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Dean of Faculty Report, March 2005
At
every monthly faculty meeting during the school year, the Dean of
Faculty presents brief overviews of recent publications and other
achievements by the Mount Holyoke faculty. Here are excerpts from the
March 2005 report of Penny Gill, Acting Dean of Faculty:
This has been
a month rich in faculty accomplishment. An abiding pleasure of serving
as the dean this year has been discovering the depth and breadth of
faculty scholarly work. As I interview very promising candidates for
our tenure track searches this month, I have been struck by what
distinguished and active company they will join. And though we are
still interviewing in most searches, I expect that we will be able to
invite some similarly stellar young people to join us in the very near
future.
Grants
Publications
Other Honors
Grants:
Jill Bubier,
Marjorie Fisher Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, has
received notice of a new NSF award for a half-million dollar project
that will establish a global network of peatland research. Jill is
co-investigator and a member of the steering committee for
“Globalization of Northern Peatland Ecosystem Research.”
Geology professor Al Werner spends his summers
drilling deep holes in the arctic and then analyzes these lake cores to
track climate change during the last 2,000 years. He has been a leader
among us in integrating students into this research for many years. His
most recent proposal to the NSF to support the analysis of the core
data has been recommended for funding. This is a good example of how we
combine faculty fellowship and grant support, student support through
Cascade mentoring and a summer grant from the Center for Global
Initiatives, and then federal funding to sustain a long-term research
program.
Publications:
Roger Babb,
professor of theatre arts, continues his work on contemporary Polish
theater. His interview with Polish director Grzegorz Bral appears in
the current Slavic and Eastern European Performance Journal. His review of Kazimierz Braun’s Concise History of Polish Theater appeared recently in The Polish Review. His chapter on the Open Theater and The Winter Project will appear this spring in Radical Collectives Circa 1968: Group Theatres and their Legacy, published by the University of Michigan Press.
Martha Hoopes, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant
Professor of Biological Sciences, has sent over copies of four articles
on topics in ecology she had published in 2004: “Alternative Stable
States and Regional Community Structure” and “Stabilizing Effects in
Spatial Parasitoid-Host and Predator-Prey Models: A Review” both in the
Journal of Theoretical Biology; “The Metacommunity Concept: A Framework for Multi-Scale Community Ecology” in Ecology Letters; and “Mechanisms of Coexistence in Competitive Metacommunities” in The American Naturalist.
It is a particular pleasure to note that biology professor emerita Jane Townsend,
who allegedly retired from the College more than a dozen years ago,
continues to both teach and publish at an enviable clip. She has
published 16 papers since 1993, such as “Glycoconjugate localization in
larval and adult skin of the bullfrog “in the Journal of Morphology and “Immunocytochemical detection of integrins alpha 3 and beta l in allografts of the marine sponge” in Biological Bulletin,
both in 2004. She continues to supervise student summer research at
Woods Hole and several student independent projects each year. Jane, we
congratulate and thank you!
Tom Wartenberg, professor and chair of philosophy, has just published a new piece titled “Teaching Philosophy with Children’s Literature” in Gifted Education Communicator.
Other Honors:
Michelle Stephens, assistant professor of English, has been elected to a three-year term on the Board of Editors of American Literature,
the flagship MLA journal in American literature. This is a high honor
that recognizes her “major contribution to the study of American
literature.
"You may have heard about this elsewhere, but we now include a
genuine Knight amongst us. A month ago the President of Iceland
recognized Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Brad Leithauser’s love
affair with things Icelandic and made him a Knight of the Order of the
Falcon. He reports receiving a medal, a pin, and a testimonial in
Icelandic. It is a wonderful tribute, and we share his pleasure.
Submitted by Penny Gill
March 2005
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