Amherst College: Scholarly Achievements

Scholarly Achievements Archive

wwjarnagin — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:52:00 +0000

Scholarly Achievements Archive Willa W. Jarnagin Thursday, 11/13/2008, at 4:52 PM

“Scholarly Achievements” items, shown originally on the campus Announcements page, are archived here.

Holleman Wins Publication Award from American Sociological Association

kdduke — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 20:25:00 +0000

Holleman Wins Publication Award from American Sociological Association Katherine D. Duke Tuesday, 11/19/2013, at 3:25 PM

Article by Daniel Diner ’14

Assistant Professor of Sociology Hannah Holleman has received the 2013 Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environment and Technology. The biennial award, presented at the ASA’s Annual Meeting, recognizes the top publication in environmental sociology. It went to Holleman and her co-author, the University of Oregon’s John Bellamy Foster, for their paper entitled “Weber and the Environment: Classical Foundations for a Post-Exemptionalist Sociology,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in May of 2012.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Hannah Holleman

The paper regards the “post-exemptionalist” sociological-environmental paradigm that grew in the 1970s as a response to the “human-exemptionalist” paradigm. The earlier paradigm disregarded natural-environmental concerns, on the assumption that human beings in advanced societies had evolved past the point at which such concerns affected them. The rise of the new paradigm caused a rift between environmental sociology and broader sociological traditions, as the classical authors, to whom these traditions frequently turn, were seen as not offering much insight into how ecological crises impact modern social and economic processes. Foster and Holleman’s paper seeks to help repair the rift by arguing that this assumption about the classical authors results from the classics being read through the wrong lens. The paper explains in particular how Max Weber (1864–1920), an influential German sociologist, philosopher and political economist, actually offered sophisticated and substantial input on environmental issues.

The ASA is the world’s largest organization of professional sociologists and has hosted its Annual Meeting since its inception in 1905. The ASA website describes the meeting as an “opportunity for professionals involved in the scientific study of sociology to share knowledge and new directions in research and practice.”

Holleman notes that her acceptance of the award at the August 2013 meeting has helped “put [Amherst] on the map for environmental sociology” and has resulted in “several people asking about our program in this respect.”

This is Holleman’s second year on the Amherst faculty. She is currently teaching “Footprints on the Earth: The Environmental Consequences of Modernity” and “Financial Crises and the Future of Democracy.” Her research interests concern linking social and ecological theory and empirical research as a contribution toward further developing the framework for scholarly efforts in environmental sociology and political economy. She is working on a paper about challenges in water resource management in Oklahoma, as part of a broader book project about how drought and other water problems in the American Southwest may be the result of deficient frameworks for policies that address such issues. The project’s focus, Holleman says, is “the historical development of water management in the Southwestern states and emergent trends associated with the increasing recognition of a broader decline of freshwater availability.” She explains that she is “interested in the Southwest because [her] roots are deep there, [because] it is an area facing severe drought once again, and [because] it serves as a microcosm of broader issues facing our society and the world right now.”

Tags: Holleman Hannah Holleman American Sociological Association environmental sociology

Laure Katsaros Receives Mellon New Directions Fellowship to Study Architectural Design

kdduke — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 14:41:46 +0000

Laure Katsaros Receives Mellon New Directions Fellowship to Study Architectural Design Katherine D. Duke Thursday, 4/24/2014, at 10:41 AM

Associate Professor of French Laure Katsaros has received $262,500 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through its New Directions Fellowship program, which exists to “assist faculty members in the humanities … who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of special interest.” Katsaros’ award will support her in earning a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of design from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2014–15, and in traveling around France to visit several distinctive architectural sites. Her goal is to produce a final project for the master’s program, and eventually a book, tentatively titled Glass Architectures: Utopian Surveillance from Fourier to the Surrealists.

