faculty Archives - Page 18 of 38

Bibliographer Honored, Shares the Story of the Vodka Plant

Posted on February 16, 2017March 22, 2022

The Modern Language Association’s MLA Field Bibliographer Newsletter includes a profile of a Distinguished Indexer who is none other than Kalamazoo College’s own Joe Fugate, professor emeritus of German studies and director emeritus of the Center for International Programs. Indexers and bibliographers are indispensable to the art and science of scholarship in all fields. The MLA article notes that Joe has been a field indexer longer than any other contributor, enriching the coverage in the German literature section for almost fifty years, adding thousands of citations to the MLA International Bibliography. He has also served as a member of and consultant to the Bibliography Advisory Committee. He was awarded an MLA International Bibliography Fellowship for the years 2011 to 2014. Much of the article is in Joe’s own voice. He says, “My tenure as a bibliographer has differed from that of any other bibliographer I have known because for almost 30 years while maintaining my faculty status, I held an administrative post in our study abroad program, including 18 as director.

“I was fortunate because my faculty interests–German language and literature, especially of the 18th century and in particular J. G. Herder–and my administrative post complemented each other. My frequent overseas trips visiting universities on three continents enabled me to establish personal contact with a number of foreign scholars who shared my academic interests and to perfect my fluency in other languages. The fact that my name appeared in the International Bibliography helped immensely in establishing these contacts.

“Over the years I have witnessed a number of changes in the production of the bibliography. When I first became a contributor all entries were typed or hand written on three by five slips of paper (some of which I still have in my files) and sent to MLA headquarters. These slips were replaced by the color-coded sheets which likewise were completed by hand or typed and then submitted.

“Now everything is on the computer. Traditionalist that I am however, I continue to miss the printed edition. I am sure that the MLA staff was relieved when they no longer had to deal with handwritten entries. Looking back I recall with pleasure the yearly meetings of the bibliographers with the staff at the annual convention. The gathering not only gave us an opportunity to discuss bibliographical matters but also to get to know each other personally. One of our colleagues, a contract interpreter for Russian with the State Department, would enliven our meetings with stories about her experiences with visiting Russians and their habit of proposing frequent toasts of vodka. When she was asked how she handled this, she replied that she tried to stand next to a plant into which she emptied her vodka. She never did tell us what this did to the plant.

“It was my privilege to serve on the Bibliography Advisory Committee. One issue we discussed at length was the lack of recognition as a scholarly and professional activity of being a bibliographer. In this connection I was able to cite one of my colleagues, now retired but still writing and publishing, who proclaimed for all to hear that my work as a bibliographer made his and other scholars’ possible. There are many to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for making my activity as a bibliographer an interesting and enriching experience: those who originally accepted me as a bibliographer, the heads of the bibliography department at the MLA, the section heads and the MLA staff with whom I have worked together and continue to work with even today.”

Congratulations, Joe!

Imagination Celebration

Posted on January 20, 2017March 22, 2022

“The Stories They Tell,” Visiting Instructor of Art Danny Kim’s documentary film about the Co-Authorship Project of Woodward Elementary School and Kalamazoo College, is an official selection of the Made in Michigan Film Festival (Frankenmuth, Michigan). It will screen on Sunday, February 5, at 4:25 p.m.

The film is no stranger to awards. It won the Kalamazoo Film Society’s “Palm d’Mitten” Award for best local film. And the documentary took second place for best feature film at the North-by-Midwest Film Festival in Kalamazoo! It also has screened at the Lake Erie Arts and Film Festival in Sandusky, Ohio, the East Lansing Film Festival in Michigan, and Reading FilmFEST in Reading, Pennsylvania.

“The Stories They Tell” chronicles remarkable collaborations, like “Tacos for Dragons,” one of the many books featured in the film.

The saga of that unlikely pair (dragons and tacos) is the product of the imaginations and work of two seemingly unlikely co-authors, one a Kalamazoo College student and the other a third grader at Woodward Elementary.

