Iris Fanger, director of the Harvard Summer Dance Center for the past 19 years, has announced her retirement.

The Summer Dance Center, which Fanger told the Gazette "has been more of a mission that a job for me," will close late this month.

"Nelson Goodman [professor of philosophy emeritus], who founded the program, always felt that a university campus was an appropriate nurturing place for a living, breathing art form, and I think we proved Nelson's point," Fanger told the Gazette.

"I'm leaving with enormous regrets, and I'm very sorry the program is not continuing."

Besides conducting many classes, the Dance Center presented an annual series of concerts by members of the faculty, conducted a lecture series and sponsored screenings of many seldom-seen films. Fanger also established an exchange program between the Dance Center and the London Contemporary Dance School.

Fanger made news this summer when she reportedly asked a dance troop choreographed and directed by Iynn Shapiro to alter a performance in the Faculty Performance Dance Series because it contained female frontal nudity.

Fanger refused to comment to The Crimson but told the Boston Globe she made an appropriate executive decision.

Kupper Nambed Division Chief

Thomas S. Kupper, chief of the Division of Dermatoology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, has been installed as the Thomas B. Fitzpatrick Professor of Dermatology at the Medical School.

Kupper has written numerous award-winning publications on cutaneous immunology, and lectures on topics in cell biology, immunology and cutaneous oncology.

The transgenic mouse facility at Brigham and Women's Hospital, the only one in the world located in a dermatology department, is under Kupper's direction.