Joe Smith likes an element of instability in his art.
Whether he’s stacking bottles high up on glass plates and around the floor—risking shattering them—or fitting wooden blocks into a precarious construction from the top down—defying gravity—the associate professor of art says the attention that kind of daring work commands is essential.
“Standing next to glass makes people nervous—it makes me nervous,” says Smith, whose work with varied materials has been exhibited across the country. “That [emotion] affects me, so I think it’s important. Attentiveness is important to achieve.”
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Bettina Bergmann has long focused her academic research on ancient Roman art and archaeology, and is fascinated by many elements in the excavated sites around the Bay of Naples, which were buried in 79 A.D. by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. These days, her area of interest also has become part of an unexpected confluence of the ancient and modern worlds.
“Just as new work on Vesuvius asks us to connect with the plight of the ancient victims, the eruption” has become a paradigm for contemporary disasters like 9/11, the Indonesian tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina, says Bergmann, Helene Phillips Herzig ’49 Professor of Art History.
For example, a prominent Vesuvius volcanologist shared his excavation skills at the 9/11 craters in lower Manhattan, and a call went out afterwards for classical archaeologists interested in working on the continuing recovery of the victims’ remains and personal effects in a sifting facility in Brooklyn.
Long interested in the interiors of Roman houses, Bergmann is at work on an essay about the restored Roman frescoes salvaged from a villa outside Pompeii that are on display at the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (These galleries were funded, in part, by Shelby Baier White ’59 and her late husband, Leon Levy.)
In the spring, Bergmann will teach her course on art and cultural politics. When she first introduced the course nearly a decade ago, she had to search for contemporary problems analogous to ancient ones. Now, the issue of patrimony and provenance of objects— essentially, the ownership of history—has heated up, and with a growing schism between archaeologists and museums, “there’s not enough time” to cover all the issues, she laments. Nevertheless, she aims to set the current debate within its long history, which dates back to the Romans themselves.
One of a few specialists of the Roman world trained as an art historian, Bergmann revels in the recent upswing of interest in her favored time period. “It is always interesting to me to see how we engage with the past … and now seems a particularly powerful moment.”— M.H.B.
Photo by Ben Barnhart
Online Career Curriculum Prods Students Into Action
Getting students into the Career Development Center has always been a challenge. While students say they’re aware of all the good information that awaits them in the building adjacent to the health center, few make the best use of it, at least not before their senior years. Career counselors at Mount Holyoke hope a new electronic initiative will prod students beginning in their first year to think more systematically about life after college.
YourPlan is a four-year career curriculum that outlines in a logical manner the steps students need to take to find a meaningful place in the world after college. Set up as a series of checklists online, it offers students at appropriate stages in their college years the strategies, structure, and professional support they will need to carry their education into a job, graduate school, or volunteer work they are suited for and find personally rewarding.
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The Founding Fathers, whose triumphal achievements and profound failures have been addressed in a dozen recent books, including the lecturer’s, were the subject of a September lecture for first-year students by Professor of History Joseph Ellis.
It was the second in a series of talks established as part of the First-Year Seminar Program that introduces first-years to the liberal arts. “Why Dead White Males Matter” conveyed Ellis’s understanding that while “they may all be dead, and they may all be white, the men who founded America, along with [their] successes and failures, remain relevant.”
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LaundryView, an online monitoring system for MHC laundry rooms, gives a virtual glimpse of students’ clothes to see if they’re done or whether machines are available.
James Harold enjoys the outdoors with his son, Tobias.
It’s early Tuesday morning, and in a lecture hall in Kendall, students enrolled in Philosophy 235, Medical Ethics, are hashing out the moral rights of people in the late stages of dementia. Their assigned readings offer two different approaches to a thorny issue inherent in this life-altering condition. Is it more important to honor a patient’s directive for care in such a situation, made long before the dementia took place, or the current needs of the same individual, which may conflict with the person’s earlier wishes?
It’s tough stuff for many students, whose exposure to abstract ideas like the nature of self, standard fare in the philosopher’s world, has been limited. For James Harold, an assistant professor of philosophy who teaches the class, the goal is not memorization of a slate of correct answers to difficult medical questions but an understanding of how, logically, to get to an answer and the philosophical principles relevant to that answer.
