chance encounters - harvard university · pdf filechance encounters from daguerreotype ... mia...

A L U M N I QUA R T E R LY

The graduate school of arts and sciences | harvard university spring 2010

Chance EncountersFrom daguerreotype to digital,

Robin Kelsey traces photography’s efforts to reconcile good luck and high art

How graduate students are helping to build Harvard’s newundergraduate curriculum

A composer grapples with theHolocaust and family legacy

Kit Parker: Soldier, scientist, scholar

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ColloquyA L U M N I Q UA RT E R LY

Allan M. Brandtdean

Margot N. Gilladministrative dean

Elisabeth Nuñezdirector of publications and alumni relations

Bari Walsheditor

James Clyde Sellman, PhD ’93, historycopy editor

Sametz Blackstone Associatesdesign

Graduate School Alumni Association (GSAA) CouncilNaomi André, PhD ’96, musicReinier Beeuwkes, COL ’62, PhD ’70, division of medical sciencesThomas Davenport, PhD ’80, sociologyStacy Dick, AB ’78, PhD ’83, economicsA. Barr Dolan, AM ’74, applied sciencesRichard Ekman, AB ’66, PhD ’72, history of American civilizationJohn C.C. Fan, SM ’67, PhD ’72, applied sciencesNeil Fishman, SM ’92, applied sciencesKenneth Froewiss, AB ’67, PhD ’77, economicsHomer Hagedorn, PhD ’55, history, ex officioR. Stanton Hales, PhD ’70, mathematicsDavid Harnett, PhD ’70, historyGeorge Heilborn, AM ’58, physicsKaren J. Hladik, PhD ’84, business economicsDaniel R. Johnson, AM ’82, East Asian history, AM ’84,

business economicsGopal Kadagathur, PhD ’69, applied sciencesAlan Kantrow, AB ’69, PhD ’79, history of American civilizationGyuri Karady, PhD ’80, applied sciences Robert E. Knight, PhD ’68, economicsMia de Kuijper, MPA ’83, PhD ’83, economics Felipe Larraín, PhD ’85, economics, ex officioJill Levenson, PhD ’67, English and American literature and languageSee-Yan Lin, MPA ’70, PhD ’77, economicsSuzanne Folds McCullagh, PhD ’81, fine artsJohn J. Moon, AB ’89, PhD ’94, business economicsSandra O. Moose, PhD ’68, economicsF. Robert Naka, SD ’51, applied sciencesBetsy M. Ohlsson-Wilhelm, AB ’63, PhD ’69, medical sciencesMaury Peiperl, MBA ’86, PhD ’94, organizational behaviorM. Lee Pelton, PhD ’84, English and American literature and languageNancy Ramage, PhD ’69, classical archaeology, ex officioJohn E. Rielly, PhD ’61, governmentAllen Sangínes-Krause, PhD ’87, economics; chairCharles Schilke, AM ’82, historySidney Spielvogel, AM ’46, economics, MBA ’49, ex officioDavid Staines, PhD ’73, English and American literature

and languageMarianne Steiner, MEN ’78, SM ’78, applied mathematicsDennis Vaccaro, PhD ’78, division of medical sciencesDonald van Deventer, PhD ’77, economicsLee Zhang, AM ’01, medical sciencesGustavus Zimmerman, PhD ’80, physics

The graduate school of arts and sciences • harvard university

Course-Building from ScratchInside the inventive collaboration between FAS’sCollege and Graduate School that’s helping to fuelHarvard’s new undergraduate curriculum.

Speaking the UnspeakableIn language both abstract and grounded, composer Chaya Czernowin probes the limits oftime and space.

Colloquy with Kevin Kit Parker, associateprofessor of biomedical engineeringFinding the line between soldier and scientist.

Lucky ShotWhere good fortune and good form cometogether, a photograph becomes art.

Alumni Books GSAS authors on environmental sustainability, the history of American business, World ofWarcraft, and the nexus of neuroscience and aesthetics.

On DevelopmentA Graduate Research Workshop on environ-mental economics nurtures new ideas in a vitaland growing field.

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On the cover: Robin Kelsey, PhD ’87, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography in Harvard’s

History of Art and Architecture Department. Photograph by Webb Chappell.

I recently served on the dissertation committeefor a student in anthropology, and when the time came for the defense, it was an eye-opening and deeply affirming experience.The room was full; faculty and other studentshad taken every seat. The defending studentanswered questions not just from committeemembers but from peers, and he came awaywith solid ideas about how to steward hisproject to its next publishable phase. It was an intellectually satisfying and truly celebratory day for both the student and the department.

I believe that every Harvard PhD studentdeserves a defense like that, and so this year,I have asked all of our departments to evaluatetheir culminating activities. I’ve urged themto assess how the dissertation defense maybest serve their students and advance theintellectual goals of their communities.

An excellent defense has the power torecognize and validate the significance of thework the student has done. Defenses offer anopportunity to evaluate critically that whichis truly original and innovative in the work.And they encourage students — and faculty,for that matter — to sharply articulate whatthey have achieved, what questions stillremain, and where a particular line ofinquiry might lead.

Defenses present a crucial opportunityto engage with a student’s most importantwork — work that reflects the intellectualenergy and values of the student’s homedepartment. As faculty come together to consider a dissertation project, defenses canbuild intellectual community and strengthenbonds. They can be highlights of a term or a year, since the entire department has cause tofeel proud when a student defends a thesis.

Defenses offer students an occasion topresent and justify their work to a critical yet

sympathetic audience. The idea of sharingwork publicly is at the core of what we do asan academic community, and students stillhave too few chances to present their work inforums that are both engaged and informed.All scholars want their work to be taken seriously, and defenses are a clear signal ofthat serious reception.

In some institutions, defenses devolvedor were abandoned, largely due to a mostlyapocryphal series of horror stories that toldof good students who were hammered withunfair questions or committee members who

despised one another and capsized a project.When students are conscientiously mentoredduring the earlier stages of graduate school,receiving the intellectual support and theoversight they need to successfully concludea dissertation project, the foundations for a positive defense are firmly established.

I am very pleased to report that thedepartments of History and English haveboth reinstituted defenses this year, andMathematics has modified its approach tothe defense. Numerous other departmentsare reviewing their activities, looking at various models and thinking seriously aboutthe parting lessons that a dissertation defense,in whatever form, might offer. Obviously, it is best for departments to establish practices that fit well with their particulardisciplines and academic cultures. Moredepartments are rightly seeing the defense asthe last chance for committee members andother faculty to make valuable suggestionsabout work done under their auspices.