Associate Professor of French Laure Katsaros

The courses Katsaros has taught at Amherst since 2002 generally concern 19th- and 20th-century French literature, culture and art. She has developed a scholarly interest in a “distinctly utopian” concept that she calls “self-surveillance”: “the idea of opening up your life for everyone to see.” Today, this might take the form of sharing one’s opinions, interests and biographical data on social-networking websites. But French Surrealist artists of the 1920s and 1930s also embraced opportunities to expose their most intimate thoughts and experiences, going so far as to analyze one another’s dreams. Around that same time, thanks in part to advances in technology, it became relatively easy and fashionable for architects to incorporate large amounts of glass into their building designs. “And, obviously, glass, being transparent, speaks to that new theme of transparency, openness, not keeping any secrets,” Katsaros says. In the summer of 2015, upon completion of her year of coursework at Harvard, she hopes to tour Paris’ famed Maison de Verre (“House of Glass”), which was commissioned by a physician and his wife in the 1920s, designed by Pierre Chareau and used as an artistic and literary salon by the Surrealists.

Katsaros traces the theme of self-surveillance back to radical utopian socialist philosopher Charles Fourier in early-19th-century France. “He absolutely rejected the idea of privacy, of hiding, which we’re so attached to,” she says, and so he outlined a theoretical “architecture that would allow for communal living and the sharing of everything—not just property but also [sexual] partners and children.” Among the short-lived utopian communities later founded by Fourier’s disciples was Le Familistère de Guise, north of Paris, the buildings and grounds of which have recently been restored as a museum. Katsaros (who is originally from a suburb of Paris) would like to visit and study Le Familistère as well.

Also on her itinerary are buildings in the south of France designed by renowned 20th-century architect Le Corbusier—particularly a communal structure in Marseilles.

“I’ll never have another chance to do something like this,” Katsaros says of the study and travel her New Directions Fellowship will afford her. “I’m really excited about the upcoming year and excited about the ways I hope this is going to enrich both my teaching and my research.”

The professor will be on sabbatical from Amherst for the year and will live near Harvard with her husband and three children, as a full-time graduate student. When she returns to teaching, with her master’s-level understanding of architectural design, she would like some of her courses to focus on buildings in addition to poetry, prose and visual art. She is open to the possibility of teaching courses for Amherst’s architectural studies major. And she believes utopia would be a fruitful subject for a series of guest speakers at the college—invited, perhaps, through its Copeland Colloquium or the planned new Humanities Center in Frost Library. “I think that would be a great topic, because it’s very interdisciplinary: it involves political science, literature, the arts, architectural studies,” she says. “And it also goes across borders—there are utopias in every country, every language. I see the move toward a new Humanities Center as a very positive one for these kinds of interdisciplinary, cross-departmental initiatives.”

The Mellon Foundation invites select colleges and universities to nominate faculty members for the New Directions Fellowship annually. Amherst’s Dean of the Faculty Gregory Call nominated Katsaros, who then spent the summer and fall of 2013 preparing a proposal with the help of Mary Ramsay from Foundation & Corporate Relations. After a proposal-review process by scholars in related fields, as well as some budgetary negotiations, Amherst officially received the fellowship award in March. Katsaros is one of only 12 recipients nationwide this year.

Photo by Rob Mattson

Tags: Laure Katsaros Katsaros Laure A. Katsaros french architecture architectural studies utopia mellon grant fellowship

Stoffer Co-Authors Book on Early-20th-Century American Dining

kdduke — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 21:21:44 +0000

Stoffer Co-Authors Book on Early-20th-Century American Dining Katherine D. Duke Monday, 11/11/2013, at 4:21 PM

Lisa Stoffer, Amherst’s director of foundation and corporate relations, is co-author, with Hampshire College Professor Michael Lesy, of the new nonfiction book Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century, 1900–1910 (W.W. Norton & Co.).

Lisa Stoffer

The idea for the book arose several years ago, while Lesy (Stoffer’s husband) “was on an advisory committee for the New York Public Library, looking at their digital collections,” she says. “One of those collections is the Miss Frank E. Buttolph Menu Collection, and he was amazed by how beautiful they were.”

“Miss Frank E. Buttolph (1850–1924),” the NYPL website explains, was “a somewhat mysterious and passionate figure, whose mission in life was to collect menus”—more than 25,000 of them, primarily from restaurants in New York.

This menu from a New York City café, dated 1900, is one of thousands in the Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection, 1851-1930, at the New York Public Library. It is featured in Stoffer and Lesy's book.