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Among the winners in this year’s contest for photos taken by students abroad was this shot of three barley harvesters in the village of Burr in India’s Spiti Valley. Senior Nicole Edick’s image won in the “people and culture” category of the contest, sponsored by the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives. See the other winners at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/global/17635.shtml.
When Holly K. Norwick FP’08 was called to the ministry, she faced an internal struggle that one might expect to accompany a dialogue with a God who considered women unfit to be ministers.
Daughter of a conservative Lutheran pastor whose Biblical interpretation left little room for women as church leaders, Norwick recalls that she “resisted [God’s call] quite fiercely but finally submitted, and from then on the math was clear.” Introduced to MHC through a mentor at a community college in Hawaii, Norwick applied to the Frances Perkins Program. Five minutes after receiving her MHC acceptance letter, Norwick resigned from her job in the Honolulu police force.
“Being accepted at a school that empowers women is really the aspect I needed,” says Norwick, who had served as the officer in charge of community volunteers for the Crime Stoppers program. “What I needed was the confidence that it was okay to be a pastor, and MHC has done that. Seeing so many proficient, happy women who don’t find it odd that I want to do these things” boosted her self-image as a woman of faith.
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Highlighting the fall season was the debut of a new $5.9 million outdoor track-and-field facility, complete with a synthetic turf field, lights, and a state-of-the-art press box. The field hockey team opened the complex in September when it hosted the Seven Sisters Classic.
Led by junior forward Jaimie Macari, the field hockey team advanced to the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference (NEWMAC) postseason tournament for the tenth straight year. Macari tallied a team-best thirteen goals, as the Lyons finished with a record of 7–9.
Mount Holyoke’s tennis and volleyball squads also made return trips to the NEWMAC Tournament, collecting three and five victories, respectively.
Sophomore forward Lauren Orr posted eight goals to pace the Mount Holyoke soccer team, which found the win column three times. Orr was responsible for the winner in two of the Lyons triumphs.
The cross-country team enjoyed an outstanding season in which it raced to the team title at the Seven Sisters Invitational for the first time since 1999.
Mount Holyoke’s golf team competed in five events, including its home invitational this fall. The Lyons were at their best in their last tournament of 2007, placing fourth at the Wellesley College Invitational.
The riding team opened its slate at the Preseason Tournament of Champions in Laurinburg, North Carolina. After claiming the title at that competition, the Lyons went on to capture High Point Championships at both the Becker College and Williams College intercollegiate horse shows.
Mount Holyoke’s crew team excelled in its two events this fall. Its varsity eight boat nabbed second place at the Head of the Housatonic and tenth place at the Head of the Charles.—Mike Raposo, MHC sports information director
Photo of field hockey forward Jaimie Macari ’09 by Richard Orr Sports Photography
ASTEROIDS
Associate Professor of Astronomy Darby Dyer and Ronald Zissel, the longtime astronomy lab director, now retired, have had asteroids named after them. 7272 Darbydyar and 6949 Zissel orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Read more
STUDY IN COSTA RICA
Sustainable development in a community setting is a goal of a new MHC study-abroad program outside Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, beginning in 2009. Read more
GENOCIDE PREVENTION
Gerald Caplan, a leading Canadian authority on genocide and genocide prevention, was this year’s scholar-in-residence at the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives. Read more
“The main obligations of the gardener are to be mindful of the garden’s needs and to be observant each day of what is going on in the garden.” Those words from the late U.S. poet laureate and thoughtful gardener Stanley Kunitz were particularly relevant to the work of three MHC interns this summer who planted and cared for the Mount Holyoke Student Garden.
Hatched as an independent study by two students long since graduated, the project and its supporting hands have been given a small piece of land by the college for a pilot program that is just beginning to define its vegetative and curricular goals. The three interns—Sarah Lince FP’09, Morgan Lindsay ’09, and Ally Neher ’07— were paid by the Center for the Environment to make the garden’s first season a productive one. A founding gift from the class of 2007 helped launch the project.
