Three historians open a bar…. Soon afterwards the place receives regulatory approval as a treatment for insomnia. HOLD ON! Let this delightful lecture dispel that old saw. Retired Kalamazoo College history professors John Wickstrom, David Barclay, and David Strauss show how everything (how liberal arts is that!) has a history (informed by a multitude of sources), including, for example: politics, art, country music, the invasion of Ukraine, Mars, a forged biography of a medieval saint (pertinent, all these centuries later, to ongoing denial of the results of the 2022 U.S. presidential election), Julia Child, Kalamazoo College Faculty Council meeting minutes of the 1970s, “faith knowledge” and Czar Nicolas I, Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, and the uses of fiction to understand fact and change. And the list goes on. The careers of these three teachers and scholars total more than a century. How they responded to the challenge of incorporating into their 10-week courses the tsunamis of new content and approaches to teaching and research in history is a story of inspiration told by master storytellers. How wonderful was the opportunity to respond to that challenge at a college that encouraged its learning community to try new things. Why do history? Fundamentally, because it’s fun to open new windows to the past.
emeriti faculty
The Keepsake Left Behind
My love is as the path through the bamboo groves;
With the coming of the autumn wind was an endless fall of dewdrops.
A gifted scholar and teacher, the late Roselee Bundy focused much of her study on poetry, specifically poems written by women in Medieval Japan. When, how, and why did these women write poems? Why should we care? Dr. Bundy, Professor Emerita of Japanese Language and Literature at Kalamazoo College, spent more than three decades exploring these questions. The legacy of her explorations is the subject of the 2022 Nagai Kafu Lecture by Christina Laffin, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair of Premodern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of British Columbia. Roselee was a lover of books and generous reviewer of books, so her legacy includes a trove of reading (measured by truckload!) as well as a posthumous gift to support study abroad and travel to support K students’ scholarly work in East Asian studies. All things have song and sound, and poetry was a way in. These woman poets, contended Rose, wrote poems to open a rich life and landscape of mind that transcended loss and the borders of self, community, gender, and nation. Among Rose’s many translations is the following by Izumi Shibiku:
Never did I think
that I myself, still living,
not forgetting,
would become the keepsake
you have left behind.
Europe Shrugs Off U.S. Influence in Wake of ‘America’s Berlin’
U.S. influence is on the wane in Europe. But Professor Emeritus David Barclay notes that this wasn’t always the case. From 1948 through the mid-1960s, the United States enormously influenced West Berlin, causing many historians to describe the western half of the city as “America’s Berlin.” Barclay, who retired from K as the Margaret and Roger Scholten Professor of International Studies, focuses on the buildings and personalities that shaped “America’s Berlin,” from Lucius Clay to Eleanor Lansing Dulles, in a special K-Talk. He also briefly considers what happened to U.S. influence after the mid-1960s. Hear from Barclay after President Jorge G. Gonzalez unveils the David E. Barclay Endowed Scholarship in History, which benefits K students who demonstrate exemplary capacity for and commitment to scholarly work in the history department.
Encountering, by Littles, the Birds of Bernard
In a sense, painter Bernard Palchick makes his viewers painters as well. How? He invites them to make the symbols of his paintings into symbolism of their own. That makes his tour of the three-artist exhibition—“Suggestion: That is the Dream”—your tour. The exhibition’s title derives from a French poet’s distinction between naming and suggestion. The former suppresses joy, the latter enables discovery, little by little. In his wide-ranging discussion Bernard shares insight about the prevalence of his bird symbolism; his work in oils, acrylics, and alcohol inks; the influences of Kalamazoo College and COVID-19 on his recent work; his approach to liminal space and landscape; and the excitement of not knowing how a painting will finish itself. He also gives a virtual tour of his condo basement art studio. Bernard is professor emeritus of art and the former vice president of advancement and acting president of Kalamazoo College. An apostle of the liberal arts, Bernard gathers spirits as diverse as Giovanni Bellini, Charles Baudelaire, and Mary Oliver to illuminate his artwork. The latter wrote the line that suggests, a little, the importance of birds to Bernard: “Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests / of our lives.”
For more information about Bernard’s artwork, visit his website at BernardPalchick.com.