The
O'Shea Report: April 2004
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 2004.
AWARDS
Janice Hudgings,
Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Physics, is the recipient
of the Esther Hoffman Beller Award of the Optical Society of America.
The award recognizes her "innovative teaching methods"
and her involvement of undergraduate physics and engineering students
in "original, state-of-the-art, publishable research in optics
and solid state physics." The award, which consists of a
silver medal, a certificate, and $2,500, will be presented during
the Optical Society’s annual meeting October 10-14 in Rochester,
New York.
Chris Pyle,
professor of politics, has been awarded the Luther Macnair Award
by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. The award
is given in recognition of significant contributions to civil
liberties and will be made at the ACLU-MA annual meeting on May
24 in Boston, at which Chris will give the keynote speech. The
title of the program is "The Enemy Within: McCarthyism--50
Years and Counting." It begins at 5:15 pm and is at Suffolk
University Law School, David A. Sargent Hall.
Joshua Roth,
assistant professor of anthropology, won the 2003 Book Award in
Social Science from the Association for Asian American Studies.
The award was presented at the association’s annual meeting
in Boston on March 27, 2004.
Larry Fine,
Irene Kaplan Leiwant Professor of Jewish Studies and chair of
religion, was a finalist for the Koret Jewish Book Award for his
recent book Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac
Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (2003, Stanford University
Press), and was recognized at the awards ceremony in New York
City on March 29.
GRANTS
Martha Ackmann,
senior lecturer in women’s studies, has received a grant
of $7,500 from the Mellon Gender and Women’s Studies Research
Grant Program at Scripps College to fund her proposal, "Perfect
Game: The Study of Women in Professional Baseball." The grant
will allow her to work with three student research assistants
to study three African American women who played professional
baseball with men of the Negro Leagues. She will visit Mamie "Peanut"
Johnson, the only surviving member of the trio. Now 69, Johnson
was a 5' 2'' right-handed pitcher with a 33-6 record in 1954.
She currently manages the Negro Leagues Memorabilia Store in Capitol
Heights, Maryland. The women are the only women baseball players
to have ever played with men on a professional team.
Siraj Ahmed,
assistant professor of English, has been awarded a $5,000
summer stipend by the National Endowment for the Humanities for
his project "Empire’s Origins: Literature and the First
Century of British Rule in India 1672-1815." Siraj has been
working on a groundbreaking book arguing that the notion that
Enlightenment reason underwrote modern imperial ideology is fundamentally
mistaken. Instead, Siraj gives us a close reading of the literature
of the "long eighteenth century," showing that that
literature views merchant capital’s production of the modern
world not as progress
but as degeneration.
Far from imposing a scientific vision on the world, Siraj maintains
that the Enlightenment drew its energy from resisting the coercive
nature of the global economy. Understood via the period’s
own terms and images, the Enlightenment is a reaction against,
not a driver of, globalization. The grant will allow Siraj to
spend the summer in the East India Company Archive of the British
Museum.
Lisa Blouin,
lab director/instructor for psychology and education, has
received a $1,500 award from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology
to support her project "Integrating Technology into the Classroom:
An Annotated Bibliography." The award is administered by
the Office of Teaching Resources and is the result of a national
competition designed to stimulate the development of teaching-related
materials.
Jeremy King,
associate professor of history and chair of international relations,
has been awarded a $40,000 grant by the American Council of
Learned Societies for his project "Ethnoracial Difference
and Liberal Citizenship: The Hapsburg Experiment, 1905-1914."
The project studies six sets of constitutional amendments
implemented in the final years of the Hapsburg Monarchy. The amendments
give a view into the transformation of a dynastic state to a multinational
one. Jeremy argues that study of different Hapsburg attempts at
ethnoracial classification and their political dynamics offers
insight into more current American and French attempts at establishing
multiracial, multiethnic states. The grant will allow Jeremy to
spend next year working on a book with the same title as his project
and to take a couple of trips to Austrian and Czech archives.
