faculty Archives - Page 20 of 36

Festival Playhouse Presents Joshua Harmon’s “Bad Jews”

Posted on February 17, 2016March 23, 2022

Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College presents the contemporary comedy Bad Jews, a play that explores what it means to be Jewish in contemporary American society. Written by Joshua Harmon, the play will have four performances in the Dungeon Theatre (Light Fine Arts Building) on Thursday through Sunday (Feb. 25-28). It is part of Festival Playhouse’s 2015-16 season “Theatre and Belonging: Stories of Ethnicity and Racial Identity.”

Staged in the round, with production design by Lanny Potts (professor of theatre arts) and costumes by Elaine Kauffman, the story takes place in an apartment in New York City shortly after the death of the family patriarch, the grandfather of Liam, his younger brother Jonah, and their cousin, Daphna.

Liam is Jewish in name only and chooses to pursue everything that has nothing to do with his heritage. Daphna intentionally embraces all things Jewish. Like Melody, Liam’s shiksa girlfriend, Jonah often seems caught in the middle between the extremes of his cousins. It is not until the end of the play we learn where he stands on the question, “How Jewish are you?” The New York Times praised the play as the best comedy of the season, characterized by ”delectably savage humor.” The subject matter and language are for mature audiences.

K’s production is a collaboration between director Ed Menta (the James A. B. Stone College Professor of Theatre Arts) and Jeffrey Haus (associate professor of history and religion and director of the College’s Jewish Studies Program). Menta and Haus invited Dr. Jonathan Freedman, Jewish studies scholar from the University of Michigan, to speak about the play and its themes on Wednesday, February 24, in the Olmsted Room at 7 p.m.. Freedman and Haus will also lead a talkback following the Thursday performance of the play.

The play opens Thursday, February 25, at 7:30 p.m. Additional evening performances occur Friday and Saturday, February 26 and 27, at 8 p.m., and a matinee concludes the run on Sunday, February 27, at 2 p.m. Tickets are $5 for students, $10 for senior citizens, and $15 for other adults. For reservations call 269.337.7333. For more information, visit the Festival Playhouse website.

Bring Some Friends With Curious Minds

Posted on February 11, 2016March 23, 2022

Assistant Professor of Political Science Justin Berry (and members of his “Voting, Campaigns and Elections” class) knew that the 2016 William Weber Lecture in Government and Society was too big an opportunity not to share widely. The late January event featured Martin Gilens, author and professor of politics at Princeton University, speaking on the subject “Economic Inequality and Political Power in America.” Dr. Berry reached out to the one high school student who attends his class and he, in turn, gathered many of his high school classmates to attend the lecture. After the event, he wrote to Dr. Berry: “I have to say, I really do appreciate your willingness to let a mob of high school kids participate in the event. We spent the next day in class having a heated discussion regarding the topics that were covered within Dr. Gilens’ speech. I believe that I speak for all that attended when I say that it was a very informative and memorable event. Our government teacher was disappointed that he couldn’t attend, but he had prior obligations. I do know that for next year he will try to bring back some of his students to have them sit in on the lecture, making it an annual event.” Well done, Dr. Berry! The photo shows Professor Gilens (third from right) with some of the high school attendees. The William Weber Lecture in Government and Society was founded by Bill Weber, a 1939 graduate of K, and it is administered by the Department of Political Science. Past lecturers have included David Broder, E.J. Dionne, Frances Fox Piven, Van Jones and Joan Mandelle, among others.

CONTRARY MOTION Hits the Right Note

Posted on January 19, 2016March 23, 2022

On a musical instrument, contrary motion refers to a melodic motion in which one series of notes rises in pitch while opposing notes descend. In his debut novel, Contrary Motion, English professor Andy Mozina moves his 38-year-old character, Matthew Grzbc, in opposite directions in most every aspect of his life.

As a harpist living in Chicago, Matthew hopes to land a chair position in a symphony orchestra—but his every day has him playing on demand to dying patients at a hospice and to the sounds of chewing at hotel brunches.

As a just-divorced man, he dates a woman with whom he suffers erectile dysfunction—even while he can’t stop lusting for his ex-wife who is about to become engaged to another man. He’s a devoted and attentive father to his six-year-old daughter—but the girl teeters on the verge of a breakdown after witnessing her father “in flagrante delicto” with her mother while Mom’s boyfriend is out of the house. Adding drama, Matthew’s father suffers a fatal heart attack while listening to a relaxing meditation CD—leaving his son questioning his sanity as well as his mortality.

