Laura Furge, the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Professor of Chemistry, is a feature profile in a recent ASBMB Today, the professional development magazine of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The article, titled “Working at a PUI,” focuses on the demands and rewards faculty face at “primarily undergraduate institutions.” Turns out rewards and demands may be so intertwined they’re indistinguishable. For example, Furge’s academic wheelhouse is biochemistry, and yet she also teaches classes in organic chemistry and general chemistry and even a first-year writing seminar on cancer. The latter has become one of her favorite classes, a case in point of the demand-and-reward hybrid. Furge also notes that at PUIs the professor is the inter-generational “continuity of knowledge.” That vital function requires patience and broader skills on the part of the professor (demand) and makes a PUI professor-investigator-mentor like Furge the progenitor of generations of chemists and chemistry educators–think of Sarah in the Book of Genesis or Celeste in Edward P. Jones’ novel The Known World. That latter reference underscores another for Furge’s great strengths (one the PUI article misses): a fierce commitment to the liberal arts. The Known World was Kalamazoo College’s Summer Common Reading choice in 2007. Furge sits on the committee that selects these works. She also will begin her duties as associate provost at Kalamazoo College beginning July 1.
faculty
Professor Receives Lucasse Award for Teaching Excellence
Kalamazoo College’s highest teaching honor is the Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship, awarded to a K faculty member in recognition of outstanding classroom teaching. The 2015-16 Lucasse Lectureship recipient is Professor of Chemistry Regina Stevens-Truss. And for this honor, she gets to deliver a lecture! Hear this outstanding teacher talk about her love of teaching – and celebrate her award – Thursday May 19, 4:00-5:30 p.m., in the Olmsted Room of Mandelle Hall.
“I love what I do every day, and I wake up every day looking forward to it,” says Professor Stevens-Truss. “I get to learn with young people and share my love of learning with them. For now, life doesn’t get better than this.”
Professor Stevens-Truss is a medicinal biochemist who has taught at K since 2000. She previously taught at the College of Pharmacy, University of Michigan. Her teaching responsibilities at K include Antibiotics: Global Health and Social Justice, Introductory Chemistry II, Biochemistry, and Principles of Medicinal Chemistry. Her research focuses on understanding the enzyme nitric oxide synthase and its involvement in Alzheimers’ disease, research she enjoys carrying out with her students.
She has also been involved in numerous outreach programs that have taken her and her students into the Greater Kalamazoo community and bringing the community to the K campus. These have included Art & Science of Medicine, a summer workshop for high school students intending to pursue a career in medicine, and Sisters in Science, a K student group supporting young girls who demonstrate an aptitude for math and science.
She currently helps lead the Science and Social Justice Project, an initiative of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (ACSJL) at Kalamazoo College and the Division of Medical Sciences at Harvard Medical School. The Project aims to study and promote the value of social justice in scientific education and research, and to identify, connect, and coordinate scholars doing science and social justice teaching and research.
Professor Stevens-Truss recently helped coordinate a three-day “Science and Social Justice Think Tank” at the ACSJL attended by professors, scholars, scientists, public health and environmental leaders from across the country working at the intersection of science and social justice, as well as stakeholders in academic institutions and scientific organizations who can speak to diversity in the STEM fields and to the changing landscape of science and society.
Professor Stevens-Truss earned a B.A. degree at Rutgers University and a Ph.D. degree at University of Toledo. She is a married mother of two children who enjoys photography, bowling, watching sports (“especially those involving my kids”), and watching CSI.
The Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship (for outstanding classroom teaching) and Fellowship (for outstanding achievement in creative work, research or publication) at Kalamazoo College were established in 1979. The awards were created to honor Florence J. Lucasse, alumna of Kalamazoo College Class of 1910, in recognition of her long and distinguished career and in response to the major unrestricted endowment gift given to the college in her will.
Life’s Imperative: Social Justice in Science
A seed—call it science-and-social-justice—has been germinating in the mind of Regina Stevens-Truss since December of 2009. In truth, Stevens-Truss (the Kurt D. Kaufman Associate Professor of Chemistry) has been thinking on that matter long before then. But the occasion of that December seven years ago—a faculty workshop sponsored by the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (ACSJL) on the topic of incorporating social justice into the undergraduate curriculum—and a conversation at the event with Harvard University professor Jonathan Beckwith (well known for uniting social justice and science in his science courses) gave Stevens-Truss a language for her thinking.
That small seed has come to fruition in several ways over the years, most recently (in a very big way) with the April 2016 Science and Social Justice Think Tank (SSJTT), which gathered from across the country some 60 experts and advocates for social justice consideration in the conduct of research and science education.