The dissertation defense ought to be thecapstone of a productive and creative graduatecareer, the symbol of a department’s successin fostering a new generation of scholars. I am gratified that our departments sharethat vision.

Colloquy Spring 20101

Harvard Alumni Association Appointed DirectorsJohn E. Rielly • Daniel R. Johnson

GSAA Council Ex OfficioDrew Gilpin Faustpresident of Harvard UniversityMichael D. Smithdean of the Faculty of Arts and SciencesAllan M. Brandtdean of the Graduate School of Arts and SciencesMargot N. Gilladministrative dean of the Graduate School ofArts and SciencesMichael Shinagel PhD ’64, English and American literature and language,dean of Continuing Education and University ExtensionJohn P. Reardon Jr.AB ’60executive director of the Harvard Alumni Association

The GSAA is the alumni association of HarvardUniversity’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Governed by its Council, the GSAA represents andadvances the interests of alumni of the Graduate School bysponsoring alumni events and by publishing Colloquy fourtimes each year.

Graduate School Alumni AssociationHolyoke Center 3501350 Massachusetts AvenueCambridge, MA 02138-3846phone: 617-495-5591 • fax: [email protected] • www.gsas.harvard.edu

Colloquy on the WebAccess current and back issues of Colloquy, as well as a range of other alumni services and information, atwww.gsas.harvard.edu/alumni.

Letters to the EditorColloquy does not print letters, but we welcome yourthoughts and story ideas. Write to: Colloquy, HarvardUniversity Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, HolyokeCenter 350, 1350 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA02138-3846; or e-mail [email protected].

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Colloquy is printed by Kirkwood Printing, Wilmington, MA.

from the dean

The Best Defense

Allan M. Brandt Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; AmalieMoses Kass professor of thehistory of medicine, HarvardMedical School; professor of the history of science,Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Defenses present a crucial opportunity to engage with a student’smost important work — work that reflects the intellectual energyand values of the department as a whole.

GENERAL EDUCATION

course-buildingcourse-building from scratchfrom scratchINSIDE THE INVENTIVE COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE COLLEGE INSIDE THE INVENTIVE COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE COLLEGE

AND GRADUATE SCHOOL THAT’S HELPING TO FUEL HARVARD’S NEWAND GRADUATE SCHOOL THAT’S HELPING TO FUEL HARVARD’S NEW

UNDERGRADUATE CURRICULUM UNDERGRADUATE CURRICULUM

By Bar i Walsh

In the 17th and 18th centuries, with colonization of the

Americas reaching full tilt, foodstuffs were flowing back and

forth across the Atlantic, and Europeans slowly developed

a taste for the exotic substances of the new world. These

alien foods were often first accepted because of their

reputed medicinal powers, not any great shift in dietary

preference or practice, which only came later.

European medicine at the time was based on the theory

that the human body was governed by four humors —

blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile, each with associated

temperaments based on heat, dryness, cold, and moistness.

Good health meant achieving an optimal balance among

the humors and their characteristics. Sugar, from the

Caribbean colonies, was thought to preserve the body,

just as it did fruit, by increasing the coolness that preserved

life. Tobacco, considered food-like in its early uses, was

thought to stimulate the body, increasing the heat that

provided vigor. Despite a forceful warning by King James I

in 1604, and the growing sense that its use was unsavory

or vulgar, tobacco retained its medicinal reputation for

decades. Among the long list of diseases it was thought

to cure: cancer.


That’s one of the many snapshots of thepast that make it easy to understand why 200students are enrolled this spring in AmericanFood: A Global History, a new course led byJoyce Chaplin, James Duncan PhillipsProfessor of Early American History. Thecourse surveys the role of food in America’sbirth and evolution and examines how foodchoices, production strategies, and policiesand politics helped to define the country —and its relations with the world — at its outset and into the present.

It’s a great topic, but the class is interestingfor another reason, too. It’s one of several inHarvard College’s new Program in General

Education that were conceived and designedin graduate seminars, in an inventive collab-oration that gives graduate students a directrole in the most sweeping shift in Harvard’sundergraduate curriculum in more than 30 years.

The Graduate Seminars in GeneralEducation, the invention of GSAS dean AllanBrandt, began a year before the new GeneralEducation undergraduate curriculum itself waslaunched last fall. That curriculum, adoptedby the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2007after years of review and negotiation, laysout a set of requirements that all HarvardCollege students — starting with this year’s

freshman class, the Class of 2013 — mustfulfill outside of their concentrations in orderto graduate. The program’s vision is broad:the curriculum seeks to inspire in students a firm sense of the connection between whatthey learn in the classroom and the life theywill live outside of the University.

Harvard College students will completeone course in each of eight categories:Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding,Culture and Belief, Empirical and MathematicalReasoning, Ethical Reasoning, Science ofLiving Systems, Science of the PhysicalUniverse, Societies of the World, UnitedStates in the World. The program explicitly

PhD students (from left) Stephen Vider, Nicolas Sternsdorff, and Jerad Mulcare are teaching fellows for Joyce

Chaplin’s new General Education class on American food and its history. They helped design the course during

a graduate seminar last year.

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aims to prepare students for civic and ethicalengagement, while grounding them in theessential ideas and traditions that constitutea broad education.

It’s “a curriculum about connecting,”said Harvard College Dean EvelynnHammonds last fall, at a forum introducingthe new program. Connections, as it turnsout, not just among the disciplines, orbetween the classroom and life outside, butalso between the two parts of the FAS.

“One of the things we know is thatwhen we present a curriculum, graduate students are always significantly involved,”says GSAS Dean Brandt. “It seemed to me,around the time I was becoming dean, that itwould really be a shame for the faculty to behaving this intensive debate — devoting timeto developing new courses and thinkingabout what general education is, how itshould be presented, and how to innovatepedagogically — without engaging theGraduate School.”

Brandt also understood that “in anytransition to a new curriculum, it’s alwaysdifficult to develop genuinely new, innovativecourses, especially when the faculty has a significant investment. So the questionlooming for our College was how best toreally intensify the transition.”

