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Warhol Foundation Grant Supports Research Travel for K Professor

Posted on December 3, 2024December 3, 2024

Anne Marie Butler, assistant professor of art history and women, gender and sexuality at Kalamazoo College, is a recipient of a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the foundation announced December 2.

Butler is one of nine grantees in the article category, for her article, “Deviance, Penetration, and the Erotic in Aïcha Snoussi’s Drawing Installations,” examining the Tunisian artist’s work. Butler’s research focuses on contemporary Tunisian art, global contemporary art, contemporary global surrealism studies, Southwest Asia and North Africa studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory.

“I am honored to have been selected from amongst many wonderful scholars to receive this prestigious award,” Butler said. “This grant will support 2025 travel to conduct primary research for a new scholarly article on Aïcha Snoussi’s (Tunis and Paris) works. Informed by Heather Love and Audre Lorde, I argue for a new reading of Snoussi’s drawing installations, illuminating intimate relationships between theories of queer of color archives, deviance, and erotics.”

The grant program supports writing about contemporary art, with the goal of maintaining critical writing as a valued way of engaging with the visual arts.

“Artists play a vital role in illuminating key issues of our time, but it is thanks to the attention and insights of arts writers that artists’ visions become widely known and discussed,” said Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “The Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant supports and celebrates the crucial contributions of writers who not only transmit but creatively engage with artists’ methods, intentions, contexts, and blind spots to bring their perspectives into focus in the public sphere.”

Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient Anne Marie Butler — Assistant Professor of Art History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Anne Marie Butler is a recipient of a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

In addition to nine article writers, the 2024 Arts Writers Grants include nine books and 12 short-form writing awardees, for a total of $945,000 to 30 writers. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 each, the grants support projects targeted at both general and specialized art audiences, from reviews for magazines and newspapers to in-depth scholarly studies.

“The 30 writers receiving support this year are working on projects asking urgent questions about art’s place in the world today,” said Pradeep Dalal, director of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. “Exploring topics including art’s relationship to fossil fuel extraction, Native art and activism, migration and questions of visibility, internationalist solidarity networks, DIY publishing, and LGBTQ comic artist communities, and covering artists working in Chile, Columbia, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Venezuela, this year’s grantee projects actively expand our understanding of contemporary art. Many of these projects make unexpected connections between seemingly disparate aspects of art and culture. Despite the severe contraction of available venues for publishing in the arts, these writers continue to enrich and expand the academic disciplinary frameworks of both art criticism and art history.”

Butler’s writing has appeared in publications including ASAP/Journal, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and the London Review of Education. She recently co-edited a new book, Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa (Intellect Press, 2024).

Chemistry Club Engages Community in Science

Posted on November 25, 2024November 25, 2024

In celebrating the power that comes with the sharing of scientific knowledge, the Chemistry Club at Kalamazoo College participated in two community events this fall where local students and families—children in particular—could engage with hands-on experiments and interactive displays.

Hundreds attended the events, which were packed with activities designed to spark curiosity and inspire future scientists. Students such as Isabella Pellegrom ’25, at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum, and Justin Essing ’25, at the Air Zoo, were among the demonstrators representing K.

Pellegrom and her peers fascinated the general public by showing how children can protect themselves from UV radiation. Using UV-reactive beads made into bracelets, experimenters could see colors change from a neutral color into purple, blue or pink when UV light is shined onto them.

“It makes the kids really happy every time they see it,” Pellegrom said. “And then we have certain things that they can do to protect the beads from changing color, which could represent protecting themselves, their eyes or their skin from getting burned.”

The experiment used sunglasses, various types of clothing and sunscreen to help museum attendees recognize the best ways to protect themselves.

“It shocks a lot of people that sunscreen doesn’t completely protect the beads from changing color,” Pellegrom said. “We’ll start the demonstration by asking the kids whether they have ever gotten some sort of sunburn, and they sometimes say, ‘Oh! My dad got the worst sunburn in Florida last month’ or something like that. It’s funny because, as you’re telling the kids this, the parents many times say, ‘See, this is why I tell you to put on your sunscreen.’”

