The only piece of advice Kalamazoo College Senior Instructor of Economics Chuck Stull received before his first teaching job in graduate school was to erase a blackboard using vertical strokes. That’s not much prep for a teacher whose faculty colleagues recently awarded K’s highest teaching honor: the 2018 Lucasse Lectureship. Professor Stull made up for that early dearth of advice by inventing his own pedagogical approaches (simple, specific, and surprising) that open insights into complicated subject matter. How does he invent? By combining ideas from different sources—art, card playing, tango dancing (“I teach, therefore I steal”)—in order to illuminate economics. Always, always experiment, he advised in his delightful acceptance lecture. Then count on some failures, which will be as important as the successes. After all, few things are as vital to sustained good teaching than putting yourself in situations that allow you to remember: 1) what it’s like to not know, and 2) the subsequent pure joy of your mind reshaping itself to learn.
faculty
Infinite Variety
Associate Professor of Music (and director of the Kalamazoo Philharmonia) Andrew Koehler shows that the countless possibilities of musical expression and mood share a common source and beautiful unity composed of a mere twelve notes. Composers, often in homage to pre-existing material (a few notes in a specific sequence, for example) build infinite variations and whole new worlds of feeling to which lifelong students like Koehler devote entire lifetimes of study and passion.
Political Genocide
John Dugas, Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Associate Professor of Political Science, describes the attempt in Colombia, beginning in the mid-1980s, to “murder” an entire political group—the leftist, legal, legitimate and electorally successful political party, Union Patriótica (UP)—by means of the systematic targeted killing of more than 3,000 of its members. In response, UP survivors have successfully advocated for the criminalization of “political genocide,” thereby giving to the world a unique legal instrument to help prevent human rights abuses, to pursue justice and legal redress, and to hold perpetrators of the crime accountable. This little known story carries implications that stretch far beyond Colombia’s borders, because peace anywhere depends on peoples’ confidence to take part in political processes without fear of extermination.
Scholar’s Sweet Spot
Applied anthropologist (and Professor of Anthropology) Kiran Cunningham ’83 designs and implements research that yields an immediately tangible result: people gain more control of the trajectories of their lives. Such work works best when it involves students at K and abroad. Welcome to the “scholar’s sweet spot,” those projects that lead to meaningful social change, integrate multiple strands of the scholarly self, connect to classroom teaching, allow for student involvement, and require collaboration with a diverse group of incredible colleagues. Cunningham’s work with Uganda’s Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment and with the city government of Kalamazoo has led to a collaboration of communities—as well as students—to help ensure that public policy works for people on two continents.
War Memories
Imagine an important story videotaped in one language and simultaneously translated into another. Such an advance would more broadly open to the world the oral history of the world. Assistant Professor of Japanese Noriko Sugimori describes the scholarly collaboration that, using and adding to an archive of videotaped World War II memories of elderly Japanese, applied a new technology to create the world’s first bilingual, synchronized translation and indexing process. Oral history is now more widely open to cross-cultural academic explorations, and Sugimori and her K students played a vital role in that access.
Social Justice Science
Who gets to do science? To whom will accrue its benefits, or costs? What happens to scientific data? What does it mean to do—and teach—science in a socially just way? These are questions that have informed the work of Professor of Chemistry Regina Stevens-Truss for the past five years. She shares her discoveries regarding the intersection of and distinction between ethics, civic engagement, and social justice in science.
More Eyes and New Eyes
The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Assistant Professor of English Shanna Salinas elucidates two key ways to incorporate diversity into the United States literary canon. Diversity can be enhanced by expanding the canon to include more authors of color and various ethnic backgrounds and by reconsidering from different perspectives the works that have a long tradition of inclusion in the canon. In her remarks (“Mexico in the U.S. Literary Canon”) Salinas focuses on the latter, specifically the way a Chicano critical framework opens entirely new realms of meaning in The Awakening, a novel by American writer Kate Chopin published in 1899 and set in Reconstruction-era New Orleans.
Costa Rica Trip with Paul Sotherland in 2015
Kalamazoo College Professor of Biology Paul Sotherland led an 8 day alumni trip to Costa Rica in November of 2015. The trip sold out quickly.
Tour Highlights Included:
- Discovering the rainforest surrounding the Arenal Volcano from a unique perspective on the Arenal Hanging Bridges tour
- Taking a floating safari through the tropical rainforest to visit the Caño Negro Wildlife Refuge
- Hiking the Children’s Eternal Rain Forest and viewing this area’s amazing biodiversity
- Experiencing turtles nesting at night, one of the most incredible phenomena of Mother Nature
- Taking a tropical sunset cruise
A message about the trip from Paul Sotherland in 2015:
Alumni and Friends,
I am interested primarily in the ecological physiology of vertebrate eggs. Much of my attention for the past 40 years has been on factors affecting developmental trajectories of birds, turtles, and alligators while they develop in their eggs. For several field seasons at Playa Grande, Costa Rica, I focused on trying to understand how leatherback turtle embryos develop while in nests buried nearly one meter below the surface of the sand. So…come with me to Costa Rica, where we will explore cloud forests near an active volcano and beaches on the Pacific coast. ¡Pura vida!
– Paul Sotherland
Rhine Getaway Trip with Joe Fugate in 2014
Kalamazoo College Professor Emeritus Joe Fugate led an extraordinary and sold out Viking River Cruise that visited all the highlights of the legendary Rhine in March of 2014. In Germany, they saw many charming castles commanding the riverbanks as they sailed by, and toured both Marksburg Castle and the ruins of Heidelberg Castle. Admire Cologne, the jewel of the Rhine, with its awe-inspiring Dom, and experienced the lush landscape of the Black Forest region. They explored Holland’s famous windmills and waterworks, encountered multicultural Strasbourg in France, and took part in the inviting nightlife in Rüdesheim’s Drosselgasse.
A message about the trip from Joe Fugate in 2014:
Dear Alumni and Friends,
I want to invite you to participate in the 2014 Kalamazoo College Alumni Trip down the Rhine River from Basel to Amsterdam, a location shrouded in history, legend and tradition for some 2000 years. If you are an alum of Kalamazoo College you will have a chance to revisit some of the places you probably first got to know while on study abroad. If you are a first time Rhine River traveler you will experience a number of unforgettable sights. Although my wife and I have lived in two of the areas on the itinerary and have visited them and been up and down the Rhine numerous times, each time we always discover something new and exciting.
– Joe Fugate
Southern Italy Trip with Anne Haeckl in 2012
Kalamazoo College alumni enjoyed a K faculty-led study tour to one of Europe’s most popular tourist destinations — southern Italy. The sponsoring organization for the tour was The Vergilian Society, Inc., a private foundation that promotes “the ties of culture between Italy and America.” Vergilian Society tours are open to everyone (with or without K College connections), but especially to those who have a life-long learning interest in the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome.
The tour — The Archaeology of Identity in Coastal Campania: How Ancient Italians and Greeks Became Romans on the Bay of Naples occurred on July 30 to August 11. Anne Haeckl, Roman archaeologist in the Kalamazoo College Classics Department (who has excavated with K students in Italy and Egypt), and George Mason University’s Dr. Christopher Gregg, led the study tour of major Roman archaeological sites museums in Campania and the Bay of Naples. A previous Italian tour directed by Profs. Haeckl and Gregg in 2010 was a great success, with five K College students and alumni among its 28 participants.