“Around the same time, through family members, I inherited a collection of menus and cookbooks from my grandfather and great-grandfather,” Stoffer continues. Her great-grandfather had been a chef in a hotel in Bermuda in the early 1900s, and her grandfather and grandmother (to whom Repast is dedicated) met when they were working as a cook and a waitress at Amherst’s Lord Jeffery Inn several decades later. “And we put the two things together, and we realized that there were some stories there. There was a set of stories about what was happening in society, and there was also a set of stories about what was happening in restaurants. So that became the idea for the book.”

Stoffer and Lesy were able to do most of their research through various libraries’ digitized archives of newspapers and magazines from the early 20th century.

Through original text interspersed with historical photographs and images from Buttolph’s menu collection, Repast illustrates the ways in which the restaurant industry and the practice of “dining out” changed rapidly between 1900 and 1910, “and the ways that those changes reflect bigger social changes that were going on,” says Stoffer.

Those years, for instance, brought the widespread industrialization of the U.S. food supply. Canned goods and processed meat were becoming commonplace. But these weren’t always pure or safe, and so there was a public outcry for stricter government regulations on the production, packaging and sale of food.

At the same time, millions of people, many from rural America and foreign countries, were flocking to the nation’s cities to take manufacturing jobs. These workers had short lunch breaks, necessitating the rise of “automat” food-vending systems, as well as “quick food” restaurants and lunch counters, which Stoffer calls “sort of the predecessors of Friendly’s or McDonald’s.” Notably, the workforce was attracting women in ever-greater numbers, on every rung of the socioeconomic ladder—from factory workers, to doctors and lawyers, to community leaders—and ladies’ lunch clubs sprung up to provide them with safe and comfortable places to eat, away from the company of men.

This era also saw enticing innovations in fine dining for well-to-do Americans.

Promotional photo for the Childs restaurant chain, dated 1900. “They made their name in large part on the sparkling cleanliness of their dining rooms (all that tile and those marble countertops) and on their friendly, super-efficient waitresses with pristine white uniforms," says Stoffer. “This was a departure—other ‘quick lunch’ places that preceded them were known for being grungy with sassy, sometimes surly service.”

With chapters on “Pure Food,” “Quick Food,” “Her Food,” “Other People’s Food” and “Splendid Food,” Repast has drawn attention from food-history bloggers and even The Boston Globe.

Top photo by Rob Mattson; middle image from the Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection, 1851-1930, at the New York Public Library; bottom photo by the Byron Company

Tags: Stoffer Lisa Stoffer Repast dining restaurants

Sarat to Receive Service Award from Law and Society Association

kdduke — Tue, 06 May 2014 20:45:00 +0000

Sarat to Receive Service Award from Law and Society Association Katherine D. Duke Tuesday, 5/6/2014, at 4:45 PM

On May 29, Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and associate dean of the faculty, will receive the Ronald Pipkin Service Award from the Law and Society Association (LSA). The award recognizes Sarat, who has previously served as the LSA’s president and a member of its board of trustees, for having “demonstrated sustained and extraordinary service to the Association.”

The LSA is one of the leading professional associations for scholars interested in interdisciplinary legal studies and legal sociology, acting on a “common commitment to developing theoretical and empirical understandings of law.” It publishes the Law & Society Review, holds an annual academic conference, sponsors educational workshops and maintains a large number of specific research topic networks that function throughout the year. Its yearly awards include an undergraduate paper prize, and since 1989, five of those prizes have gone to Amherst College students, all of whom were nominated by Sarat.

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“I am flattered and grateful for this recognition of whatever role I’ve played in developing the health and well-being of scholarship in interdisciplinary legal studies,” said Sarat. “It means a lot to me because I respect enormously the Law and Society colleagues that I’ve met and worked with over the years.”

Sarat, who has taught at Amherst since 1974, is best known for his scholarship on capital punishment and its socio-legal implications, and for his work on the development of legal study in the liberal arts. His noted books include Mercy on Trial—winner of the 2006 James Boyd White Prize— and Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty, which was co-authored with four Amherst students and published this spring by Stanford University Press.

