FIVE MOUNT HOLYOKE FACULTY MEMBERS
HONORED FOR TEACHING, SCHOLARSHIP

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. – Five Mount Holyoke College faculty members have been honored for outstanding teaching and scholarship. Lois Brown, associate professor of English, and Stan Rachootin, professor of biological sciences, have received the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching; Michael Robinson, professor of economics, and Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturers in the Humanities, have been awarded the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Prize for Scholarship. Each prize carries with it a citation and a check for $2,500.

"Mount Holyoke is gifted with an extraordinarily fine faculty. They produce outstanding work in and out of the classroom, and it is fitting that we celebrate that work," said Donal O'Shea, dean of faculty. The award recipients were selected through a nomination and review process coordinated by the Faculty Awards Committee. Faculty members nominated their peers for the scholarship award, while students, alumnae, and faculty submitted nominees for the teaching award. The awards were presented in an April 28 ceremony in Pratt Hall.

The awards were first given in 2000, funded by gifts from members of the board of trustees. The donor of the teaching award wishes to remain anonymous. Trustee Janet Hickey Tague '66 endowed the scholarship award in honor of Meribeth E. Cameron, professor emeritus of history and former acting president and academic dean of the College.

About the recipients:

Lois A. Brown -- Lois Brown joined the Mount Holyoke English department in 1998 and has quickly become one of the most popular and engaging members of the faculty. Specializing in African American literature, nineteenth-century American women writers, and contemporary African American women writers, she has introduced dozens of students to a wide range of written genres. Brown's English department courses, which often are interdisciplinary and cross-listed with African American studies and with American studies, reflect her deep interest in literary history, women and religion, New England narratives, and the use of literature to revisit vital political, social, and cultural questions. Brown received a B.A. from Duke University and a Ph.D. from Boston College.

Brown was recently one of the recipients of the first African American History Awards given by the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston. The award recognized her work on Memoir of James Jackson, the attentive and obedient scholar, published in 1835 by an African American Boston schoolteacher named Susan Paul. The earliest prose narrative by a black woman in the United States, Memoir is the first account of the life of a free child of color in the United States. The memoir, published by Harvard University Press in 2000, was largely unknown until Brown discovered it in the course of her research for a literary biography of the New England novelist Pauline Hopkins.

Stan Rachootin -- Stan Rachootin has long been fascinated by evolutionary biology. Rachootin teaches how evolution is thought to happen (Ecology and Evolution, Macroevolution), who evolved (Introductory Biology and Invertebrate Zoology), and how the theory of evolution came about (Darwin). In the summer, he usually takes students in the Howard Hughes Summer Program to the Isle of Shoals to study marine invertebrates. He also serves as president of the Mount Holyoke chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Rachootin spent his undergraduate and graduate career at Yale University, though with time off for a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge University. He has been a member of the Mount Holyoke faculty since 1981.

Michael Robinson -- Robinson's work has centered primarily on labor economics, economics of higher education, and women in the economy. He has studied gender and race discrimination in the pay of economics and business faculty, as well as discrimination against African American and Latin American players in Baseball Hall of Fame balloting. Robinson's expertise in the economics of higher education has led him to work closely with the admission office doing econometric modeling and special studies. He recently presented his research on Mount Holyoke's SAT optional policy at an NBER education conference. He has also served as senior adviser to President Joanne V. Creighton on enrollment planning, and has been actively engaged in a study of the College's new SAT-optional policy.

Robinson earned a B.A. at Washington University and a Ph.D. in economics from University of Texas, Austin. He joined the Mount Holyoke faculty in 1988.

Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser -- Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser have distinguished themselves as both scholars and celebrated authors. The couple share a full-time lectureship in the English department, which allows each to teach half-time and write continually.

Salter has published five collections of poems, including Open Shutters (2003), and is the coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She teaches courses in composition, verse writing, poetry criticism, and modern poetry. The recipient of an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, Salter serves on the boards of the Amy Clampitt Trust, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Kenyon Review. She has been vice president of the Poetry Society of America since 1995. Salter, who joined the Mount Holyoke faculty in 1984, received an A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. from Cambridge University.

Leithauser has published four collections of poems and six novels, including Darlington's Fall (2002), which garnered a spot on the New York Times Book Review'slist of notable books for 2002. He is the recipient of an Ingram Merrill fellowship in poetry, an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Leithauser, who joined the MHC faculty in 1987, teaches Introduction to Literature; Short Story Writing; and Comic Verse, Light Verse. He earned an A.B. from Harvard University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

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