The
O'Shea Report: December 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 December 2003.
GRANTS AND AWARDS
Jill Bubier,
assistant professor of environmental studies, has just learned
that she has been awarded a five-year CAREER award for $500,000
from the National Science Foundation for her proposal "Strategies
for Understanding the Effects of Global Climate and Environmental
Change on Northern Peatlands." No one - not even Jill - expected
that she would receive this award. For one thing, the NSF's Ecosystem
Studies Program has been flooded with proposals, including 20
proposals for CAREER grants, almost entirely from Research I Institutions.
For another, Jill had already received a hyper-prestigious $390,000
NASA Young Investigator Award just three years ago, and there
is a strong desire among reviewers to try to spread the limited
funds around. In the end, the Ecosystem Studies Program decided
to make just two CAREER awards, and Jill's was one. Jill and her
students plan to study the effect on one another of peatland ecosystems
and atmosphere in response to global climate change and increasing
nitrogen deposition. They will do this by studying bogs in Canada,
the United States, and Finland. The reviewers heaped praise on
the accomplishments of Jill and her students to date, the quality
of the science, and the contribution that Jill was making to our
understanding of basic biochemical function and feedback loops
between environment and climate change. Some thought Jill should
add more research sites, while others thought the proposal was
already too ambitious. All the reviewers were blown away by the
College's Cascade Mentoring Summer Research program, by which
more advanced students mentor beginning students.
Sean Decatur,
associate professor and chair of chemistry, has won
a Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award from the Camille and Henry
Dreyfus Foundation. This is an incredibly prestigious award -
institutions can nominate at most one member and lots of letters
are required from chemists outside the institution. Award winners
are chosen from among those who demonstrate dedication to excellence
in undergraduate education as well as exceptional success in teaching
and research and in encouraging undergraduates to become effective
members of the chemical profession. The award provides an unrestricted
grant of $60,000 to Sean to further his work. He plans to use
it for his project "Studies of Protein Folding and Misfolding
in Vitro: Isotope-Edited Infrared Spectroscopy of Protein Aggregates."
His early work with students had shown that combining isotope
labeling with infrared spectroscopy could improve the resolution
of the latter and allow one to get a good handle on the way certain
proteins fold. He proposes to use this new technique with his
students to
study not how proteins fold when they are behaving themselves,
but how they can misfold, creating fibrous protein globs. This
mechanism seems to be behind Alzheimer's and various other unwholesome
disorders (such as mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease).
Not surprisingly, Sean's work has been funded both by the National
Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
The exhibition catalog
"Diane Arbus: Family Albums," which was edited by Tony Lee,
associate professor of art and chair of American studies, John
Pulz of the University of Kansas, and Marianne Doezema,
director of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and which was
published earlier this fall by Yale University Press, was chosen
as one of the ten best art books of the year by "Art and Auction,"
an influential, upscale art magazine.
Andi Whitcomb,
lecturer in physical education and coach of the varsity field
hockey team, has just won two major coaching awards. She was selected
as Coach of the Year by NEWMAC, the conference in which we compete.
She also received the award for Regional Field Hockey Coach of
the Year by the National Field Hockey Coaches Association.
BOOKS
Another book by Tony
Lee has just appeared. Entitled "Yun Gee: Poetry, Writings,
Art, Memories" and published by the University of Washington Press,
the book is co-sponsored by the Pasadena Museum of California
Art, and appears in The Jacob Lawrence Series on American Artists.
If you are like me, the first you ever heard of Yun Gee was in
Tony's book "Picturing Chinatown." However, as Tony points out,
that book only covers Yun Gee's career up to 1927, when he was
21 years old and left San Francisco for the first of two sojourns
in Paris, each of which was followed by an even longer residence
in New York. Yun Gee lived an additional 36 years and was an accomplished
painter, poet, and writer. The book contains selections of each
medium, including about half of Yun Gee's poems, none of which
has appeared in print before, and most of which are fascinating.
Tony contributes four wonderful interpretative essays that tie
everything together. The book also includes a critical essay by
Paul Karlstrom on Yun Gee's painting, a number of articles about
Yun Gee by his peers, and some reminiscences by a cousin and his
daughter, Li-Lan. The result is a lovely, warm book that mixes
criticism, biography, and personal remembrance and that works
on many levels. It examines Yun Gee's art and traces his life
and career from China to San Francisco to Europe and New York.