Such collaborations are unlikely no more, thanks to the Co-authorship Project, the subject of Kim’s 80-minute film and the heart of Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan’s developmental psychology class for the last 15 years. The Co-authorship Project gives K students the opportunity to create an original storybook with an elementary student in order to gain a deeper insight into child development. Tan’s developmental psychology class is one of many academic service-learning courses that are designed in collaboration with the College’s Center for Civic Engagement.

The documentary showcases the project from beginning to end, starting with the picking of partners and culminating in the various unique completed works. The film spans almost a decade and a half of story making, to which Kim had unique access. He and Tan are husband and wife.

Animation infuses both the class and the film. “The project has made the developmental psychology class come to life,” said Tan,”awakening ideas with real world experience. The collaborations give my students something more than what they could get in books alone.” Likewise, Kim’s animation of the creativity in each story makes the film leap to life.

“The documentary is really about relationships, learning, connecting, and, at its core, imagination,” said Tan. “One skill that children naturally possess is imagination and creativity.”

The film highlights how much each interaction with a child can help augment what a college student knows about child development. The interactions also can affect a career path.

The life’s work of at least two of Tan’s former students offers proof. After viewing a sneak preview of the film in April of 2015, both women confirmed that the project directly influenced their decisions to pursue careers in education.

Rachelle (Tomac) Busman ’05 is a school psychologist in the Byron Center (Michigan) School District and Sally (Warner) Read ’08 is the head of the Kazoo School, an independent school in Kalamazoo.

“I remember everything about the little girl I worked with,” said Busman.

Kim thinks the contact with colleges students could help inspire their elementary school aged partners to consider college as part of their futures, and he said he hopes the documentary inspires similar projects elsewhere.

“It would be wonderful if somebody saw it and said maybe we could start something like this,” said Kim.

At K The project’s concept has been expanded and continued through a partnership with the Center for Civic Engagement. As the students (college and primary school) create these whimsical, amusing and surprising stories, the connections they make with each other have a lasting impact, not only in literacy and learning, but in understanding their pasts and futures.

Photo by Danny Kim
Art by Pennilane Mara
Matt Munoz ’14 contributed to this story.

“backyard song”

Posted on January 20, 2017March 22, 2022

Writer in Residence Diane Seuss has published a poem, “backyard song,” in the February issue of Poetry Magazine. Di’s poem is part of a group of a recently devised poetic form known as the Golden Shovel, an homage to the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who would be 100 years old this year. The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken often, but no invariably, from a Brooks poem.

Di’s poem is a riff on Brook’s “a song in the front yard.” Here’s a taste of Di’s Golden Shovel poem:

Uncorked, I had a thought: I
want the want
I dreamed of wanting once, a
quarter cup of sneak-peek
at what prowls in the back, at
what sings in the
wet rag space behind the garage, back

where the rabbits nest, where
I smell something soupish, sour and dank and it’s
filled with weeks like rough
cat tongues and
the wind is unfostered, untended,
now that it’s just me here and
I am so hungry
for the song that grows tall like a weed
grows, and grows.

But you should swallow it whole: page 452 in the February issue of Poetry. Di is one of several impressive poets in the Golden Shovel group, which includes the late Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Alberto Rios and Danez Smith, who read some of his poems on campus this past Monday at the Martin Luther King, Jr. convocation. Di’s most recent collection of poems, Four-Legged Girl, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her next book, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, will come out in 2018.

Beloved English Professor and Poet Dies

Posted on January 12, 2017March 22, 2022

In a speech he gave in 1987, Professor Emeritus of English Conrad Hilberry said, “When I think of poems that I am especially drawn to, I find they often have a silence, a mystery at the center.”

Today Con is that silence, a life now part of a “mystery at the center” into which words will penetrate insufficiently at best, the way sunlight beneath the surface of a deep ocean shimmers a few meters at most then disappears.