He began to consider strategies for utilizing the intelligence and energy of graduate students in a way that might alsoencourage faculty members to sign on todevelop new courses. The idea of makingthat process itself into a course for graduatestudents seemed like a natural win. “Thatway, faculty could set aside the time, andgraduate students could really becomeengaged in substantive ways,” Brandt says.“Rather than do this in an ad hoc way, wecould actually do it in a course that was

promoting the intellectual development ofgraduate students, helping to develop theirinstructional and pedagogic abilities, andassisting in the outcome of a new course.”

Conceptualizing new courses is a primaryresponsibility of any faculty, and it can beamong the most creative work that facultydo, Brandt says. “But it’s often done in a notcompletely observed way,” he continues.“We go off and think about readings, mate-rials, lab resources, fundamental theoreticalquestions in our fields, and then we developa course. This all seemed to me to be inade-quately transparent to our graduate students,who, of course, will be asked to do this whenthey become faculty.”

Thus was born the initiative that resultedin the new Graduate Seminars in GeneralEducation (GSGEs), 8 of which were offeredlast year, 13 this year, and more to come. Theseminars have so far generated four coursesfor the undergraduate curriculum, two beingtaught this year (including Chaplin’sAmerican Food) and two next. StephanieKenen, associate dean of undergraduate education and the administrative director ofthe Program in General Education, says thatat their best, these seminars have been“incredible collaborative efforts” in whichgraduate students make substantial contribu-tions, rather than just receive training in howcourse development happens.

The experience for graduate students canbe rewarding on levels that encompass peda-gogy, disciplinary expertise, and professionaldevelopment, Kenen says. “They’ve taughtfor people, but to do all this research andread deeply in the field, beyond what youknow, but then to go through the thoughtprocess of how and why do you choose thematerials and assignments you’re going touse in an undergraduate course — it’s very

exciting. How do you take this sophisticated,methodological scholarship and translatethat into an undergraduate course?”

Participants in the seminar are givenfirst rights to become teaching fellows in theresulting undergraduate class, so studentswill in many cases have the chance to judgethe fruits of their work in real time. Learningfirsthand about what works best, and whatdoesn’t work at all, in an undergraduateclassroom is even more meaningful when youhave an ownership stake.

Joyce Chaplin knew she’d give students inher graduate seminar, which was offered lastspring, a substantial role to play in helpingher build her new course on American foodand its history.

Chaplin, who considers herself an environmental historian, had written aboutagriculture and early modern dietetics in earlier research, but says, “Food was nothingI had ever taught before. One of the incen-tives of the graduate seminar was that youcould train your TFs. I thought, ‘Perfect.These smart young people will help me thinkthrough the material and then maybe they’llcome along and teach the course with me.’”

The students helped her explore readingsand craft exercises for the undergraduates,she says, but she was also trying to teachthem how to teach. “I encouraged them tothink in terms of the books you assign toyour students and the books you use for yourlectures (and don’t mix them up!), how muchinformation you put onto a syllabus, andwhat a paper topic should look like.” Shesays she gained insights of her own aboutpedagogical challenges that might arise witha course like this. “I was trying to make surethe lectures and materials were a good mix— that there would be some stuff aboutdomesticity and cooking, some stuff aboutempires — so that there would be shifting,but cumulatively meaningful, ways of lookingat food,” she says. “I thought, ‘This can’t bea course on cuisine and taste only. It probablycan’t be a course only on labor regimes.’”Instead, it had to be about all of that, and more.

Stephen Vider, a third-year PhD studentin history of American civilization, took thegraduate seminar and now TFs for the under-

Harvard University GSAS4

GENERAL EDUCATION

“I’M CONVINCED THAT IN GREAT RESEARCH UNIVER-

SITIES, THE RELATIONSHIP OF UNDERGRADUATE TO

GRADUATE EDUCATION IS ONE OF THE CRITICAL

QUESTIONS.” — Allan Brandt


graduate course. He laughs as he recallsChaplin’s habit of bringing in food that shecooked (or, in the case of an intricate jello mold,created) to tie in with whatever historicalperiod they were examining in the seminar.

As he describes the process of designingpaper assignments, Vider says he was mindfulthat “one of the purposes of the Gen Ed curriculum was to liberate professors tocome up with new strategies.” The assign-ment he designed follows that inspiration,pointing students to a database, rather than a single source, and asking them to explore itand come up with a topic. “It’s more like theexperience historians actually have whenthey’re digging through an archive to find a topic that interest them,” he says.

Vider and his fellow TF Jerad Mulcare,another former seminar student who alsodesigned a paper assignment, say there’ssomething both exciting and slightly unnervingabout watching the results of those designsessions play out in real time. “As a bunch ofgraduate students sitting around in seminar,we thought they’d be fine. But you neverknow. You only find out by doing it,” saysMulcare, a third-year student in history.

Nicolas Sternsdorff, a second-year studentin anthropology, says he enrolled in the seminar not just because he’s interested infood cultures, but also for the pedagogicalbenefits. “I definitely see a trajectorybetween the seminar, the course, and myown teaching,” he says. “It’s helpful to have a sense of where the lectures are going andwhy the assignments are there. I rememberdiscussions we had in the graduate seminarthat are coming up now.”

“It’s unique, to have helped create thiscourse,” says Vider. “I do feel more owner-ship. Other courses have been collaborative,but this was new.”

A perpetual challenge in curricular devel-opment is finding ways to sustain themomentum and continue to introduce newcourses over time, says Brandt. He sees theGSGEs as one mechanism for ensuring thatcurricular innovation continues at Harvard.As they grow in number and reputation, theGSGEs can be a standing invitation to facultythinking about a new course, helping to

provide a mutually beneficial framework forthe process. And they can serve other instru-mental goals of both the College and theGraduate School, not least of which is firmingup connections within the FAS.

“I’ve been concerned about the insulationof graduate education from undergraduateeducation in general,” Brandt says. “I’m reallyconvinced that in great research universities,

the relationship of undergraduate to graduateeducation is one of the critical questions.

“There can be tensions between goals andpriorities, and the time and energy that facultyinvest in both,” he continues. “Anytime wecan find approaches that make clear theadvantages of embedding graduate andundergraduate education, that’s a desirableoutcome.”