The SSJTT, like so many previous fruitions, was sponsored by the ACSJL. “It is so vital to have the social justice center here,” says Stevens-Truss. On the issue of science and social justice, as with so many others, the center provides “a language, a name, if you will, a platform for what needs to be done, and the national reach to do it,” says Stevens-Truss. Language, platform, reach. “The social justice center is indispensable.”
According to Stevens-Truss, in recent years scientists and science educators have improved in the area of science and ethics. Both groups have become better at considering and carefully answering questions like: am I doing research (or teaching research protocols) in a way that respects the human rights of research subjects as well as the integrity of the scientific process? Comparatively, science has been less effective in its consideration of social justice matters.
“We must become better at framing and answering social justice questions,” says Steven-Truss. Is the research we are considering good for society? Who will benefit? Will different communities benefit disproportionately? Will there be adverse burdens to bear and, if so, who or what communities are most likely to bear those burdens?
A similar battery of social justice questions for science educators certainly includes this one: What course content is required to ensure that students from various backgrounds see themselves as stakeholders in science to a degree that is sufficient to keep them involved in the discipline?
That last question inspired at least one living ancestor of April’s SSJTT. In 2011 Stevens-Truss, Beckwith and Lisa Brock, academic director of ACSJL and associate professor of history, began collecting the syllabi of science courses that integrate social justice. Two K undergraduate students and a Harvard graduate student searched colleges and universities across the country and compiled the various ways science professors fit social justice into the academic content of their courses. The trio made these ideas available as a resource to all on science and social justice website, part of ACSJL’s Praxis project.
Work on the SSJTT soon followed. Eliza Jane Reilly, deputy executive director of the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement; Karen Winkfield, radiation oncologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and Anne Dueweke, director of faculty grants and institutional research at K, joined Stevens-Truss, Beckwith and Brock to form a planning committee. Senior Shannon Haupt, an environmental activist and anthropology and sociology major, served as project assistant.
“We wanted to gather professors, scholars, scientists, public health and environmental leaders working where science and social justice intersect,” says Brock. “We also sought experts on diversity in the STEM fields and people thinking about changes underway in society and science.”
SSJTT participants engaged with three questions: What benefits will accrue when social justice is included in undergraduate, graduate and medical school science courses? What are specific strategies for integrating social justice issues into scientific research? What disciplinary and institution reforms will most effectively advance social-justice-in-science nationally?
“We need to train the next generation in a way that these questions are second nature,” says Stevens-Truss. Particularly gratifying for her was the liberal arts diversity of the SSJTT’s presenters and participants. Attendees included researchers, science professors, policy makers, lawyers, journalists, writers and philanthropists.
“Our evening keynote speakers were a writer [and English professor Debra Marquart, “Owning Our Future: A Poet’s Response to Extraction”] and a visual artist [Mary Beth Heffernan, “Ebola, Culture and Social Justice Through the Lens of a Photographer”],” says Stevens-Truss.
Such diversity matters a great deal, she added, because social justice connects to art, poetry, the social sciences and the hard sciences, a fact with “deep implications for how we teach and practice science.” The committee is currently tackling how to extend the SSJTT’s momentum. The Praxis Center will help. And the language, platform and reach of the ACSJL will be critical.
Stevens-Truss has long been an activist, albeit (perhaps) without the sobriquet. Her work on campus with Sukuma, locally with Sisters in Science, and nationally in a program that connects practicing scientists and middle school teachers comprise distinct expressions of her preoccupation with matters of social justice and science. And now, through the Praxis Center and programs like the SSJTT, the cause and (yes!) its activists have a growing magnitude and unity.
“As scientists and educators we must help each other see our impact on people,” says Stevens-Truss, “and on communities. Especially the marginalized people and communities who often are the most adversely affected by our choices in boardrooms, laboratories, classrooms and scientific funding committees.”
17th Century Reality TV
Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College wraps up its 52nd season with Molière’s comedy, The Learned Ladies, in the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse, Thursday through Sunday, May 12-15.
The play, first produced in 1672, has been perceived as Moliere’s criticism of educated women. However, Director Marissa Harrington believes “his mockery [targets] the excess in which the women of this play indulge. We must always seek balance.”
“Though the play encourages female empowerment,” explains Dramaturg Lauren Landman ’18, “it also emphasizes the chaos that occurs when indulgence becomes immodesty–not unlike popular television shows such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
“To illustrate this parallel, Festival Playhouse’s production will transform audience members into avid fans of reality television, offering a behind-the-lens perspective that will question what exactly it means to be ‘learned’.”