At the Air Zoo, Essing helped operate a booth that used the College’s virtual reality headsets to show Portage Public Schools students the structure of a COVID-19 protein so they could make connections between an illness they would feel and the science behind a virus’ structure. He said with multiple youths immersed within virtual reality at any given time, it was difficult to keep them from bumping into each other, but a common effort proved successful in engaging everyone.

“We had some people giving our spiel and explaining some of these tough concepts to kids,” Essing said. “Others were helping students put on the headsets. They all had to work as a team toward a common goal of educating and inspiring young students to pursue the sciences.”

Six Chemistry Club students representing Kalamazoo College at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum — Several members of Kalamazoo College’s Chemistry Club, including Isabella Pellegrom ’25 (bottom right), have participated in community science days over the past few years at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum including this one in 2023.

Students help AirZoo attendees put on virtual reality headsets — Kalamazoo College Chemistry Club members including Justin Essing ’25 (seated left) attended an Air Zoo event where they helped Portage Public Schools students view an enlarged model of a COVID-19 protein.

These are examples of how K chemistry students, and Chemistry Club members specifically, go beyond the classroom and labs to communicate what they learn in the community.

“I think it’s a great opportunity,” Pellegrom said. “And it’s one of the best parts about this club. It’s a fun experience to get together with people, take time out of your schedule, and talk about science or just be around other people who are interested in it.”

Essing said the community opportunities and the 66 students involved show the strength of the Chemistry Club and why it endures year after year.

“We all have personal relationships with each other, both through this Chemistry Club and taking classes together,” he said. “With the small campus size, everybody gets to know each other pretty well, personally and professionally. I feel that allows us to coordinate our goals together and figure out how to reach them in and out of the classroom.”

National Honor Salutes K’s Voter Participation Efforts

Posted on November 20, 2024November 20, 2024

A nonpartisan and nonprofit initiative is saluting Kalamazoo College today as one of 471 U.S. institutions doing the most in higher education to increase student voter participation.

K is just one of two private institutions in Michigan being recognized as a 2024 ALL IN Most-Engaged Campus for College Student Voting, meaning that the College:

Reported its 2022 student voting data to the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement (NSLVE), which is run through the Institute of Democracy and Higher Education (IDHE) at Tufts University.
Shared that data with the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, an effort that strives to improve and increase democratic engagement activities on college campuses.
Developed and submitted to the ALL IN challenge a 2024 voter-engagement action plan.
Received support from the College’s president through ALL IN’s Higher Education President’s Commitment to Full Student Voter Participation.

K Votes volunteers drive voter participation by offering assistance at the Center for Civic Engagement — K Votes volunteers, including Oakley Gabriel ’21 (center), offered students rides to the polls on Election Day to drive campus voter participation.

K Votes—the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement’s (CCE) nonpartisan coalition to inform the College’s students, faculty and staff members about voting and civic engagement—is the primary driver of the institution’s efforts in increasing voter participation. K Votes representatives work in partnership with students to register new voters, mail absentee ballots, provide rides to the polls, and distribute candidate information with maps to local polling places.

CCE Program Associate Oakley Gabriel ’21 leads K Votes, along with students, faculty and staff.

“The relationships and momentum built among community organizations and our campus were critical to implementing our robust action plan as supported by a grant from Students Learn Students Vote Coalition,” Gabriel said. “We expanded voter registration initiatives, increased capacity for voter education and elections support, and made connections with hundreds of students. More than 200 K students are newly registered voters thanks to our K Votes Coalition. The Center for Civic Engagement took on a massive undertaking, and the campus and Kalamazoo communities showed up with us, and I’m very proud of what we achieved.”