“I THOUGHT, ‘PERFECT. THESE SMART YOUNG PEOPLE

WILL HELP ME THINK THROUGH THE MATERIAL, AND

THEN MAYBE THEY’LL COME ALONG AND TEACH THE

COURSE WITH ME.’” — Joyce Chaplin

Joyce Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, conceived of the class as a way to

explore connections among people and the natural world.

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When Chaya Czernowin’s first opera waspremiered at the Munich Biennale in 2000,audience members were moved to tears. The piece, Pnima . . . ins Innere, is based on the opening chapter of the 1989 novel See Under: Love, by Israeli writer DavidGrossman. In the story, a precocious Israeliboy tries to connect to his grandfather, a concentration camp survivor whose lifewas shattered by the trauma. In many ways,that story is Czernowin’s own.

“Pnima was autobiographical,” saysCzernowin, a native of Israel and a leading figure in experimental contemporary music,who last fall became Walter Bigelow RosenProfessor of Music at Harvard. “Both of myparents are Holocaust survivors. DavidGrossman created something completely

autobiographical and personal, based on hisown history. I did as well.

“I think we both needed to talk aboutthe Holocaust,” she continues, “not in a self-righteous, blaming, or justifying way, but tofigure out the way it was present in our lives.How does one approach a trauma that isunspoken, impossible to talk about or comprehend, but that is present in one’s lifeon every level, through one’s parents?”

The haunting work, which will haveanother staging in July at the StuttgartStaatstheater, grapples with the difficulty of communicating a deeply harrowing experience. Perhaps fittingly for a piece that attempts to speak about the unspeak-able, Pnima opened a new window ontoCzernowin’s work, putting her on the map as

a composer who not only wrote ethereal,“difficult” new music, but who was able tocreate emotionally intense internal land-scapes of sound with universal themes.

“My contemporary operas are notabstract,” Czernowin says. “They are a placefor me to figure things out. In Zaide/Adama[commissioned by the Salzburg Festival in2005–06], I could reflect on and express myanger and frustration with Palestinian/Israelirelations, and in Pnima, reflect on my ownchildhood biography. These works considerthe fabric of life, as it were.

“My chamber and orchestral music, onthe other hand, creates islands of alternativelife,” she continues. “There I can be extremelyprobing and push things toward questioningevery aspect of music we take for granted, or

MUSIC

SPEAKING SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLETHE UNSPEAKABLE

In language both abstract

and grounded, composer

Chaya Czernowin probes the

limits of time and space

By Les ley Bannatyne

Lesl

ey B

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tyne

create alternate realities, like strangelymutated organic elements — stones, roots, orwater, for example.”

Czernowin’s compositions have beenperformed at more than fifty festivals around the world and include commissionsby major ensembles, orchestras, and festivals(among others, Ensemble Modern, theArditti Quartet, Klangforum Wien, EnsembleInterContemporain, ELISION, the SanFrancisco Contemporary Music Players, theVienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and theMunich Philharmonic). She has receivedmany international awards for her work,including the Kranichstein Music Prize(1992), Asahi Shimbun Fellowship Prize(1993), the Schloss Solitude Fellowship(1996), the IRCAM reading panel (1998),the Rockefeller Foundation Prize (2004), andthe Fromm Foundation Award (2008).

In 2005 and 2006, when she was composer in residence, the Salzburg Festivalcommissioned her to supplement Mozart’sopera Zaide. The resulting work, Zaide/Adama, fragments, was the first attempt to answer an unfinished work with an intervening contemporary “counterpointwork.” It was broadcast on Germany’s ARD network and recorded for DeutscheGrammophon.

And Pnima . . . ins Innere, the work thathelped shape her career, was awarded theBavarian Theater Prize at its debut and laternamed the best premiere of the year by themagazine Opernwelt. The opera is still very

much a part of Czernowin’s creative life. In2008 it had a new production in Weimar, andCzernowin has been involved with theupcoming Stuttgart production for the pastthree years. “It will involve 100 children andbe directed by Korean director Yona Kim,”she says. “The theater wanted to highlightthe universal side of the work. I am reallylooking forward to this.”

She’s now working on a piece calledlovesong, for the German ensemble Recherche’s25th anniversary, and she’s thinking ahead to two orchestral commissions: Sand, snow, a study of dust, for the Bavarian RadioSymphony Orchestra, and a piece for guitarand orchestra for the Lucerne Festival, whereshe will be in residence in 2011.

“I work on one thing at a time,” saysCzernowin. “But there are many piecesgrowing inside me in various stages of completion. I let them grow subconsciouslywhile working on other pieces, and thenwhen I work on them the inquisitive light ofconscious thinking shines on them as well.”

And teaching? Where does that fit into hercreative life?

Czernowin laughs. “From a young age —I was maybe four or five — I would gatherthe children from my neighborhood and sitthem in a line in our small yard. I had a blackboard, and I would play the teacher ina classroom. Teaching has always been verynatural for me.” As early as elementaryschool, she says, she was sent to classroomswhose teachers were absent, because the children would listen to her stories.

Teaching has been part of her profes-sional life since she was 20. Before Harvard,she was at the University of California SanDiego and then the University of Music andPerforming Arts in Vienna.

“Composition and teaching can mutuallybenefit each other,” Czernowin says. “Inorder to teach in a deep way, which I alwaystry to do, you have to see the score almost asif it were a person. What is hiding in thisscore, what is trying to emerge, be expressed?It is an intimate dialogue with another person’s mental language. One can learn somuch from this kind of dialogue. It is anapproach to acceptance and to critiquewhich leads to stronger clarity about whereand when to deepen or refine something, versus where and when to erase or change.

“Exercising this clarity is very pertinentwhen returning to one’s own work. This isone of the ways in which teaching keeps meon my toes creatively.”


ChemistryEric Block, PhD ’67, has published Garlic and OtherAlliums: The Lore and the Science. The book is the culmination of over 35 years of research on the history, culture, and chemistry of the members ofthe Allium genus: garlic, onions, and leek. Block is currently the Carla Rizzo Delray DistinguishedProfessor of Chemistry at the University of Albany,State University of New York, and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Comparative LiteratureDeborah Heller, PhD ’70, has written Daughtersand Mothers in Alice Munro’s Later Stories, an essay on how the interpretation of Munro’s earlier auto-biographical works is shaped by mother-daughterconflict in her later fiction. Heller is an associateprofessor of humanities emerita at York University.