When a longed-for audition for a harpist in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra opens career possibilities for Matthew (if only his harp would stop buzzing and twanging), he is pulled once again in opposing directions. To audition or not to audition? And, should he be offered the chair, to move or not to move away from his girlfriend, his ex-wife, his daughter, his life in Chicago?

Matthew’s saving grace, the glue to keep his life from splitting down the middle with all that contrary motion, is his sense of humor. It’s hard not to root for the guy between chuckles. He is as perfectly imperfect as are we all on those days when we take an honest look in the mirror. He is riddled with anxiety when most of his fears are never realized. By end of novel, all that anxiety becomes a tad exhausting—-get it right, Matt! Do it, dude!—-and then he does that, too, hitting the perfect note, humanly well.

Andy Mozina has taught English at Kalamazoo College since 1999. He is the author of the short story collections, The Women Were Leaving the Men, which won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and Quality Snacks, a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, and he has received special citations in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the Midwest. Mozina is also the author of a book of literary criticism called, Joseph Conrad and the Art of Sacrifice.

“Princess, Prisoner, Queen” is Original Research by a Liberal Arts Agent

Posted on January 4, 2016October 31, 2022

Sara Stack on study abroad in Strasbourg, France

This week Sara Stack ’15 will break from her study of insects (she is working on a master’s degree in entomology at Purdue University) to travel to San Francisco and present a classics paper at the 2016 annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). From insects to classics!? Therein hangs a liberal arts tale, vintage Kalamazoo College.

Stack’s paper–“Princess, Prisoner, Queen: Searching for Identity and Agency in the Life of Kleopatra Selene”–is one of only four undergraduate research projects selected for presentation at the AIA meeting.

Selection was nation wide and very competitive,” said Senior Instructor in Classics Anne Haeckl. Stack wrote the paper for Professor Haeckl’s Junior Classics Seminar, which provided, said Stack, “an amazing opportunity to explore Selene’s life through the lens of intersectional feminism.”

Kleopatra Selene is one of history’s forgotten women, mentioned only marginally (if at all) in the history- and world-changing story of her famous parents, the Roman general Mark Antony and the last queen of Egypt, Kleopatra VII. Theirs was a story that crowded the stage of the entire Mediterranean world of their time, a story that has inspired countless historical and literary interpretations from Plutarch to Shakespeare to a recent bestseller biography by Stacy Schiff.

“I’ve always been very interested in history, particularly dynamic historical women,” said Stack, who majored in biology and religion. “Kleopatra VII has been a particular favorite of mine since childhood; my favorite book is a 1000-page novel called The Memoirs of Cleopatra. Because I’m so familiar with her mother, I’ve been aware of Selene for a long time, but I started to wonder about her as a historical figure in her own right.

“The most interesting part of my research was how strongly Selene’s political agenda and identity were influenced by the events of her childhood.”

After her parents’ defeat by Octavian (later the Roman emperor Augustus), Selene became Augustus’ prisoner and political pawn. He marched the 10-year-old girl in his Egyptian triumph through the streets of Rome as a symbol of her fallen dynasty and conquered nation. He gave her to his sister to raise and later arranged her marriage to Juba, king of Mauretania (today’s Algeria). “As the queen of Mauretania she very clearly identified herself as a Ptolemy (her mother’s royal house) and a Hellenized Egyptian queen,” said Stack. “She commissioned coins in her own right, not just in conjunction with her husband, and portrayed herself with the imagery and titles of her mother, Kleopatra VII. To me this indicates that she never forgot her heritage or her family, and used her power to maintain their legacy.”

Haeckl had equal praise for Stack’s research paper and for the liberal arts ethos from which it took wing. “At K we value the breadth and depth of academic course work and the Senior Individualized Project. It’s hard to find a more dynamic example of that than Sara, with her curiosity and hard work in biology, religion and classics.”

Stack’s biology SIP studied the effect of the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle that kills ash trees, on the biodiversity of a family of beetles known as Carabidae. “I really enjoyed my SIP research, and it was ultimately what made me fall in love with entomology and got me into graduate school,” said Stack.

She obviously also enjoyed her classical research. “She unified and analyzed through a feminist lens the scattered corpus of ancient material culture and texts relating to Selene,” praised Haeckl, work that yielded a new and original understanding of Selene’s “increasingly empowered agency and self-identification as a North African queen.”

