---

Activist honored by state--Nancy Larson, senior administrative assistant to the dean of studies/dean of the College, recently received a special recognition award from the Massachusetts Office for Victim Assistance. The award was given in recognition of her continuing work on behalf of victims of violent crime and is the highest state honor bestowed upon a crime victim "who has transformed his or her victimization into healing activities that have made significant contributions with long-term benefits to the community."

Attorney General Scott Harshbarger presented Larson with a plaque that reads: "The Massachusetts Victim and Witness Assistance Board recognizes Nancy Larson for her dedication and many contributions to victims of crime." Larson is president of the Daniel A. Larson Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides emotional support and financial assistance to the survivors of homicide victims.

This is no mere boarding school--Peter Carini, assistant director for archives and special collections, corrected the author of a March 2 New York Times article about the novel I Never Came to You in White, which mentions that Emily Dickinson attended a "boarding school in South Hadley, Mass." Carini notes that the "boarding school" was in fact Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (the College's original incarnation), which offered "the closest thing to a college education available to women in New England." He chided, "Not to emphasize this distinction is to relegate an extremely important step in the history of women's education to a lower standing."

"Virtue and virtuosity" at the keyboard--Gary Steigerwalt, associate professor of music, received a rave review for his April 8 piano recital at the Boston Conservatory. His performances of music by Schubert, Copland, and Liszt had both virtue and virtuosity, according to the Boston Globe reviewer. "Recitals like this instruct us in what virtuosity really is," he wrote. Steigerwalt's approach, the reviewer continued, is "capable of imparting the best-known chestnuts in the literature as though they were new."

Sponges that don't sponge off others--Aaron Ellison, associate professor of environmental studies, led a team of scientists that discovered a mutually beneficial relationship between red mangroves and two species of sponge. According to an article in the April issue of the British magazine BBC Wildlife, Ellison's team discovered that both mangroves and sponges thrive by living in tandem; the mangroves obtain nitrogen from the sponges while sponges get carbon from the mangrove roots on which they live.

A monstrously interesting course-- The April 18 Chronicle of Higher Education carried a feature article about history professor Robert Schwartz's course Frankenstein Meets Multimedia. Students are reading Mary Shelley's classic novel, studying its historic milieu, and creating their own CD-ROMs holding essays, film clips, poems, and paintings related to the book. It's the first MHC course requiring students to hand in a multimedia project.