Tags: sarat austin sarat award Law and Society Association

Horton Honored for Excellence in Teaching Statistics

wsweet — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 16:35:21 +0000

Horton Honored for Excellence in Teaching Statistics William E. Sweet (inactive) Friday, 2/13/2015, at 11:35 AM

The Special Interest Group of the Mathematical Association of America on Statistics Education has granted Nicholas Horton, professor of statistics, the Robert V. Hogg Award for Excellence in Teaching Introductory Statistics.

The award recognizes Horton as an individual who exhibits both excellence and growth in teaching introductory statistics. Horton was presented with the award last month at the 2015 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Antonio, Texas.

The award, which includes a $500 stipend, honors the late Robert V. Hogg, professor of statistics at the University of Iowa. Hogg is known for his widely used textbooks on statistics. He passed away in December 2014.

“I'm honored to be named the recipient of the Hogg award,” Horton said. “Robert Hogg’s infectious enthusiasm and skill in teaching statistics had an impact on generations of students and instructors, and it’s a privilege to be associated with his efforts on behalf of the profession.”

The association noted Horton’s contributions to the statistics community: he has served as chair of the American Statistical Association (ASA)’s working group on undergraduate statistics curriculum guidelines, developed R books for introductory statistics and co-authored the Project MOSAIC R Package. R is an increasingly popular programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics, widely used for developing statistical software and data analysis. The NSF-funded Project MOSAIC is intended to help integrate the teaching of statistics, calculus, computing and science.

Horton received his A.B. from Harvard College and his Sc.D. in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health. He has received teaching awards at Boston University and Smith College and was the 2009 winner of the ASA’s Waller Education Award for innovation in the instruction of elementary statistics. He is recognized as a Fellow of the ASA.

Statistics is one of Amherst’s newest majors, added to the math department in 2014. The Department of Mathematics and Statistics includes Horton, assistant professors Amy Wagaman and Shu-Min Liao and lecturer Xiaofei Wang.

Ilan Stavans Publishes "A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States"

kdduke — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:54:17 +0000

Ilan Stavans Publishes "A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States" Katherine D. Duke Thursday, 7/10/2014, at 12:54 PM

Ilan Stavans, Amherst’s Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, is the author of A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States (Basic Books). With text by Stavans and illustrations by cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, the book presents the nation’s history through true stories of its “most overlooked and marginalized peoples: the workers, immigrants, housewives, and slaves who built America from the ground up and made this country what it is today.”

Ilan Stavans

Stavans and Alcaraz first collaborated in the late 1990s on Latino USA: A Cartoon History (Basic Books), which, according to the author, became a surprise hit, particularly in high school and college classrooms. “When the publisher of Latino USA decided to do a 15th-anniversary edition, he suggested that maybe we now look more seriously into doing another project,” says Stavans, “and Lalo said, ‘Why don’t we do something more epic, larger?’”

So, while the pair’s first book focused solely on the history of Latinos in the United States, the new book takes a broader view, depicting, in comic-strip style, the interconnected histories of Native Americans, European explorers, Mayflower Pilgrims, African-American slaves, Jewish immigrants, women’s-rights activists, AIDS victims, tech entrepreneurs, pop-culture icons and more.

A Most Imperfect Union is informed by the writings of such historians as Doris Kearns Goodwin and Howard Zinn, by Stavans’ personal experiences as an immigrant from Mexico and by his work as editor of the 2009 anthology Becoming Americans: Immigrants Tell Their Stories from Jamestown to Today.

In addition, the book“is very much defined by the movies that I’ve watched in the last 15 years,” he says, “from Forrest Gump to Saving Private Ryan to Lincoln to movies like Born on the Fourth of July.”

In fact, the entire book traces a fictional director’s effort to turn American history into a movie, while Stavans and Alcaraz repeatedly pop up as characters in the cartoon panels, raising questions and arguing over which facts and figures should be included—hence the book’s subtitle: A Contrarian History.

“I think that being a ‘contrarian’ is not playing with sabotage, with undermining thought, but inciting others to get involved in the act of thinking,” Stavans says, “to see ideas as interacting in a true marketplace, where they are tested, they are refined, and ultimately the best ideas are the ones that are embraced.”

