April
18 , 2003 Benfey,
Cobb, Nicholson, and Savoy to Receive Awards
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Photo:
Todd M. LeMieux
Howard
Nicholson, Kennedy-Schelkunoff Professor of Physics (back
left) and Christopher Benfey, professor of English and codirector
of the Weissman Center for Leadership (front), will receive
this year’s Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Prize for
Scholarship. George Cobb, Robert L. Rooke Professor of Mathematics
and Statistics (back right), and Lauret Savoy, associate
professor of geology (standing), will receive the Mount
Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching. |
Four Mount Holyoke
faculty members—a scholar of literature, a mathematician
and statistician, a physicist, and a geologist—will be honored
for outstanding teaching and scholarship Monday, April 21, when
the College community gathers to celebrate the accomplishments
of its faculty as teachers and scholars. George Cobb, Robert L.
Rooke Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, and Lauret Savoy,
associate professor of geology, will receive the Mount Holyoke
College Faculty Prize for Teaching. Christopher Benfey, professor
of English and codirector of the Weissman Center for Leadership,
and Howard Nicholson, Kennedy-Schelkunoff Professor of Physics,
will be given the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Prize for Scholarship.
Each will be presented with a citation and a check for $2,500
and will deliver a short talk at the awards ceremony, scheduled
to begin at 4 pm in Pratt Hall. A reception will follow in the
music library lounge, where recent faculty publications will be
displayed.
The awardees were selected through a nomination and review process
coordinated by the Faculty Awards Committee, composed of Dean
of Faculty Donal O’Shea, faculty members Jim Coleman and
Peter Berek, and retired faculty members Sarah Montgomery (chair)
and Diana Stein. Faculty nominated their peers for the scholarship
award, while students, alumnae, and faculty nominated professors
for the teaching award. Committee members read nominees’
scholarly works and reviewed teaching evaluations and student
comments before arriving at their decisions. “Mount Holyoke’s
faculty deserve all the awards we can give them,” said O’Shea.
“They work hard at both teaching and scholarship and produce
an abundance of outstanding work on both fronts.” Notes
Berek, “In a faculty with so many outstanding scholars and
teachers it was difficult to make a choice for these awards, but
it was a great pleasure to see what wonderful things one’s
colleagues are doing.” “As a former recipient of the
teaching award, I think it’s wonderful that the College
continues to honor the faculty in this way,” says Coleman.
“Teaching is so critical, particularly at a liberal arts
college, and it is important that pedagogy, as well as scholarship,
be recognized.”
Given for the first time three years ago, the awards were made
possible by gifts from members of the MHC board of trustees. The
donor of the teaching award wishes to remain anonymous. Trustee
Janet Hickey Tague ’66 endowed the scholarship award in
honor of Meribeth E. Cameron, Professor Emeritus of History and
former acting president and academic dean at MHC. Cameron taught
and served as dean of the College from 1948 to 1970. Tague, who
took a class in Chinese history with Cameron, remembers her as
“a formidable intellectual presence on campus” and
funded the prize to recognize her contributions and the centrality
of faculty excellence in the College’s mission.
Past winners of the awards are Jonathan Lipman, professor of history;
Lynn Morgan, professor of anthropology; Anthony Lee, associate
professor of art; Susan Smith, Norma Wait Harris and Emma Gale
Harris Foundation Professor of Biological Sciences; Rachel Fink,
associate professor of biological sciences; Penny Gill, Mary Lyon
Professor of the Humanities and professor of politics; Joan Cocks,
professor of politics; James Coleman, professor of dance and arts
coordinator; Sean Decatur, associate professor of chemistry; Indira
Peterson, professor of Asian studies; Joseph Ellis, professor
of history; and Elizabeth Young, associate professor of English.
Christopher Benfey
Christopher Benfey has emerged over the past decade as a prolific
critic, essayist, and author, whose reviews in the New York
Times Sunday Book Review, the New Republic, the
New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary
Supplement have established him as a distinguished contemporary
arbiter of modern and late twentieth-century American literature.