Student Filmmakers Praise Instructor, Showcase

Posted on November 18, 2024December 5, 2024

After a pandemic pause, a favorite Homecoming tradition returned in October, showcasing the creative talents of Kalamazoo College film and media studies students. A film festival featuring the introductory and advanced students in classes led by Visiting Instructor Danny Kim, allowed alumni to peek behind the curtain and see how students hone artistic skills through documentary filmmaking. After the screening, alumni asked questions of the filmmakers to learn more about the projects and applauded the students’ talents.

The projects required students to take B-roll footage to supplement the main footage, conduct about four interviews and use a filming technique called framing that shows the interviewee looking somewhere other than at the camera. Three of the student producers recently shared what they learned from their experiences.

Homecoming film festival with instructor and filmmakers — Visiting Instructor Danny Kim (from left), and students Ethan Galler, Davis Henderson, Alex Quesada, Megan McGarry, Emma Frederiksen and Jane Bentley, all from the class of 2025, attend the Homecoming Film Festival.

‘Saturday Night Live’ if it Had No Budget

Davis Henderson ’25 put K’s TV-production class in the spotlight with “ARTX-200,” a film named for the course taught by media producer and studio instructor Jaakan Page-Wood.

“To quote Jaakan, it’s very much like Saturday Night Live if Saturday Night Live was filmed on a Thursday afternoon by amateurs with no money, and was at 4:15,” Henderson said. “It was a great time, and I wanted to give it more attention. It’s definitely helped me find a space at K where I’m able to make stuff.”

“ARTX-200” presents Henderson’s peers as they explain how the course provided a creative outlet they had yet to find elsewhere on campus. Henderson, a theatre major who plans to pursue voice acting, developed an interest in filmmaking as a child when he and his brother began making skit videos with his mom’s photography equipment along with editing tools such as iMovie.

“ARTX-200” by Davis Henderson ’25

“Documentary filmmaking is interesting to me because it’s challenging,” Henderson said. “When something unexpected happens, you can’t restart. There’s no script and you pick it up as it goes. I can open up a history book and get bored. But being able to open a documentary, and see and hear what people are talking about, provides demonstrations that allow your imagination to take over. This is probably the most influential and crucial class I’ve taken here at K. I was able to create something tangible that will go in my portfolio and use it to get a job.”

An Art Form That’s Interesting and Exciting

Jane Bentley ’25 took a much more serious issue of importance to her and created “Students for Justice in Palestine,” a film about the student organization of the same name.

The film opens with Suha Qashou ’24—then president of K’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—leading a vigil outside the Light Fine Arts building, surrounded by signs and supporters. She discusses her desire to commemorate the lives lost in Gaza in an honorable way.

The subject matter provided Bentley with some challenges.

“Between rallies and meetings, I set up a lot of my shots so a lot of people wouldn’t be identifiable for two reasons,” Bentley said. “First, I wasn’t confident that I was going to get a release form for every single person who might be there. And also, when you’re making something about the pro-Palestinian movement, especially in the immediate aftermath of October 7, you have to consider that leaving someone recognizable could put them in a vulnerable position.”

“Students for Justice in Palestine” by Jane Bentley ’25

Regardless, Kim’s class provided Bentley a chance to be expressive in an inclusive fashion that was supportive of all the student members of SJP.

“If you have something in your life that you think is worth talking about, the best way to get people interested in it is to package it in a form that’s interesting and exciting,” Bentley said. “I think a documentary can be the best way you to do that.”

A Day to Live Graciously

Unlike Bentley or Henderson, Ethan Galler ’25 had the problem of being uncertain when circumstances would allow him to film the bulk of his footage given his subject matter, K’s Day of Gracious Living.

“This is DOGL” captures student voices and some thoughts from Vice President for Student Development Malcolm Smith the day before DOGL 2023. They discussed the importance of the traditional day off toward the end of the spring term as well as the history of it being a secret date selected by student government representatives and revealed in advance only to a few administrators.

Thankfully, Galler scheduled the interviews in advance through some sleuthing and logical conclusions.

“This is DOGL” by Ethan Galler ’25

“It was getting close to the end of the term, and either DOGL was the day it was or there would’ve been conflicts with other student events,” he said. “We picked the day before for interviews and hoped for the best.”

