What’s New

The Leon Levy Center for Biography, at the Graduate Center/CUNY, held its annual conference on Mar. 18, entitled Writing Writers’ Lives. Biographers including Hermione Lee, Blake Bailey, Jeffrey Cramer, Megan Marshall, and Greg Bellows, among others, discuss the challenges of writing about other writers. The event is free, and open to the public. More information is here.

Sixty-five years after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, the Israeli Antiquities Authority joined with Google to introduce an online library where the public may explore them. Among the 5,000 images posted are some 1,000 of scroll fragments, 3,500 scans of negatives from the 1950s, and a database of about 900 two-thousand-year-old manuscripts — all in a quality never before seen, thanks to new technology developed by NASA.

For more information about this online library and the scrolls project may be found here, and the library may be accessed here.

In advance of the opening ceremonies of the first phase of the historic restoration of Prospect Park, Shelby White speaks about what the park has meant to her and the renaming of the Music Island after her late father Chaim Baier and the dedication of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Esplanade.

“Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan” displays sculptures, wall paintings and fragments from these famous caves of northern China, the latest exhibit of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 E. 84th Street. On view from Sept. 11, 2012, through January 6, 2013, it features a group of remarkable sculptures as well as a full-scale digital 3-D recreation of the interior of one of the site’s impressive caves.

More information is here.

Robert K. Massie, the award-winning author, delivered the Fifth Annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture on Sept. 24 to a sold-out crowd in the Proshansky Auditorium at the Graduate Center/CUNY. Massie’s most recent biography, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, was praised in The New York Times for being “as juicy and suspenseful as the book that thrust him into celebrity when it was published in 1967…Nicholas and Alexandra [which] recreated the tragedy of the last Romanov rulers from the inside out” and in the Wall Street Journal as being “a great story in the hands of a master storyteller.” The book won the 2012 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Nonfiction. 

Sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the lecture aims to shed light on the craft of writing biography. Massie, calling himself a storyteller, talked about the need to create relevance, suspense and immediacy in biographies.

On July 25, the Skyscraper Museum opened Urban Fabric: Building New York’s Garment District, an exhibition exploring the famed Manhattan 7th Avenue area, whose 25 blocks are home to the largest concentration of skyscraper factories in the world. The Foundation supported the research of Andrew Dolkart, the James Marston Fitch Associate Professor of Historic Preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, who guest-curated this exhibition.

The exhibition will continue through Jan. 20, 2013. More information here.

The first Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellows Symposium was held at Rockefeller University on May 16, 2012. Leon Levy Fellows from Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Columbia and New York Universities and Weill Cornell Medical College discussed their neuroscience research. In attendance were their mentors, invited guests, former fellows and principal investigators involved with the program. Cori Bargmann, Director of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior delivered the Plenary Talk.

Jeffrey A. Lieberman, MD, Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Director of the Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellows Program at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons has been elected by the membership of the American Psychiatric Association to be the next president-elect.

Dr. Cori Bargmann, Co-Director of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior at Rockefeller University has been elected to The American Philosophical Society, an honorary society that elects new members each year who have shown extraordinary accomplishments in their fields.

On April 21 and 22, 2012, the Eleuthera One Foundation is presenting five events to promote the heritage and culture of the Island as well as celebrate Earth Day Weekend. The Leon Levy Native Plant Preserve is hosting Birds, Bagels and Brunch on Sunday, April 22nd.