March
12 ,
2004
Mount
Holyoke Trustees Approve 13 Faculty Chairs
The Mount Holyoke College Board of Trustees
met the last weekend in February and approved the following 13
faculty members to fill endowed chairs.
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Christopher Benfey, Mellon Professor of English
Benfey is professor of English and codirector
of the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership and
the Liberal Arts. He specializes in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century
literature. He has emerged over the past decade as a prolific
critic, essayist, and author, whose many book reviews and essays
in the New York Review of Books, the New
York Times Book Review,
and other venues have established him as a distinguished contemporary
arbiter of modern and late twentieth-century American literature.
Well known as an Emily Dickinson scholar, he also has served
as an art critic for the online magazine Slate and is the author
of the critically acclaimed Degas in New
Orleans (1997). His
most recent book is receiving even wider acclaim: The
Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the
Opening of Old Japan (2003) has been hailed by critics as
a major study of cultural exchange between New England and Japan
during the Gilded Age. In his capacity as codirector of the Weissman
Center, Benfey was the initial spark and one of the driving forces
behind last fall’s extraordinary weekend symposium, Artists,
Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount
Holyoke College, 1942–1944.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities, last held by Joseph
Brodsky, was established in 1971 with a $750,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation.
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Sheila Browne, Bertha Phillips Rodger Professor of Chemistry
Browne is a physical organic chemist whose current area of interest
is polymer chemistry. Her research involves monitoring the
biosynthesis and biodegradation of bacterial polyesters in
vivo. Since coming to Mount Holyoke in 1976, Browne has mentored
more than 83 students during their independent research projects.
More than 40 percent of those students have been women of color.
In 1998, in recognition of her many years of mentoring students
at all levels, Browne received the Presidential Award for Excellence
in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. The annual
program, administered on behalf of the White House by the National
Science Foundation, identifies outstanding mentoring programs
that increase the participation of groups underrepresented
in science and mathematics. Among those recommending her for
the award were members of two Mount Holyoke student groups,
Native Spirit and Sistahs in Science, who spoke of Browne’s
unstinting work for and support of minority students at the
College.
Browne is the first holder of the Bertha Phillips Rodger Chair in Chemistry,
which was established in 1997 by the Rev. Alexander Rodger in memory of his
wife, Dr. Bertha Rodger ’34, who died in 1992.
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Jill Bubier, Marjorie Fisher Associate Professor of Environmental
Studies
Bubier is a field scientist with a passion for northern ecosystems.
She studies the responses of ecosystems to climate change, examining
the exchanges of greenhouse gases between ecosystems and the
atmosphere. She works in northern wetlands—primarily bogs
and fens—because northern latitudes respond more dramatically
to global warming than other parts of the planet. Bubier’s
research has taken her to peatlands all around the boreal, subarctic,
and arctic Northern Hemisphere in Canada, Alaska, and Scandinavia.
Bubier is committed to involving students in her research, and
several students have coauthored papers with her. Because of
the complexity of environmental problems, Bubier’s teaching
and research are by nature interdisciplinary and practical—addressing
real problems, not just textbook cases. In 1999, she received
a $350,000 NASA New Investigator grant, and in December 2003
she was awarded a prestigious five-year CAREER award of $500,000
from the National Science Foundation for her proposal “Strategies
for Understanding the Effects of Global Climate and Environmental
Change on Northern Peatlands.”
The Marjorie Fisher Chair in Environmental Studies, last held by Aaron Ellison,
was established in 1990 by Marjorie Fisher ’42.
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Joseph Cohen, Class of 1929
Dr. Virginia Apgar Professor
of Psychology
Cohen has researched a variety of problems in vision and visual
perception. He has tracked the behavioral recovery of spatial
vision in goldfish with regenerating optic nerves. His research
on color adaptation has focused on how people’s perceptions
of colors change as colored stimuli are viewed over time. He
has identified significant individual differences in rates of
color adaptation that may underlie certain types of color vision
deficiency. He has also explored the strategies people use to
categorize colors. Most recently, with Petya Radoeva ’03
(profiled in the spring 2003 Vista), he has looked at whether
dissociations between perceptual and visuomotor responses to
three-dimensional geometric visual illusions are similar in the
two cerebral hemispheres. Aside from courses in perception, Cohen
has been teaching a popular first-year seminar called Brain/Mind
in which the primary readings are narratives of neurological
cases. Cohen served the College as officer of sponsored research
for five years. He was a founding member of the psychobiology
(now neuroscience and behavior) program established in 1976,
and he has twice chaired the psychology and education department.