EconomicsFelipe Larraín, PhD ’85, is Finance Minister in thenew government of Chilean President SebastianPiñera, PhD ’76. He is also a member of theGraduate School Alumni Association Council.

English and American Literature and LanguageG. Y. Dryansky, AM ’60, is busy writing novels in Paris, with his wife, Joanne. Their latest, Satan Lake,is coming out in June from Actes Sud. They’ve alsodone the sequel to Fatima’s Good Fortune, publishedby Miramax Books in the United States and repub-lished worldwide. The new Fatima book, Fortune’sSecond Wink, debuts with the Editions Héloïsed’Ormesson in April.

Michael Shinagel, PhD ’64, has won the annualFrandson Award for Literature given by theUniversity Continuing Education Association(UCEA) for his recently published book, The GatesUnbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard, 1910–2009. [See page 14.] Shinagel is Deanof Harvard Extension School.

Helen P. Trimpi, PhD ’66, has published CrimsonConfederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South,a biographical register of the 357 Harvard alumniwho served in the Confederate Army during theCivil War. Trimpi has taught at Stanford Universityand previously published a book and several essayson Herman Melville.

History of ScienceLara Freidenfelds, AB ’94, PhD ’03, is pleased to announce that her book, The Modern Period:Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America (JohnsHopkins University Press), has won the 2009 EmilyToth Award for Best Book in Women’s Studies

alumni notes

continued on page 9

UPCOMING PERFORMANCES

•Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice Composer-in-residenceNew England ConservatoryJune 12–19, 2010 http://sicpp.org

••Pnima . . . ins InnereOpernhaus, Stuttgart, GermanyJuly 9–22, 2010

•••Composer PortraitMiller Theatre at Columbia UniversityApril 8, 2011www.millertheatre.com

yy


s a researcher, Kevin Kit Parkerdelights in exploring the nuances of cardiac cell biology and tissue

engineering, traumatic brain injury, andmicro- and nanotechnologies. An associateprofessor of biomedical engineering, he leadsthe Disease Biophysics Group at the Schoolof Engineering and Applied Sciences, and he’sa core member of Harvard’s Wyss Institutefor Biologically Inspired Engineering.

But he has another profession, one that’sequally important to him. He is a major inthe U.S. Army, and late last summer hereturned from his second tour of duty inAfghanistan.

There wasn’t much time for R&R.Parker’s lab needed his attention, and askeenly as he’d felt a sense of duty on the battlefield, he felt the same on campus.Almost a dozen manuscripts were nearingcompletion, a PhD student needed a disserta-tion ushered, and postdocs needed letters of recommendation. “They did a great jobwhile I was gone,” says Parker of his juniorresearchers, “but their lives can’t be put onhold for mine.”

The balancing act is a burden thatwould fall heavily on some, but Parker,known informally as Kit, is a larger-than-life figure (literally, at 6'5", as much asmetaphorically) with an easy sense of humorand a deep Southern drawl that defuses tensioneven as it establishes leadership. Once you’vebeen where he’s been, his manner suggests,there’s not much else to get riled about.

In a recent conversation, he talked abouthis work and drew connections between thelab and the battlefield.

What’s exciting you in the lab these days?One thing is our tissue engineering effort.Two of my postdocs, Adam Feinberg andMohammad Badrossamay, are working onnew techniques to make protein textiles —making fabrics and fibers out of proteins.You can exploit the secondary and tertiarystructures of the protein to get uniquemechanical and chemical properties.

How did the work develop?The nanofibers story is a good one. I got invitedto speak at a Society of LaparoendoscopicSurgeons meeting on the future of surgery. I got there early and was checking out theequipment demonstrations, and it dawnedon me: Wow, we do all this tissue engineeringthat starts off with a chunk of polymer. Butnow, when you get operated on, it all goes inthrough a small hole. Nothing we’re buildingin the lab right now is going to go into a holethat small.

So what did you do?A long time ago, I’d seen someone use a cottoncandy machine to weave fibers. I got thisidea: What if you could take a cotton candymachine, weave some protein fabrics out ofit, and then miniaturize it and put it insidethe body? You’d go in there, inflate someone’sabdomen with gas, weave a three-dimensionalstructure with your nanofibers right in thebody, and use it as a scaffold for your engi-neered tissue or to repair a damaged organ.

col.lo.quy: a conversation, a dialogue...with KIT PARKER, associate professor of biomedical engineering

Finding the line between scientist and soldier

A Wiq

an A

ng

Associate Professor Kit Parker says his military training helps him run a more efficient lab, with an emphasis

on mutual trust and accountability.


I had my lab manager, Josh Goss, go out andbuy a cotton candy machine, and I just said,“Play with it. Just play.”

Adam had already been doing proteinnanofabrics, and I wanted to see if we couldmake something more deployable. So I hiredMohammad, who had a background in textiles and an in-depth understanding ofpolymer science. He got here two monthsbefore my last deployment to Afghanistan. I said, “Make me nanofibers. I gotta go fight.”

And six months later, he had it. Josh isan expert scientific instrumentalist, and heessentially built our own version of a cottoncandy machine — but it’s tricked out. Nowwe’re getting ready to start working withRob Howe [Gordon McKay Professor ofEngineering at SEAS], a surgical roboticist,to miniaturize this thing and take it in vivo.

What else are you working on?Our lab is primarily a cardiac tissue engi-neering lab, but we launched a big effort intraumatic brain injury [TBI] a few years ago.As an undergraduate in our lab, BornaDabiri [AB ’07] started building tools formimicking blast injury to engineered neuronsand vascular tissues. He went to medicalschool at UC Irvine, but I convinced him totake a sabbatical to come back. He’s here ona Pierce Fellowship to do a PhD in biomedicalengineering. He’s working with another PhDstudent, Matt Hemphill, and they’re goinggreat guns after this TBI problem.

What’s their approach?The idea is to build in vitro models of blastinjury — to develop a set of tools that mainstream this science. Because in trauma science, the problem is that the experimentsusually require animals. They’re prettygnarly. The question is, can you use engi-neered tissues to mimic in vivo structures anddo these kinds of experiments without blowing anything up. Our team has built a series of technologies to help us understandthe scaling laws of blast injuries — under-stand them all the way from the proteinensemble or macromolecular scale up towhole engineered tissues.