Haeckl also presented research at the AIA annual meeting. Her work posits a specific identity (the Emperor Caracella) of a painted limestone statuette depicting a falcon-headed human figure in the armor of a Roman imperator. Haeckl’s paper, “Caracalla as Birdman? Proposing an Imperial Identity for the British Museum’s ’Horus in Roman Military Costume,” explicates the iconography of the statue (Horus was the Egyptian falcon-god) in terms of both the public image Caracalla cultivated (as an ordinary Roman soldier and latter day Alexander the Great) and a specific visit Caracalla made to Alexandria in 215.

K Philosopher Writes About Syrian Refugees

Posted on December 4, 2015March 23, 2022

Max Cherem, philosophy, has contributed a thoughtful reflection to a “Philosophers On” segment focused on the Syrian refugees. Since 2011, more than 10 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes, and more 4 million have fled their homeland, seeking refuge from the violence and chaos of the civil war wracking their country. The war has reportedly left between 140,000 and 340,000 dead, including (by some estimates) up to 12,000 children. The situation has been described as “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.” Recently, the United States agreed to allow 10,000 Syrian refugees to enter in 2016, but even that modest accommodation was met with political backlash. Two dozen Republican governors announced that their states would no longer accept Syrian refugees. Recent terrorist attacks, no matter how tenuous (or nonexistent) their ties to Syrian refugees, have inflamed political rhetoric, with some politicians suggesting a religious test for refugees.

Max was one of eight philosophers invited to “explore the ways in which philosophers and theorists can add, with their characteristically insightful and careful modes of thinking, to the public conversation” about the Syrian refugees. His piece, titled “Understanding the Structural Issues,” references the Refugee Convention’s definition of a refugee and its signatories’ obligations to provide refugees (as specifically defined) protection from return and new membership (in a state). Those guarantees, Max writes, are gutted by refugee camps (which are nowhere found in the Convention), where the gap between non-return (albeit tenuous) and new membership can stretch to 17 years, and by unilateral extra-territorial migration controls. “Apparently,” writes Max, “political leaders calculate that they can subscribe to the convention in name, defect in practice, and that their publics won’t notice or care. So far, the sloppiness and level of our public discourse hasn’t proven them wrong.” What’s needed, he adds, is a clearer understanding of our responsibilities under the Convention and subsequent informed activism for structural reforms as needed. Both possibilities are obscured by “table-pounding” rhetoric that promulgates a false-dichotomy between compassion and security.

Max is the Marlene Crandell Francis Assistant Professor of Philosophy and one of four persons in the country honored with the prestigious Humanities Writ Large Visiting Faculty Fellowship for the 2015-16 academic year. The Fellowship has him in research residence at Duke University and working in the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

Distinguished K Professor and Administrator Dies

Posted on October 28, 2015March 23, 2022

Former Kalamazoo College professor of economics and business Sherrill Cleland died of natural causes at the age of 91 on October 26, 2015, in Sarasota, Florida. He was an outstanding teacher and educator, a leader and innovator in higher education, and an accomplished economist.

Professor Cleland was born in 1924 in Galion, Ohio, to Fred and Doris Cleland. He was a decorated World War II veteran with a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. He earned his degrees in economics from Oberlin College (BA) and Princeton College (MA and Ph.D).

He joined the faculty at Kalamazoo College in 1956 as an assistant professor of economics and business and chair of that department. Within three years he had achieved the rank of full professor and served in that role until 1973. He also served as dean of academic affairs (1965-1967) and vice president (1966-67). Among other subjects, he was an expert in Middle East studies and on the integration of courses on consumerism into college curricula.

Professor Cleland was known for his optimism, encouragement, curious mind, and his interest in others and in the world. He was widely admired for his creativity, his commitment to mentoring others, and for promoting equal rights and opportunities for women.

He left Kalamazoo College in 1973 to serve as President of Marietta College (Marietta, Ohio), a position he held until 1989.

Professor Cleland’s acumen as an economist was recognized near and far. In 1962 former Governor John Swainson named Cleland to a five-person advisory committee on the Michigan economy. Internationally, through the Ford Foundation, Professor Cleland worked as an economic advisor to Jordan, and he helped create the country’s first infrastructure development plan in Amman (1963-64). Later he led the creation of the world’s first masters program in Development Economics at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon (1967-69). In 1965 the Great Lakes Colleges Association and the U.s. State Department appointed Professor Cleland to a team of educators who visited various colleges and universities in six African nations to study possibilities of faculty and student exchanges.