Benfey’s interests and scholarship transcend academic disciplines—
ranging from art and literature to social history. In addition
to his work on literary figures and movements, Benfey, who is
well known as an Emily Dickinson scholar, has served as an art
critic for the online magazine Slate and is the author
of the critically acclaimed Degas in New Orleans (1997),
in which he explores little-known aspects of the life and work
of the nineteenth-century French impressionist painter. The book
was named one of the ten most important books of 1997 by the Chicago
Tribune. Benfey is also the author of The Double Life
of Stephen Crane (1992) and Emily Dickinson and the Problem
of Others (1984). His poems have appeared in the Paris
Review and Ploughshares. Cultural exchange between
New England and Japan during the Gilded Age is the topic of Benfey’s
current research and of his new book, The Great Wave: Gilded
Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan,
which has just been released. Benfey has held fellowships
from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
George Cobb
George Cobb is a leader in the area of statistics reform who believes
that statistics is “almost impossible to learn unless you
get your hands dirty.” Cobb uses a variety of unusual activities
to teach students the basics of statistical methods, ranging from
experimental design to regression analysis. In one exercise he
designed, a catapult is used to launch gummy bears in the air,
exploring such principles as sources of variability, the value
of protocol to keep things constant, and the use of randomization
to protect against bias. During data collection, students contend
with catapult misfires and the most effective way to record them.
Cobb maintains that when students have a hand in creating data,
they are more interested in analyzing them and learn from being
part of the production process. Whether catapulting gummy bears
or chairing national committees on undergraduate education in
his field, Cobb is concerned with finding new and better ways
to teach statistics. Beginning in the 1980s he was at the forefront
of redesigning introductory statistics, as computers liberated
faculty to set their students to work with real data. More recently,
Cobb has turned to the content and pedagogy of more advanced classes.
He is responsible for newly designed courses in Markov Chain Monte
Carlo, linear statistical methods, and mathematical statistics,
and expanded versions handouts and problem sets for each of these
will be included in textbooks. Cobb is the author of Introduction
to Design and Analysis of Experiments (1998), and Statistics
in Action: Practical Principles for a World of Uncertainty,
written with Richard L. Scheaffer and Ann E. Watkins and just
published.
He has written and spoken widely to varied audiences of
statisticians, mathematicians, and educators; has led major initiatives
in statistical education; and has received grant support for his
innovative work.
Howard Nicholson
Howard Nicholson is one of the rare physicists who have made substantial
contributions to major scientific research while teaching at a
small college. Considered a universal
physicist, he knows electronics, software, and how to manage small
and large collaborations. Nicholson’s doctoral studies on
experimental high-energy physics were carried out at California
Institute of Technology and were completed in 1971. Since then,
he has conducted research at other prestigious institutions including
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Stanford, and Brookhaven National
Laboratory. He is a member of the Calorimeter Group at the Stanford
Linear Accelerator, and at Stanford, has been a run coordinator
working on the $280 million BaBar project, one of the three highest
priority high-energy physics experiments currently being supported
by the United States Department of Energy. Last year, he was responsible
for the quality and quantity of the experimental data obtained
in the experiment, and he was on call twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week for six months, serving the approximately 500
international scientists working on this project. Nicholson also
studies the behavior of elementary particles in atomic nuclei
at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Nicholson’s research
has been continuously funded by the Department of Energy since
1978. As noted by a physics colleague at UMass, his research grant
in this field is the only federal grant awarded to a physicist
at a four-year college.
Lauret Savoy
Lauret Savoy believes that human history and natural history are
braided strands of human existence. Their connections guided her
undergraduate work as she first explored studio art (landscape
photography), then history (American studies and geography), and
geology. A teacher, earth scientist, writer, photographer, and
pilot, Savoy tries to challenge students to examine their assumptions
about the world, and she enjoys
“helping them see what a very human endeavor the inquiry
of nature is,” she says. Savoy teaches interdisciplinary
courses on human-Earth interactions through time (Perspectives
on American Environmental History and Evolution of North American
Landscapes), and coteaches with English professor John Lemly a
course on nature writing (Reading and Writing in the World). She
is also a woman of mixed-blood (African American, Native American,
Euro-American) ancestry. Her work now turns from geologic studies
to “interdisciplinary reflections on the stories we tell
of land, its origin and history, and stories we tell of ourselves
in the land,” Savoy says. In a just-published anthology
of essays, The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the
Natural World, which she coedited with poet-essayist Alison
Deming, diverse writers of color explore “cultural hybridity
and difference in human interactions with environment and place.”
Savoy has been the recipient of professional awards and has published
widely. In 1996, she was featured in a CD-ROM, along with other
women scientists, that was designed to show girls age ten and
above what it's like to be a scientist. The disc is a part of
the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent Science in American
Life exhibition. Visitors to the Smithsonian's Museum of
American History can use the CD, which is installed in an interactive
kiosk and provides text, visual displays, and audio.
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