With today’s reality television shows becoming increasingly popular, Harrington poses a question to the audience: “Do we demand enough truth from ourselves and each other?”
The play opens Thursday, May 12, at 7:30pm. Additional evening performances occur Friday and Saturday, May 13 and 14, at 8p.m., and a matinee concludes the run on Sunday, May 15, at 2pm. Tickets are $5 for students, $10 for seniors citizens, and $15 for other adults. For reservations call 269.337.7333 or visit the FP website.
The performance features Elaine Kauffman, costume designer; Lanford J. Potts, scenic and lighting designer; and Val Frank ’17, sound designer. This production of The Learned Ladies has been translated into English verse by Richard Wilbur.
STORIES Wins at North by Midwest
EDITOR’S NOTE (May 24): “The Stories They Tell” won the Kalamazoo Film Society’s “Palm d’Mitten” Award for best local film. And the documentary won second place for best feature film at this weekend’s NxMW Film Festival in Kalamazoo! Pictured (below) at the award ceremony are (l-r): Zac Clark ’14 (Production Assistant), Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan (Co-Authorship Project Creator), Visiting Instructor of Art Danny Kim (Director), Matt Hamel (Photographer/Animator), Michelle Hamel (Videographer) and Dhera Strauss (Videographer). CONGRATULATIONS!
(April 26) “The Stories They Tell,” a documentary film by Visiting Instructor of Art Danny Kim is an official selection of the 2016 North by Midwest Film Festival and will be shown in the Wellspring Dance Theater at the Epic Center (359 S. Kalamazoo Mall) on May 21 at 3:30 p.m. In this charming film, Kalamazoo College Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan partners every Kalamazoo College student in her “Developmental Psychology” class with a child at Woodward Elementary School to write children’s books together. The project’s concept has been expanded and continued through a partnership with the College’s Center for Civic Engagement. As the student (college and primary school) create these whimsical, amusing and surprising stories, the connections they make with each other have a lasting impact, not only in literacy and learning, but in understanding their pasts and futures. The film also screened at the Lake Erie Arts and Film Festival in Sandusky, Ohio, the East Lansing Film Festival in Michigan, and Reading FilmFEST in Reading, Pennsylvania. The tickets for the showing at the Wellspring Dance Theater are FREE but registration is required.
Intercultural Conference and Hip Hop Collective
Kalamazoo College’s Intercultural Student Life group presents the “Intercultural Conference and Hip Hop Collective,” a two-day event on April 29 and 30 featuring guest speakers, the Black History 101 Mobile Museum, panels, discussions and a performance featuring five Hip Hop artists. The event’s venues include the Hicks Banquet Hall and Hicks Center.
Among the event’s goals are building relationships and learning about the intercultural ethos of K. “My student advisory board and I decided to focus our first event on Hip Hop because Hip Hop has a way to cross over cultural boundaries and speak to multiple groups,” said Natalia Carvalho-Pinto, director for intercultural student life.
The museum exhibit is open both days of the conference and is a powerful experience. “Khalid El-Hakim, the museum’s curator, travels with about 1,000 exhibit pieces,” says Carvalho-Pinto, “ranging from the slavery era through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement up to Hip Hop and the modern era.” El-Hakim will deliver the keynote address Saturday, talking about the museum and the importance on continuity in social justice work.
The Conference also features Ernie Pannicioli, a photographer who has documented Hip Hop from its birth through modern days and photographed every celebrity in Hip Hop,” according to Carvalho-Pinto. She adds, “He published a book titled Who Shot Ya, and he speaks about ’the other side of Hip Hop,’ the movement building and struggles that few discuss.” Carvalho-Pinto also is excited about the presence of OLMECA at the conference. “He is a very unique artist,” she says, “and his keynote address will focus on his experiences in the Zapatista movement and Hip Hop in Latin America.”
A Hip Hop panel occurs Saturday afternoon with Miz Korona, Mu, Supa Emcee and Kenny Muhammed THE HUMAN ORCHESTRA. Five Hip Hop artists will perform Saturday night for the “Zoo After Dark” activity.
“Our speakers, panelists and performers are really great people,” says Carvalho-Pinto. I would love to see as many students, staff and faculty as possible attend some or all the conference. My hope is that the event opens more opportunities for dialogue and serves as a place of empowerment for our students of color on campus.”