His civic engagement while a resident of Kalamazoo was exemplary. He served as chairman of the Kalamazoo Employment Advisory Council and president of the Kalamazoo County Chapter of the United Nations Association and the Kalamazoo Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. He also worked as the Democratic civil rights coordinator for Kalamazoo County.

Professor Cleland remained active in retirement, serving as Chairman of the Student Loan Funding Corporation and on the Board of Directors of KnowledgeWorks, Tuition Exchange, and AMIDEAST.

He is survived by his wife of 27 years, Diana Drake Cleland, and his children Ann Feldmeier, Doug Cleland, Sarah Allen, Scott Cleland, Cynthia Rush, Allison Abizaid, Linda Wiener, Carol Abizaid, Amanda Abizaid Plonsky, and Richard Abizaid. He is also survived by 19 grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren. Professor Cleland was widowed by his first wife of 39 years, Betty Chorpenning Cleland.

Sherill Cleland loved Kalamazoo College, and that love was a legacy he passed to his family. His daughter Ann and son Scott are graduates (1972 and 1982, respectively) as is his granddaughter Amy Houtrow (1996).

Finding Strengths

Posted on October 21, 2015March 23, 2022

Kalamazoo College Assistant Professor of Psychology Kyla Fletcher has been awarded a grant by the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities (part of the NIH) to study African-American partner relationships and share “what goes right” in terms of daily HIV risk reduction behavior.

The three-year grant ($438,000, making it the largest single-investigator award ever received at Kalamazoo College) is titled “Substance Use and Partner Characteristics in Daily HIV Risk in African Americans.” Fletcher hopes to enroll 200 participants in the community-based study. Participants will complete daily surveys for a month (a study approach called “daily diary” that provides more reliable data than do retrospective approaches). Participants also will do confidential in-person interviews in the lab Fletcher has set up in Olds-Upton.

The study will empirically consider the role of partners, specifically relative to managing (one’s own and one’s partner’s) substance use and condom use, and negotiating the knowledge of a partner’s HIV status through testing–all behaviors that can be associated with HIV prevention.

“There are relationships where partners talk about these behaviors and negotiate them successfully,” says Fletcher. “The study will help us learn how they accomplish that, which may suggest strategies to encourage such engagement and behaviors more widely among intimate partnerships in specific populations.”

In addition to setting up the interview lab and a website for the study, Fletcher is working with her newly hired Research Associate (hailing from the greater Kalamazoo area) and her team of six Kalamazoo College students to begin the recruitment phase of the study. “I had an enthusiastic pool of K students,” smiles Fletcher. “There is great interest in human sexuality and the influences of community on relationships and the influence of partners in relationships.

“The K students, which include members of every class, bring a diverse set of experiences and new ideas to the study team,” adds Fletcher. In return, the students will learn how to think analytically and how to initiate (and collect and analyze data from) a ’daily diary’ research protocol, knowledge that would be relevant for graduate study or employment in the field of psychology, according to Fletcher.

She is particularly excited that the work will be community-based. “The grant allows us to build a cohort that is diverse in multiple ways and more reflective of the reality of the community,” she explains. “It also obligates us to disseminate the results back to the community and to seek their input on how to communicate those results most effectively.”

Fletcher has already enlisted community representatives as advisers. And, she notes, the community-based character of the research is an opportunity for the K students to get off campus and interact with people from whom they differ in a variety of ways and with whom they also share fundamental similarities. The discovery and exploration of distinctions and commonalities can be a valuable learning experience.

This academic year is Fletcher’s fourth at Kalamazoo College. She teaches courses in general psychology, adolescent development, research methods, the psychology of the African-American experience, and the psychology of sexuality.

She earned her bachelor’s degree from Howard University (Washington, D.C.) and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. In grad school she focused on developmental psychology with an emphasis on sexual socialization, and she did post-doctoral work at U of M’s Substance Abuse Research Center.

“It’s in the nature of human relationship development that partners tend to meld into one another, adopt each other’s interests and give greater consideration of a partner’s desires,” says Fletcher. “How partners influence behaviors related to substance use, sexual risk and HIV prevention is a key question of this study. What strengths in relationships work toward healthy outcomes, and can these strengths be applied more widely?”

“It’s exciting work,” concludes Fletcher, “and could be part of a cultural shift—a needed shift, in my opinion—from a deficit-based view to a strength-based view of sexuality and health.”