“I’m a contrarian in the classroom; I love to take the devil’s-advocate position,” he continues. “I very much want my students not to think as I do, but to think. To think in whatever way they want, as long as they are thinking … thoroughly, profoundly, and they are thinking for themselves.”

His hope for the new book is “that it reaches the hands of people who are going to have questions about how to think of history. That is my purpose: to invite them to think of history not as monolithic—not as ‘This is it; you can’t question it’—but instead as something that you need to get involved in, be critical, and feel that it is yours.”

Tags: stavans ilan stavans A Most Imperfect Union comics

Drabinski Wins Book Award from Caribbean Philosophical Association

kdduke — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 20:20:09 +0000

Drabinski Wins Book Award from Caribbean Philosophical Association Katherine D. Duke Monday, 1/13/2014, at 3:20 PM

John E. Drabinski, professor of Black studies, has won the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2014 Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought for his book Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other.

John E. Drabinski

Drabinski describes the book as “an effort at bringing some of the debates in contemporary European postmodern theory into conversation with a set of international authors who speak from the perspective of former colonized people.” Specifically, it relates the concept of “the Other,” developed by 20th-century French thinker Emmanuel Levinas, to the ideas of Indian philosopher and Harvard professor Homi Bhabha; Indian postcolonial theorist and Columbia University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Subcomandante Marcos, spokesperson for Mexico’s Zapatista movement; and Martinican poet, writer and critic Édouard Glissant. (For more about Levinas and the Postcolonial, see Amherst’s article announcing its 2011 publication.)

The Frantz Fanon Prize Committee, consisting of scholars from colleges and universities in the United States and abroad, praised Levinas and the Postcolonial as “a work that takes Levinas scholarship out of its exclusive dialogue with other European philosophers and opens it up to new geographies of reason. Drabinski refers to this new exchange as the ‘decolonizing’ and ‘creolizing’ of Levinas. These two terms point to the profound influence of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, two postcolonial scholars from the Caribbean island of Martinique.”

The award is named in honor of Fanon (1925–1961), a Martinique-born Algerian-French psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary whose work has influenced anti-colonial movements around the world. The Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) gives the award “annually in recognition of up to three works in or of special interest to Caribbean thought” published in the past six years, out of an array of works nominated by the CPA’s executive committee. Drabinski plans to travel to St. Louis to receive the award in a special session of the CPA’s international conference, June 19 to 21. As a winning author, he will automatically become a member of the prize committee.

The professor calls the award “the highest recognition for written work by my home organization,” noting that “the CPA is the center of Caribbean philosophy and cultural theory.” He is honored to have his name “alongside some of the very most important figures in the field—previous winners like Linda Alcoff, Paget Henry, Walter Mignolo and Susan Buck-Morss.”

Drabinski says the award validates the decision he made, after earning a Ph.D. in European philosophy, to shift his focus to Black studies—a transition “motivated by my insight that Western philosophy has been entwined with racism and colonialism for centuries, and that work from the global South offers important, transformative critique of the West, as well as a deep, complex and compelling alternative tradition. That is the controversial argument in Levinas and the Postcolonial, so getting the veracity of that claim affirmed by such an important association is a big deal for me personally. Switching fields was a huge personal and professional risk, but this confirms it was the right choice.”

“As well,” he adds, “Levinas and the Postcolonial is my explicit bridge from previous work in French philosophy to my future work in (exclusively) Afro-Caribbean and African-American philosophy.”

Drabinski is on leave from Amherst this year, but in previous semesters he has taught such courses as “Critical Debates in Black Studies” and “The Creole Imagination.” As a 2013–2014 Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, he is at work on a book-length study that “offers a philosophical reading of James Baldwin’s nonfiction work in relation to a range of black Atlantic thinkers, from early African-American thought to contemporary Caribbean critical theory.” He is also completing a study of Glissant’s poetics, called Abyssal Beginnings, and a translation of In Praise of Creoleness, by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. In mid-February, he will give a seminar and a set of talks at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, as an Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Fellow; he received the fellowship, he says, on the basis of the success of Levinas and the Postcolonial.

