April 21, 2005
Faculty Honored for Outstanding
Work
Four
Mount Holyoke faculty members will be honored for outstanding teaching
and scholarship on Thursday,
April 28, when the College community gathers to celebrate the professional
accomplishments of its faculty.
Andrew
Lass, professor of anthropology, and Eleanor Townsley, associate
professor of sociology, will receive
the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching;
Jill Bubier, Marjorie Fisher Associate Professor of Environmental Studies,
and David Sanford, associate professor of music, will receive
the Meribeth E. Cameron
Faculty Prize for Scholarship. Each prize carries with it a citation and
a check for $2,500.
The
recipients will give brief speeches at the awards ceremony, which
will take place at 4 pm in McCulloch
Auditorium in Pratt Hall. A reception will
follow
at 4:45 pm in the music library lounge.
“These
awards remind us of the depth and breadth of excellent teaching
and cutting-edge creativity and scholarship in the Mount Holyoke faculty,” said
Penny Gill. “It is both a privilege and a pleasure to work with
such colleagues.”
Jill
Bubier
 Jill
Bubier spends some of her happiest moments
mucking about in northern peat bogs with Mount Holyoke students.
A field scientist who specializes
in the responses of ecosystems to climate change, she developed
her passion for northern ecosystems
during canoeing expeditions in the Canadian Arctic and teaching
in Outward Bound’s
adventure education programs. Bubier studies the exchange
of greenhouse gases between ecosystems and the atmosphere.
Northern wetlands lend themselves well
to her research because they respond more dramatically to
global
warming than other parts of the planet.
Bubier,
who came to Mount Holyoke in 1998, is dedicated to involving
students
in her research, and several of
her students have coauthored
papers with
her. Student research has included the environmental controls
on greenhouse gas
emissions from wetlands and plant community responses to climate
change. “I find
teaching at Mount Holyoke very rewarding because students here
are enthusiastic and love a challenge,” she said. She
presents her students with real-world problems rather than
textbook cases.
Her Environmental
Science class, for example,
investigates the impact of beaver and deer populations on local
ecosystems and examines water quality and microclimates on
the Mount Holyoke
campus.
Bubier’s
broad-based education prepared her well for a career in environmental
research, which is by nature
interdisciplinary
and practical. She received
her B.A. in history from Bowdoin College, an M.S. in botany
from University of Vermont,
a J.D. in environmental law from the University of Maine
School of Law, and a Ph.D. in biogeochemistry from McGill University.
In
1999, Bubier received a $350,000 NASA grant for her research
on carbon dioxide and methane exchange in northern peatlands.
In 2004,
she received
a $500,000
CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, which
will allow her to continue her research on ecosystem feedbacks
to
climate
change and
involve students in
the process.
Andrew
Lass
 Andrew
Lass, who came to Mount Holyoke in 1981, teaches courses on contemporary
anthropological theory, linguistics,
science
and technology,
and the
culture of memory. His research interests include the
relationship between memory
and history, print culture and the historical crossovers
between linguistics, anthropology,
and avant-garde art. His area specialty is central Europe,
specifically the Czech and Slovak Republics.
Lass,
the son of American journalists, grew up in Prague until his
family
was expelled in 1973. In 1990, he revisited
Prague
to find
the collection
in the
Czech National Library—one of Europe's oldest—in
a state of extreme disarray. Many books and important
manuscripts were rotting, while other volumes
in the collection had never been catalogued or shelved.
In the past 15 years—and
with the generous help from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—Lass
has helped the national libraries, research libraries,
and several university libraries
in the Czech and Slovak Republics rethink and retool
their technical and public services.
Lass
divides his time between South Hadley and Prague, Brno, and other
locations in former Czechoslovakia
where he lectures
at universities
and continues
to work with the library community.
In
addition to two coedited volumes (with Richard E. Quandt of Princeton
University)
on library automation
in Eastern
Europe and
South Africa,
he has written dozens
of articles on a variety of topics, in both English
and Czech.
MHC students describe Lass as “brilliant” and “wicked funny” and
call his classes “awesome” and “ innovative.”
“Of
all the things I have ever dabbled in, teaching at Mount Holyoke
is certainly
the most challenging as well as the most rewarding. What else
would you want?” noted
Lass.
 David
Sanford
David
Sanford joined the music department faculty in 1998. He teaches
theory (ear training,
class harmony, and advanced
seminar),
composition,
jazz
history, music in film, and music of the
1970s. After completing undergraduate music
studies at the University of Northern Colorado,
Sanford earned master’s
degrees in theory and composition from
New England Conservatory of Music and an
M.F.A.
and Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Sanford
has won many awards and honors, including
BMI Student Composer Award, an
ASCAP Grant
to Young Composers,
a Guggenheim
Fellowship,
and the Samuel
Barber Rome Prize Fellowship. His works
have been performed by the Chamber Society
of
Lincoln Center, the San Francisco Contemporary
Chamber Players, the Chicago Symphony
Chamber Players, the
Detroit Symphony
Orchestra, the
Harlem
Festival Orchestra,
cellist Matt Haimovitz, the Corvini e
Iodice Roma Jazz Ensemble, the University of Iowa
Center for
New Music,
and dozens of
other performers.
In addition,
he leads his own big band, the Pittsburgh
Collective.
Sanford
credits a variety of influences with igniting his interest in
music. “I
started on the trombone when I was about
ten and liked big band music early,” Sanford
said. “I wanted to be a jazz musician.
Charles Mingus inspired me to be a composer
later on.” Sanford was
also influenced by rhythm and blues/funk
groups,
such as Parliament, the Isley Brothers,
and Sly and the Family Stone,
and, later, by orchestral and more mainstream
popular music.
“
Mount Holyoke has been very supportive of my work,” Sanford
said. “I’m
grateful for the encouragement and
generous assistance I’ve
received from my colleagues in the
music department, and from the College in general.
I also
enjoy working and performing with the
students here. Their individuality and enthusiasm
are
inspiring, and I tend to learn a lot
from them.”
Eleanor
Townsley
 Eleanor
Townsley, a native of Australia, came to Mount Holyoke in 1997
after
receiving her M.A.
and Ph.D.
in sociology from
UCLA. A
comparative-historical
sociologist, she studies the role
of intellectuals
in society. Her fields of inquiry
include the professionalization of
social science
in the 1960s,
the
role of intellectuals in post-Communist
Central and Eastern
Europe, and the
boundary
work between academic and media
intellectuals in the contemporary United States.
“I
look at concrete groups of intellectuals
in particular times and places
and the choices and decisions that they
made. How
do ideas
affect social change?
How
do ideas affect how we decide courses
of action
or how we solve problems?”
Townsley
enjoys a reputation among her
Mount Holyoke students for
being passionate
about
the subjects
she teaches, for
sparking her
students’ interest, and
for encouraging them to articulate
their own arguments and perspectives. “My
main teaching goal is to build
critical thinking so that students
possess the intellectual and
moral tools to participate fully
in all
the social worlds they
will encounter at college and
beyond,” said
Townsley. “By
critical thinking, I mean the
reflexive capacity to locate
oneself in social,
cultural, and intellectual space,
not only when using
technical tools and abstract
intellectual concepts but also
in the mundane
interactions of everyday
life.”
Townsley
coauthored a book, Making Capitalism without
Capitalists:
The New Ruling Elites
in Eastern Europe
(1998), with Gil
Eyal and Ivan Szelenyi.
She has also
published numerous articles
including, most recently, an essay in Theory,
Culture & Society
titled “'The Sixties’ Trope,” which
examines how “the
sixties” operates as a
figure of speech in contemporary
political
narratives.
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