Con died on January 11, 2017. Several weeks previous, his daughter, Jane, wrote that her father had written to her that he planned to “make his exit” after Christmas but wasn’t sure he could endure that long. He endured and then died from complications of cancer and pneumonia. He was 88 years old. A campus memorial service for Con will occur on Saturday, February 4, at 1 p.m. in Stetson Chapel. A reception will follow in the lobby of the Light Fine Arts Building. Memorial donations may be made to The Katharine Hilberry Scholarship Fund at Kalamazoo College.

Con earned his B.A. at Oberlin College, his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. Attracted to “the promise of a college that was willing to try things,” Con was recruited to Kalamazoo College by Larry Barrett, a colleague in the English department and later a dear friend. Con started his career at K in 1962, the first full year of the bold and quirky curriculum called the K-Plan. He retired in 1998. In between, countless students of all majors and liberal arts inclinations fondly recall his literature and writing classes and especially his poetry courses. He wrote 11 volumes of poetry. His latest, Until the Full Moon Has Its Say, he wrote in his mid-eighties, and many of its poems are villanelles, a demanding form Con seemed to execute with ease. Like his friend and colleague Larry Barrett, whom he eulogized in 2002, Con was “in business right to the end.”

His prolificity as a poet sometimes obscured the fact that he was a marvelous writer of prose, author of the genre-bending creative nonfiction piece, Luke Karamazov, and countless essays and chapel talks, often on poets such as John Donne and Galway Kinnell, two he particularly loved, though there are many many more. Con loved to illustrate with poems the ideas he articulated in his prose as if to remind us that poetry (as he once said) can be a brief and invigorating elevation from the “lowly ground” of our inward selves–not that such ground is bereft of beauty and mystery, only that our souls seek a glimpse of something abundant beyond our own inwardness. Con often found that abundance, “a pool of meaning,” in the ordinary.

He was a remarkable teacher, entirely and joyfully at home in the “arches and vaults” of the liberal arts, created when the seemingly separate disciplines lean together and conjoin. He continually sought inspiration for his own work (both his teaching and his poetry) in the subject matters of his colleagues and friends–biology, mathematics, religion, philosophy, physics and psychology to name just a few. Often he’d audit courses in different departments as grist for his imagination, for example John Spencer’s seminar on Alfred North Whitehead and David Evans’s class on ethology. What he learned in those classes found its way into his poems, intentionally or not. Most of all he loved K students, and the effect on them of the K-Plan: their genius, he wrote, “for combining academic work and off-campus experience in just the way to allow themselves the most dramatic growth.”

In 1995, three years before his retirement, he began teaching night classes in poetry at the Stryker Center. These he continued for some 15 years, and many of his ex-students and members of the greater Kalamazoo community attended. Con helped poets make and publish their poems, and the list of these writers is impressive, including, among others, Susan Blackwell Ramsey, Corey Marks, Gail McMurray Martin, Marie Bahlke, Kit Almy, Gail Griffin, Rob Dunn, Hedy Habra, Marion Boyer, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jane Hilberry, Amy Newday, and his lifelong student and friend, Pulitzer Prize finalist Diane Seuss. His beloved wife of 60 years, Marion, who died on April 8, 2008, often joined him in these classes.

In an essay he wrote on Galway Kinnell, Con described the opposition between poems and the notion of the final word. Comments on poems we perceive as “right on certain points and wrong on others,” he said. “But no one sees [those comments, even if they are the author’s] as the last word, equivalent to the poem itself. We always assume there is more to be said as the complexities of the poem take different configurations from other readers….Whenever a reading is taken as final, the poem is diminished.”

He managed his classes like that, starting things off, then sitting back to listen and provide space for students’ voices–for that peculiar confluence of text and the texture of readers’ lives, from which arises meaning. “I just need to choose the right books,” he once said. “Then the students notice things about the poems, and they teach each other.”

