Faculty on the leading edge of change

Mount Holyoke College’s faculty gathered at the Faculty Awards Ceremony on March 5, 2026, to celebrate their achievements and contributions to the community. 

“Mount Holyoke’s faculty can be found at the leading edge of change, supporting and inspiring students to think deeply and act purposefully,” said Provost Lisa Sullivan. “The annual Faculty Awards Ceremony is always a wonderful way to take a few moments and celebrate these individual scholars and colleagues and the faculty as a whole.” 

Mara Breen, professor of psychology and education, and Ligia Bouton, professor of art studio, received the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship.

Breen, a cognitive neuroscientist, studies prosody, the music of language. She has been supported by major grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and private foundations in her study of the “voice in your head,” through which she illustrates how we make sense of language as we read. Her current research is an ambitious multiyear study examining children’s brain activity while reading “The Cat in the Hat,” a famous children’s book well-loved for its musical rhyming and complex metrical structure.

Breen’s prolific publication record has earned her international recognition, and she is frequently invited to present at conferences and university colloquia. She also regularly reviews federal grants and serves as an editor and reviewer for leading journals. 

Bouton, an internationally recognized artist, has secured a prominent place in contemporary art history for her award-winning work at the intersection of art, science and feminist historical recovery. A recent example is “25 Variable Stars,” an installation located at the Kendall/MIT Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority station in Cambridge, Mass. It celebrates astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, whose underrecognized work at the Harvard Observatory laid the groundwork for our understanding of the scale of the universe. The installation built on Bouton’s research at the Center for Astrophysics, which was supported by a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Drawing on the history of science to recapture a forgotten history, her artistic practice tells the story of a woman who found her way in a world largely closed to her, bringing it to vivid life for the thousands of commuters passing. 

For her research, she has visited cutting-edge space observatories and been an artist in residence at physics laboratories across the globe, including CERN and the Niels Bohr Institute. With the support of a 2016 Creative Capital grant, she served as production designer for the chamber opera “Inheritance.” Most recently, her research gave her the opportunity to collaborate on a multi-media installation, “Something Overtakes the Mind,” at the Emily Dickinson Museum. Her artistic work has been exhibited at the Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Guildhall Art Gallery (London, United Kingdom), Minneapolis Institute of Art, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico Museum of Art, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Bellevue Arts Museum and Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.

Naomi Darling, Five College associate professor of sustainable architecture, and Sabra Thorner, associate professor of anthropology, received the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Award for Teaching. 

Darling’s students say that courses are “hard” and “worth it.” For most of the past five years, her name was synonymous with architectural studies because she was the program director, the only faculty member advising all majors and minors and the chair of the Five College Architectural Studies Program. She teaches introductory studios and intermediate courses in the College’s Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab and has helped pilot co-taught design-build courses for undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Until recently, she also single-handedly advised all students undertaking independent study projects. She has advised more than 30 MHC seniors on theses and independent study projects since starting as an assistant professor in the Five Colleges just over a decade ago. 

Students seek Darling’s advice on courses, careers and graduate studies and ask for constructive criticism on their projects. Darling doesn’t hand out easy solutions to students’ questions, which is partly what makes her courses challenging. As with the design process, learning builds on itself through perseverance to bring students to deeper insights, competencies and creativity. 

Thorner is well known for her deep passion, especially for her students’ learning. She teaches at every level of the anthropology curriculum, offering the full range from theoretical discussions to hands-on learning. Students agree that she is careful, reflexive and pays close attention to the influence of power and people on how we create information. 

Thorner asks questions about the ethics of knowledge sharing, and she urges students to think critically about their choices. She challenges her students to reflect on their intentions as they read, watch and create media and to weigh relational awareness in every choice they make: from daily media diaries and film reviews to reflective video exercises to learning from indigenous knowledge-holders.

Amina Steinfels, associate professor of religion, received the Faculty Award for Service. Steinfels was integral to the reconstitution of the Mount Holyoke College chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 2018. She advocates for staff and contingent faculty on campus and is a leader in our institutions of shared governance. 

She is a prominent member of the steering committee of the local AAUP chapter and has dedicated significant time to researching faculty legislation, state laws and national AAUP policies to inform and guide faculty discussions. She also helped reimagine the chapter more broadly as one that would elevate the voices of junior tenure-track faculty, non-tenure-track faculty and other instructional staff. 

She served as a member of the Faculty Conference Committee (FCC) from 2019 to 2023 and as co-chair from 2022 to 2023. During that time, the FCC worked alongside other faculty committees and the administration to address myriad issues.