K Expert on Anti-Semitism and the EU Addresses Colloquium in England

Posted on October 12, 2015March 23, 2022

Amy Elman, the Weber Professor in Social Science, traveled to Bristol, England, in September as an invited speaker at an international colloquium on contemporary anti-Semitism. Her talked was titled “The Enduring Significance of an Abandoned Definition: the EU’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism and its Foreign Policy Ambition,” and it focused on the the past year’s developments in the European Union. The paper builds on Amy’s recently released book The European Union, Anti-Semitism and the Politics of Denial (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Amy also wrote the chapter “The EU’s Responses to Contemporary Anti-Semitism: A Shell Game,” which appears in the book Deciphering the New Anti-Semitism, edited by Alvin Rosenfeld (Indiana University Press, 2015)

Does Good Need Memorable?

Posted on October 12, 2015March 23, 2022

Psychology Professor Siu-Lan Tan outdoors — Kalamazoo College Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan

BuzzFeed’s Reggie Ugwu wrote an explication of a new vocal phenomenon he calls “Indie Pop Voice” (“Selena Gomez’s ’Good for You’ and the Rise of the ’Indie Pop Voice’”). The trend refers to many singers’ creative reshaping of vowel sounds. But why do that?

To arrive at a more comprehensive answer to that question, Reggie turned to Kalamazoo College’s Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan, who also posts a blog (“What Shapes Film”) for Psychology Today online. Siu-Lan expands on Reggie’s question in her “Six Reasons Pop Singers Pronounce Some Lyrics in Odd Ways: ’Secret Asian Man’ and Other Mysteries of Song.” The reasons range from the more prosaic “making a song one’s own” to the wonderfully poetic “tightening or relaxing one’s lips or throat to change the tone color of your voice.” How cool is the fact that a voice has tone colors!

According to Siu-Lan it’s vowels that make the song, so those might be re-shaped in any number of ways for any number of reasons. Consonants, on the other hand, are flow-stoppers and are therefore emphasized…or omitted entirely…depending on the effect a singer desires. (That’s why Siu-Lan for some time thought Johnny Rivers was singing about a secret Asian man rather than a “Secret Agent Man”). Both Reggie and Siu-Lan cite the desire to be more interesting or catchy—“good” needs “memorable,” according to Reggie. Okay, agrees Siu-Lan, but be careful. Too much “capital-M Memorable” via pronunciation deviation carries some risk—such as a feeling of contrived affectation or garbled words. You especially don’t want the latter if the lyric’s magic.

Here’s another question Reggie or some other inquirer might one day ask: Why’s a top notch psychology professor weighing in on independent pop music? “Although as an academic I spend most of my time on scholarly works, I think bringing what we do to the public is also important,” says Siu-Lan. “Technical aspects of singing include articulators and resonators and formants. But when applied to Selena Gomez and Top 40 pop singers, we can make the basic ideas relevant to the general public—and perhaps make them aware of some more nuances involved in singing.”

College Breaks Ground on New Wellness Center

Posted on September 24, 2015March 23, 2022

Kalamazoo College celebrated with a groundbreaking ceremony the beginning of construction of its new fitness and wellness center. The ceremony took place at the building site at 4 p.m. (September 24). The approximately $9 million project is funded by gifts made to K’s recently completed fundraising drive, The Campaign for Kalamazoo College.

President Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran said that the center is germane to the College’s liberal arts mission. “We focus on the whole student; we focus on the balance of mind, spirit and body.” The center, she added, would be “a common space in which the entire campus community–faculty, staff, students and retirees–can develop healthy life styles through participation in fitness and wellness programs.”

Grace Smith at a podium — Grace Smith ’17 explains what the fitness and wellness center will mean to students.

The 30,000 square foot, two-story center will house the following:

– a weight room and cardio fitness area of sufficient capacity to meet the needs of all students and employees;

– five multi-purpose rooms, as flexible in function as the liberal arts to which they are dedicated;

– two racquetball courts;

– expanded lockers for both the Hornet tennis teams and for general use;

– an office and health assessment room for the campus wellness director; and

– space for the George Acker Tennis Hall of Champions.

The building provides an example of excellence in sustainability. “Our building is designed and will be constructed to the high standards of energy efficiency and resource conservation explicit in a LEED silver rating,” said Wilson-Oyelaran. “And our efforts in this area will be audited by two students who have been hired and trained in LEED certification.”

(Photo by Jessie Fales ’18)