It’s important work, judging from all the newsabout IEDs.Even before it got out in the press, it wasclear we had a problem. These guys were

getting their bells rung. Early on, the IEDswere kind of crude, but on this last tour, I saw much more sophisticated technology.

We’ve got soldiers out there that havebeen blown up 12 or 13 times. The questionis, what are the long-term consequences forthese young guys? Are we going to see ourVA hospitals flooded with a bunch of 40-year-old men who suffer from dementia,Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s? This is a public-health crisis that we’re about 15 years outfrom, but it’s going to hit hard.

I believe there are therapeutic opportu-nities in first 10 minutes to an hour after a blast. What I want to know is, what are the signaling pathways that get turned onfirst? In combat casualty care, we talk about the golden hour, trying to get casualties off the battlefield and back tomedical care within an hour. Now we’restarting to think about the platinum ten, the ten minutes after the injury, and aboutwhat’s happening. That’s when people aresuffering a cascade of injuries that later can’tbe reversed.

What part of your scientist self goes with you to the battlefield?The scientific method is applicable anywhere.My first tour in Afghanistan, I had a verygood team sergeant named Aaron Chapman.He and I would patrol and develop hypothesesabout what we were seeing. We’d say, if thisis what we think is happening, then we need to answers questions A, B, and C to testthat out. The tools are different, the scale isdifferent, the thinking is the same.

What part of the battlefield do you take back to the lab?Managing people is probably the best thing I bring back. In both situations, the key toproductivity is accountability and teamwork.Look, in both of my professions, the 18–30year old demographic is where I live. I putmy life in their hands on the battlefield, and I make my living with them in the lab. In both situations, these are young peoplewho are pushing hard to push the envelope. I have seen what they’re capable of in the lab, and I’ve seen what they’re capable of on the battlefield. The achievers are thesame, it’s just the medium of their achieve-ment that differs.

alumni notes continued from page 7

from the Popular Culture Association/AmericanCulture Association. Find more about the book at www.themodernperiod.com. Freidenfelds is currently working as an independent scholar on hernext book, about the history of experiences of first-trimester pregnancy and early-pregnancy loss.

MusicJack Behrens, PhD ’73, reports that CentaurRecords has released a CD of his Homages for Piano Solo, performed by Bianca Baciu. Baciu’s book, Death of the Author — A Tribute: Aspects ofPostmodernism in Jack Behrens’s Homages for PianoSolo, has been published by VDM Verlag Dr. Müller(2008). Behrens is currently Dean of AdvancedStudies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Music.

Organismic and Evolutionary BiologyMichael J. Balick, PhD ’80, has compiled and edited Ethnobotany of Pohnpei: Plants, People and IslandCulture, a volume about the relationship betweenplants, people, and traditional culture on Pohnpei, anisland of Micronesia. Balick is the vice president for botanical science and director and philecologycurator of the Institute of Economic Botany at theNew York Botanical Garden. He teaches ethno-botany courses at Columbia University.

Sociology and Study of ReligionRobert R. N. Ross, PhD ’73, has publishedWalking to New Orleans: Ethics and the Concept ofParticipatory Design in Post-Disaster Reconstruction, co-written with Deanne Ross. The book is an explo-ration of the relationship between nature andhuman society, using the example of the HurricaneKatrina tragedy to suggest a practical approach forthe collaborative reconstruction of natural environ-ments and neighborhoods. Ross currently teachesphilosophy and the study of religion at theUniversity of Massachusetts, Boston, and at StarrKing School for the Ministry/Graduate TheologicalUnion in Berkeley, California.

Submit Alumni Notes to: Colloquy, Harvard University

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Holyoke Center

350, 1350 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-

3846; fax: 617-496-5333; or gsaa@fas. harvard.edu. Alumni

Notes are subject to editing for length and clarity.

On the afternoon of June 8, 1972, on a smoke-filled roadway outside theVietnamese village of Trang Bang, a youngAssociated Press photographer named NickUt got the shot of his life. Ut had made thedangerous trip from Saigon to meet SouthVietnamese units as they prepared to engagethe North over control of the road and thevillage. Along with other photographers, hewatched as South Vietnamese jets droppednapalm bombs on the village, then snapped

images that captured the panic and despair ofcivilians, many of them children, who fledthe ruined village, burned and desperate.One of those images, in which a nine-year-old girl runs naked and crying down theroad, having ripped off her burning clothes,became one of the iconic photographs ofmodern history.

Thirty-five years later, to the day, NickUt took another image that soon made itsway to media outlets around the world. This

HISTORY OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE

By Bar i Walsh

Where good fortune

and good form come

together, a photograph

becomes art

Robin Kelsey, PhD ’87, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography

Har

vard

New

s O

ffice

{time, the shot was of a crying Paris Hilton, in a car on the way to county jail in LosAngeles. In both cases, he was in the rightplace at the right time (no mean feat in either situation), and he was prepared, persistent, and lucky. One photo is art; theother, spectacle.

The difference in outcome, along withquestions of intent, meaning, and the propor-tionality of talent and good fortune, makesphotography a fascinating and a tricky art, says

Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professorof Photography in the History of Art andArchitecture Department. Kelsey, PhD ’87, isexploring those tensions as he prepares themanuscript for a forthcoming book on pho-tography and chance, to be published later thisyear by the University of California Press.

He’s working through the history ofphotography episodically, “focusing on practices that I think grapple most intelli-gently, most sensitively, with the issue of

chance,” Kelsey says. “Part of my interest isin understanding chance as a historical idea.It’s often treated as that impish agency whichescapes all systemization, and, as a result, it’soften treated ahistorically. But of course,what chance means changes dramatically


Julia Margaret Cameron Julia Jackson“Of the several superb portraits that Cameronmade of Virginia Woolf’s mother, this one wasevidently Cameron’s favorite and has becomemine. It characteristically associates melancholywith the stranding of the subject between a literary idealism and the surface accidents ofbodily life.”

Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College,Wellesley, MA. Given in honor of Eugenia Parry Janis by Prof.and Mrs. Hugo Munsterberg (Peggy Brown, Class of 1943).

Flash of Genius Robin Kelsey on four of his favorite photographs

throughout history. I’m trying to give anaccount of how chance and photographyhave changed together over the history of the medium.”