Holly Hanson,
assistant professor of history, just learned that she won a Fulbright-Hays
Faculty Research Abroad Grant for $52,150 for her project "The
Social History of Kampala." She will focus on moments of
social conflict in the city of Kampala over the last century and
build on her preliminary research, which suggests that disagreement
over basic factors of economic production is at the heart of many
of those public controversies. She argues that private property
and commodified market relations characterized neither the practices
of the Baganda who claimed Kampala nor the South Asians who settled
there. Instead, each of these populations utilized a distinctly
noncommodified, noncapitalist logic to create material success,
strategically mobilizing social networks to create wealth and
social security. Needless to say, this would make analyses rooted
in Western neoclassical economic principles inappropriate. The
grant will cover eight months of research, allowing Holly to take
two months this summer and a full year in 2005-2006.
Giuliana Davidoff,
mathematics professor, and Margaret Robinson, mathematics
professor and chair of mathematics and statistics, have just received
a five-year award of $288,470 from the National Science Foundation
for their project "Mount Holyoke Undergraduate Mathematics
Summer Research Institute." The award will allow Giuliana,
Margaret, and their colleagues in the mathematics and statistics
department to continue to operate a nationally known Research
Experiences for Undergraduates site. The project brings ten to
twelve very capable undergraduates to campus for eight weeks each
summer to work in groups of three to five individuals, each under
the supervision of a faculty member, on current research problems.
The competition for these grants is intense--only 27 percent of
the 362 proposals science-wide were funded--and it is particularly
difficult to get a renewal, much less one for five years. Part
of the reason for the success of the program has been the careful
choice of research problems–the problems are, without exception,
in mainstream research areas, but are often accessible to computer-aided
experimentation (and are often high-risk). The summary review
lauds the faculty’s "enormous experience in nurturing
undergraduates" and "great research strength."
One reviewer muses wonderingly on how "the faculty managed,
through computer-experimentation and probably sheer personal talent,
to introduce the participants to extremely deep and sophisticated
areas of mathematics, and have them make genuine discoveries and
research advancements."
Sean Decatur,
associate professor and chair of chemistry, and his colleagues
Wei Chen, Mary E. Woolley Assistant Professor of Chemistry;
Maria Gomez, assistant professor of chemistry; Darren Hamilton,
Mary E. Woolley Assistant Professor of Chemistry; and Megan
Nunez, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Chemistry,
have just received word that they have been awarded $100,000 from
the National Science Foundation for a highly speculative proposal
on integrating nanotechnology into the core chemistry proposal.
No one expected this to come through. More next time.
BOOKS and PAPERS
In the great American
tradition of election-year political pamphleteering, John Fox,
visiting lecturer in complex organizations, has just written and
published a short book entitled 10 Tax Questions the Candidates
Don’t Want You to Ask with an appendix entitled 5
Common Tax Myths and Misunderstandings. The book is exactly
what the title says. It is absolutely clear, utterly convincing,
deeply rational, passionate, and even a little angry. Not only
does it articulate key questions, it explains why they are critical
and exposes the underlying reasons (if they can be dignified with
such a name) behind some of our ridiculous inequitable policies.
A sample question: "Why shouldn’t Congress do for a
single person what it does for a family of four–exempt them
from income tax until their income rises well above the poverty
level?"
Associate professor
of English Lois Brown’s lovely and haunting paper
"Memorial Narratives of African Women in Antebellum New England"
appeared recently (Vol. 20, nos. 1 and 2) in the journal Legacy:
A Journal of American Women Writers. Lois presents a close
reading of obituaries of three African women who died in New England
between 1815 and 1828. The paper works on all levels. Lois’s
prose is luminous, the analysis is theoretically sophisticated,
and the material on which she brings the analysis to bear is rich,
highly specific, and complex. The complexity results in contradictory
impulses, not all of which were conscious. Lois contrasts different
narrative handlings of slavery, some in the same account. The
treatments range from locating the deceased African female in
the American public sphere and erasing any mention of enslavement,
to locating the deceased in an African context that enslavement
interrupts (but erasing the actual period as a slave), to attempting
to describe aspects of the period of bondage. Lois concludes that
in some ways these death narratives function inversely to many
African American autobiographies: as confirmations of bondage
as opposed to manifestos of freedom.
Interesting papers
have appeared by Sam Mitchell, associate professor of philosophy,
Jessica Sidman, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of
Mathematics, Peter Viereck, professor emeritus of history,
Robert Shaw, professor of English, Lynn Morgan, professor
of anthropology, and Michael Penn, assistant professor
of religion, and others. Next time.
--The March 2004 O'Shea
Report more>
--The February 2004
O'Shea Report more>
--The December 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The October 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The September 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The May 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The April 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--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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