Despite cloudy and cool conditions for DOGL, Galler collected footage of a good number of students having fun at the beach in South Haven and supplemented it with footage from K’s archives of previous DOGL activities.

The end product and his enjoyment of the creative process led him to echo Henderson and Bentley’s praise for their instructor and the advantages of taking the class.

“It’s always good to have a little variety in the classes you take, especially if you’re a K student,” Galler said. “Everybody can be a fan of film in their own way, and making a documentary, you get to see behind the curtain with a production. It’s a fun experience.”

All the student videos from the film festival are available on YouTube. Click the links below to watch the others.

Featured Filmmakers

The other student filmmakers featured in the film festival and their projects included the following. Links are included where available:

Ian Burr ’24: “Football,” spotlighting K football players and what their sport means to them.
Sam Douma ’26: “Via Ferrata,” in which a voracious duo aims to harness their raw musical energy despite being young and distracted.
Emma Frederiksen ’25: “Growing with Disability,” showcasing three K students who describe their experiences navigating adulthood and transitioning into college while living with a disability.
Alek Hultberg ’26: “Tom Evans,” showing students and friends of Music Professor Tom Evans honoring him as he prepares to retire.
Caleb Kipnis ’26: “How to Run Hillel,” presenting insights into the Jewish student organization Hillel and its board members’ roles in planning and executing an event.
Megan McGarry ’25: “Clay and Community,” with ceramics students collaborating to make art pieces in response to a problematic mural.
Alex Quesada ’25: “Train Swag,” featuring cities, states and people that can seem far apart, but with a train, the world becomes smaller and connected communities get bigger.
Amalia Scorsone ’24: “A SuperKut of Us,” with friends discussing the importance of their time at K as they approach graduation.
Luke Torres ’25: “Squishmallows,” in which Jenna Paterob ’23 reveals her obsession with Squishmallows toys.
Tariq Williams ’23: “Sustainability at Kalamazoo College,” showing K’s efforts in sustainability and the impact of recycling on campus.

“Football” by Ian Burr ’24

“Train Swag” by Alex Quesada ’25.

“A SuperKut of Us” by Amalia Scorsone ’24

Internship Prepares Young Entrepreneur for Specialist Role

Posted on November 18, 2024February 5, 2025

Kelvis Quaynor ’25 has long thought he would like to be an entrepreneur, and an internship with Startup Zoo helped prepare him to pursue his goals.

Quaynor completed a Community Building Internship (CBI) through the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) during summer 2024, and Startup Zoo subsequently hired him as community engagement specialist for his last year at Kalamazoo College.

“Engaging in this work has given me a good idea of the things I will need to put in place to be a better entrepreneur, when that time does come,” Quaynor said. “That’s one way this internship has helped position me to accomplish my goals.”

Working at Startup Zoo, a hub for the Kalamazoo entrepreneurship community, has also helped Quaynor build his confidence, network and learn about the business world—applying and reinforcing lessons from the classroom.

“One takeaway is definitely the fact that people in the business world are more open than I thought,” Quaynor said. “A lot of opportunities are out there for you, and if you jump on it, you might be able to capitalize. Another thing is that I’m capable of occupying certain spaces, which is something I’ve struggled with. I think COVID played a role, a lot of things played a role, being Black probably played a role as well. I got to see that I’m capable of doing things and occupying spaces in certain places.”

Much of Quaynor’s internship work with Startup Zoo involved contacting and connecting with entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the business community. That was challenging and surprising to Quaynor.

Young entrepreneur Kelvis Quaynor — An internship with Startup Zoo helped entrepreneur Kelvis Quaynor ’25 secure a community engagement specialist role with the nonprofit.

