On November 6-8, 2003, the Weissman Center for Leadership celebrated--with a scholarly symposium and other events--a luminous moment in the history of Mount Holyoke College. During the Pontigny colloquia held during the wartime summers of 1942-1944, some of the leading European figures in the arts and sciences gathered at Mount Holyoke with their American peers for annual MHC Archives & Special Collections conversations about the future of human civilization in a precarious world. Among the participants were writers Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Hannah Arendt, and Rachel Bespaloff; anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss; mathematician Jacques Hadamard; and artists Marc Chagall and Robert Motherwell. Our own commemorative celebration of Pontigny-en-Amerique included major speakers--the philosopher Stanley Cavell, art historians Romy Golan and Jed Perl, mathematician Donal O'Shea, cultural historian Jeffrey Mehlman, biographer and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, opera singer Nancy Gustafson, '78, among others--and a memory session with alumnae (especially refugees from Europe) from 1940s classes, as well as art, music, and theater.

The Legacy of Rachel Bespaloff

Photos from the Mount Holyoke Archives, Pontigny 1942-1944