The
O'Shea Report: February 2002
At every monthly faculty
meeting during the school year, Dean of Faculty Donal O'Shea presents
brief overviews of recent publications and other achievements
by the Mount Holyoke faculty. Here are excerpts from his report
for February 2002.
Martha Ackmann, senior lecturer
in women's studies, has received a grant of $15,000 from The Ninety Nines to
support her research on the Mercury 13 women who were tested for astronaut viability
in 1961. The Ninety Nines is an international organization of women pilots founded
in 1929 by Amelia Earhart, named for the 99 women pilots who responded to Earhart's
initial inquiry for creating an organization. Ackmann was sponsored for the
award by Dr. Petra Illig, a physician who specializes in aviation medicine and
who also spends her time as an Alaskan backcountry bush pilot. Ackmann's book
on the Mercury 13 will be published by Random House with a tentative publication
date of March 2003.
Helen Leung, associate professor
of chemistry, just received the John S. Burlew research award from the Connecticut
Valley American Chemical Society for her delicate work using Fourier transform
microwave spectroscopy to study intermolecular forces. In recent history, this
award has gone to researchers at universities or in industry, so it's a definite
coup that it went to a college researcher.
A number of faculty members have
won residential fellowships. Nancy Campbell, associate professor of art,
has been selected for Michigan State’s program in Hikone, Japan. Next spring,
she will become a visiting scholar at the Japan Center for Michigan Universities,
which is located on the shore of Lake Biwa in the city of Hikone (Shiga Prefecture)
in Japan. Indira Peterson, professor and chair of Asian studies, has
been awarded a monthlong residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center in
Bellagio, Italy, for June-July 2002, to complete her translation of an eighteenth-century
Tamil drama, The Fortune-teller of Kurralam. Roberto Marquez,
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, has
also been awarded a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Center in
Bellagio for August-September 2002. He will complete his study and anthological
book of original translations Borinquen to El Barrio and Beyond: Puerto Rican
Poetry from Aboriginal Times to the Present. Gail Scanlon, librarian
and director of access services, has been accepted for this year's Frye Leadership
Institute at Emory University. The institute runs a high-profile summer program
that trains the next generation’s leaders in the library and information
technology fields. Scanlon's project, which has to do with Mount Holyoke's space
study and the library as place, is an opportunity to look with fresh eyes at
our service areas and to think about proximities of staff in various library
information technology services departments.
The College received a grant of
$447,180 from the Freeman Foundation. Jonathan Lipman, professor of history;
Indira Peterson, professor and chair of Asian studies; Ying Wang,
assistant professor of Asian studies; and Tara Fitzpatrick, director
of corporations and foundations, conceived and wrote the proposal. The grant
will fund a new faculty position in Chinese philosophy and religion, which would
include offering courses in English, open to all students, and other courses
in Chinese for third- and fourth-year Chinese language students. It will also
allow us to expand our East Asian Studies program by developing a network among
our 250 alumnae living in East Asia and will provide greater opportunities for
our students to study and conduct internships in East Asia and to enhance the
historic ties between Mount Holyoke and colleges in Japan, China, and Korea.
Finally, it will fund the creation of a number of curricular and cocurricular
opportunities for our students to learn more about East Asian cultures, through
lectures, exhibits, film series, workshops, library and multimedia acquisitions,
and other cultural studies programs.
Solving for X, a new collection
of poetry by Professor of English Robert Shaw, has been awarded the Hollis
Summers Prize by Ohio University Press.
Speaking the Same Language: Speech
and Audience in Thucydides’ Spartan Debates by Paula Debnar,
associate professor and chair of classics, has been published by the University
of Michigan Press. Debnar analyzes twelve speeches involving Spartans in Thucydides’
History. These speeches open whole worlds. To name three of them: the
scholarly world in which the nature of the speeches in the History is
vigorously contested; the ancient world of the Greek city-states in which a
fragile peace unravels; and the fierce world of rhetoric in which a closely
fought battle for the heart and mind of the listener is engaged using every
conceivable trick: elision, misdirection, tense change, bait and switch. Debnar
shows how the speakers made their points by using what the specific audience
would have known or liked to have heard. She shows how events distant in time
are juxtaposed, how shifts from indicative mood to subjunctive are used to raise
doubt, and how word choice is used to flatter or misdirect. It is a joyous tour
de force and a fabulous read. The book can be read as an exhilarating manual
in the black arts of persuading readers and listeners.
Professor of Philosophy Tom Wartenberg
has just published The Nature of Art: An Anthology (Harcourt). The book
starts with an excerpt from a recent play in which friends discuss the nature
and value of a painting of a solid white rectangle, just purchased by one of
the characters from a celebrated contemporary artist. Wartenberg uses their
conversation to launch a concise and fascinating discussion of some of the main
questions in the philosophy of art: What is art? Can it be defined? Does intention
make art? This discussion is followed by twenty-eight carefully selected excerpts,
each about ten pages, from philosophers and theorists ranging from Plato and
Aristotle, through Dewey and Adorno, and ending with Derrida, Hein, Jegede,
Appiah, and Davis. About a third of the choices are pre-nineteenth century,
a third nineteenth century, and a third twentieth century. Each excerpt is preceded
by an introduction to the author’s work and the context in which it occurred.
