The
O'Shea Report: October 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 October 2002.
Darby Dyar, associate
professor of astronomy and geology, has been awarded $150,000
by NASA's Mars Fundamental Research program to support her three-year
(October 2002 to September 2005) project entitled "Temperature
Dependence and Resolution of Fundamental Mossbauer Parameters
in Mars-Analog Minerals." Two Mars flights are scheduled to be
launched early next summer. They will arrive on Mars in January
2004 and deploy rovers carrying a number of instruments, one of
which will be a Mossbauer spectrometer. Particularly good for
studying minerals containing iron, this device zaps rocks with
gamma rays of different frequencies and measures the proportion
of rays that are absorbed as a function of the frequency. The
plot of the percentage of radiation absorbed by a rock as a function
of the frequency is called its Mossbauer spectrum and varies with
the proportion of different isotopes of iron and iron minerals
in the rock. The spectrum also varies with temperature. In order
for the spectra that are going to be measured to do anyone any
good (say, for example, to identify minerals in the rock), one
needs to know the Mossbauer spectra at Martian temperatures of
the different rocks and minerals that are likely to be zapped.
The catch is that no one knows what minerals the rovers are going
to encounter (if you did, there would be no need to send them),
and no one has measured Mossbauer spectra of most known materials
at temperatures that are as low as on Mars. So, over the next
three years, Darby, who has the only lab at an undergraduate college
in the country that can measure Mossbauer spectra, is going to
have undergraduates working feverishly measuring three to four
Mossbauer spectra per day, 365 days a year, of minerals and glasses
thought likely to occur on Mars at Martian (i.e., low) temperatures.
This data will be posted to the Web and will be essential in allowing
researchers to interpret the data the rovers send back. The data
will also provide a basis for possible theoretical prediction
of what Mossbauer spectra of as yet unknown minerals should look
like.
The title of Assistant
Professor of Anthropology Joshua Roth's new book Brokered
Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan (which has
just appeared with Cornell University Press), may lead you to
think that the book is a narrow scholarly treatise on a recondite
topic of interest only to specialists. Don't be fooled. In 150
beautifully written pages, Josh presents a riveting ethnographic
account of the Nikkeijin in Japan (Japanese émigrés
to Brazil and Peru who subsequently returned after one or two
generations to work in Japan) that illuminates Japanese working-class
life and the universal themes of home, exile, identity, race,
and culture in a global society. Everything shifts, and ironies
abound. The Nikkeijin feel like Japanese in Brazil, and Brazilians
in Japan; the Japanese extol the Nikkeijin's Japanese virtues
in Brazil and decry their lack of them in Japan. Josh details
his work at an automobile factory in Hamamatsu and analyzes how
the presence of Nikkeijin and foreign workers inflects the ways
in which native Japanese workers describe their own relation to
their work and their employer. Understanding, he writes, requires
that "we should regard culture as a toolbox of resilient symbolic
resources that can be deployed for rhetorical or political purposes
at appropriate moments, rather than as a fixed structure of thought
or behavior that can be discerned in all members of a culture
in all contexts." So, the same culture can be used to construct
differences or to construct solidarity.
A beautiful book,
edited by Associate Professor of Geology Lauret Savoy and
Alison Deming, entitled The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity
and the Natural World, has just appeared. Nature writing,
the editors maintain, "bears witness to the wounded relationship
between people and the Creation …" All peoples. Mainstream,
Euro-American writing, they explain, tends to celebrate the pristine
wilderness or mourn its loss. But what of those whose "primary
experience of land and place is indigenous or exiled or degraded
or toxic? What are the stories of relationship with place that
might come out of these histories. . . ?" Lauret and her collaborator
set themselves the task of finding out, and this book is the result.
They have assembled/nursed-into-existence a truly provocative
collection that defies summary. Turtles are different when you
think of them as the greatest of all beings that walk and swim.
Walden Pond is different when you think of Thoreau regularly returning
his dirty laundry to his mother, and Kaho`olawe is different for
the healing chants and poems that have been sung and performed
on its behalf.
Marianne Doezema,
director of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and lecturer
in the Department of Art, has edited, and Christopher Benfey,
professor of English and codirector of the Weissman Center for
Leadership, has contributed a foreword to Changing Prospects:
The View from Mount Holyoke, which has just appeared with
the Cornell University Press. The book accompanies and documents
the exhibition of the same name at the art museum. In addition
to Marianne's preface and Chris's foreword, the book includes
three essays and an amazing number of color plates. A newcomer
can scarcely live in the Pioneer Valley more than a month without
a neighbor or colleague (or curiosity) bringing him or her to
the top of Mount Holyoke, but one does not travel to the valley
to ascend the mountain. What is extraordinary about the show,
and the book, is that they make it clear that this scenery that
we enjoy, but take for granted, was famous 150 years ago. They
also underscore the fact that destinations change. The book documents
as well the influence of the school of landscape painting established
by Thomas Cole.
The second, revised
edition of Real Choices / New Voices by Professor and Chair
of Politics Douglas Amy is appearing with Columbia University
Press this month. I have not had a chance to read it. Next month.
Visiting Professor
of History Ming Chan's tenth book Crisis and Transformation
in China's Hong Kong has just appeared. I haven't had a chance
to read it yet.
Associate Professor
of Art Joe Smith won a competition run by the art museum
for a commission to produce an outdoor sculpture on the side of
the Art Gallery facing Pageant Green. The money was donated by
the class of 2000. Joe produced the striking bench to the right
of the building as you walk from Clapp to Willits. It is fenced
off to let the grass grow in front of it, so I haven't had a chance
to sit in it, but I plan to. I'm told that the bench is very comfortable.
It is lovely–I especially like it because the back appears
to be a genuine ellipse, as opposed to the still nice, but much
more common oval. However, the ellipse is not oriented as you
might think so that the major axis is parallel to the ground,
but so that it has a slightly negative slope. Its major axis is
not parallel to the ground but tips slightly down from front to
back. Moreover, the plane of the seat cuts the back along a chord,
but one that unexpectedly is under the center of mass of the ellipse
that forms the back (but not so far under that the right vertex
is above the plane of the seat). The seat, again I haven't had
a chance to get too close, is another ellipse (or possibly an
oval)–the back meets it along a chord that is not the major
axis and, in fact, not quite parallel to the semi-axis. As a result
the vertex of the ellipse that makes up the seat is considerably
to the right of where the back meets the seat. The result is very
pleasing–slightly asymmetrical, but with a deep sense of
harmony, coming, I think, from the inherent symmetries of the
ellipses. The scene is completed by some plantings selected by
Ellen Shukis, director of the Botanic Garden. The whole
effect is really lovely–I know of no other word.
Taking Haiti
by Associate Professor of History Mary Renda has won the
John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association for
the best book in American studies published in 2001. This very
prestigious prize honors the eminent and beloved scholar John
Hope Franklin, professor emeritus at Duke and past president of
the association. The last three prize winners were from Princeton,
New York University, and Yale respectively. The prize will be
presented on November 15 in Houston at the American Studies Association
Annual Meeting. This is the second major prize that Mary's book
has won. Last May it won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society
for Historians of American Foreign Relations for the best first
book on the history of American foreign relations.
--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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