“Reaching out to people I didn’t know was hard, because it’s one thing when you’re in front of someone and you can say, ‘I like your shirt’ or something, but when you’ve never met someone, it’s hard to establish a genuine connection,” Quaynor said. “It surprised me how open people in the venture community were, though. I was reaching out to executives, some of the biggest venture funds in the state, and they would accept a connection on LinkedIn, and sometimes they would even reach out to me if they were going to be in Kalamazoo and say they would love to connect and see how we can help each other. A lot of people in the venture and entrepreneurial support organization space are good people trying to help. I didn’t know how that existed in the business world.”

Quaynor was also analyzing what other entrepreneurial support organizations were doing, researching business funds, and helping plan for the Southwest Michigan Entrepreneur Summit in September. An economics major from Seattle, Washington, Quaynor appreciated learning more about the resources that exist for businesses in Kalamazoo. Early on, he learned a lot from Carl Brown, executive director of Startup Zoo. As the internship progressed, he grew more independent.

“It was hard in the beginning,” Quaynor said. “Carl would give me direction, but sometimes it would be things I had never done before. I hate to be a pest, so for me, if you told me what to do, it’s hard for me to then ask you how to do it. I feel like I should have the tools to be able to figure it out. He was super open, though, and every time I did have to ask, he was fine with that, and he would point me in the right direction.”

The CCE’s reflection dinners for K students working on CBIs helped Quaynor stay in touch with friends completing CBIs, make new friends and put into words what he was learning and experiencing at Startup Zoo. His reflections throughout the summer as well as his final project for the CCE prepared him for his Senior Integrated Project on the internship.

“This internship is definitely going to help inform my decision on what I want to do post-Kalamazoo, because I’m not sure what’s next,” Quaynor said. “I’m just trying to finish my senior year the best way I can, academically and socially and all the good things. Recently, actually, I was thinking about potentially going to graduate school, which is something I never thought I’d do. I feel like there’s still a lot to learn.”

K Faculty Member Co-Edits Contemporary Queer Art Book

Posted on November 15, 2024December 2, 2024

Anne Marie Butler, assistant professor of art history and women, gender and sexuality at Kalamazoo College, co-edited a new book, Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa (Intellect Press, 2024), with Sascha Crasnow, assistant professor of art history at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series, the book presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) region from artists and scholars. In addition to serving as editors, Butler and Crasnow wrote one of the chapters, “Transing Contemporary Art: Aïcha Snoussi and Khaled Jarrar.”

The book is important because it stands as the first volume to consider this particular intersection of geographical location, visual arts and queer studies, Butler said—hopefully, the first of many.

“Obviously, it’s a resource for people to learn about queer visual culture in the region and at diaspora, but Sascha and I very much don’t want this book to define that field,” Butler said. “We are more interested in the book generating questions, responses and new inquiry than marking off a territory. We hope it is used to build on.”

Each of the book’s three sections—Unfixed Genders, Intersectional Sexualities, and Sites and Spaces—includes at least one of each type of chapter: scholarly essay, interview and artist contribution.

“I think it’s unique to have that many interviews, and having artists’ contributions is a little bit unique to scholarly volumes,” Butler said. “Especially since this is about contemporary art, we wanted to have those artists’ voices represented. The artists’ contributions are one of my favorite parts of this book. It’s fantastic to read artists talking about their own work in this context.’”

With her research focused on contemporary Tunisian art with an emphasis on gender, sexuality and the state, Butler has long cultivated connection with the artists she studies. Working on this volume allowed her to continue that approach while broadening her lens.

“This volume was great for me to be able to think about some of the things I read, and some of the things that my scholarship is in conversation with, in a little bit bigger way,” Butler said. “Continuing to work with the artists and the people that I’ve made connections with has been important to me. I want to continue to build and maintain those relationships. I also want to continue to ask different questions and ask questions in different ways.”

The work of building relationships served Butler well as she and Crasnow prioritized contributions to the book from people living in the SWANA region, representing diaspora and bringing different perspectives and experiences to the collection.

