|
April 19,
2002
Lee,
Lipman, Morgan, and Smith to Receive Faculty Awards
|
Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Lynn
Morgan, professor of anthropology (left) and Jonathan Lipman,
professor of history (middle) will receive the Mount Holyoke
College Faculty Prize for Teaching. Anthony Lee, associate
professor of art (right), and Susan Smith, Norma Wait Harris
and Emma Gale Harris Foundation Professor of Biological
Sciences (below), will be awarded the Meribeth E. Cameron
Faculty Prize for Scholarship.
|
Four Mount Holyoke
professors will be honored for outstanding teaching and scholarship
Tuesday, April 23, when the College community gathers to celebrate
the accomplishments of its faculty as teachers and scholars. Jonathan
Lipman, professor of history, and Lynn Morgan, professor of anthropology,
will receive the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching.
Anthony Lee, associate professor of art, and Susan Smith, Norma
Wait Harris and Emma Gale Harris Foundation Professor of Biological
Sciences, will be awarded 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 Indira Peterson and Penny Gill; and
retired faculty members Sarah Montgomery and Marilyn Pryor, who
have served on the committee since its inception three years ago.
Faculty nominated their peers for the scholarship award, while
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.
|
Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Susan
Smith
|
"The selection
process is a very difficult job because of the richness of gifts
within this faculty," said Montgomery, Dean of the College
Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Economics. "But there
is also enormous pleasure in the process, in learning what faculty
members are doing in terms of creative teaching and distinctive
scholarship. These awards bring to our attention many of the special
skills and talents at Mount Holyoke. They give us the opportunity
to recognize a few of many who are committed and creative teachers
of both students and their peers, and distinguished scholars,
recognized within and outside the College."
Given for the first
time two 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
teaching award are Rachel Fink, associate professor of biological
sciences; Penny Gill, Mary Lyon Professor of the Humanities and
professor of politics; Joan Cocks, professor of politics; and
James Coleman, professor of dance and arts coordinator. Past winners
of the scholarship award are Sean Decatur, associate professor
of chemistry; Indira Peterson, professor of Asian studies; Joseph
Ellis, professor of history; and Elizabeth Young, associate professor
of English.
Lynn Morgan
The recipient of numerous
research awards, Lynn Morgan focuses on feminist social studies
of science, critical medical anthropology, and the political economy
of development. She is author of Community Participation in
Health: The Politics of Primary Care in Costa Rica (Cambridge
University Press, 1993). Most recently, she has focused on the
social history of embryology, reproductive ethics, and crosscultural
understandings of the beginning of human life. She is the editor
of Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions (University of Pennsylvania
Press,1999). Morgan teaches courses in medical anthropology, gender
and sexuality, development, and the anthropology of reproduction.
"My goal as an anthropologist is to destabilize and unsettle
my students. I want them to question—profoundly—everything
they were ever taught (including what I tell them!). The highest
compliment I ever received was when a student approached me in
tears at the end of the semester and said, ‘I don’t
know what to believe anymore.’ She realized how ethnocentric,
complacent, and docile she had been prior to taking my class.
I hoped she would turn her distress in a positive direction, toward
addressing intractable and vexing problems, such as the shocking
degree of inequality we seem to tolerate and perpetuate."
Jonathan Lipman
Asian history scholar
Jonathan Lipman researches and writes on a broad range of topics,
from women in Japanese history to food in Chinese culture. He
is author of Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest
China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), and
coauthor of Imperial Japan: Expansion and War, A Humanities
Approach to Japanese History, Part III, (Boulder: Social Science
Education Consortium, 1995). His current projects include a study
of Islam in Xinjiang; a comparative ethnohistory of the Chinese,
Korean, and Japanese peoples; and an analysis of texts by Chinese
Muslims. Lipman has taught numerous courses at Mount Holyoke since
1977 and at the Five Colleges; the University of Washington, Seattle;
Yale University; and institutes and universities in France, China,
and Japan. Of his award, Lipman said, "This is a place where
teaching really matters and everyone works very hard at it; it’s
a tremendous honor to be selected."
Anthony Lee
Anthony Lee lectures
and writes on European and American modern and contemporary art,
the relationship between art and class politics, and the role
of art in the encounter between cultures. He has published two
books with the University of California Press, Painting on
the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s
Public Murals (1999) and Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism
in San Francisco (2001). Currently on leave, he is studying
late nineteenth-century photographs of Chinese cobblers in North
Adams, Massachusetts, and a large body of unpublished photos by
the 1960s New York photographer Diane Arbus. Of his efforts to
consider art as an expression of social life, Lee said, "Some
of the most experimental and audacious painting and photography
that now hangs jewel-like on the museum walls, once upon a time
had a relationship with such seemingly unaesthetic concerns as
radical politics, immigrant societies, and organized labor. I’ve
wanted to discover what that relationship consisted of."
Susan Smith
Internationally known
ornithologist Susan Smith has been called "the doyenne of
chickadee research" by National Wildlife magazine
for her groundbreaking research on the ranking systems, mating
behavior, survival strategies, and other social practices of black-capped
chickadees. Her book The Black-Capped Chickadee: Behavioral
Ecology and Natural History (Cornell University Press, 1991)
is considered the definitive scholarly guide to the species, and
her long-term studies of a local chickadee population continue
to make major contributions to her field. Currently on leave and
"getting twenty-three years’ worth of data in a form
to be entered into a computer," Smith wrote, "My research
on chickadees is always fascinating to me, and I enjoy every minute
of it. The recognition of this work by my College means a very
great deal indeed."
counter
is
2,212
|