It is a story of a career shaped by race and marginalization,
by wanting to belong and rebel, by hope, creativity, despair,
and alcoholism. Tony argues that racism is not tangential to Gee's
life, under which lies a core sense of self, independent of what
others see, but that racism is part of who Yun Gee is and how
he sees himself. The materials in the book and Tony's commentary
show how racism frames, guides, and ultimately stunts Yun Gee's
career and, by extension, the lives of Chinese Americans in the
three decades following the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act
barring all Chinese immigration to the United States.
Keti Kintsurashvili,
who joins us this year as a Fulbright Scholar in Russian and Eurasian
studies, has just had her book entitled "David Kakabadze: A Twentieth-Century
Classic" appear with Arbat Press. The book is about the life and
work of the early twentieth-century Georgian artist David Kakabadze
(1889 - 1952). Multitalented, Kakabadze became interested in photography
at an early age and painted in a wide variety of styles. The book
traces Kakabadze's life and work, organizing the account into
five different periods: early, 1889 - 1913; Saint Petersburg,
1913 - 1918; Tbilisi, 1918 - 1919; Paris, 1920 - 1927; and Tbilisi
1927 - 1952. In each period, Keti covers Kakabadze's work and
what and who influenced it. If, like me, you had never heard of
Kakabadze, the book will be a revelation: his early sketches are
lovely; the painting entitled "My Mother Imeretia" from his early
Tbilisi period is amazing (I'm sure I've seen reproductions, but
now would love to see the original); and the sheer range of his
work and his willingness to experiment is stunning. Keti's account
of the Paris period is fascinating. Kakabadze worked with an incredible
collection of Georgian artists who lived there in the early 1920s,
among them Lado Gudiashvili (also a dancer) and Elene Akhvlediani,
persons whose acquaintance I first made in this book. On returning
to Tbilisi, Kakabadze fused abstract techniques with folk elements
to create some unforgettable landscapes. The book itself is a
joy. It is filled with photographs, many taken by Kakabadze himself,
many in margins. It functions as a biography, as a critical outline
of the artist's work, and as an account of the extraordinary creative
scene in early twentieth-century Georgia, of which Kakabadze was
a crucial part.
Assistant professor
of history Holly Hanson's book "Landed Obligation: The
Practice of Power in Buganda" has just been published by Heinemann.
The book is an ambitious retelling of the history of Buganda,
a region and people within the present day Uganda. Holly tells
the story from the point of view of the Buganda people, using
their categories and cultural framework. Thus, she talks in terms
of love and reciprocal obligation instead of the more traditional
Western categories of power, capital, political hierarchies, and
modernization. The result gives hugely different, and very satisfying,
explanations of interactions among the Bugandan peoples and colonial
authorities through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Holly completely changes how the land issues of the early twentieth
century were viewed by arguing persuasively that the Bugandan
expectations of reciprocal obligation were still in force, even
as the accepted practices were imploding. Read this book, and
you will wonder about how the categories that Western historians
use distort traditional historical accounts. This book will almost
surely touch off a vigorous debate among historians. Stay tuned.
My favorite chapters are the last two: they are stunning.
A volume edited by
Bob Schwartz, professor of history, and his colleague Robert
Schneider has just appeared from the University of Delaware Press.
Entitled "Tocqueville and Beyond: Essays on the Old Regime in
Honor of David D. Bien," it is a collection of fascinating articles
on the French Revolution. In college I learned that sharpening
class conflict driven by economic transformation caused the French
Revolution. Bob's introductory essay to this volume and the essays
themselves make it clear that the way that historians understand
the origins of the French Revolution has changed utterly. In a
few absolutely lucid pages, Bob's introductory essay describes
the different theoretical approaches to the French Revolution
(all of which was news to me - what I had been taught turns out
to be the orthodox interpretation). Bob also describes how the
ferment makes room for the classical account of Tocqueville (and
Michelet), which had been largely ignored by social historians.
I'm pretty sure that this essay will appear in course packets
around the world. Bob also contributes an essay contrasting Tocqueville's
assessment of late eighteenth-century French peasantry with one
based on a different set of archival sources pertaining to a number
of Burgundian villages.