Drabinski published Godard Between Identity and Difference in 2008 and Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas in 2001. He is co-editor, with Scott Davidson, of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy.

Tags: John Drabinski Drabinski Black Studies caribbean Philosophy postmodern Frantz Fanon Award Book Award postcolonial Caribbean Philosophical Association

Singh Organizes, and Morales ’14 Presents at, First Liberal Arts Colleges Development Economics Conference

kdduke — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 19:49:18 +0000

Singh Organizes, and Morales ’14 Presents at, First Liberal Arts Colleges Development Economics Conference Katherine D. Duke Friday, 10/11/2013, at 3:49 PM

Prakarsh Singh, assistant professor of economics, served as the main organizer for the inaugural Liberal Arts Colleges Development Economics Conference (LAC-DEV). Held on the Amherst College campus on Oct. 4 and 5, LAC-DEV was the first conference in the U.S. designed specifically to bring together development economists based at top liberal arts colleges. It featured a keynote speech by Dean Karlan, professor of economics at Yale University and president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action; a discussion of the best ways to teach development economics; and paper presentations by numerous scholars—including, rather unexpectedly, Amherst undergrad Alvaro Morales ’14.

Professor Prakarsh Singh in his classroom

As Singh describes it, development economics is a fast-growing field concerned with studying the methods and policies that might be employed to improve the lives of the world’s poor. A few conferences have been established for development economists, but the major ones cater mainly to scholars based at large universities. Last year, Singh, representing Amherst, and several colleagues from Colgate, Hamilton, Wesleyan and Vassar founded LAC-DEV, an annual conference to be held on a rotating basis at each of their five schools. They decided that the inaugural conference would take place at Amherst, and they put out a call for papers from development economists on the faculties of the nation’s top 40 liberal arts colleges. Out of about 50 papers submitted, they chose 19 to be presented at the conference, during sessions focusing on “Infrastructure,” “Political Economy,” “Schooling,” “Health,” “Latin American Development” and the “Role of the Public Sector.”

Shortly before the conference began, one of the presenters scheduled for the session on Latin America fell ill and told Singh he couldn’t participate. So Singh called Morales, a student from his Spring 2013 “Microeconomics of Development” seminar who had written an excellent final paper on the relationship between child abuse and child health in Peru. The Dean of the Faculty’s Office had awarded Morales funding to spend this past summer revising the paper and preparing it for submission to academic journals. Singh asked Morales: Would he step in and present his paper at LAC-DEV?

“I was like, ‘Sure. Why not? I’ll put together a PowerPoint,’” Morales said. He gave his presentation the next day.

“This was quite a brave thing to do, because you have all these top development economists sitting in the audience, and this guy’s never presented a paper before,” Singh noted.

“I got some great feedback, some good comments,” Morales said. “And it was just a really cool experience that, as an undergrad, I got to do that.”

His professor agreed: “That was, I think, the highlight for me in the conference, because I felt proud that I have a student who could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the others.”

Morales is now working with Singh to finish revising the paper and submit it for publication, as well as to organize his senior thesis, which will examine the relationship between child abuse and terrorism in Latin America. Morales has also applied for a 2013–2014 Watson Fellowship to study remittances in that area of the world.

He appreciated the opportunity to experience the conference, especially as a student who’s considering a career in development economics. “It’s a really broad field,” he observed. “Since it’s one of my possible paths, it’s really cool to see what it entails on a deeper level than just having a class.”

“Because development is such a vast field, it’s very difficult to organize [classes] in a logical manner,” said Singh. But he plans to bring some of the tips from the conference’s “Teaching Development Economics” session—on gathering student opinions and demonstrating research methods—back to his own classroom. He had assigned the 10 students in his “Microeconomics of Development” course this semester to attend LAC-DEV and to summarize the papers presented.

Singh in front of the LAC-DEV audience in the Paino Lecture Room of the Beneski Museum of Natural History

According to Singh, the inaugural LAC-DEV, which attracted some 50 people, “went much better than anyone had expected. I’m still getting emails from the participants saying that it was such a great conference and everything went really smoothly.” He acknowledged that he couldn’t have organized it without assistance from Jeanne Reinle, academic department coordinator for economics, and from student hosts David Beron ’15 and Hao Liu ’16. And, he noted, no one had to pay to attend, thanks to sponsorship from the dean of the faculty; Five Colleges, Inc.; and Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges.