Forum on Education Abroad bestows honor on the late Joe Brockington, former head of international educational at Kalamazoo College
From The Forum on Education Abroad:
The Forum on Education Abroad gave its 2016 Peter A. Wollitzer Advocacy Award to the late Joe Brockington, Ph.D., at the 12th Annual Forum Conference in Atlanta. The award was accepted on his behalf by Joe’s wife, Cathy, and sons, David, Sam and Drew. The award was presented to the Brockington family by Joe’s colleague and friend, Margaret Wiedenhoeft, Ph.D., acting director of the Center for International Programs at Kalamazoo College.
Here is an excerpt from Margaret’s citation delivered at the award ceremony:
“Throughout his twenty-plus years in international education, Joe Brockington consistently contributed to and advocated for the Standards of Good Practice for Education Abroad, mentoring colleagues at institutions on how to develop and provide programs incorporating The Forum’s Standards that met curricular goals while also fully supporting students. His contributions to the research of the development of the profession of international education helped to create recognition of the increasing professionalization of our work while acknowledging how much the field has changed. Throughout his career, Joe never missed an opportunity to remind colleagues that having standards was so important because, as he would say in his very Midwestern, dry, humorous tone, ‘that next to parenting, education abroad is the world’s greatest amateur sport.’”
Joe Brockington, a member of the founding Board of Directors of The Forum, passed away in August 2015. He served as associate provost for international programs and professor of German language and literature at Kalamazoo College. He was instrumental in the founding of The Forum and over the years contributed to the field in innumerable ways by presenting at conferences and initiating projects.
The Peter A. Wollitzer Advocacy Award was established to honor a Forum member who has been remarkably effective in influencing institutions of higher learning to understand and support education abroad through the dissemination of the Forum’s goals: standards of good practice, data collection and research, curricular development and academic design, and assessment. The award will be given to an individual, but individual achievement pre-supposes institutional efficacy and impact and provides inspiration to the field of education abroad. Awardees can be individuals who work on a U.S. or foreign university campus or for domestic or foreign providers or organizations.
The award is presented each year at The Forum’s Annual Conference.
The Forum on Education Abroad (https://forumea.org) is recognized by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission as the Standards Development Organization (SDO) for the field of education abroad. The Forum provides training and resources to education abroad professionals and its Standards of Good Practice are recognized as the definitive means by which the quality of education abroad programs may be judged. The Quality Improvement Program for Education Abroad (QUIP) and The Professional Certification for Education Abroad Program provide quality assurance for the field through use of the Standards in rigorous self-study and peer reviews for institutions and professional certification for individuals.
Blind Date
DI SEUSS NAMED one of two finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry! A first in the history of Kalamazoo College to have one of her own so honored. Di is an alumna (class of 1978) and Di is our writer-in-residence and Di is an assistant professor of English. “Di is” is the roiling wellspring and outflow of her remarkable books, most particularly Four-Legged Girl, which the Pulitzer jurors describe as “A richly improvisational poetry collection that leads readers through a gallery of incisive and beguiling portraits and landscapes.”
I like to think of each Di’s books as a glimpse (part dark, part light, and both motion) of a journey into “Di Seuss named,” a good name for a vast, strange and absolutely singular land at the margins of the world.
Graywolf Press commissioned Di to write an essay on Myrtle Corbin, the four-legged girl and Di’s muse for part of her recent collection. You can see Myrtle–or a portion of her–on the cover of Di’s book. Di’s essay, writes her publisher, is “something dark, weird, and beautiful.” It calls forth the poet Emily Dickinson and (at least for me, albeit less explicitly) another hero, another “Di,” the photographer Diane Arbus.
“When born with two vaginas, what is a girl to do?” writes Di Seuss in her essay, “Wear white, collect plants by moonlight and construct an herbarium, become a recluse, write poems? Or take the other route: join the circus, become, as Myrtle did at thirteen, a live exhibit. Without the economic privilege a poetic genius freak like Dickinson was born into, the Four-Legged Girl went for the paycheck. She dressed all four of her appendages in striped socks and black boots and pulled up her skirt to reveal the four knots of her knees. She wore fringe and silk and a hair bow. Her bangs were plastered to her forehead in spit curls with whatever they used for styling gel in those days. Oh yeah. spit.”
Arbus once wrote, “Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot….There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks are born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
Later in her remarkable essay about her remarkable book’s namesake, Di Seuss writes, “I believe my association with her predecessor paved the way. My first love was the taxidermied two-headed lamb in my little hometown museum. He was John the Baptist to Myrtle’s Jesus. In his two soft heads and four sweet eyes I discovered the vulnerability and genius of marginality, the burden and the gift of originality….I love and lust after Myrtle Corbin because she is queered and empowered by her idiosyncrasy…dizzied by the realization of her absolute singularity. I experience my own body as a spectacle, an exhibit, a performance, and a condition. My legs are exponential….
