April
23,
2004
Faculty
Honored for Outstanding Teaching and Scholarship
Photo by Todd M. LeMieux
Stan Rachootin, professor
of biological sciences |
Five Mount Holyoke
faculty members will be honored for outstanding teaching and
scholarship Wednesday, April 28, when the College community
gathers to celebrate the professional accomplishments of its
faculty. Lois Brown, associate professor of English, and Stan
Rachootin, professor of biological sciences, will receive the
Mount Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching. Michael Robinson,
professor of economics, and Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser,
Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturers in the Humanities, will be
given the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Prize for Scholarship.
Each prize carries with it a citation and a check for $2,500.
The recipients will each deliver a short speech at the awards
ceremony, scheduled to take place at 4 pm in Pratt Hall. A
reception will follow in the music library lounge, where recent
faculty works will be
displayed.
The award recipients
were selected through a nomination and review process coordinated
by the Faculty Awards Committee, comprising Dean of Faculty Donal O'Shea,
faculty members Penny Gill, Mary Lyon Professor of the Humanities and professor
of politics, and Peter Berek, professor of English, and emeriti faculty members
Sarah Montgomery and Diana Stein. Faculty members nominated their peers for the
scholarship award, while students, alumnae, and faculty submitted nominees for
the teaching award. Committee members read nominees' scholarly works and
reviewed teaching evaluations and student comments before arriving at their decisions. "Mount
Holyoke is gifted with an extraordinarily fine faculty," O'Shea said. "They
produce outstanding work in and out of the classroom, and it is fitting that
we celebrate that work."
The awards were
first given four years ago, funded by gifts from members of
the 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 of the College.
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Lois A. Brown
Lois Brown joined the Mount Holyoke English department in 1998
and has quickly become one of the most popular and engaging
members of the faculty. Specializing in African American literature,
nineteenth-century American women writers, and contemporary
African American women writers, she has introduced dozens of
students to a wide range of written genres. Her English 250
students, for example, read and discuss mysteries, romances,
works of science fiction, and historical novels as they consider "how
events like the Civil War and literary movements such as the
Harlem Renaissance have influenced the African American novel
tradition."
Brown received a B.A. from Duke University and a Ph.D. from
Boston College. A Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship enabled
her to spend the 2000--2001
year at the DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.
In spring 2003, she was the guest curator for Black
Books: African American Firsts, an absorbing exhibit staged at the Boston Public Library that was part
of a citywide festival series organized in memory of the seventieth anniversary
of the Nazi book burnings in Berlin. In May 2004, she will address the seniors
as one of the two faculty chosen to speak at the College's baccalaureate
service.
Brown was recently honored with one of the first African American History
Awards given by the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston. The museum
praised Brown for her "extraordinary commitment to American history" and
her "obvious commitment to education and equality." Brown received
the award for her work on the Memoir of James Jackson,
the Attentive and Obedient Scholar. The memoir, published in 1835 by an African American Boston
schoolteacher named Susan Paul, is the earliest prose narrative by a black
woman in the United States and the first account of the life of a free child
of color in the United States. The memoir, published by Harvard University
Press in 2000, was largely unknown until Brown discovered it in the course
of her research for a literary biography of the New England novelist Pauline
Hopkins.
Brown's English department courses, which often are interdisciplinary
and cross-listed with African American studies and with American studies,
reflect her deep interest in literary history, women and religion, New England
narratives, and the use of literature to revisit vital political, social,
and cultural questions.
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Stan Rachootin
Stan Rachootin has long been fascinated by evolutionary biology. "Often,
biologists start thinking about evolution as they grow senescent--I
have been allowed a head start," he said. Rachootin teaches
how evolution is thought to happen (Ecology and Evolution, Macroevolution),
who evolved (Introductory Biology and Invertebrate Zoology),
and how the theory of evolution came about (Darwin). He has worked
with honors students on projects ranging from the last amarckian
to the sea snake that undid many of the key features of being
a snake, to the contributions made by Mary Lyon (not the one
you are thinking of) to the understanding of mouse chromosomes.
In the summer, he usually takes students in the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute Undergraduate Biological Sciences Educational
Program to the Isle of Shoals to study marine invertebrates.
He also serves as president of the Mount Holyoke chapter of Phi
Beta Kappa.
Rachootin spent his undergraduate and graduate career at Yale University, though
with time off for a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge University. He has been
a member of the Mount Holyoke faculty since 1981.
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Michael Robinson
Michael Robinson says, "It's fun to be an econometrician
because you can learn about so many different topics." The
wide range of his work certainly bears out this observation.
As an econometrician, he applies economic analysis to real-world
situations of all magnitudes. He has examined issues as large
as the effect of liberalized world trade on worker wages and
as localized as the career paths of graduates from the Five College
Dance Department.
Robinson's work has centered primarily on labor economics, economics
of higher education, and women in the economy. He has studied gender and race
discrimination in the pay of economics and business faculty, as well as discrimination
against African American and Latin American players in Baseball Hall of Fame
balloting.
Robinson's expertise in the economics of higher education has led him
to work closely with the admission office doing econometric modeling and special
studies. He recently presented his research on Mount Holyoke's SAT-optional
policy at an NBER education conference. He has also served as senior adviser
to President Joanne V. Creighton on enrollment planning and has been actively
engaged in a study of the College's new SAT-optional policy.
Robinson has written numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews. He earned
a B.A. at Washington University and a Ph.D. in economics from University of
Texas, Austin. He joined the Mount Holyoke faculty in 1988.
Mary Jo Salter and
Brad Leithauser
Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser have
distinguished themselves as both scholars and celebrated authors.
The couple share a full-time lectureship
in the English department, which allows each to teach half time
and write continually.
Salter has published five collections of poems, including Open
Shutters (2003),
and is the coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She teaches courses
in composition, verse writing, poetry criticism, and modern poetry. The recipient
of an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, Salter serves on the boards
of the Amy Clampitt Trust, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Kenyon
Review.
She has been vice president of the Poetry Society of America since 1995. Salter,
who joined the Mount Holyoke faculty in 1984, received an A.B. from Harvard
University and an M.A. from Cambridge University.
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Leithauser has published four collections of poems and six novels,
including Darlington's Fall (2002), which garnered a spot on the New
York Times Book Review's list of notable books for 2002. He is the recipient of
an Ingram Merrill fellowship in poetry, an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship,
a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Leithauser,
who joined the MHC faculty in 1987, teaches Introduction to Literature;
Short Story Writing; and Comic Verse, Light Verse. He earned an A.B. from
Harvard University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
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