The
O'Shea Report: February 2003
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 2003.
Professor of English
Donald Weber has received a fellowship to the Bellagio Center
for his project "The Anxiety of Belonging: Multiculturalism
and Identity Politics in U.S. and U.K. Literary and Popular Culture."
He will compare how the idea of belonging and the constructions
of ethnic identity are explored in the literary and popular cultures
of the U.S. and U.K. On a theoretical level, he wants to explore
the charge of French sociologists, such as Bourdieu, that multiculturalism
is another example of American academic imperialism, together
with the notion that, due to American sociologists, the term "identity"
has become overburdened and lost all explanatory power. Fellowships
to the Bellagio Center, a historic estate on the shores of Lake
Como run by the Rockefeller Foundation, are highly prestigious
and go to established scholars judged by their peers to be doing
cutting-edge work. Incredibly, this is the fourth such award to
MHC faculty members in as many years, surely a record.
Professor of Mathematics
Giuliana Davidoff, Peter Sarnak, and Alain Valette's eagerly
awaited book Elementary Number Theory, Group Theory, and Ramanujan
Graphs has just appeared with Cambridge University Press.
It is based on a set of notes that have, over the past few years,
become a minor cult classic in the mathematical world. Graphs
are sets of points, called vertices, together with lines, called
edges, joining some of the pairs of vertices. They have been studied
intensively by mathematicians and are of interest to engineers,
theoretical biologists and computer scientists, among others,
who have used them to model all sorts of things: networks, brain
connections, economies, codes. The airline route maps you find
in the seat pockets in front of you on an airplane and interstate
maps on the inside of road atlases are graphs. This book studies
Ramanujan graphs, which connect many vertices with a minimal number
of edges but with reasonable redundancy (such graphs are of intense
interest to phone and computer companies). There have been a number
of beautiful constructions of infinite families of graphs that
appear to be Ramanujam. However, the proofs that they are Ramanujan
are highly nontrivial. This lovely little book presents some of
these recently discovered constructions together with full proofs.
The range of seemingly disparate mathematical techniques and objects
that make an appearance is stunning: harmonic analysis, group
representations, number theory, spectral theory. The book evokes
a deep sense of wonder and hints at unexplored connections that
lie just beyond our understanding.
Assistant Professor
of History Jeremy King’s book Budweisers into Czechs
and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948
has just appeared with Princeton University Press. It tells the
story of how a bilingual population and their small town south
of Prague became the town Budweis/Budæjovice inhabited by
Czechs and purged of Germans and Jews. Jeremy argues that traditional
accounts that frame the history as a contest between two ethnic
groups, Czech and German, with Czechs emerging as victors, are
in fact ahistorical and impose modern, constructed categories
that obscure and do violence to what actually happened. The story
Jeremy tells is one that starts not with ethnic groups but with
a loose bilingual amalgam loyal to the Hapsburg state, the people
of which constructed over time nationhoods we recognize today.
It is a history of nationhood as opposed to a national history,
one that shows just how national and narrow the concepts of race
and ethnicity are, and one that makes one wish urgently for similar
histories elsewhere.
Assistant Professor
of Spanish Nieves Romero-Diaz's first book Nueva nobleza,
nueva novela: reescribiendo la cultura urbana del Barroco
(New Nobility, New Novel: Rewriting the Urban Culture of the Baroque)
has just appeared with Juan de la Cuesta Press (Newark, Delaware,
2002). I'm ashamed to say that I can't read Spanish, but happily
a translation is in the works. Nieves's book examines the novela,
one of the two major literary genres in Baroque literary culture
in Golden Age Spain, as a social phenomenon that reflected changes
in the urban aristocracy of the time. She focuses on four authors,
two of whom (Maria de Zayas and Marina de Carvajal) are women,
chosen for the differing social and economic perspectives from
which they write.
A lovely new collection
of poems by Professor of English Robert Shaw, entitled
Solving for X, has just appeared with Ohio University Press.
The poem from which the collection takes its title is an exhaustively
wonderful characterization of the various guises in which the
symbol X appears, starting with the mathematical unknown and ending
with the taped bracing on windows facing an impending hurricane.