PAPERS
I've received loads
of papers. Two of the nicest were written by Lester Senechal,
Professor of Mathematics on the John Stewart Kennedy Foundation,
for a volume collecting some works of the influential Viennese
émigré mathematician, Karl Menger ("Karl Menger:
Selecta Mathematica" published by Springer, 2003), famous for
his work on dimension theory. The first comments on Menger's papers
on the problems and various methods of defining the lengths of
curves in very general spaces, where one only has a notion of
distance between two points, but no other structure. The problem
is very delicate and Lester gives an overview of the issue in
four spare pages. But it is the second paper, entitled "A Mengerian
Tour along Caratheodory's Royal Road," written jointly with Professor
Bert Schweitzer, that is truly lovely. Two of the most elegant
mathematical books to appear in the early twentieth century were
written by legendary Greek mathematician and Munich professor
Constantin Caratheodory. Among many other things, Caratheodory
reformulated both thermodynamics and the calculus of variations
in a stunningly concise and transparent manner. (Just as the usual
one-variable calculus gives methods of finding numbers that maximize
or minimize functions of real numbers and is indispensable in
elementary formulations of mechanics, the calculus of variations
allows one to find functions that maximize or minimize functions
of functions and is indispensable in more advanced mechanics.)
However, his formulation of the calculus of variations has been
largely forgotten. Lester gives Menger's reformulation of Caratheodory's
reformulation of the calculus of variations. It is even more elegant,
more transparent, and more powerful than Caratheodory's treatment.
In six short pages, he and Schweitzer work out the main equations
governing analytical dynamics.
Gary Gillis,
assistant professor of biological sciences, is one of 16 experts
retained by the "Journal of Experimental Biology" to write up
quarterly reviews of articles published in other journals for
a section of the journal entitled "Outside JEB." Gary does the
reviews for the articles on locomotion and biomechanics, and the
resulting short articles are minor masterpieces that I cannot
recommend highly enough. Check out, as examples, his articles
in numbers 5, 11, 17, and 23 of JEB. Which would you rather read:
an article entitled "Determinants of Maximal O2 Uptake in Rats
Selectively Bred for Endurance Running Capacity," or Gary's explanation
of it entitled "Evolving Couch-Potatoes and Endurance Athletes?"
Want to get the real lowdown on viscosity and Reynolds Number
(and on how to quantify the difference between the hydrodynamic
environments encountered by sperm and sperm whales)? Read Gary's
article,"Swimming with the Larval Fishes." Want to know about
energy expenditure in walking or a new theory on how insect wings
might have evolved? Check out his articles, "Pedestrians Pay to
Push" and "Row, Row, Row your Wings." This is really fine science
writing (as are a couple of other book reviews that Gary has done).
Scott Brown,
director, Career Development Center, has written a hilarious article
entitled "Career Confidential: Confessions of Not-So-New Director"
for the fall issue of the "NHCE Journal." The article deals with
his experiences since coming to Mount Holyoke. Not only did he
change employers, he made a career shift from residential life
to career development. His comments on the different cultures
are too good to miss (as are his comments on himself: "I have
also learned that my sense of humor appeals to about three people,
and they all live in one house outside of Los Angeles.").
One wonders what the
three folks in the one house in LA would think of associate director
of communications Kevin McCaffrey's story, "Revenge of
the Meat God," that has just appeared in the Pets and Beasts section
of the online journal "Exquisite Corpse" (http://www.exquisitecorpse.org/).
Darkly humorous and unabashedly demented, this piece is beautifully
written, but should be read only by those with an exceedingly
strong stomach and extremely short-lived visual memory. Imagine
the inevitability (and tastelessness) of Sophoclean tragedy, the
horror (and tastelessness) of H. P. Lovecraft, the broody atmospherics
(and tastelessness) of cult classics like "Dark City," and the
helplessly sick humor (and tastelessness) of Monty Python, and
you will begin to get the picture. Don't say you weren't warned.
"The art of writing
for women who were expected to place domesticity at the center
of their lives was an act of creating rather than burying a self
capable of song" writes Leah Glasser, dean of first-year
studies and lecturer in English, in a paper that has just appeared
in "American Literary Realism." Leah offers a lovely analysis
of how Celia Thaxter's writings about landscape she loved (the
islands off Portsmouth, New Hampshire), and by extension the writings
about landscape of other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
American women writers, provided a means to explore self-identity
in ways that defied the traditional gender constructions of the
time.
--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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