Each introduction includes a set of questions for the reader to consider as
she reads the excerpt. These questions are most helpful, point to the heart
of what the excerpted piece is saying, and, perhaps most importantly, model
how a philosopher works by asking questions. It is difficult to conceive of
a more engaging, challenging, enticing, yet gentle, introduction to the subject.
This is a wonderful service to his students, and all those, like me, he reaches
through this book.
Italian Renaissance Ceramics,
a sumptuous book by Wendy Watson, curator, Mount Holyoke College
Art Museum, has just appeared. It was commissioned for the occasion of the donation
of the Howard I. and Janet H. Stein collection of Italian Renaissance ceramics
to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As the museum's Senior Curator Dean Walker
writes in the preface: "For the choice of author of the book, the obvious person
was Wendy M. Watson…. Responding to Anne d’Harnoncourt’s challenge
to create a book useful to both neophytes and specialists, Wendy has written
an original text whose graceful accessibility belies its command of the field
and perceptive observations about numerous individual objects." Watson's text
is actually a history of Italian ceramics told through the items in the Stein
collection. It starts with the origins of the industry in attempts to imitate
Chinese porcelain and the importation of techniques from Spain and the Middle
East, and moves through the development of the flourishing majolica industry
in the Italian peninsula during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Along
the way, Watson addresses such issues as whether the plates were actually used
for dining and the relative degrees of learning of potters and painters. The
photographs have to be seen to be believed. Some of the pieces feature unbelievably
beautiful shades of blue and gold.
William Cullen Bryant: Poemas
de Espana, a slim volume of translations by Professor of Spanish
R. Alberto Castilla, has just appeared. The Spanish translations
of poems written by William Cullen Bryant on visiting Spain in 1857 and 1867
are presented side by side with the English-language original. The timing of
the book couldn’t be better. William Cullen Bryant was a native of western
Massachusetts and close friend and patron of Thomas Cole, whose painting of
the Oxbow will shortly be exhibited at the art museum.
A number of faculty articles have
appeared, and a number are scheduled to appear shortly: Gail Hornstein,
professor of psychology and education, has a lively article on narrative accounts
of madness written by mental patients in the January 25 Chronicle of Higher
Education. She notes that these accounts are a form of protest literature
that "retell the history of psychiatry as a story of patients struggling to
escape doctors’ despair" and that frequently detail the extremes of human
experience. Harriet Pollatsek, Julia and Sarah Ann Adams Professor of
Science, has a paper on quantum error correction in the December American
Mathematical Monthly, the world’s most widely read mathematics journal
(with a circulation of over 30,000). The security of the nation’s computer
systems and online transactions is based on the fact that current algorithms
for factoring numbers with several hundred digits would require billions of
years on any digital computer. In 1994, Peter Shor discovered an algorithm that
would allow a quantum computer (one that uses quantum states instead of numbers
to represent information) to factor large numbers relatively quickly. He went
on to remove the last of the theoretical objections to computing with quantum
states by showing error-correction is possible for quantum computers. This result
is highly counterintuitive because you cannot copy a quantum state without destroying
it. Pollatsek's article describes all this and explains how some interesting
mathematical groups (algebraic structures that encode symmetries and that are
studied in standard undergraduate algebra courses) can be used for error correction.
Laurie Priest, director of athletics and senior lecturer in physical
education and athletics, has a paper entitled "Addressing Homophobia in Intercollegiate
Athletics" in the December issue of Athletics Administration (the official
publication of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics).
She asks why intercollegiate athletics seems to be one of the most homophobic
environments in higher education, noting that the question is all the more puzzling
given the lack of tolerance in athletics for harassment based on race or religion.
She suggests that one of the causes is silence and lays out a number of ways
to address and talk about homophobia. The December 20 edition of the New
York Review of Books was another MHC issue. Brad Leithauser, Emily
Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, reviewed two books on Icelanders’
sagas, and Robert Herbert, professor emeritus of humanities, reviewed
four books on Paul Signac. Both articles are quite lovely and hugely engaging.
Christopher Benfey, professor of English and codirector of
the Weissman Center for Leadership, did the annual New York Times review
of art books.
Jean Grossholtz, professor
emeritus of politics and women's studies and chair of women’s studies,
is quoted in a story in Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English-language
newspaper, as deploring the refusal of governments backed by transnational corporations
to accept international regulation of genetic engineering and other areas of
biotechnology.
Professor of English Robert Shaw
has been invited to serve this year as the Phi Beta Kappa Poet at Yale.
This will involve his appearing and reading one of his poems at a ceremonious
dinner for the new inductees and other members of the Yale Phi Beta Kappa chapter.
Peter Viereck, professor
emeritus of history, is the featured translator in the most recent edition of
Modern Poetry in Translation and the subject of an essay by editor Daniel
Weissbort, who discusses Viereck’s translations and work, and his relationship
to Joseph Brodsky. The essay includes a generous excerpt from some of Viereck’s
translations together with Viereck’s comments on them. Viereck’s "Transplanter’s
Credo" is striking: "… The soil must suit the root. Synonyms may not be
synonymous. Given its history, 'Volk' means more than 'folk,' being more sentimental
and more sinister…. "
Correction from earlier reports:
Mimi Hellman, visiting assistant professor in the art department, received
a National Endowment for the Humanities research fellowship of $40,000 for her
project entitled "Architecture, Interior Decoration, and Social Identity
in Eighteenth-Century France."
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