At the beginning of that history, in the1820s and the 1830s, Kelsey notes, a new science of social statistics was gaining prominence. New statistical models wereuncovering predictable patterns in seeminglyrandom occurrences. “So, statisticians foundthat the number of letters in the dead letteroffice in Paris is approximately the sameevery year,” says Kelsey. “They found that thenumber of suicides is roughly the same everyyear, and not just suicides, but the number ofpeople who kill themselves by jumping outwindows is the same. That there’s regularityin things that once seemed random.”

This regularity raised theological questions that would persist for the rest ofthe century, Kelsey says. “Regularity had traditionally been understood in a theologicalsense, but it seemed mind-bending to imaginethat the divine was concerned with the number of letters in the dead letter office,” he says. The invention of photography —announced to the world by two of its

competing pioneers, Louis Daguerre inFrance and William Henry Fox Talbot inEngland, in early 1839 — coincided withthese new questions about randomness anddesign. “Talbot was keenly aware thatchance played a role in the production ofthese pictures in a way that it did not in anyother medium,” says Kelsey. “This was thefirst time you had pictures being created inwhich every mark was not intentionallydelivered by a hand.”

Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, the firstbook illustrated with photographs, motivatedKelsey’s interest in the topic. “I realized thathe was, tacitly at least, creating a theory of the role of chance in photography. It’s a deceptively simple book, but I came tobelieve it’s actually a brilliant book, very subtle in its argumentation. I wanted to tracethat forward.”

His project seeks to record “an intergen-erational conversation among photographers”on managing and rationalizing chance, hesays. After Talbot, Kelsey moves to theVictorian period, where the rise of financialmarkets helped associate chance with socialupheaval, “with the fact that people can


HISTORY OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Talbot:The Stapleton Collection / Art Resource, NY

Sommer:© Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation.

Frederick SommerJackrabbit“Sommer brilliantly unmade the distinctionbetween figure and ground in this study ofdesert decomposition.”

William Henry Fox TalbotThe Open Door“An image that combines aesthetic conservatismand visionary modernity. Ushers in the thendim possibility of photography as art and associates it with the medium’s peculiar truckwith time.”

}Colloquy Spring 201013

become millionaires overnight, or paupers.”There was a discomfort with the moral

implications of the new economic order, andfor the British photographer Julia MargaretCameron, a sense that photography hadbecome, in its short history, much too alignedwith industry, compromising its aestheticpurpose. “She was largely self-taught, andshe understood herself as in some sense reinventing the medium,” Kelsey says. Herphotographs have a dreamy, gauzy quality tothem, and in their composition they can seemstartlingly modern.

“She employed accident or chance inremarkable ways,” Kelsey explains. “Criticshave been puzzled by why she accepted whatseems like sloppiness or defects in her photographs — things like arbitrary focus,fingerprints, and what some have said wasdefective equipment. My own theory aboutthat has to do with performance. In lettersshe talked about the process of making a photographic portrait in a way that suggestsshe understood it as an exchange of perform-ances. The sitter performs for her, she performsfor the sitter. Because she wanted those performances to mingle on the surface of the

photograph, she invited her own bodilylabor, as well as the irrepressible life of thesitter, to leave its mark.”

In the 20th century, the connotations ofchance are influenced first by Freud, “wherein a sense you have a return to determinism,”Kelsey says, and then by physics, which theorizes the intentionality of chance, posi-tioning it as a fundamental element in themakeup of the universe. Meanwhile, photog-raphers have become more interested in suppressing chance; art photographers likeCindy Sherman, working in what’s called thedirectorial mode, produce pictures of elaboratestaging and closely controlled drama, andamateur photographers routinely edit the redeyes and ex-spouses out of their pictures.

But all that hasn’t altered photography’sinherent susceptibility to chance, Kelsey says.The role of fortune was on the mind of PeterHenry Emerson, a British photographer ofthe later Victorian era, when he wrote to theAmerican photographer Alfred Stieglitz, trying to get Stieglitz to enter a photo compe-tition. “Emerson wrote, ‘you have to send meseveral photographs, because anyone canmake a lucky photograph one time.’ This

notion that anyone can get lucky is some-thing that I think haunts photography,” saysKelsey. Stieglitz himself ruminated on therole of luck in a later essay, wondering howto measure its effect over a long career.

“It’s all well and good to say that thegreat photographer shows him- or herselfover time by producing many more greatphotographs,” says Kelsey. “But what doesthat still say about any individual photograph?It’s fine to say that the track record separatesout the Stieglitzs or the Cartier-Bressons, but the question of chance still looms. Oneimagines that Cartier-Bresson and Stieglitzalso got lucky sometimes. So when you’relooking at any individual photograph, whatcan you read into it in terms of intention?

“For someone working in an art historydepartment, with colleagues looking atMichelangelos and reading into them allkinds of intention and meaning, it’s some-thing one worries about,” Kelsey adds with a smile.

Roy DeCarava, Graduation, New York, 1949/printed 1982, gelatin silver print on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase made possible by Henry L. Milmore.

Roy DeCarava Graduation, New York“This photograph manages simultaneously to sustain

and shatter the Cinderella myth for this subject in

Harlem. Both moves could trouble our expectations.”

RECENTLY RECEIVED

the arabsA History

By Eugene Rogan,AM ’84,

PhD ’91, regional studies

— Middle East

Basic Books, 2009,

592 pp.

This work recounts 500 years of Arab history— marked by the encroachments of theOttoman Empire, European colonizers, theUnited States and the Soviet Union (during theCold War) — and more recent Americanactions.Yet rather than a litany of victimization,Rogan offers a complex account of Arabachievements and failures, faith and aspirations.He draws on many firsthand observers — an18th-century Damascus barber, a young Egyptiandoing a “reverse Tocqueville” in early 19th-century France, among others. The result is a welcome corrective to the one-dimensionalimages of Arabs and Islam that have marred popular culture and political discourse.

treading softlyPaths to Ecological Order

By Thomas Princen,

MPA ’83, PhD ’88,

political economy and

government

MIT Press, 2010, 224 pp.

For a sustainable future, Princen argues,societies and economies must live within theirmeans. Where current responses to environ-mental crisis either envision a world much like the present, just “greened up and mademore efficient,” or predict a global collapse (the “doom-and-gloomers”), Princen suggests the possibility of a sweeping yet truly positiveoutcome. The transformation — not just inbricks and mortar, but in assumptions anddesires — won’t be easy. Unfortunately, hisfocus on the “vision thing” doesn’t offer muchhelp with the problem of getting there from here.

