The
O'Shea Report: November 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 November 2002.
Professor of Art Marion
Miller received the commission to paint the official portrait
of former Smith College acting president John Connolly. This is
a big honor.
Professor of Philosophy
Thomas Wartenberg received a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship
in the film department at the University of Kent in Canterbury
for the spring semester. This award is funded by the Leverhulme
Trust, a British foundation dedicated to the support of high quality
research and education. The purpose of Leverhulme Visiting Professorships
is "to enable U.K. universities to host an internationally distinguished
academic from overseas (chosen and invited by the host institution)
in order to enhance the research skills and work of the host institution.
Visiting Professors will be expected to offer a short course of
'Leverhulme Lectures' to mark their residence in a British university."
They are available in any field but are very competitive. You
can't apply for them directly; a British university has to invite
you and apply on your behalf.
Donald Sanders, executive
artistic director of the Massachusetts International Festival
of the Arts, wrote and produced the play Thomas Cole, A Waking
Dream, which played October 24-27. The play was a wonderful,
dreamy account of the life and work of Thomas Cole, founder of
the Hudson River school of painting. Vanessa James, associate
professor of theatre arts, did the costumes (plastic for women,
cloth for men), which were stunning, and Jens Christiansen,
professor of economics, and Paul Staiti, Professor
of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation, made their stage debuts.
The second edition
of Real Choices/New Voices: How Proportional Representation
Elections Could Revitalize American Democracy by Professor
of Politics Douglas Amy has appeared with Columbia University
Press. Many times, small, seemingly trivial, almost mechanical
things (a bad hip, for example) that we take for granted can have
enormous, and unrecognized, effects. Doug's book focuses on one
such instance: the winner-take-all system of voting in the United
States (and Canada), as compared to different, more proportional
systems in other democracies. Doug goes through the different
systems of proportional representation, which might sound like
pretty dry stuff but isn't, because of his lively analyses of
the influences that these systems have. The most fascinating thing,
however, is the analysis of the effect that our current voting
system has on American political life. This was an eye-opener
for me. Doug traces many features of American political life,
such as the outsize influence of lobbyists and pressure groups,
low voter turnouts, and the success of the two-party system, to
name a few, to the voting system. And he does so very convincingly.
If I'd thought about it at all, I'd always ascribed more cosmic,
unfixable influences for our political life being the way it is.
The fourth edition
of Biochemistry by Mary K. Campbell, Class of 1929
Virginia Apgar Professor of Chemistry, has just appeared with
Thomson-Brooks/Cole publishers. Mary's book is one of the best-known
biochemistry textbooks and has been translated into Japanese,
Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese. For the new edition, Mary has
taken a coauthor, Shawn Farrell, of Colorado State University.
The book is visually stunning. It contains beautiful three-dimensional
pictures of large molecules, as well as discussions of their secondary
and tertiary structures unknown only a few years ago. (The primary,
secondary, and tertiary structures of a phone cord are, respectively,
a copper wire coated with plastic, the way the cord coils when
you buy it, and the maddening way it twists and writhes and folds
back on itself after two or three months of use.) Mary has shamelessly
snuck Mount Holyoke references in all over the text (there is
a picture of an MHC field hockey game in the table of contents).
Page one contains a photo and biography of Sean Decatur,
chair and associate professor of chemistry. Sixty pages later,
one encounters a profile of our internationally renowned alumna,
Lila M. Gierasch '70, head of biochemistry and molecular biology
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who, like Sean, studies
issues related to the protein folding problem (how the amino acid
sequence in a protein determines its three-dimensional structure).
The book makes any number of interesting connections made to daily
life. I immediately turned to the section entitled "Why Is It
So Hard to Lose Weight?" where I learned that it is a snap for
the body to turn carbohydrates into fat, but that it can't turn
fats back into carbohydrates (something about two carbon atoms
being lost in the citric acid cycle). In Mary's words, "All roads
lead to fat . . . " Similar sections are devoted to lupus, the
real story on omega-3 fatty acids, DNA chips, ketosis and weight
loss, aspartame, butter vs. margarine, and much, much more. The
visual lushness of the book combined with the limpid, pithy, direct
writing (none of those dreadful passive-voice constructions here)
make for a glorious romp through one of the youngest and most
active fields of current research.
Associate Director
of Communications Kevin McCaffrey's novel Nightmare
Therapy, which appeared in August 2002 with Xlibris Corporation,
is now available from online booksellers including Amazon.com
and Barnes and Noble (bn.com). If you have a latent rapport
with science fiction, H. P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King, you will
love it. The story takes place in a totally dysfunctional society
in the near future and centers on a support group in which the
members' nightmares start to come to life. There are some unforgettably
demented images in the book: cancer cells as little Richard Simmons
(that peppy diet guy) spreading their vapid message to normal
people/cells (and American mass culture as cancer); a restaurant
called Scraps at which diners choose reheated celebrity leftovers
flash-frozen and shipped to Scraps from restaurants around the
country. Thus, you could order, say, the uneaten half of George
W.'s burrito shipped straight from his favorite Tex-Mex restaurant.
