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Dean of Faculty Report, February 2005
At
every monthly faculty meeting during the school year, the Dean of
Faculty presents brief overviews of recent publications and other
achievements by the Mount Holyoke faculty. Here are excerpts from the
February 2005 report of Penny Gill, Acting Dean of Faculty:
I hope everyone has had a restful and productive January. I have good
news to report about projects recently brought to completion and new
projects receiving funding. But first, a stunning award to LITS. The
Association of College and Research Libraries has awarded LITS the
Excellence in Academic Libraries Award to recognize academic libraries
which are most successful at furthering the educational mission of
their institutions. They cite “creativity and innovation in meeting the
needs of their academic community, leadership in developing and
implementing exemplary programs that other libraries can emulate, and
substantial and productive relationships with classroom faculty and
students.” We congratulate Pat Albanese, Chief
Information Officer and Executive Director of Library, Information, and
Technology Services on the Katherine Johnson Hatcher Endowment, for her
leadership, and the outstanding LITS staff on this
superb accomplishment. We are so grateful for the central role you play
in every dimension of teaching and learning at Mount Holyoke.
Publications
Awards
Publications:
The fifth edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry has arrived, edited by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter,
Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, and Jon Stallworthy.
It is a splendid collection, as I am sure many of you know. Three Mount
Holyoke poets are included: Gjertrud Schnackenberg ’75, Brad Leithauser,
husband of Mary Jo and fellow Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the
Humanities, and of course, Emily Dickinson. Many of the contemporary
poets have read at Mount Holyoke, in part through the good offices of
the Glascock poetry competition each spring.
Tom Wartenberg, professor and chair of philosophy,
has returned from giving an invited paper in Moscow, where he also
demonstrated his new CD about teaching children philosophy. Along with
Angela Curran, a former member of our philosophy department, Tom has
edited a new book to be published by Blackwell: The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings.
Joe Ellis, professor of history, has returned from
a fall of book tours; at last count, he visited 21 cities with five or
six stops in each one. TV watchers might have seen him talking with Dan
Rather about the inauguration or with Charlie Rose. Ellis’s latest
book, His Excellency George Washington, continues to receive critical praise.
Awards:
Being dean of faculty must stimulate one’s creative juices. A new piece by Peter Berek,
professor of English and former dean of faculty at MHC,
“Cross-Dressing, Gender, and Absolutism in the Beaumont and Fletcher
Plays,” which appeared in Studies in English Literature last
spring, received the Monroe Kirk Spears Award. The editors described
the essay as “marked by clarity, economy, and felicity of expression
and by elegant and discerning interpretation.”
Dan Czitrom, professor of history, has been awarded a very competitive NEH fellowship for next year for his new book, Mysteries of the City: Politics, Culture, and New York’s Underworld in Turn-of-the-Century America.
Siraj Ahmed, assistant professor of English, has also received a NEH for next year to finish his new book The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment, British India, and Empire's Origin on the first century of British rule in India.
Darby Dyar, associate professor of astronomy and
geology and chair of astronomy, has received $76,939 from the National
Science Foundation for “RUI: Collaborative Research: Improvements in
the Application of the Mossbauer Effect to Studies of Minerals,” a
collaborative project with Louisiana State University.
Submitted by Penny Gill
February 2005
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