“Our whole guise,” echoes Arbus, “is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you….I mean if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is totally fantastic…. Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.”
Di’s poems (and prose) take me to what I’ve never seen before.
Scores Make Waves
Answer this question, “What’s the best movie you ever saw?” and chances are your answer will be accurate for a slightly different question: “What’s the best movie you ever heard?”
Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan, a leading figure in the psychology of film music and the editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, has been involved in two recent projects exploring the critical role of musical scores (some say the “heartbeat,” others the “symphonic music of our day”) to the emotional impact of a film.
The most recent project is a film titled SCORE: A Film Music Documentary. Siu-Lan’s was one of some 60 live interviews compiled for the film, including conversations with the top living film composers in United States and the United Kingdom (Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, Randy Newman, Howard Shaw, Trent Reznor, Alexandre Desplat, among others), film directors like James Cameron, producers like Quincy Jones, and several film scholars.
Siu-Lan will appear in SCORE several times. In the meantime you can view a short trailer for the film.
A related project that occurred in late March was the panel discussion “Making Waves: Why Movies Move Us.” The conversation was sponsored by the New York University (NYU) Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and in addition to Siu-Lan it featured Ronald Sadoff, chair of the NYU department of music and performing arts professions and director of film scoring at NYU Steinhardt; neuroscientist Stefan Koelsch, professor of biological psychology and music psychology at Freie University Berlin; and Professor Elizabeth Margulis, director of music cognition lab at the University Arkansas.
At the event Siu-Lan used movie clips from films including Indiana Jones, Gravity, and The Shining to explore why music is an essential component of how emotion is conveyed in film. The panel occurred at NYU’s Frederick Loewe Theatre.
Danny Kim prepared four short videos that were shown at the presentation. “One surprising highlight was when we played Danny’s last video,” said Siu-Lan, “an eight-minute collage of scenes and music from films. It was meant to play in the background as people left the theater, and we invited them to do so. But to our astonishment, the whole audience stayed and watched with rapt attention and applauded at the end!” That’s the surprising power of music.
Nor was it the only surprise of the evening. Alumnus Matthew Jong ’15 (currently a graduate student pursuing a degree in music business at NYU) showed up for the panel discussion. “I was delighted that Matt could come,” said Siu-Lan. “We were unable to connect in person, but he emailed me later to let me know he was there, and he wrote, ’Please tell ‘K’ I miss it for me!’”
War Crimes Trial Anniversary Occasion for Human Rights Workshop
A workshop on human rights (April 14-16) at Kalamazoo College will offer the opportunity for some of the world’s leading scholars to discuss their work among themselves and an audience that includes students, faculty and the general public. The workshop is titled “Seventy Years After Nuremberg: Genocide and Human Rights in Comparative Perspective.”
“Seventy years after the end of the Second World War and the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of 1945-46 is a particularly appropriate time to reflect on genocide and responses to genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries,” said workshop organizer David Barclay, the Margaret and Roger Scholten Professor of International Studies. “Although the study of genocide, the Holocaust, international human right and related issues has become an essential component of academic scholarship and civic education, the current anniversary of the first war-crimes trials after World War II offers important opportunities to reflect comparatively, and in a focused way, on these vital matters.”
The workshop begins on Thursday evening, April 14, with a keynote address by Daniel Chirot (University of Washington) titled “No End in Sight: Why Mass Political Murder Continues to Occur.” Friday morning’s session focuses on genocide prior to the Second World War (and before the invention of the word), locating the phenomenon of genocide in the larger context of global history from the 19th to the 21st centuries. The session includes new scholarship concerning the Armenian genocide and new work detailing colonialism and genocide in Africa. Friday afternoon features two sessions on recent discussions of the Holocaust.
The workshop will conclude on Saturday morning with a consideration of other examples of 20th-century genocide, responses to genocide, and genocide and the protection of international human rights. Public participation and discussion will be encouraged. The event occurs in the Mandelle Hall Olmsted Room and is free to the public. In addition to Chirot and Barclay, among the other scholars featured are Joseph Bangura, Kalamazoo College; Carter Dougherty ’92, Bloomberg News; John Dugas, Kalamazoo College; Hilary Earl, Nipissing University, Canada; Amy Elman, Kalamazoo College; Geoffrey J. Giles, University of Florida; Lesley Klaff Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom; Paul Gordon Lauren, University of Montana; Wendy Lower, Claremont McKenna College; Samuel Moyn, Harvard Law School; James Nafziger, Willamette University and American Society of Comparative Law; Raffael Scheck, Colby College; and Ronald Suny, University of Michigan.
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