May 20, 2005
Trustees Name Four Faculty Members to Endowed Chairs
The
Mount Holyoke College Board of Trustees named four faculty members
to endowed chairs at its meetings
on May 6–7, including two new chairs established this year
as the result of alumnae generosity.
A strong
supporter of Mount Holyoke for many years, Helene Phillips Herzig ’49 has established
a new chair for the Helene Phillips Herzig ’49 Professor of
Art. Herzig is an aficionado of the arts and has long been associated
with the Art Museum’s Art
Advisory Board. In fact, Herzig’s support for the arts is
directly tied to her education at Mount Holyoke. She was among
the first group
of students to visit Europe and its museums after the end of World
War II in a trip sponsored by the College. Herzig also has extensive
familial ties to the school. Both of her daughters and her sister
attended Mount Holyoke. For many years, Herzig, now retired, served
as the features editor at North Shore Magazine in Manhasset, New
York. Professor of art Bettina Bergmann has been named to this
new chair.
“Mount
Holyoke has always been a special place for me, my four years
there a cherished part of my life,” said Herzig. “My
late husband Philip returned from the WWII battlefield to share
three years of my college life, and I wanted to give something
back to
anchor those memories. My experience at Mount Holyoke in mind,
we thought, ‘What could have more impact on a student's
life than a fine professor?’ Remembering Marion Hayes,
chair of the art department, who took me and 20 other students
to Europe in 1948,
who awakened my mind to the visual arts; my many rewarding
years on the Art Advisory Committee of the Art Museum, truly
a place
for all students; and the fact of daughter Julie’s experience
as an art major at MHC, this chair is a step to strengthen
the excellence
of the art department, and to say ‘thank you.’ ”
Marilyn
Dawson Sarles ’67, a physician trained in internal
medicine, established the Marilyn Dawson Sarles, M.D. Chair
in Life Sciences this year. Dr. Sarles graduated cum laude
in zoology
and
went on to receive her medical degree from Brown University.
A longtime supporter of her alma mater, Sarles was greatly
influenced
by the
quality of her science education while at MHC.
“The
primary reason for my gift to science teaching at MHC is my belief
that one should encourage strong and sustained educational
opportunities for women in the sciences—an issue that continues to be
of paramount importance in our society,” Sarles said.
Sarles’ husband,
H. Jay Sarles, is a banker and a newly appointed trustee of the College.
The Sarles have three children. Professor
of chemistry Sean Decatur has been named to the new Sarles
chair.
At
a May 7 dinner honoring holders and donors of endowed chairs,
President Joanne V. Creighton said, "Endowed
chairs underwrite, in a very real way, the work of
the professor whose spirited teaching
and research challenge and inspire new generations
of students, and who go forward, in Mary Lyon's words, to ‘attempt
great things’ and ‘accomplish
great things.’ Endowed chairs are an important
part of the engine that’s powering the ‘great
intellectual and moral machine,’ that Lyon called
Mount Holyoke College.”
The
four faculty members named to chairs this year are:
Bettina Bergmann
Helene Phillips Herzig ’49 Professor of Art History
Bergmann is widely known and much respected for her
work on Greek and Roman art. She has published a
dozen major
articles, a collection
of symposium papers, and many review essays, all
looking from
one vantage point or another at the relationships
among Roman architecture,
painting, and literature. Examples of the range of
her work are the edited volume The Art of Ancient
Spectacle; the catalogue
essay “The
Moon and the Stars: Afterlife of a Roman Empress” for
the Mount Holyoke Art Museum exhibit focusing on
the museum’s recently
acquired bust of Faustina the Elder; and two books
in preparation, one on Roman ensembles and another
on Roman spectacles of landscape.
Bergmann is a splendid teacher, offering innovative
100-level courses such as Art and Cultural Politics,
200-level courses on landscape
and interdisciplinary courses in ancient studies,
and advanced courses on Roman and Greek art. Her
teaching has national and international
dimensions as well, through a number of symposiums
and seminars organized
over the years at the University of Michigan, Harvard,
Columbia, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual
Arts, and the American
Academy in Rome, and through major lectures at such
places as Yale, Dumbarton Oaks, the Getty Research
Center, the Institute of Fine
Arts at NYU, and the New York Classical Society.