“We have fewer contributors living in the region than we might have liked to, which is a product of some of the tensions that this volume embodies,” Butler said. “This book comes at an unparalleled moment of queer global visibility, and with queer and trans visibility, there’s always this paradox where it’s good that people are more visible, but also it can put people in danger. There’s also, on the larger scale, cultural imperialism, problems with global flows of scholarship, extractive scholarship, misguided ideas about saving LGBTQ people from their cultures, and a homogenization of a global queerness that is the Euro-American perspective of what queerness is. Visibility comes with all of these complications that we need to be really attentive to.”

Queer Contemporary Art Co-Editor Anne Marie Butler — Anne Marie Butler, assistant professor of art history and women, gender and sexuality at Kalamazoo College, co-edited a new book, “Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa.”

Butler Queer Contemporary Art book cover — “Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa” is available from the publisher at intellectdiscover.com.

Gayatri Gopinath, a preeminent scholar on visual culture and queer studies, wrote a forward to the book that Butler believes helps to contextualize the importance of the book at this moment.

“Anne Marie Butler and Sascha Crasnow’s astute framing of the uses of a trans methodology in the study of contemporary SWANA art is a reflection on the mobility of many of the artists they study,” the forward says. “For Butler and Crasnow, to actively trans SWANA contemporary art is to foreground flux and fluidity, and movement over origin or destination, as well as to jettison rigid identity categories. … The very formations of ‘SWANA,’ ‘queerness,’ and even ‘contemporary art’ are predicated on an acknowledgement of the difference, heterogeneity, and incommensurability of the various social and aesthetic formations that fall within these capacious rubrics. Rather than flattening out difference to create a coherent, homogenous whole, the contributors to this volume attend to the particularities, divergences and incoherences within and between these categories. They suggest that it is perhaps only in the recognition of the radical difference and unknowability of the other that a truly ethical relationality can be forged.”

Although the edited scholarly volume is primarily intended for an academic audience, Butler believes that the artist interviews and contributions make parts of it accessible to anyone who is interested. She hopes people will encourage their libraries to purchase the volume, making it available to a larger audience, since they were unable to secure the funding to publish the book online with open access.

“I think it’s a really special book, and I think that a lot of times when people hear edited volume or academic collection, they think, ‘Oh, that’s not something that I would enjoy reading or looking at.’ But I think that this book has a lot to offer a lot of different people.”

Butler has taught at K since 2019. She holds a Ph.D. in global gender and sexuality studies from the University at Buffalo, an M.A. in arts politics from New York University, and a B.A. in art history and French from Scripps College.

Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa is available from the publisher at intellectdiscover.com.

Co-Editor-in-Chief Provides a Behind-the-Scenes Look at ‘The Index’

Posted on November 14, 2024November 14, 2024

Three Kalamazoo College students—Lily Stickley ’25, Bernice Mike ’26 and Kennedy West ’27—have joined the office of Marketing and Communication this term as social media ambassadors to openly share their on-campus experiences with prospective students and families. Lily, a Loy Norrix High School graduate from Kalamazoo, is a double major in English and women, gender and sexuality. Her activities include serving The Index, K’s student newspaper, as its co-editor-in-chief.

We asked Lily to give us a behind-the-scenes look at producing an issue of the paper and here’s what she had to say. Look for the latest edition of The Index across campus on Thursday, November 14, or find it online at index.kzoo.edu.

The Index is the Kalamazoo College student newspaper. Established in 1877, it is the oldest college newspaper in the state of Michigan.

I started writing for The Index my first year at K, when the whole newspaper was only six people in total. But I fell in love with journalism when I was writing for my high school newspaper, Loy Norrix Knight Life. Knight Life was entirely online, so when I came to K and was able to write for a physical paper and see my name in print, I was beyond excited!

Because the staff was so small my first year, I almost immediately became the news editor for The Index. I have stayed in that role since. I have stepped up to start working as the co-editor-in-chief along with Jose Lopez Bernal ‘27 while the actual editors-in-chief are studying abroad. An editor-in-chief at The Index is like a club president, but because we are writing and publishing, they are the people who get the final say in whether something gets published. We also make the final edits to the papers to make sure they are ready to be printed!