The Class of 1929 Dr. Virginia Apgar Chair was established in 1984 by the class
of 1929 to honor their classmate, Dr. Apgar. It was their fifty-fifth reunion
gift to the College. The chair is held now by Mary K. Campbell, who is retiring.
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Edwina Cruise, Professor of Russian on the Alumnae Foundation
Cruise teaches a broad range of courses
in Russian language and culture and is well known on campus as
a dynamic and passionate teacher. Her research in recent years
has alternated between, and sometimes combined, two great interests:
Tolstoy and horses. In 1998 she was invited to speak on the symbolic
use of horses in Anna Karenina at the First International Tolstoy
Conference, held at Tolstoy’s ancestral home near Tula. She has contributed
seven biographies of native Russian horse breeds to the Web site
of the International Museum of the Horse. Her most recent publication
on Tolstoy, “Women, Sexuality, and the Family in Tolstoy,” appeared
in the distinguished Cambridge Companion
to Tolstoy (2002). Cruise
has been a Fulbright lecturer in Seoul, Korea, and in her college
years at Barnard was among the first American undergraduates
allowed to study in the Soviet Union.
In 1953, the trustee Finance Committee recommended to the full
board that unallocated money from the College’s $2-million
campaign be used to fully fund seven chairs. This is one of the
funded chairs and was last held by Philippa Goold.
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Alan Durfee, Professor of Mathematics on the John Stewart Kennedy
Foundation
Durfee’s research interests cover topology and algebraic
geometry, specifically singularities of varieties and maps, problems
in real algebraic geometry around Hilbert’s sixteenth problem,
mixed Hodge theory, intersection homology, knot theory, and Vassiliev
invariants. He has published widely in professional journals
and has received several NSF grants. During the last decade,
he has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, MIT, and Martin-Luther
University and a visiting professor at the University of Bordeaux.
He is an active member of Mount Holyoke’s Summer Research
Institute, a highly acclaimed program supported by NSF’s
Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. Durfee is also
an accomplished organist, harpsichordist, and clavichordist and
is a board member and former president of the Boston Clavichord
Society.
The John Stewart Kennedy Foundation Chair in Mathematics was established in
1912 with a gift from Mr. John Stewart Kennedy. The chair is now held by Lester
Senechal, who is retiring.
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John Grayson, Professor of Religion on the Alumnae Foundation
Grayson has a wide range of scholarly interests: religion, identity,
and human freedom; German and American philosophical idealism
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; philosophical and
religious implications of black American literature and music;
instructional technology for teaching theological and philosophical
ideas. His current scholarly project, When
the Fullness of Time Was Come, is an intellectual biography of the women who
shaped the mind of Frederick Douglass. A beloved professor,
Grayson offers courses on philosophy of religion, human freedom,
creation and evolution, and the enormously popular course Spirituals
and the Blues. This spring he is offering a senior seminar
called Theology Meets The Matrix. Grayson has been a faculty
lecturer for two Mount Holyoke alumnae trips abroad, and he
has served (in 1997–1998) as the College’s
interim dean of religious life.
The chair Grayson will hold is another of the seven funded in 1953 and was
last held by James Ellis.
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Mark Peterson, Professor of Physics and Mathematics on the Alumnae
Foundation
Peterson, who specializes in fluid dynamics, biophysics, and
the history of science, is jointly appointed in both physics
and mathematics. His work often explores the intersection of
science and the humanities. He has written on the scientific
speculations of Dante, developed a pioneering computer program
for introductory Chinese language courses, and, in 1997, published
the cover article on the painter Piero della Francesca in The
Mathematical Intelligencer. Peterson makes the case that Piero,
one of the great painters of the Italian Renaissance, was also
the greatest mathematician of the fifteenth century. Much of
Peterson’s scientific research has been in modeling microhydrodynamics
in biophysical settings. His interests in the integration of
mathematics and the humanities in liberal arts education, and
in promoting summer research experiences in mathematics for undergraduates,
have been supported by grants from the NSF and the NEH. He recently
developed, and now has twice taught, a first-year seminar on
Galileo. Laboratory
exercises in the course follow Galileo’s own investigations
of such features as vibrating strings, buoyancy, clocks, scaling
laws in biology, and the principle of relativity.
Peterson’s appointment is one of the seven chairs funded by the trustees
in 1953 and was last held by Edwin Weaver.