She has served the College generously by chairing
her department and major College
committees,
helping to develop the interdisciplinary ancient
studies program, and serving on the advisory board
to the Weissman Center for Leadership
and the Liberal Arts.
Sean
Decatur
Marilyn Dawson Sarles, M.D. Professor of Life Sciences
and Professor of Chemistry
Decatur works in biophysical chemistry, specializing
in the spectroscopy of proteins and the protein-folding
problem.
Crossing the boundaries
of biology, chemistry, and physics, he looks at
how chains of amino acids transform themselves
into three-dimensional
proteins.
Mishaps
in that protein-folding transformation are linked
to diseases such as mad cow and Alzheimer’s.
Decatur’s research has been
supported by over a million dollars in grants,
including an NSF CAREER Award, two NIH AREA Awards,
and a number of other research and instrumentation
grants. Last year alone, his research lab published
five new papers.
Seven Mount Holyoke students wrote theses on projects
related to that work—again in one year alone—and
two of those were summa theses. This year, Decatur
has been on sabbatical working
in
three areas: peptide conformations, protein folding,
and peptide adsorption to very small (nanoscale)
particles. He is a superb
teacher at all levels of the chemistry curriculum,
and is an innovator in
curriculum development for science and nonscience
students alike. His many initiatives include a
series of talks on race and science,
a course exploring ethical, social, and political
questions about such topics as bioengineered food
and gene therapy, and a team-taught
chemistry course combining biophysical chemistry,
physical chemistry, and inorganic chemistry. He
has served on key College committees
and, until his sabbatical, was a member of the
Presidential Commission on Diverse Community.
Joseph
Ellis
Professor of History on the Ford Foundation
Ellis’s eighth book, His Excellency: George Washington, is
a masterly narrative of the nation’s first president, and a
New York Times best-seller as well. His seventh book, Founding
Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History.
He is one of the two or three leading scholars of the American revolutionary
era and the leading historian of the nation’s founders. In
addition to his books, which are delightfully readable and manifest
the highest standards of historical scholarship, Ellis has produced
a host of articles, essays, and reviews, including a piece on Alexander
Hamilton for the New Yorker and an essay titled “Jefferson:
Post-DNA” for the William and Mary
Quarterly. Ellis is also
a brilliant and attentive teacher. Generations of former students—some
of them now professional historians in their own right—claim
him as one of the great inspirations of their lives and an enduring
friend. Ellis served Mount Holyoke as dean of faculty from 1980 to
1990. At the end of his term the trustees named him to the then-new
Ford Foundation Chair, noting Ellis’s uncommon achievement
and excellence in his field, his commitment to excellence in the
teaching of history, and his encouragement of students to stretch
their intellectual and analytical abilities to the fullest measure
of their potential. Ellis stepped down from the Ford Chair in 2001.
After four years of teaching, scholarship, and service of the highest
standards and integrity, he has earned the chair anew.
Indira Peterson
David B. Truman Professor of Asian Studies
Peterson is a scholar of Indian and comparative
literature, both classical and modern; Sanskrit
and Tamil language;
Hinduism; South Indian cultural history, literature,
folklore, religion,
and performing
arts (music, dance, and drama); and women and
gender in South Asia. She is fluent in her native
Tamil,
in English,
Sanskrit,
Hindi, Marathi,
French, and German. In her spare time she uses
Russian and Greek.
As her students and many colleagues know, she
is a performer as well as a scholar, introducing
the
arts
of South Indian
dance, music,
and voice into her courses and her work in this
community and beyond. In the wider academic world,
Peterson
is known as a
leading scholar
of classical Sanskrit, of classical and modern
Tamil languages and culture, of classical Hinduism,
and
of colonial, postcolonial,
and
gender studies. Since 1982, when she first came
to Mount Holyoke, she has published at least
one major
article
a year. Her several
books include Poems to Siva: The Hymns of
the Tamil Saints. She edited the Indian literature
section
of the Norton
Anthology of World Masterpieces.
Beloved as a teacher, she offers courses in classical
literature of India, great epics of India, sacred
narratives in the
Hindu tradition, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath
Tagore, and modern
Indian fiction.
|
