Ever wonder what professors do on their sabbaticals? Here's a summary of accomplishments by faculty members who took sabbatical leave during the last academic year. (Note: This is the first of five planned installments listing faculty sabbatical activities. Space limitations, and the high activity level of our professors, make it impossible to publish them all in one issue.)
Martha Ackmann, assistant professor of women's studies, worked on her book on Emily Dickinson's matrilineage, including completing a chapter examining the influence of the poet's maverick Uncle Joe Norcross on her life and art. She also began directing the upcoming Emily Dickinson International Society Conference, a gathering that will bring approximately 300 Dickinson scholars from around the world to Mount Holyoke in August 1999. She also published two newspaper commentaries on contemporary women's issues: an essay on so-called preventive mastectomies in the Chicago Tribune and an essay on the NCAA and Title IX in the Providence Journal-Bulletin.
During her spring leave, anthropology professor Debbora Battaglia wrote an invited chapter entitled "Towards an Ethics of the Open Subject: Contingency Theory and Anthropology" for an edited volume, Anthropological Theory Today, to be published by Polity Press in 1998. She also continued her work on a collection of essays to be titled The Self-Displaced (currently under contract with University of California Press), and drew from that project a paper of the same title for an invited talk at Columbia University in the fall. In addition, she prepared a keynote address entitled "Ethnomathematics and Ideology" for the July 1998 Dartmouth College conference on Mathematics across the Curriculum. This last project grew out of her participation in Math across the Curriculum at Mount Holyoke.
During her spring leave, associate professor of art Nancy Campbell printed and prepared work for group exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, Ohio, Kansas, and Texas. She attended a printmaking conference at Ohio University, studied computer applications for fine art screenprinting, and prepared to teach at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor this fall.
Politics professor Joan Cocks substantially revised "A New Cosmopolitanism? V.S. Naipaul and Edward Said." She wrote two new essays, "Isaiah Berlin and Herderian Nationalism," and "On the Jewish Question: Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt." These essays complete the main body of her book manuscript, Between Criticism and Passion: Political Philosophy in the Light of the National Question. She wrote a book review for the Journal of Politics and a response piece to be published in The Intellectual History Newsletter. She also participated in a faculty seminar on masculinity and queer theory and a seminar session on postcoloniality and feminism, gave a number of talks for Mount Holyoke, helped prepare two new courses for critical social thought, and saw one of her articles reprinted in the Australian Arena Journal.
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