The Index meets at 4:30 p.m. every Monday in the Nest at Hicks Student Center. During weekly meetings, students pitch their ideas for the articles that they want to write for the paper. In other meetings, we workshop articles to help people who are stuck on a certain element of their article. We also edit each other’s articles to improve our writing and help students learn the skills of writing in a journalistic style.

I also work on creating the newspaper layout. We use the program Adobe InDesign to format the paper. InDesign is a complicated program that takes a long time to figure out. The first paper of the fall term is coming out on Thursday! Jose and I spent basically the whole of our weekends in The Index office working on layout.

As it was our first time ever using InDesign, we did not know what we were doing, but we eventually started to get the hang of it. One of the complicated things about using InDesign involves adding photos. It requires us to shift everything around to fit it perfectly. That’s fine, but rather time-consuming. However, spending time to make the paper look good is what matters the most to me!

I also work to upload the articles to our website, index.kzoo.edu, where everyone is able to read them! As my high school newspaper was published exclusively online, I am much more used to this format, and I can make more creative choices to make the articles look nicer than in the print edition. It will also not take me an extra 20 minutes to fix something if I accidentally mess it up.

I have really enjoyed working as co-editor-in-chief. I am glad that I had the opportunity to take on the role for the term! I am also happy to give it back.

The Hicks Student Center office of The Index. — Lily Stickley ’25 is the co-editor-in-chief of “The Index,” Kalamazoo College’s student newspaper.

Co-Editor-in-Chief Lily Stickley recruited students to join The Index this fall during K Fest, the College's student-engagement fair — Stickley recruited students to join “The Index” this fall during K Fest, the College’s student-engagement fair.

NSF Grant Benefits K’s Tresca, Lab Students

Posted on November 13, 2024November 13, 2024

A National Science Foundation (NSF) grant will help a Kalamazoo College faculty member and his students develop a lab partnership with some of their counterparts at the University of Toronto while performing research with peptoid nanomaterials.

Blakely Tresca, assistant professor of chemistry, has been awarded nearly $250,000 under the NSF’s Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS). The LEAPS-MPS grant emphasizes helping pre-tenure faculty at institutions that don’t traditionally receive significant amounts of NSF-MPS funding, including predominantly undergraduate institutions, as well as achieving excellence through diversity.

Tresca and his students will create peptoid nanomaterials, which are synthetic molecules that show promise in detecting harmful substances in water or people, for example, or in creating coatings that can impart new properties onto other materials. Their work will dovetail with research at University of Toronto in the lab of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Helen Tran.

“I’ve been working with Dr. Tran on putting an alkyne functional group into peptoids, and then studying how the peptoids can self-assemble into materials,” Tresca said. “And once they self-assemble, we want to know how alkynes react in these materials.”

Tresca explained that his lab’s processes require several repetitive tasks including shaking and rinsing samples five or six times each with 10 to 18 individual steps requiring a total of 18 to 20 hours of work when done by hand. The grant covers the cost of a robot that makes the process faster, easier and safer.

“Dr. Tran’s lab has expertise in doing automated synthesis,” Tresca said. “They have a robot that’s the same as the one we have here now. They also have expertise in characterizing the materials, using instruments like an atomic force microscope or AFM. I’m excited because, if things turn out the way we plan, we will be able to work on some really cool applications to design new ways of sensing, either analytes or toxins.”

The grant also covers funding for Tresca’s students to work in the lab, travel to conferences and visit the University of Toronto over the next two years. He estimates that two K students will assist in his lab during the academic year and five will work during the summer.

Tresca’s grant is one of two NSF awards given to faculty members in K’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the past year. The other has allowed Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Assistant Professor of Chemistry Daniela Arias-Rotondo to redesign the lab portion of inorganic chemistry (CHEM 330 at K). It also has helped her and her lab students make compounds that can absorb solar energy and turn it into electricity using manganese, a low-cost, low-toxicity alternative to the materials currently used in solar energy conversion, which tend to be rare, expensive and difficult to mine.

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