The
O'Shea Report: December 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 December 2002.
The Dickinsons of
Amherst by Jerome Liebling (photographs), Professor of English
Christopher Benfey, Polly Longsworth, and Barton Levi St.
Armand has been selected as the winner of the 2002 Umhoefer Prize
for Achievement in the Humanities presented by the Arts and Humanities
Foundation. The photographer and authors will receive a medallion
and a cash prize. The foundation will announce the award with
an advertisement in the late December double issue of the New
Yorker magazine. Previous winners include John Singer Sargent,
edited by Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond, published by Princeton
University Press, and The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by
R. W. Franklin, published by Harvard University Press.
Visiting Assistant
Professor of Sociology Paul Lopes's book The Rise of a
Jazz Art World, which has just appeared with Cambridge University
Press, provides a carefully written account of the jazz music
world. It studies the emergence of jazz as high art from the interplay
between the various musical/social worlds in twentieth-century
America: vernacular and cultivated, European and American, high
and popular. This entails fascinating discussions of the musicians,
audiences, criticism (popular and professional), and music that
made up each such world and the social and cultural substrate
that framed them. The book is very accessible and clearly a work
of love, and it shines as a result.
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. A brief forward describes the first
execution (by lethal injection) that Richard witnessed. The first
chapter sets the hook even deeper, recounting the execution of
William Kemmler, the first use of the electric chair. The horrid
details tumble out--the smell of burned flesh, the charred, smoking
corpse. You'll find yourself following with morbid fascination
as the whole story is revealed: the deliberations of a state commission
to find a humane way to extinguish life, the delicate balance
necessary to cleanly break a neck during a hanging (as opposed
to popping the head off), the sad attempt of Edison to discredit
his arch-rival George Westinghouse and alternating current, and
the darkly humorous, deeply flawed experiments on animals by Edisonian
sycophant Harold Brown. Without a single word of preaching, the
book is a stunning indictment of capital punishment.
Visiting Professor
of History Ming Chan's tenth book, Crisis and Transformation
in China's Hong Kong, coedited with Alvin Y. So, appeared in late
summer with Hong Kong University Press. The book is a collection
of fifteen essays, three by Ming Chan, assessing the changes in
Hong Kong since retrocession to China on July 1, 1997. The essays
range widely over a variety of topics, including the education
system, language study, housing, local government, the media,
and the civil service and provide a very concrete case of postcolonial
transition. Many of the changes are different from those expected,
and the book conveys the surprising rapidity, and unpredictability,
of economic and political change and of a city's fortunes. Ming
Chan's prose is especially refreshing, and he does not mince words
(what he has to say about Tung Chee-hwa is worth the price of
the book).
Darby Dyar,
associate professor of astronomy and geology, has had another
proposal funded, this one from the National Science Foundation,
for $86,000 to support her project "Hydrogen and Ferric Iron in
Felsic Melts." The amount will support the work done by Darby
and her students with another team at the University of Massachusetts.
The ultimate aim of the work Darby proposes is to understand the
presence and behavior of water in magmas. Darby and her colleague
propose some new experimental methods to get at this. They also
propose to test the widely held, but unconfirmed, hypothesis that
the magma that first erupts contains more hydrogen and more water
than magmas that erupt later. They will do this by measuring the
amount of hydrogen in selected feldspar samples from Arizona,
Chile, and Antarctica. If this hypothesis holds, and if their
techniques work out, they will be in heaven. For feldspar is the
most common mineral on earth, and they will have an efficient
way of reconstructing the relative timing of ancient volcanic
events almost everywhere. If the hypothesis does not hold, they
will have the lesser, but still not neglible, satisfaction of
having challenged a misleading assumption.
The National Science
Foundation awarded Michelle Markley, Clare Boothe Luce
Assistant Professor of Geology, $109,551 for her proposal "Fabric
in Granite: The Vinalhaven and Cadillac Mountain Intrusive Complexes,
Maine." The program director at NSF wrote to me saying that
this was one of only five of about a hundred proposals that he
thought was strong and that he was recommending directly for funding,
without the usual panel review, and that he wanted me to know
just how strong the work was and how unusual it was to find work
of this caliber anywhere, much less at a purely undergraduate
institution. The award will allow Michelle, Robert Wiebe of Franklin
and Marshall College, and two Mount Holyoke students to build
on earlier work at two old sites of exposed granite in Maine.
The overriding question is how the Earth's crust makes room for
big pools of liquid rock. Michelle proposes, among other things,
to test an interesting hypothesis (the "trapdoor hypothesis,"
but a trapdoor active over millions of years) to explain the Cadillac
Mountain intrusion. She and her students will also catalog and
analyze the alignment of the granite and materials in it (the
"fabric") and combine it with the chemical analyses
Wiebe has carried out.
Stephen Jones,
associate professor of Russian studies, will be the program director
of a Georgian Library Professional Training program this January,
which will bring sixteen Georgian librarians to Mount Holyoke
College to receive training in various aspects of library science.
The training will be conducted by Mount Holyoke librarians in
conjunction with the Simmons College Graduate School of Library
and Information Science program, which has a branch here at Mount
Holyoke. Stephen worked on the grant proposal together with International
Training and Development (ITD), a local nonprofit in Amherst that
has experience in exchange programs. Their main rival for the
grant was the American Library Association. ITD received the $150,000
grant from the State Department Bureau of Education and Cultural
Affairs. Stephen was in Georgia this October selecting candidates
and will direct the program in January (while also running an
innovative J-Term course that brings Williams College and MHC
students to Georgia).
--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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