“The best thing about this [conference] was that there was this feeling of bonhomie between all of the participants. We are all based at similar types of colleges; all of us value teaching; all of us value presenting results as clearly as possible,” Singh said. “Everyone was hugging each other at the end of the conference.”

Top photo by Rob Mattson; bottom photo by Hao Liu ’16

Tags: singh prakarsh singh economics development economics Morales Alvaro Morales Conference LAC-DEV

Nicola Courtright Named Vice Chair of American Council of Learned Societies and Editor-in-Chief of Grove Art Online

kdduke — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 19:52:18 +0000

Nicola Courtright Named Vice Chair of American Council of Learned Societies and Editor-in-Chief of Grove Art Online Katherine D. Duke Wednesday, 9/25/2013, at 3:52 PM

Nicola M. Courtright, professor of the history of art, chair of European studies and past president of the College Art Association, has been elected vice chair of the Executive Committee of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). She has also been appointed editor-in-chief of Oxford’s Grove Art Online.

“The largest purpose of the ACLS,” the professor explains, “is to grant money to academics for their scholarly projects … in the humanities and related social sciences.” Millions of dollars in ACLS grants go out annually to junior and senior faculty members at colleges and universities around the United States (Courtright herself received one early on in her career at Amherst), and in recent years the council has begun funding digital, collaborative and international projects. Courtright notes that the competition for ACLS grants is, in fact, even tougher than for Guggenheim grants.

Having served on the ACLS’s 15-member Board of Directors for several years, Courtright is now vice chair of the smaller Executive Committee, which oversees the organization’s finances, policymaking, personnel issues and reporting to constituencies. Courtright believes that her ideal role is to be “a wise voice of counsel” to the ACLS and, as the only art historian on the board, to advocate for “the importance of the historical study of visual arts.” Her term ends in 2016.

Grove Art Online is the subscription-based Web version of what was originally printed as Oxford’s 34-volume, 45,000-entry Dictionary of Art, to which Courtright contributed an article while finishing her dissertation at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. In her teaching at Amherst, she guides her students to Grove and its bibliographies as a reliable and fruitful place to begin their research.

In 2012, one of Grove’s editors approached the professor and convinced her to sign on as its new editor-in-chief. Courtright introduced herself to readers via a video and letter, describing her vision for the future of the online resource.

“The articles in the Dictionary of Art, written by recognized experts in the fields it covered, are still invaluable,” she wrote, “but there is a strong need to update them, thoroughly and accurately. Also, as we all know, new areas of art historical inquiry have emerged, not just in contemporary art, but in areas of the world in which scholars have become vitally engaged—notably Africa, Latin America, and Asia. … I am assembling an editorial board that will confer about new scholarly needs in Grove, and help them come to fruition.”

Courtright’s other goals include incorporating more high-quality imagery into Grove’s entries and, most importantly, making them “more accessible to readers who are looking for an authoritative online source but only get as far as Wikipedia.” Right now, she says, for most art lovers outside of academia—and even for many at colleges and universities—Grove is “a sleeping giant: it’s this amazing resource that people don’t think to use.” She believes that such a credible source of carefully vetted factual and bibliographical information is especially needed in an era when other online content is often biased, contradictory and rapidly changing.

Courtright says that her work with the ACLS allows her to bring a useful new perspective to her work as a professor, and vice versa: “All the issues that we’re facing at Amherst College”—including how to allocate the budget, how to teach undergraduates most effectively, how to support the careers of young faculty members and how to respond to the rise of MOOCs—“are always discussed on a higher level, on a national level, at the ACLS.”

Similarly, she says, her position at Grove pulls her back from the narrow, intensive focus of her scholarly research—which is on “ideologies of rule for early modern French queens through the art and architecture of French palaces”—and requires her to “start thinking about trends of art as a whole in the world. And that is hard. But I think it’s what I wanted to learn about. … Because I am at a liberal arts institution … I really have always had to teach about larger things.”

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