The
O'Shea Report: April 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 April 2003.
The fourth edition
of Out of Many: A History of the American People, by Professor
of History Daniel Czitrom, Johnny Faragher of Yale University,
Mari Jo Buhle of Brown University, and Susan Armitage of Washington
State University, has just appeared. It is unlike any other history
text I have seen and a far cry from the American history text
I stumbled through as a student. It reads like a novel, interweaving
the stories of the different communities, local and global, past
and present, that make up this country with a cultural, political,
and economic history of the United States. Fascinating vignettes
describe different American communities, beginning with Cahokia,
a thirteenth-century city of about 30,000 people on the banks
of the Mississippi across from present-day Saint Louis, and ending
with the transnational community housed by the World Trade Center.
The last chapters, entitled "The Conservative Ascendancy,
1974—1987" and "Toward a Transnational America,
since 1988," present a gripping account of post-Vietnam America
through the first Gulf War, the Internet, the election of George
W. Bush, and the destruction of the World Trade Center towers.
This text fairly glows with the insights of wonderful scholarship
and superb teaching and ebulliently gainsays those who would undervalue
textbook writing.
Associate Professor
of Geology Alan Werner has received unofficial word that
the National Science Foundation has awarded the College $507,581
to fund his project "Holocene and Modern Climate Change in the
High Arctic: Establishing an REU Site on Svalbard, Norway." The
three-year project will allow six students each year for the next
three years to travel to Svalbard to study the Arctic environment
and carry out climate change research. The students will be housed
at UNIS, a high Arctic station (79° N) in Longyearbyen established
by the Norwegian government and owned by four Norwegian universities.
(Check out their Web site: http://www.unis.no.)
They will focus on a field site in the Linné Valley, a
small (15 km) glacial valley 50 km west of UNIS. They plan to
study cores from glacial-fed lake beds, attempting first to study
how the strata in the cores match up to known climactic changes
and second to then use the strata to infer climactic changes over
the last 2,000 years. This is part of an urgent program in Arctic
and climate science to try to expand the network of records that
can be used to track climate changes with high resolution over
the last two millennia.
Orin Hoffman, laboratory
director in the physics department, and the Society for Physics
Students have received a grant of $1,468 from the Engineering
Center Education Trust in Boston, to support the Mount Holyoke
College Engineering Outreach Program in its work with the South
Hadley Middle School. Among other things, they are working with
teams of middle school students designing solar cars.
The Association for
Asian American Studies has awarded Associate Professor
of Art Anthony Lee the 2001 Cultural Studies Book Award
for his book Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San
Francisco. The award ceremony will take place during the association’s
annual meeting May 7—11 at the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San
Francisco.
Associate Professor
of Art Ajay Sinha has received a $5,000 grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities to support his project "The
Cultural Currency of Oil Painting in Early Modern India, 1780—1850."
These grants are hugely competitive and awarded on the likely
significance of the contribution that the project will make to
knowledge in the specific field and to the humanities generally.
Ajay will visit museums in Essex (Massachusetts), London, Calcutta,
and Bombay to study early-nineteenth-century oil paintings of
Indian subjects by non-British painters. These paintings, which
are more objects of commerce than high art, show how the official
history of British colonization is but a small part of a far more
diverse, global culture of the time. The links between them and
that culture underscore the shortcomings in the current mainstream
account of the development of modern Indian art.
Jessica Sidman
and Megan Nuñez, both of whom are joining us next
year (in mathematics and chemistry, respectively), have just been
named Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professors. They join ten (new
record) other current and former Clare Boothe Luce assistant professors:
Sarah Bacon (biological sciences), Lisa Ballesteros (computer
science), Susan Barry (biological sciences), Jill Bubier (environmental
studies), Janice Hudgings (physics), Michelle Markley (geology),
Jillian McLeod (mathematics), Lauret Savoy (geology), Sharon Stranford
(biological sciences), and Rebecca Younkin (physics).
--The February 2003
O'Shea Report more>
--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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