faculty

The Keepsake Left Behind

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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.

James Baldwin’s Blues Sensibility

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Looking forward for transcendence requires looking back with honesty. Essential to both: story sharing. Call that a blues sensibility. In November 1960 James Baldwin delivers a lecture in Stetson Chapel. Decades later the story of Baldwin’s visit inspires a timely story gathering. The voices are members of the Kalamazoo community recalling their experiences during the civil rights movement. The story gatherers are K students. That gathering effort—also known as “building the archive”—was a collaboration between Professor of English Bruce Mills’ senior seminar on James Baldwin and the Society for History and Racial Equity (SHARE), a local nonprofit organization founded by Donna Odom ’67. This K-Talk by those collaborators is fascinating, in part, because it’s far less lecture than it is story sharing, including, among others, stories from or about Harold Phillips, Walter Hall, Paul Collins, Robert Stavig, and, of course, James Baldwin. Mills and Odom and the other participants in this singular event show the power of storytelling to connect and celebrate diversity and to unite diverse individuals in the acts of imagining and then making a future that includes us all. The work’s neither quick nor easy, and needs that blues sensibility.

Resources

The Arc From “Being Here” to “Making ‘Here’ Home”

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More black people, indigenous people, and people of color are choosing to attend K as students and work at K as faculty and staff. That’s progress in diversity, or “being here.” More progress is required in equity and inclusion, or “making ‘here’ home” for all. Home is deep and complicated. K is shaping itself into a space conducive to in-and-out-of-the-box ideas and actions that extend the arc from “being here” to “making ‘here’ home,” a place that every member of the K community considers to be their own. In this K-Talk, four members of the community describe the multitude of projects—a hard work as urgent as it is painstaking—that constitutes the march to extend the arc. These four educator-activists are D’Angelo Bailey ’05, Karen Isble (Advancement), Regina Stevens-Truss (Chemistry), and Rhiki Swinton (Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership). What they describe is eye-opening (in terms of need and effect) and inspiring. And a good start.

Paralympics Pioneer

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Japan has been the (unlikely) prime mover in the development of the Paralympics movement, says Professor Dennis Frost, which is a surprising fact given the country’s nearly total inexperience with disability sports in the early 1960s, when it made the monumental decision to host the 1964 Paralympics in Tokyo. Since that time Japan has provided foundational contributions to the expansion of the Paralympics, including: stronger links to the Olympics; expansion of participation from a single category (spinal cord injury) to multiple categories of disability; growth in the number of largescale regional and international events; the evolution of Paralympic focus from rehabilitation to elite competition; exponential growth in media coverage; and the movement’s effect on social changes, including barrier free environments and inclusion more generally. Frost is the Wen Chao Chen Associate Professor of East Asian Social Sciences. The Paralympics movement in Japan (and the world), he says, is a complicated and imperfect success story (still being written) about the effect of large events like the Paralympic Games and (even more so) of people on the course of durable changes to society. His K-Talk is based on his recent book: More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan.

Encountering, by Littles, the Birds of Bernard

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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.

What Was Burr Up To?

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That is the question. Except, contends Professor of History James Lewis, it isn’t. There’s insufficient material for historians (or novelists and playwrights) to ever know the minds and motives of the principals in the so-called Burr Conspiracy. On the other hand, there is something that is knowable: the way Americans of the time used stories to make sense of the event. In 1807 Aaron Burr was tried (and acquitted) for supposedly trying to divide the United States into two countries. His actions in the run-up to his arrest and trial are shrouded in impenetrable mystery. “Just what was he up to?” has been the question for decades. Because it’s unknowable it uncovers much less about the early years of a fledgling republic than does a new set of questions posed by Lewis in his recent book, specifically: Why were so many Americans so worried? How did they arrive at the certainty that they knew his guilt, or innocence? In what ways are the crisis and the certainty related? Lewis’s painstaking exploration of contemporary source materials provide answers to these better questions. The way Americans of the time used stories about the conspiracy story says much about their hopes and anxieties, particularly about the very means of “American.” Could Americans be a unified people living together under this nascent republic? Lewis’s book is titled “The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis.” Note the nuance: not uncovering the crisis; instead uncovering the stories told to make sense of contemporary fears, both conscious and subconscious.