He was a poet and teacher of the people, deeply involved in the city of Kalamazoo’s Poetry on Buses program during its heyday. Often, with fellow poets (and friends) Herb Scott and John Woods (English professors at neighboring Western Michigan University) among others, Con would bring poetry into public middle schools, somehow managing to engage that always potentially intractable audience into the “best poems,” which Con considered an ineffable harmony of vividness (which the junior high students loved) and wholeness (where, often, the work began). He served as an editor of the Third Coast anthologies of Michigan poets and seemed to be a friend to every writer therein.

In his teaching prime Con’s presence was unforgettable, especially his red hair and ready smile. His limp and the rattle of his bike always suggested some past accident that had had no effect on his love of biking steep grades, celebrating gravity. And why not celebrate the force that holds us in what he called our “borrowed dust” for our short while on earth–the best, the only place for love.

In his last chapel talk (2001), using a line from a poem by Stanley Kunitz, Con said, “I have walked through many lives, some of them my own.” Indeed, Con contained multitudes.

Near the end, when Con was in the hospital, before he came home for hospice care, he said to his daughter, Jane, “I still have some talents left. One of them is sleeping. Another one is laughing.”

So like Con: able to sort by scent the smoke of sleep and laughter. He was, to the very end, the poet of the ordinary’s miracle.

Former K Economics Professor Dies

Posted on January 9, 2017March 22, 2022

Frederick Strobel, who taught economics and business administration at Kalamazoo College for two decades (1974-1994), died on December 22, 2016. He was 79 years old.

Born and reared in Quincy, Massachusetts, Fred earned a bachelor’s degree (accounting) and M.B.A. from Northeastern University, and he earned his master’s degree (economics) and Ph.D. (economics) from Clark University. He served as a lecturer at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Clark University, and he was a professor of economics for three years at Holy Cross College. Prior to joining K’s faculty he served as senior business economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. At K Fred was the Stephen B. Monroe Professor of Money and Banking. In that position he developed meaningful relationships with the executives in the banking industry, and he planned and presented the annual Monroe Seminar on campus. That day-and-a-half event–“a vital, enriching contribution to the department and the College as a whole,” according to Fred’s colleague, Professor Emeritus of Economics Phil Thomas–featured a prominent keynote speaker and always a capacity audience. Fred, too, used the occasion to deliver major talks on the economic outlook of the region, country and world.

He was a prolific scholar who published articles in Business Week, The American Banker, The Eastern Economic Journal and the Journal of Economic Issues. He was a much sought-after viewpoint writer for the Kalamazoo Gazette, the Detroit News and other daily newspapers, and he was a frequent radio talk show guest on the subjects of the decline of the middle class and the creation of a two-class society in the United States. Fred wrote two books, Upward Dreams, Downward Mobility: The Economic Decline of the American Middle Class (1993) and The Coming Class War and How to Avoid It (1999). His thinking was prescient, according to Phil: “His books identified and documented the decline of the middle class long before the issue entered the national consciousness and policy debate.”

In 1992 Fred received a six-week appointment as visiting professor of economics at Moscow State University, where a taught a course in money and banking to a group of 60 Russian undergraduate and graduate students.

In 1994 Fred became the William G. and Marie Selby Chair of Economics at the New College of the University of South Florida in Sarasota. He taught there until his retirement in 2008.

Fred is survived by two daughters, Heidi Strobel and Gretchen Strobel. Heidi is a K graduate, class of 1990. A memorial service for Fred will occur in Stetson Chapel on Saturday, February 25, at 3 p.m. A reception in the Olmsted Room will follow the service.

Problematic Art and Agonistic Space

Posted on November 14, 2016March 23, 2022

Associate Professor of Art History Christine Hahn published an article, “Maintaining Problematic Art: A Case Study of Philip Evergood’s The Bridge of Life (1942) at Kalamazoo College.” The article was published in Public Art Dialogue (6:1, 116-130) on May 27, 2016.