Acorn squash, pumpkins, potatoes, basil, parsley, dill, and cilantro grace the plot’s half acre at the south end of Prospect Hill, next to the college’s botanic garden nursery. The vegetables and herbs were sold to Dining Services in the fall. Thus, students had a bigger taste of truly local produce, which is rapidly becoming a mantra for consumers of all stripes concerned with transportation costs, freshness, and support of community producers.
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As Darren Hamilton, associate professor of chemistry, enthusiastically relates, the department is in a multidimensional process of enhancing its teaching labs with the more efficient use of nontoxic and recyclable materials; focusing on more efficient technologies like microwaves instead of hotplates to carry out basic experiments; and having students make better use of chromatography and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, state-of-the-art instruments that are currently underused.
“Using a glass flask, solvent, and a hotplate for recrystallization tends to leave our students with the idea that everyone does it like this,” says Hamilton, a British-born and educated organic chemist who has led the charge to reevaluate the teaching labs. While it’s still important that students know how tried-and-true procedures work, he says, “we want to look like the outside world.”
Part of the department’s efforts relate to an academia-wide movement to “green” chemistry, which involves using less-toxic solvents and thinking critically about the scale of experiments and how much waste they produce. A clean working environment is not only safer but mimics the functioning of pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline—places MHC chemistry students routinely intern and work. —M.H.B.
How many students applied
3,194
How many were accepted
1,671
How many enrolled
522
How many are African
American, Asian
American, Latina,
and Native American
121
How many states are represented
42
How many countries are represented
24
Critical Social Thought 252: Literature and Politics
As conversation jumps from Academy Award winner Helen Mirren to Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses to the sexualized concept of “the Orient,” Five College visiting assistant professor Constantine Pleshakov pushes the far-reaching, all-inclusive dialogue even further. In Critical Social Thought 252: Literature and Politics, everything is up for discussion.
The syllabus for the class reads like a Who’s Who of twentieth-century novelists and includes not only Rushdie but also Yukio Mishima and Arundhati Roy. Students relate the literature to its historical context, approaching the novels as forums for political change. “Literature is politics, remember that,” Pleshakov repeats. What were the novelists’ causes? What were their solutions to the problems of the twentieth century? How do their stories reflect social realities?
Offering an inter-disciplinary major, the Critical Social Thought (CST) program prompts students to turn intellectual traditions upside down for a new look at social realities through the colorful lenses of history, anthropology, culture, and language.
One cold day last winter, class discussion revolved around Edward Said’s Orientalism as students discussed its place on the class syllabus. It’s not beach reading, but it’s useful in a theoretical way, claimed most readers. The book addresses the question of “Orientalism” as a construct and how this construct fits into our culture—from foreign policy to vacation destinations.
This is critical social thought at its organic roots: taking social theories and using them as a jumping-off point, rather than a destination. The conversation is lively and intelligent, with Pleshakov alternating between a precarious perch on his desk and pacing the crowded room, eyes widening as he emphatically nods the debate along.
“I was skeptical at first, jumping right into a 200-level critical social thought course with no prior experience,” says Natalya Goykhberg ’07. “As it turns out, CST is a combination of every discipline I have studied— philosophy, politics, literature, international relations, and history.” Lauren Senchack ’07 concurs. “I’m not an English major, so I was initially concerned about the level of discussion, but Pleshakov has a wonderful way of validating every person’s opinion.” — Stephanie Miedema ’07
Photo by Andrea Burns
Students, faculty, staff, and alumnae signed their names or left written sentiments on nine pieces of structural steel that became part of the new residence hall this summer. Traditionally, the steelworkers sign the final piece of steel erected in a building, says John Bryant, director of facilities management. But the act of leaving a mark on the world is so popular at MHC that nine beams were ultimately offered and indelibly marked. Other buildings on campus are also repositories of names and messages, including Blanchard, where the plywood under the rotunda is a veritable signature scrapbook. The new hall will open to students in fall 2008.
Latest still image of new residence hall under construction:
Visit the Mount Holyoke College web site for a live video feed.
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
