA, the state’s first low-residency Master of Fine Arts degree program in creative writing.

Beginning next June, aspiring writers can pursue the terminal degree in their field by attending eight-day residencies in Newport twice a year (with an optional winter residency being offered in Havana, Cuba) that will connect them with established professionals in a location steeped in literary history. Henry James, Thornton Wilder and Edith Wharton are among those to be inspired by Newport.

“One of the appeals when you’re deciding on a low-residency program is you want somewhere special,” said Hood, founding director of The Newport MFA. “You want somewhere beautiful. We all know how breathtaking Newport is and Salve Regina University’s oceanside campus is gorgeous.”

These intensive residencies will offer specialization in fiction, poetry, nonfiction or young adult writing with daily workshops, craft lectures, manuscript consultations and keynote readings. Students will be initiated into the writing life as well as the business of publishing and editing, and will spend the months between residencies writing and reflecting in individualized mentorships with eminent writers.

Hood, who has taught at many low-residency MFA programs across the country during her distinguished career, says when she was first approached about starting one in Newport by Jen McClanaghan, Salve Regina’s writer-in-residence, it was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. “Not only because it was right in my backyard,” Hood said, “but I thought, here’s the opportunity for me to take the best of all the ones that I’ve taught in and put all of that together in one program. So I feel like we’re really bringing the best of all those programs to one place.”

The 48-credit MFA program requires four residencies and four mentorships, in addition to a final graduation residency. In addition to actively recruiting students for the inaugural class this summer, Hood has been busy lining up instructors and mentors who will be teaching in the program.

“I’ve had the great pleasure of reaching out to the writers who have become my friends, my professional colleagues, who are names that everyone has heard to invite them here both as teachers but also to come and give readings and craft talks as special guests,” Hood said. “And we have a list that is really going to dazzle anyone who reads and loves literature.”

McClanaghan said one reason The Newport MFA will stand apart from other programs is because of Hood. “She is charismatic, hilarious and deeply connected to the national literary community,” she said. “In addition to her own reputation as a best-selling author, she is also someone who brings people together easily, a kind of alchemy of personality that is magnetic.”

For more information or to apply, call the Office of Graduate Studies and Continuing Education at (800) 637-0002 or visit salve.edu/mfa.