LISTEN to a podcast on The Burr Conspiracy featuring James. E Lewis, Jr.

Couch Kahoot!

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How do you teach (and learn) virtually WHILE preserving (as much as possible) the educational values that make K K? Put another way what does virtual learning feel like? Jeff Bartz, the Kurt D. Kaufman Professor and Chair of Chemistry, does more than lecture on this question. In this interactive presentation he gives you the experience of online learning by making you part of a real-time experimental group of surrogate Physical Chemistry and Introductory Chemistry undergraduate students. Feel the challenge (and ingenuity) of translating K when professors and students cannot be in the same room or lab. Hint: It takes a virtual village in Kahoot, and then some.

 

View the Chemistry handout that was used during the presentation by Professor Bartz.

The Traitor’s Wife: An Innocent? or a Co-Conspirator?

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That question is crucial, says Professor of History Charlene Boyer-Lewis ’87, to a deeper understanding of the American revolutionary war era, a time of instability for much more than politics. Exactly what role did Margaret Shippen Arnold—wife of notorious traitor Benedict Arnold—play in the plot to deliver West Point to the British Army? Turns out a very active one, notwithstanding the many decades of her presumed innocence. A role active enough to be worthy of a post-war annuity of 500 pounds—for espionage services rendered at great personal risk. Boyer-Lewis contends that a revision of Margaret’s role from the margin of this spy story to its center more accurately illuminates the cultural upheaval that was part of the revolutionary era, a tumult that included a fluidity of identity that was eroding the rigidity and constraint of weakening gender roles. Like Margaret, many women of the era were strong actors who made political choices separate of their husbands. Margaret’s story shows the war transpired in households as much as on battlefields. The spy plot’s crisis of exposure reveals a capable woman who, in a “performance without faking,” exploits a gendered thinking that her leading role in the story is in the very process of revolutionizing.

WATCH the Smithsonian Channel’s episode of American Hidden Stories: Mrs. Benedict Arnold, featuring Dr. Boyer Lewis.
LISTEN to the podcast: Another Badly Behaving Woman featuring Dr. Boyer Lewis.

Gender, Sex, and the LDS

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Taylor Petrey, ThD talks (and takes some fascinating audience questions) about the beliefs, teachings, and political actions of the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) relative to homosexuality, feminism, and so-called family values. The Lucinda Hinsdale Stone Assistant Professor of Religion recently published a book—Tabernacles of Clay: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Mormonism—which takes a historical approach to LDS positions on gender and sexuality, and talks more broadly on gender and sexuality in right-wing religion generally. His research brings nuance, complexity and some surprises, positing, for example, that, contrary to popular misperception, LDS believes that gender is socially constructed (as opposed to naturally fixed) with boundaries so fragile they require significant church—and societal—support. Also contrary to popular misperception, LDS teachings regarding gender and sexuality have changed over time much more than most people think.

Molecule Maker, Mind Shaper

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Chemistry drives the natural world. Put another way, life is a dance of molecules. Chemists seek to understand the dance by elucidating molecular structures and making new ones. One of the five major fields of chemistry is inorganic chemistry, the study of elements exclusive of hydrocarbons and their derivatives and the field wherein Tom Smith, the D.H. Heyl Professor of Chemistry Emeritus, has spent four decades with students and fellow chemists across the planet, teaching, advising, supervising Senior Individualized Projects, conducting research and inspiring the research journeys of others. Tom specializes in transition metals, a small group within the Periodic Table of Elements. In his delightful and lay-accessible retirement lecture (“Reflections on Teaching and Research in Inorganic Chemistry: From Small Molecules to Crystals to Metalloproteins”) Tom describes the enthusiasm, clarity of thought, creativity, and collaboration that inspired him as a chemistry student and that distinguished his 40 years of pedagogy and research. Above all, all he did in the classroom and in the lab involved students, from project conception through the subsequent synthesis and purification of compounds and measurement. And he did all this in the wider context of the liberal arts.