AWARDS AND PRIZES:
The Carnegie Corporation has honored Sohail Hashmi, Associate
Professor of International Relations on the Alumnae Foundation,
with one of its very coveted
fellowships
to enable him to pursue a two-year, $100,000 project titled “Islamic International
Law and Public International Law: Convergence or Dissonance?” I have
been told these fellowships are very rarely given to scholars at liberal arts
colleges,
and that this year Sohail is the only such recipient. Our warmest congratulations
to you, Sohail.
Equally impressive is associate professor of English Elizabeth Young's selection as a Howard Foundation Fellowship recipient for next year. These
are highly competitive (12 recipients among 160 nominees). The annual topic
is Literary Criticism, Film Criticism, and Translation. Elizabeth's project
is entitled American Frankenstein: Race, Sex, and the Politics of Monstrosity.
Professor of chemistry Sean Decatur continues to empty the deep pockets of
the NIH, receiving this time $194,170 for his project “The Structure
and Assembly of Peptide Aggregates.”
Darby Dyar, associate professor of astronomy and geology and chair of astronomy,
has been awarded $35,625 by NASA for acquisition of a 4.5K Mossbauer spectrometer.
Gary Schmidt, visiting assistant professor of German Studies, will be a participant
in a Fulbright seminar in Berlin this summer. This year’s topic is “Current
Trends in Contemporary German Literature.”
The National Endowment for the Humanities continues to support Mount Holyoke
faculty. Michael Penn, assistant professor of religion, has received an NEH
summer fellowship for his new project on Syriac Christianity, a fine way
to begin his
sabbatical research on how early Syriac Christians understood their contemporary
Moslem compatriots.
And Calvin Chen, Luce Assistant Professor of Politics, reports that he has
received the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship for a year’s work at Harvard’s
Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.
The NSF has awarded an $18,000 supplemental grant to geology professor Al
Werner, the director of a 12-person team working on a project titled “Collaborative
Research: A Synthesis of the Last 2,000 Years of Climatic Variability from Arctic
Lakes.” The grant includes significant support for undergraduates cooperating
on the research. And speaking of supporting undergraduate scientific research,
emerita professor of chemistry Mary Kay Campbell, my spy, reports that our chemistry
department “covered itself with glory” at the American Chemical
Society national meeting. She counted ten Mount Holyoke presentations, all
of which involved
student coworkers.
Martha Ackmann, senior lecturer of women’s studies, has been on the road
giving talks based on her recent book, The Mercury 13: The Untold Story
of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Space Flight. It has received the 2005 Book Prize
from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. But my favorite
of the long list of notices she has received is the book’s selection as
the common reading for next fall’s orientation program at the University
of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.
James Morrow, codirector of SummerMath and lecturer in mathematics, and SummerMath
have been awarded a $5,000 grant from the Mathematical Association of America/Tensor
Foundation.
And the Five College Consortium has just heard that it will
receive $337,000 from the Department of Education to support African Languages
and African
Studies. Our piece of that will be a Five College position in ethnomusicology,
to be housed
in our music department.
PUBLICATIONS:
Do you remember the pleasures of the Weissman Center conference
on Pontigny?
Chris Benfey, Mellon Professor of English and former codirector
of the Weissman Center, has just published a small book, War and the
Iliad,
with the New
York Review of Books, which includes Simone Weil’s and Rachel Bespaloff’s
essays on The Iliad, along with a lovely introduction by Chris himself.
The Smith College Board of Trustees invited the Mount Holyoke trustees to
cocktails and dinner during the last February board meeting. The evening
began at the
Smith College President’s house. There, beautifully displayed, is a stunning
portrait of Smith’s former acting president and dean, John Connolly, painted
by Bonnie Miller, professor of art and chair of art studio. It is a rich and
serene painting in its own right, but for those of us who know John, we could
also appreciate how it captures so elegantly John’s spirit and wisdom.
Carolyn Collette, Professor of English Language and Literature on the Alumnae
Foundation and chair of medieval studies, has two books on the way. The first
is titled Performing Polity: Women and Agency in the Anglo-French Tradition
1385-1620. The second is a collection of essays Carolyn has edited, under
the title The
Legend of Good Women: Reception and Context.
Bob Shilkret, Norma Cutts DaFoe Professor of Psychology, has been a member
of the faculty at the Smith College School for Social Work for many years.
He has
recently presented two papers at the Society for Research in Child Development
with Ph.D. candidates at Smith. He and Yona Weiss reported on “The Importance
of the Peer Group in the Israeli Kibbutz for the Development of Adult Attachment
Style,” and Galina Markova and Bob presented “Relationships among
Parents’ Attachment Styles, Mental Representations, and Institutionalization
of Children in Bulgaria.” Bob also continues to publish regularly on his
own research on control-mastery theory. His latest contribution, written with
Sara A. Silberschatz, “A Developmental Basis for Control-Mastery Theory” is
a chapter in G. Silberschatz, ed., Transformative Relationships: The
Control-Mastery Theory of Psychotherapy, published by Routledge in 2005.
Connie Allen, dean of the classes of 2006 and 2007, will have an article
published in The Journal of Chemical Education. The title is “Catalytic Oxygen
Evolution by a Bioinorganic Model of the Photosytem II Oxygen-Evolving Complex.”
Indira Peterson has joined another disciplinary conversation. She recently
gave a paper entitled “Peasants, Nomadic Hillwomen, and Birdcatchers: Landscape
and Environmental Dialogues in Early Modern South Indian Literature” to
the Environmental Politics Colloquium at Berkeley.
The current issue of The Journal of Social Philosophy includes an article
by James Harold, assistant professor of philosophy, titled “Between Intrinsic
and Extrinsic Value,” in which he calls into question both the distinction
and the foundational theories that rely on the distinction.
Julia Whitworth, visiting instructor in theatre arts, has published a review
of the local ensemble, Double Edge Theater, in Theater Journal, which is
published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
And one last and perhaps useful announcement: The Five College Publishing
Day is set for Monday, May 16, from 10 AM-3:30 PM at the Smith College Campus
Center,
in the Carroll Room on the second floor. This brings publishers’ representatives
to the valley, followed by lunch and time for individual appointments, as desired.
A flyer with more details will come around soon.
