"Mind and Memory," a popular public lecture series and undergraduate course, has received a $5,000 grant from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The grant will help support the "Mind and Memory" series, directed by Diane Ackerman under the aegis of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. Ackerman, visiting professor in the society, is a renowned poet and naturalist and author of A Natural History of the Senses.

The Wilson grant is part of a new program launched in partnership with Imagining America, a national initiative sponsored by the White House Millennium Council and based at the University of Michigan. Seven universities received $5,000 grants to support the public outreach work of university artists, humanists and designers. The grants recognize civic scholarship that addresses issues of cultural or social significance at the local, regional and national levels.

Cornell's "Mind and Memory" series explores the nature of creativity in a variety of fields as presented by specialists in those fields. The course seeks to redefine the role of outreach in humanistic and artistic education while also serving as an accredited section for undergraduates. This spring up to 140 students registered for a section of the cross-disciplinary course, which includes Monday afternoon public lectures that draw upwards of 200 outside visitors. The lectures, initiated in 1996 by Cornell Professor Emeritus James McConkey, have grown in popularity each year since. The other six grants recipients are: Eastern Connecticut State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, SUNY Buffalo, University of Pennsyvania and the University of Michigan.