The piece is particularly interesting for any alumni familiar with the mural (see above) in Old Welles Hall. It covers the history of controversy inspired by the work since it’s unveiling (1942), including specific calls (in 1966 and in 2010) for some redress for iconography deemed offensive to and by some individuals and groups. Detailing the call-and-response to the criticism voiced in 2010, Christina ultimately suggests “that problematic public art has the unique potential to produce positive social change by staying in place.”

The article reveals much about K’s history, including Evergood’s time on campus as an artist and a teacher as well as his bona fides as an ardent social radical. Christina also introduces (from Lewis Hyde, author of Common as Air) a concept of “freedom of listening.” In his book Hyde cites Benjamin Franklin’s creation of a lecture hall where “people were free to give lectures on whatever they wanted.” In that space (Christina quotes Hyde): “Individual speakers present singular views; individual listeners entertain plurality….The hall was thus built to serve the eighteenth-century idea of replacing the partial self with a plural or public self, one who is host to many voices, even those otherwise at odds with the singular being you thought you were when you first walked in the door….If we take free listening to be the true end of free speech, then freedom itself takes on a different aspect…intelligence arises in the common world, where many voices can be heard; it belongs to collectivity, not privacy, and is available especially to those who can master the difficult art of plural listening.”

Christina invokes Hyde’s notion of “agonistic listening amongst equals in conflict” (a notion that is at the heart of the academy and a direct contrast to “antagonism, where opponents try to silence or destroy the other”) to describe College and student responses to the controversy implicit and explicit in the work, particularly the responses that took place or were considered between 2010 and 2015. She writes: “The building Benjamin Franklin built that embraced such agonistic pluralism eventually became the Philadelphia Academy, which in turn became the University of Pennsylvania. This transformation of space, built to house agonistic conflict among equals, is a particularly fitting symbol of how physical space can potentially create a space for inquiry, conflict and debate. This type of site is necessary and important. Indeed, as Lewis Hyde argues, it is agonistic spaces such as these that are the foundations of democracy.”

The presence of the mural, Christina continues, has provided the intellectual and emotive space for agonistic listening, “has allowed these twenty-first-century conversations on race, class dynamics and elite educations to take place….[M]aintaining problematic public art in an agonistic space helps keep our understanding of the past and our vision of the future firmly in view.” A fascinating article, well worth the time to read it.

Undergraduates Present Research

Posted on November 9, 2016March 23, 2022

Fifteen Kalamazoo College students joined three of their teachers (professors Dwight Williams, Santiago Salinas and Ellen Robertson) to present research at the 2016 West Michigan Regional Undergraduate Science Research Conference (WMRUGS) in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The annual conference provides undergraduate students with an opportunity to present their own research to a large and supportive group of professional scientists. K was well represented with sophomores, juniors, and seniors in attendance from both the Departments of Biology and Chemistry: Suma Alzouhayli ’17 (Chemistry and Biology), John Bailey ’17 (Chemistry), Christi Cho ’17 (Chemistry), Quinton Colwell ’17 (Chemistry), Rachel Fadler ’17 (Chemistry), Sarah Glass ’17 (Chemistry), Sharat S. Kamath ’19, Christina Keramidas ’18 (Chemistry and Biology), Cydney Martell ’19 (Chemistry), Garret Miller ’16 (Chemistry), Susmitha Narisetty ’19 (Biology), Darren Peel ’17 (Biology), Collin Steen ’17 (Chemistry), Myles Truss ’17 (Chemistry), Raoul Wadhwa ’17 (Chemistry and Computer Science). In addition to presenting their research, students heard a keynote address and research talks by undergraduate and graduate students from regional colleges and universities. This free event also provided undergraduate researchers the opportunity to interact face-to-face with graduate school recruiters and to learn more about future career opportunities.

