Extras
Wellesley's nearly 500 faculty members cover a lot more than wintry topics! Our focus on winter, ice, and cold, however, provided a theme through which to introduce just a few of the teachers and researchers and creative people on campus who make our intellectual community so vibrant. Hear a bit more from them here.
Cord Whitaker
Assistant Professor of English
A scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature, Cord Whitaker investigates origins of “otherness” reflected in ancient works and the influences these cultural constructs have carried into our present lives. His courses include Advanced Studies in Medieval Literature: Reason and the Medieval Wild Man; Critical Interpretation; Chaucer: Community, Dissent, and Difference in the Late Middle Ages; and What Is Racial Difference? He recites some captivating Middle English too—here he shares a lesson from the anonymous 14th-century alliterative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Laura Bossert-King
Senior Music Performance Faculty in Violin and Viola
On her website, award-winning performer and teacher Laura Bossert-King says, “It is my hope that my students feel they are in a comfortable environment where they are encouraged to think for themselves. Questions, analogies, and humor are also a part of our lessons. My goal is to have each student become her own greatest teacher.” We see that in evidence in a lesson with Shanti van Vuuren ’17 accompanied by Pallas Reidler ’17 to work on Vivaldi’s Winter concerto. An effective technique she uses to help students relax, embrace mistakes, and find their own way into the music is to play it as a duet with them. Listen and enjoy!
Monica Higgins
Lecturer in Environmental Studies
We caught up with Monica Higgins during her class, Environment and Society: Addressing Social Change, which happened to be held outdoors during some balmy October weather. In class, she and students discussed (among other things) the ice albedo effect—a feedback loop relating to how well a surface reflects solar energy: When ice and snow melt, more solar energy is absorbed instead of reflected, further accelerating the melting. After class we discussed her research interests, in particular the investigation of what happens to pharmaceuticals that find their way into groundwater.
Marjorie Agosín
Luella LaMer Slaner Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Spanish
A native of Chile, Majorie Agosín writes in Spanish and English and, among other honors, has received the Dr. Fritz Redlich Global Mental Health and Human Rights Award for the healing power of her poetry, and the Pura Belpré Author Award for outstanding children’s literature by a Latino/Latina author for her first novel for young readers. At Wellesley she teaches Spanish; Jewish literature and literature of human rights in the Americas; women writers of Latin America; migration, identity, and ethnicity. “Your Footsteps in the Snow of Prague” appears in her collection Among the Angels of Memory, both in English and in Spanish as “Tus pasos sobre la nieve de Praga.”
Heping Liu
Associate Professor of Art
Heping Liu is a specialist in painting and society of 10th-11th century China, and suggests that snowscapes of that era constitute an important, independent category of landscape painting, transcending their place in the four-season landscape tradition. He presented his thinking on this thesis at an international conference on Song Dynasty painting at Zhejiang University in China in 2014; his paper will be published by Zhejiang University Press in May 2016. Come along with Liu and his students in the seminar Poetic Painting in China, Korea, and Japan for a quick tour of iconic Chinese snowscapes from approximately a thousand years ago. Shivering in the cold has not changed too much!
Thomas Hodge
Professor of Russian
In The 19th Century Russian Classics: Passion, Pain, Perfection, Thomas Hodge and students study Russian fiction from Pushkin to Tolstoy, including critical reaction and the role of fiction and literary movements in Russian history. They take a moment to enjoy the music of Pushkin’s “Winter Evening” in Russian. “In Russia, the winters are very cold,” Hodge says. “So it stands to reason that Pushkin, being the national poet, writes a lot about it. Three poems in particular are very famous: ‘Winter Evening,’ ‘Winter Morning,’ and ‘The Winter Road.’ These are beloved and beautiful; even if you don’t speak Russian you can hear the excellence of the orchestration of the sounds and rhymes in the poem.”
Kristin Butcher
Marshall I. Goldman Professor of Economics
Kristin Butcher is the chair of Wellesley’s Economics Department. Her areas of focus include the impact of immigration on the United States and the causes of childhood obesity in this country, and encompasses the impact of immigration on labor market outcomes for U.S. natives, as well as the impact of immigration on crime in the United States. She is a frequently cited expert on economic indicators, and in spring last year PBS Newshour tapped her to discuss the March jobs report—of course asking what effect a heavy winter weather might have played.
Justin Armstrong
Lecturer in Anthropology and Writing
Justin Armstrong studies the anthropology of remote places and isolated populations, including many in cold and challenging northern climes. He has conducted fieldwork in Iceland for the last 11 years, and for the last X years has brought Wellesley students to the country with his course ANTH299: Home and Away: Human Geography and the Cultural Dimensions of Space and Place. Taking this course prompted Katie Donlan ’16 to write a thesis for her anthropology major. Armstrong is her thesis advisor for “The Lopapeysa: A Vehicle to Explore Icelandic Heritage and National Identity.”
Rachel Stanley
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Rachel Stanley brings multiple research endeavors into students’ lives at Wellesley. For example, Brenda Ji ’18 assists in analysis of Beaufort Sea ice for a study of phytoplankton blooms in relation to unusually intense Arctic ice melting; others do fieldwork with Stanley studying the carbon cycle in salt marshes in Massachusetts; still others join her in developing improved and field-portable mass spectrometers. She also teaches Aquatic Chemistry, Chemical Analysis and Equilibrium, and Inorganic Chemistry. She explains a bit about her sea ice study in this video.
Amy Banzaert
Lecturer in Engineering
Amy Banzaert received the first doctorate associated with MIT’s D-Lab, a program that fosters development of appropriate technologies and sustainable solutions within the framework of international development, and she brings that approach to Wellesley in the form of We-Lab. In Product Development for All, students work on real-world solutions to problems faced by real-world people, their “clients.” In 2015 students worked on mechanisms to enable adaptive rowers to more easily get from a wheelchair on the dock into a boat. A classroom challenge to envision solutions to navigating a snowy sidewalk—inspired a little bit by 2015’s weather—helps make students into more confident brainstormers.