("You are the unknown quantity in hiding / behind a blackboard’s
haze of wasted chalk, / . . . But one stroke leaves the other
standing, starts / the latest round of tic-tac-toe.") The poems
defy easy description. They range from Robert's meditation "Drowned
Towns" on the towns evacuated, razed, and flooded to create the
Quabbin Reservoir, to poems that capture perfectly some of the
more awkward of academic life's moments (writing a letter of recommendation
for a dimly remembered student), to very short poems with utterly
unlikely rhymes. Two examples of the latter are "An Out-of-Print
Avant-Garde Anthology" ("Those poets who pursued le dernier
cri / have found oblivion through cacophony") and "Reception
after the Reading" ("After prolonged obeisance to Apollo / a nod
to Dionysus ought to follow"). Neoclassical haiku?
Last spring semester,
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Rachel Fink brought
together the students in her upper-level seminar class on cloning
and stem cells (Biology 321) and those in her introductory biology
class (Biology 200) in a pedagogical tour de force. Each of the
students in the seminar class was assigned the task of focusing
on one of the members of President Bush's council on bioethics,
of learning everything she could about that member, and of taking
on his or her persona. The upper-level students then used their
adopted personae to present a forum on the issues to the introductory
class. Members of the introductory class asked questions and debated
courses of action. The details and reflections on this extraordinary
experiment have just appeared in Rachel's article "Cloning, Stem
Cells, and the Current National Debate: Incorporating Ethics into
a Large Introductory Biology Course" in the winter 2002 issue
of Cell Biology Education. An interesting wrinkle was that
Rachel sent the transcript of the forum to the (real) members
of the president's council. One turned out to be an alumna and
complained that a quote attributed to her by the Boston Globe
was, in fact, a misrepresentation of her views!
A large number of
articles have appeared:
I couldn’t read
a word of "American Abstract Painting and the Asian Philosophy
of Zen," a Chinese-language article by Lian Duan, visiting
instructor in Asian studies, in the journal Artist Magazine
(11 [2002]: 444-449), but the pictures were great.
More accessible is
Professor of Russian Edwina Cruise's article "Women, Sexuality
and Family" in the Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (Cambridge
University Press, 2003), a collection of papers by leading Tolstoy
scholars. Edwina argues that Tolstoy's views on mothering expressed
in his essays were relatively constant, whereas those expressed
in his fiction changed fundamentally over time.
In the irresistibly
entitled essay "Romancing the transgendered native" (GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no. 4 [2002]: 469-497),
Professor of Anthropology Lynn Morgan and a former student
criticize the notion of a third gender and the use of non-Western
examples in popular transgender literature, warning that "our
ability to comprehend the complexity of others' lives is jeopardized
when the power to represent them is placed in the hands of those
who stand to gain from misrepresenting them." In another recent
article (Medical Anthropology 21 [2002]: 247-274), Lynn
convincingly traces the classification of embryos as medical waste
to an alliance of convenience between embryologists and state
authorities. The paper argues that a nearly century-old understanding
is breaking down: "Their containers are leaking," "their disciplinary
location is up for grabs," and "even an anthropologist might stake
a claim."
Professor of English
Donald Weber presents a hugely penetrating analysis of
the way that the classic films Crossfire and Gentleman's
Agreement take on anti-Semitism in postwar U.S. in his essay
"The Limits of Empathy: Hollywood's Imaging of Jews circa 1947"
(in the collection Key Texts in American Jewish Culture,
Rutgers University Press, 2003). In another paper, entitled "Accents
of the Future: Jewish American Popular Culture" (in the collection
Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, Cambridge
University Press, 2003), he examines Jewish American immigrant
fears and dissent in film, 1950s TV, and comedy. This exuberantly
multidisciplinary romp covers lots of territory (Yiddish film,
Yinglish parody, and stand-up comedy, to name a few) with good
humor and grace. "Nostalgia," he writes, "bridges the gap between
the ache for a lost place as it addresses the hurts of contemporary
history."
Associate Professor
of Biological Sciences Craig Woodard and collaborators
have an article in Developmental Biology (252 [2002]: 138-148)
on the role of ecdysone, a steroid hormone, in programmed cell
death in salivary glands of fruit fly larvae (aka maggots). They
study the hormonal effects at the genetic level, using careful
experiments with mutants to examine a number of genes that are
turned on and off by the hormone. This is critical to understanding
the relations between different mechanisms of programmed cell
death. Partly because of its connection with cancer and aging,
programmed cell death is a hot topic of current research.
--The December 2002
O'Shea Report more>
--The November 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The October 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The September 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The May 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The April 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The March 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The February 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The December 2001 O'Shea Report more>
--The November 2001 O'Shea Report more>
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