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Dean
of Faculty Report, March 2006
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 March 2006 report of Donal O'Shea,
Dean of Faculty.
BOOKS
AND FILM
Anthropology
professor Debbora Battaglia’s book E.T.
Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces has just appeared
with Duke University Press. It will surely become an instant
classic. “These
pages.” she writes, “suggest how the idea of
the extraterrestrial can attune us to insiders’ voices
in outerspaces and, too, guide our critical inquiry of
the reach and range of anthropological theory and methods,
productively destabilizing prior knowledge of the field.” This
highly serious, always playful, and very scholarly romp
challenges us in turn to honor the disconnect, to consider
an expanded sense of possible affinities, and to explore
globalization as planetization. Debbora’s provocative
lead essay introduces notions such as “the devotional
mode of the cult alien” and “technoscience
spirituality” to describe aspects of the contemporary
Zeitgeist. You may never have heard of them, but after
reading Debbora you find them indispensable. Two months
ago, I had never heard of visibility or mobility anxiety.
A month ago, awash in the warm glow of a second glass of
wine, I found myself trying to explain Debbora’s
hypothesis that the two were inseparably linked. The essays
in the collection are uniformly fascinating. My favorite
two are Debbora’s on the Raelian cult and Joseph
Dumit’s on illnesses you have to fight to get. Dumit,
a professor at University of California at Davis and M.I.T.,
discusses conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome,
Gulf war syndrome, and repetitive strain injury, viewing
them anthropologically both from the point of view of the
sufferers and others’ experience of them. The connection
with E.T. culture? All can be viewed as a sort of host-planet-rejection-syndrome.
The Harlem Renaissance refers to the predominantly African
American literary and artistic flowering associated with
Harlem and other areas between the World Wars. Associate
professor of English and director of the Weissman Center
for Leadership and the Liberal Arts Lois Brown’s Encyclopedia
of the Harlem Literary Renaissance explores all aspects
of this social and cultural phenomenon. It is at once a
browser’s
dream and a monumental work of scholarship. It begins with
a concise introductory essay and a wonderful map, and ends
with two useful bibliographies and a careful chronology.
The heart of the book is a series of encyclopedia entries,
arranged alphabetically, and all written by Lois. So you
could, say, start with the chronology and look up the various
works and authors and events. Or, you could begin with
the map of Harlem and move from one theater and club to
another,
moving to the entry and iterating the cross-references
in each article. The articles are wonderful and deal directly
with achievement, contradiction, and failure without a
trace
of moralizing or sycophancy. Some, such as the entry on
Alain Locke that straightforwardly navigates a career of
great
complexity, are minor masterpieces. The resulting depiction
of the Harlem Renaissance captures its complicated, multi-sited,
diverse strands, individuals, events, and places. It records
triumph, failure, and achievement in the face of overwhelming
odds and pervasive racism, and is at once inspiring and
haunting. Above all, it a scholarly tour de force that
no one, I think,
could have predicted would succeed so well on so many levels.
It will be essential for any serious student of American
literature or history as well as African American, American,
ethnic, or gender studies.
French professor Samba Gadjigo’s documentary
film The
Making of Moolaadé covers the production of
Ousmane Sembène’s film Moolaadé.
Samba and his crew journeyed to the village of Djerisso
in Burkina
Faso,
documenting Sembène’s choice of the village,
and the difficulties of making a feature-length film with
a multinational cast of Ivorians, Malians, and Burkinans
in a remote area of central West Africa. Interviews with
actors, technicians, and editors underscore the theme that
making a film in Africa is part adventure, part grand folly,
and part heroic act. Samba’s choice not to include
a filmed interview directly with Sembène, but rather
to have footage of Sembène participating in various
parts of the filming, choice of set, and editing with appropriate
voiceovers works to highlight Sembène’s ever-present
role, and the respect in which he is held by everyone associated
with the film. Sembène’s passion for social
change, and for film as a vehicle of such change, comes
through clearly in his description of Moolaadé towards
the end of the documentary not just as a film about the
horror of female circumcision, but as a means of “liberating
our societies and freeing our peoples.” The documentary
is utterly engaging, and one can only imagine the difficulties
of making it -- one of the producers interviewed in the
documentary describes following Sembène as always
being at the heart of the storm. Doubtless, Samba knows
that better than anyone else, yet his documentary runs
effortlessly.
GRANTS
Jessica Sidman, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Mathematics,
has heard that her NSF grant will be recommended for funding.
So did associate professor of chemistry Wei Chen.
Jessica’s,
entitled Computational and Commutative Algebra, proposes
a number of projects aimed at exploring a number of mysterious
phenomena at the interface of geometry, combinatorics, and
computational complexity. She studies how certain computational
techniques give rise to algebraic gadgets that somehow mirror
geometric simplicity in terms of computational complexity.
Understanding such phenomena is at the cutting edge of twenty-first
century mathematics and has applications to the algorithms
that drive today’s data search engines. Wei’s
project, Impregnation of Nanoparticles in a Biocompatible
Hydrogel Matrix, involves the fabrication of hydrogels in
which nanoparticles are isotropically embedded. Here again
the science is cutting edge, and the potential applications
to medicine, sensing, and imaging almost boundless. More
on these when the grants become definite.
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