There were 169 undergraduate posters presented at WMRUGS from students representing 17 different college and universities. Ten students from the Kalamazoo College Department of Chemistry, presented results of their research conducted under the mentorship of Kalamazoo College faculty that included Laura Furge, Regina Stevens-Truss, and Dwight Williams. Other students presented the results of their summer research projects conducted in laboratories at Indiana University and the University of Oregon. Students from the Department of Biology presented their findings from research conducted this past summer in laboratories at South Dakota State University and Michigan State University.

“Without Borders” Conference Imagines World Where All Life May Thrive

Posted on October 27, 2016March 23, 2022

The tension between what is politically possible under the world’s current political and economic systems and what is ecologically necessary exposes an urgent need for change, said journalist and activist Naomi Klein, keynote speaker for the conference, “Without Borders, Post-Oppression Imaginaries and Decolonized Futures.” The conference was sponsored by the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College and attracted several hundred activists and social justice experts from across the country.

According to Klein, even though the recent Paris climate change agreement looked like the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era, the treaty is neither legally binding nor sufficient in its goals to avert ecological disaster.

“Fossil fuel frontiers have to be closed if we have any hope of a future,” said Klein. “Politicians have absolutely no plan to do this.”

Adequately addressing climate change has failed since the late 1980s, emasculated by a neoliberalist interpretation of capitalism that promotes privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending to enhance the public sector. Such policies have created in people a profound sense of hopelessness about climate change, said Klein.

“We are told that selfishness and short-sightedness is part of human nature, which prevents us acting,” said Klein. “This is not true and it steers us away from an analysis of our system. In fact, the fight for survival is human nature.”

Many local, grassroots groups are advocating steps to address climate change because they see the issue’s connection to an unjust economic system that is failing for a vast majority of people all over the planet, she added.

Klein challenged the audience to work for “climate justice” by reversing the “extractivist” point of view of the Earth and promoting the “caretaking” of one another, an ethos that indigenous people advocate.

“It’s not just ‘energy democracy’ but ‘energy justice’ that we need,” said Klein. “This leads to clean energy projects and jobs.”

She also emphasized that service work like nursing, child care, public interest media should be redefined as climate work that sets out to create a “caring and repairing economy.”

“We need to embed justice in every aspect of our lives,” said Klein. “The people are hungry for transformational change, and we have to go for it on all fronts.”

The conference focused on four related themes: Afrofuturism, Decolonized Knowledge, Sustainable Futures, and Next Systems.

Text by Olga Bonfiglio; conference photo by Susan Andress

SCORE Shows Scores Matter

Posted on October 10, 2016September 17, 2024

The world premier of a documentary that prominently features Kalamazoo College Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan occurred at the Hamptons International Film Festival. For SCORE: A Film Music Documentary Siu-Lan was one of some 60 live interviews compiled for the film, including conversations with the top living film composers in United States and the United Kingdom (Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, Randy Newman, Howard Shaw, Trent Reznor, Alexandre Desplat, among others), film directors like James Cameron, producers like Quincy Jones, and several film scholars.

Last Saturday’s world premier will be quickly followed by this Thursday’s showing of Score as the Closing Night Film at the Tacoma Film Festival in Washington. That is quite an honor! Each year TFF receives more than 1,000 submissions, whittled down to 100 films. Of those, one is chosen the Opening Night Film, the other for Closing Night Film. Both draw the largest audiences.

Siu-Lan appears five times in the film, and she has its final soundbite, finishing a sentence begum by director James Cameron. Kalamazoo College is mentioned every time Siu-Lan appears, and K is thanked in the end credits along with the filming location of Dalton Theater. Siu-Lan not only has the last word in the film; she has the last word in the film’s first review (by Sheri Linden of The Hollywood Reporter).

If you get a chance, see Score; it’s likely to be the best film you’ve ever heard, or at least reveal why your favorite movie has as much to do with your ears as your eyes.