University of Arkansas at Little Rock

UALR will honor Drs. Jonathan Bates and Sally Everson-Bates at the fifth annual Finale 2010 on Saturday, April 24 at the Jack Stephens Center.

Dr. Bates is president and chief executive officer of Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock. Dr. Everson-Bates is an associate hospital administrator for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

The gala begins with cocktails at 6:30 p.m., followed by dinner at 7:30 and entertainment at 8:30 p.m.

Finale celebrates the arts in Central Arkansas and is the premier fundraising event for UALR’s arts programs. The dinner gala features performances and artwork by students. This year’s performance will feature selections by American composer and pianist George Gershwin (1898-1937). Proceeds from the event benefit UALR art, music, and theatre arts and dance students and programs.

“The Drs. Bates are amazing leaders in the Central Arkansas community,” said Deborah Baldwin, dean of the UALR College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. “We are honored that they would assist us in raising awareness about how arts programs enrich the communities in which we live.”

Arts organizations from around the region lend their support to Finale each year. This year’s participating arts partners are Accademia dell’Arte, Arkansas Arts Center, Arkansas Festival Ballet, Arkansas Repertory Theatre, and the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.

Presenting sponsors of the 2010 events are the Stella Boyle Smith Trust and Glazer’s Distributors of Arkansas. Premier sponsors include ACH and Simmons First National Bank, and sustaining sponsors are Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield and UAMS. Craig O’Neill of Today’s THV will serve as master of ceremonies. This is his third year to host the event.

Reservations to Finale are $150 each. Call 501-569-3296 for more information.

Jonathan Bates, M.D. earned his doctorate of medicine at the University of Missouri School of Medicine and was chief resident at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston, a Harvard teaching hospital.

Bates also did a two-year tour of duty in the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office and eventually became the senior vice president at Children’s Hospital and Health Center in San Diego. He has been President and CEO of ACH since May 1993.

He has served on the board of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra Society, including chairman of the board from 1999 to 2000, and currently serves as a member of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra Foundation board. In the past, Bates has been a board member of both the Child Health Corporation of America and the National Association of Children Health Related Institute.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences awarded Dr. Bates the Chancellor’s Award in 2001, and the Lions World Services recognized him with their “Vision Award” in 2005. He currently serves on the Governor’s Roundtable Task Force on Health.

Sally Everson-Bates, RN, DNSc received her master of arts in nursing in child psychiatry at New York University and her doctorate of nursing science, nursing administration at the University of San Diego. Everson-Bates was director of nursing research, education and quality Improvement and the assistant director, patient care services at the University of California, San Diego.

She is a member of Sigma Theta Tau, Organization of Nurse Executives, Arkansas, the American Organization of Nurse Executives and Western Society for Research in Nursing. She has received honors in Sigma Theta Tau, Zeta Mu Chapter and the Doctoral Award for Academic Excellence and Leadership.

The couple has one daughter, Samantha, a practicing nurse who is a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Dr. Lillian Nayder, an expert on Charles Dickens and currently the chair of English at Bates College in Maine, will present a public lecture at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 8, on the marriage of the novelist and his wife.

The lecture, “Marriage and Mesmerism: The Union of Charles and Catherine Dickens,” kicks off the spring schedule of the William G. Cooper, Jr., Honors Program in English.

The lecture in Donaghey Student Center Room 205G is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the presentation.

Zabelle Stodola, director of the UALR Honors Program in English, said the talk will examine the fascinating but highly fraught relationship between Charles and Catherine Dickens.

Nayder has published three books, most recently “Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship,” published by Cornell University Press in 2002.

A fourth book is forthcoming this year, also from Cornell, titled “The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth.” Nayder is also the author of many articles on Dickens and other Victorian writers.

For more information, contact Stodola at 501-569-3161 or kzstodola@ualr.edu.

The Irish publishing world will unveil on Thursday, Jan. 21, a new book by UALR Professor Moira Maguire on the history of childhood in Ireland after the country gained independence from England in the 1920s.

Precarious Childhood in Post-Independence Ireland, published by Manchester University Press, examines how the Irish state cared for poor, illegitimate children after its war of independence with Great Britain.

Maguire, interim chair of UALR’s Department of History, will be honored at the launch of the book at the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM). The book focuses on children who formed a significant proportion of the Irish population but have been seemingly ignored in the historical record. She re-evaluates Catholic influence on Irish society from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Maguire began Precarious Childhood more than 10 years ago when researching a dissertation on infanticide in Ireland led her to NUIM.

“Even as I was finishing my dissertation, my intellectual focus was shifting to broader questions of children, childhood, and state care for poor children,” she said.

Much of Maguire’s research was included in the Ryan Report, an investigation by the Irish government through the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) into all forms of abuse in Irish institutions for children.

The majority of allegations centered on the system of 60 residential reformatory and industrial schools operated by Catholic religious orders and funded and supervised by the Irish Departments of Health and Education.

When the Ryan Commission released its final reports in May 2009, the evidence of rampant neglect and physical and sexual abuse received worldwide media attention and led to troubling questions about how such a state of affairs could have existed in a democratic western society.

“The media, as well as the Ryan Report, missed the real message of this dark period in Irish history,” Maguire said. “The media chose to focus on the most salacious elements of the Ryan Report, such as the sexual abuse that occurred in many of the boys’ schools. The report overlooked the historical context of the industrial school system.”

The Catholic Church received the brunt of worldwide criticism. Many people called for investigations into church activities, legal action against Catholic clergy and prominent Catholic leaders, and demands for compensation and restitution for victims of alleged abuse and neglect.

In her book, Maguire concludes that Irish society failed poor and marginalized children.

“The Departments of Health and Education, who had legal responsibility for the children involved, failed in their duties to provide for and protect them,” she said.

“District court justices willingly committed children to industrial schools whose parents were guilty of nothing more than poverty, and inspectors from the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children seem to have made it their mission to take children away from parents who did not conform to middle-class standards of respectability.”

For more information about her book or her research in the Ryan Report, contact Maguire at (501) 569-3235 or at mjmaguire@ualr.edu.

UALR’s Artspree, the University’s performing arts series featuring diverse and celebrated artists and musicians from around the world, presents Yeol Eum Son on piano at 3 p.m.  Sunday, January 31 in the Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall at UALR’s Fine Arts Building.

Tickets are $20 for the main floor, $17 for the balcony, $10 for non-UALR students, and free for UALR students. Group discounts are available. All UALR faculty and staff will receive a free companion ticket with a purchase of an individual ticket. For more information, call 569-3288.

The concert program will include Four Sonatas by Scarlatti, Miroirs by Ravel, Danse Macabre by Saint-Saens/Liszt, and the Complete Preludes, Op.32 by Rachmaninoff.

At the age of 23, Son’s performances earned her the 2009 Silver Medal at the 13th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. She has also been a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic on several occasions, most recently as part of the orchestra’s historic visit to Seoul.

Son is the recipient of many international awards including third prize at the 2005 Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Israel, and first prizes at Italy’s 2002 Viotti International Music Competition and the 2000 Ettlington International Piano Competition in Germany.