To quote Kevin, "Nightmare Therapy moves at a rapid pace
through a drug-twisted world of feminist anti-car terrorists,
homicidal children, political egomania, unwholesome Francophilia,
and occasional–and wholly gratuitous–inundations of
bodily fluids and other sickening effluvia." It's a great read.
The Modern Language
Association has just published a pair of books, one a new edition
of Adolphe Belot's novel Mademoiselle Giraud, Ma Femme,
edited with a critical introduction by Associate Professor of
French Christopher Rivers, the other Chris's translation
Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife. Belot's novel originally
appeared in serialized form in 1869 but was canceled because of
the public furor over its content. It was a huge success when
published as a book a year later, ultimately being reprinted 30
times, much to the disgust of critics. (Flaubert lamented the
lunacy of a society in which Belot outsold Zola by a factor of
four in one-third the time.) Chris discusses briefly the problem
of translating a page-turner that is more than a century old.
He succeeds brilliantly–you simply cannot put it down. If
you like light (a.k.a. trashy) reading, Belot's novel will enthrall
you. It has it all: innocence, transgression, homophobia, and
suspense. If you read it before reading Chris's preface (or, for
that matter, Zola's preface, which Chris also translates), you
can clock how long it takes you to figure out what is really going
on. If you disdain lowbrow potboilers, then read Chris's introductory
essay first. Either way, the preface offers a fine example of
how a close reading of another society's best-sellers says much
about the society. The pair of books would be a fabulous gift
for a student of French (or a French-speaking student of English);
comparing the French original and its translation teaches much
about the translator's art.
Lester Senechal,
Professor of Mathematics on the John Stewart Kennedy Foundation,
has translated into English (from Russian) and edited a monograph
by A. Yu. Kitaev, A. H. Shen, and M. N. Vyalyi entitled Classical
and Quantum Computation. The book, which appeared this month
under the imprint of the American Mathematical Society, is the
most lucid account to date of the theory of quantum computation.
This theory is arguably the most exciting scientific development
of the last decade. The book begins with a quick explanation of
the classical theory of computing, which is the theory behind
how all known computers, including Apples and PCs and hand calculators,
work. Classically, one thinks of information as stored in a string
of zeros and ones. The information is processed, that is, converted
to other information, by Turing machines, which are conceptual
devices for operating on strings of zeros and ones to produce
other strings of zeros and ones. If you can write a procedure
or algorithm as a Turing machine, then you can build electronic
circuits (or lots of other physical devices) that carry out the
procedure or algorithm. A (classical) computer is a flexible device
that allows one to quickly create different Turing machines. Intense
theoretical work over the last few years has resulted in a theory
of quantum computation, in which information is stored in quantum
states, which are sums of strings of zeros and ones with complex
numbers as coefficients. One encodes procedures and algorithms
in quantum analogues of Turing machines, called quantum circuits
(and a quantum computer would be a device that creates and realizes
different quantum circuits). One can create quantum circuits that
allow one to factor numbers, hence break codes, much faster than
any classical computer. One can show that quantum circuits could
also be used to actually predict the properties of molecules and
crystals and construct microscopic electronic devices of several
dozen atoms, tasks that would take too long on classical computers.
The trouble is that no one knows how to build physical systems
that realize any but the simplest quantum circuits. Feverish attempts
are currently under way, but will probably take decades. When
they arrive, they will be awesome. If you have any interest in
computing, you should read this book. In translating it, Lester
has performed a huge service to the mathematical and scientific
community.
The Academy Press
of Beijing appointed Wen Xing, visiting associate professor
of Asian studies, as general editor of its new series Academy
Translation Series of International Scholarship in Chinese Studies.
Wen's translation of the English language conference proceedings
Guodian Laozi: Proceedings of the International Conference,
Dartmouth College, May 1998 (S. Allan and C. Williams, eds.)
into Chinese is the first volume of the series. The conference
proceedings are quite extraordinary. In 1993, a tomb dating to
the Warring States period (475-221 bce) was excavated at Guodian
near Jingmen in the Hubei province of China. A version of the
Laozi (a.k.a. Daode jing, a.k.a. Book of the
Dao and Its Virtue), written on bamboo strips and quite unlike
the canonical version, was discovered in the tomb. The conference
brought together about 30 scholars, of whom Wen Xing was one,
from all fields to read through the bamboo-strip Laozi.
The proceedings contain background papers and notes of the discussions,
arranged thematically, which are absolutely fascinating. Wen Xing
contributed a review of the Chinese scholarship on the Guodian
texts, most of it previously unknown in the West.
The Rise of the
Jazz Art World by Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology
Paul Lopes has just appeared with Cambridge University
Press. Professor of Sociology Richard Moran's book Executioner's
Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention
of the Electric Chair has just appeared with Knopf. Visiting
Professor of History Ming Chan's tenth book, Crisis
and Transformation in China's Hong Kong, coedited with A.
Y. So, appeared in late summer with Hong Kong University Press.
--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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