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William Quillian, Professor of English on the Emma B. Kennedy
Foundation
Quillian’s fields are nineteenth- and twentieth-century
British literature, history of criticism, critical theory, science
fiction, and computers and literature. An early adopter of computer
uses for the humanities, he is currently collaborating with a
number of James Joyce scholars on a hypermedia edition of Joyce’s
Ulysses. He is one of 18 editors from around the world who have
committed to having this multimedia edition of the novel ready
in time for the celebration of Bloomsday, June 16, 2004, which
will mark the 100th anniversary of the day on which the novel
is set. Other research interests include cyberpunk science fiction,
the American novelist Cormac McCarthy, and the English novelist
and critic John Berger. His teaching, admired by nearly 30 years
of Mount Holyoke students, includes a first-year seminar on the
experimental narratives and multiple “stories” of
contemporary fiction. He has twice chaired the Department of
English.
The Emma B. Kennedy Foundation Chair in English was also established in 1912
with a gift from Mr. John Stewart Kennedy. The chair was last held by Virginia
Ellis.
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Robert Schwartz, E. Nevius Rodman Professor of History
Schwartz’s current research looks
at rural communities and politics in Burgundy during the period
1750 to 1859, focusing on the influence of seigneurialism before
the French Revolution, changes in property holding from the 1780s,
and the evolution of rural political culture from the Old Regime
to the Third Republic. In a second research project, he uses GIS
(Geographic Information Systems) methods to examine development
in rural Britain and France from 1840 to 1914, blending GIS analysis
with narrative social history to compare spatial and temporal patterns
of change. His aim is to recover the experiences of rural communities
during the railway age, testing whether communities well served
by rail transport experienced some revitalization that stemmed
the decline characteristic of rural Britain and France as a whole
from the 1870s. Schwartz used parts of this research in his quantitative
reasoning and environmental history courses. More recently, he
has used GIS methods closer to home. This fall he offered a 200-level
history course, Mapping the Memorable: A Cultural and Environmental
History of the Mount Holyoke College Campus,
in which he and his students created an interactive electronic
atlas of the campus from its origins to the present.
The E. Nevius Rodman Chair in History
was established in 1912 with an anonymous gift and was last held
by Eugenia Herbert.
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Robert Shilkret, Norma Cutts DaFoe Professor of Psychology
Shilkret’s research deals with college students’ development,
including how they accomplish goals and overcome unconscious
obstructions, and the relations between earlier parenting experiences
and college adjustment. Another line of recent work involves
stigmatization and self-handicapping among college students with
learning disabilities labels. His work has been published in
the Journal of Counseling Psychology and Contemporary
Psychology.
He teaches developmental psychology, concepts of abnormality,
psychoanalytic psychology, laboratory courses in personality
research and psychological assessment, and a seminar titled First
Love, on attachment theory and research. Shilkret served a three-year
term as dean of studies and has twice served as acting dean of
faculty.
The Norma Cutts DaFoe Chair in Psychology was established by the estate of
Dr. Norma Cutts DaFoe ’13 in 1988.
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Nicole Vaget, Reverend Joseph Paradis Professor of French
Vaget publishes in the fields of French and Francophone cultural
studies, eighteenth-century literature, and pedagogical applications
of technology. Her most recent book is Saint-Jean-d’Arvey
en Savoie, a unique and personal cultural study of a socioeconomic
group of French peasants that no longer exists. The local government
of the department of Savoie selected the book as one of the
three best books published in Savoie for 1999. A pioneer in
distance learning, Vaget has used satellite technology and
the Web to teach French to African students in Zimbabwe, Ghana,
and Kenya under the auspices of the African Virtual University.
She teaches all levels of language, literature, and culture
courses. She is a member of—and has often chaired—the
European studies and romance language programs.
The Reverend Joseph Paradis Chair in French was established in 1997 by a bequest
of Eileen Paradis Barber ’29 in memory of her grandfather. She graduated
with a degree in French.
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Donald Weber, Lucia, Ruth, and Elizabeth MacGregor Professor
of English
Weber works in American literature, ethnic studies, film, and
politics and literature. Currently he is finishing a book on
Jewish American culture from 1880 to the present. He is also
working on a comparison of British and American debates on multiculturalism.
Among his many publications are “Powers of Empathy: Hollywood’s
Representation of Jews in Crossfire and Gentleman’s
Agreement,” “Shame
and Self-Hatred in the Early Fiction of John Fante,” and “Memory
and Repression in Early Ethnic Television.” Last summer
he was selected from many applicants for a coveted stay at Bellagio,
the intellectual retreat created by the Rockefellers on the shores
of Italy’s Lake Como. Weber has chaired the English department
for the last several years and has helped select and then land
a splendid group of young faculty. He is also a mainstay of the
American studies program, and, for the last two years, has chaired
the Academic Priorities Committee.
The Lucia, Ruth, and Elizabeth MacGregor Chair in English was established by
the estate of Frank MacGregor in 1979 to honor his wife, Elizabeth ’10;
his sister Ruth ’01; and his mother, Lucia, class of 1880.
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