“the gates unbarred”A History of University Extension at Harvard,1910−2009

By Michael Shinagel,

PhD ’64

Harvard University

Extension School, 2009,

250 pp.

Written by Harvard’s long-time Dean ofContinuing Education and University Extension,The Gates Unbarred recounts the first century of the University Extension program. Rooted in the Lowell Institute, a lecture series estab-lished by John Lowell Jr. (1799−1836), Harvard’sExtension School was established soon afterAbbott Lawrence Lowell,Trustee of the Institute,became University president. Over the years, theschool has offered inexpensive night courses(often taught by illustrious faculty members),pioneered educational broadcasting (radio and television), and developed an educationalprogram for the US Navy.


alumni books

Alumni authors: If you have published a general-interest book within the past year and would like

it considered for inclusion, send a copy to Colloquy, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Holyoke

Center 350, 1350 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138. Questions? E-mail [email protected].


the two hendricksUnraveling a Mohawk Mystery

By Eric Hinderaker,

PhD ’91, history

Harvard University Press,

2010, 368 pp.

Mohawk leaders Tejonihokarawa (ca. 1660−1735) and Theyanoguin (ca. 1691−1755) — who asbaptized Christians shared the common Dutchname Hendrick — have long been conflated into a single historical figure.The two Hendrickswere notable for their alliance with Anglo-America against the French, and their leadershipand diplomatic efforts played a significant role inshaping the imperial struggle for North America.In disentangling their lives, Hinderaker not onlysets the record straight but underscores theagency of Native Americans — particularly theIroquois Confederacy — in the colonial era.

the story of americanbusinessFrom the Pages of The New York Times

Edited by Nancy F. Koehn,

MPP ’83, PhD ’90, history

Harvard Business Press,

2009, 416 pp.

This anthology of articles from The New YorkTimes outlines various themes in the history ofAmerican business — from corporate consoli-dation to technological innovation to the changing nature of the American workplace.Koehn provides useful introductions to the various thematically organized chapters, offeringbackground and context, but the work stands onthe strength of the selected articles, which areuniformly lively and often strikingly insightful.The collection focuses on the 20th century(with a relative handful of pieces coming fromthe 19th and 21st centuries).

drawing the linePublic and Private in America

By Andrew Stark,

PhD ’85, government

Brookings Institution

Press, 2009, 245 pp.

One key to our contentious politics involvesdisagreement over “public” and “private.”However, Andrew Stark argues, liberals and conservatives — in debating welfare, healthcare, education, etc. — repeatedly ground theirarguments in both public and private values(though they do so in quite divergent ways).Stark highlights the resulting ironies — e.g.,a gated California community that incorporatedas a municipality so its expenses would be tax-deductible but located its “city hall” safely outside the gates (otherwise anyone couldenter their exclusive community to reach thepublic building).

the neural imaginationAesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts

By Irving Massey,

PhD ’54, comparative

literature

University of Texas Press,

2009, 195 pp.

In exploring the nexus of neuroscience andaesthetics, Massey’s brief but dense narrativeinvestigates how scientific advances can influ-ence the arts (for example, discussing linksbetween 19th-century psychology and the riseof cubism) as well as ways in which neuro-science provides a lens for understanding thecreative processes at work in poetry, art, andmusic. But, he insists, despite its explanatorypower, neuroscience can’t supplant, displace, orexplain away humanistic interpretations of thearts. As ways of knowing, neuroscience and aesthetics simply cannot be conflated.

the pueblo revolt and the mythology ofconquestAn Indigenous Archaeology of Contact

By Michael V. Wilcox,

PhD ’01, anthropology

University of California

Press, 2009, 334 pp.

This book is an excellent case study and a compelling manifesto for what Wilcox (himselfa Pueblo Indian) terms “Indigenous anthropology”— anthropology marked by close collaborationbetween researchers and the Native Americancommunity. His interdisciplinary approach to the1680 Pueblo revolt combines century-oldethnographies, contemporary oral sources,historical scholarship, social science theory, andarchaeological findings. And he deftly advancestwo larger arguments — that research shouldfocus on native cultures’ long-term survival, nottheir “demise,” and that narratives premised onthe role of disease and native population collapsein explaining colonial conquest seriously misrep-resent the scale and impact of European violence.

the warcraft civilizationSocial Science in a Virtual World

By William Sims

Bainbridge, PhD ’75,

sociology

MIT Press, 2010, 256 pp.

Large-scale, multi-player computer games likeWorld of Warcraft are elaborate enough toqualify as virtual societies. And WilliamBainbridge offers the logical counterpart:virtual sociology. After spending 2,300 hoursplaying World of Warcraft, Bainbridge is now the undisputed authority on this fantasy game.Indeed, in 2008, he organized the first-ever scientific conference held within the World ofWarcraft, although he conceded that the participants “all died during the final day’s socialevent — a massive raid on an enemy fort.”

Reviews by James Clyde Sellman, PhD ’93, history

ON AND OFF CAMPUS


news and notes

Har

vard

Uni

vers

ity H

erba

ria

Minister Quentin Davies, left, was the special guest at a GSAS alumni luncheon

in London. Among the attendees were Allen Sangínes-Krause, PhD ’87, and Mia de

Kuijper, MPA/PhD ’83.

HONORING A HARVARD CENTENARIANThe Harvard Club of Hong Kong celebrated the 100th birthday of Dr. Shiu Ying Hu, PhD ’49, with a ceremony at Chung Chi College in Hong Kong on February 26. Hu was one of the firstChinese women to earn a PhD (in cellular and developmental biology) at Radcliffe, and she went on to a 50-year career as a botanist at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Over the course of her accomplished tenure — and even beyond, into her retirement — she made significant contributionsto our understanding of Chinese medicinal plants, food plants, orchids, and the flora of Hong Kong,publishing more than 160 papers, a book entitled Food Plants of China (in 2005), and an index of158,844 file cards for Chinese plant names, now housed at the Harvard University Herbaria.

As a Chinese researcher living and working in America during a time when formal ties betweenthe two nations did not exist, Hu was an intellectual ambassador, networking with fellow scientistsand sending current books, publications, and journal articles back and forth. She was also a pioneerin crossing gender barriers, conducting fieldwork in western Sichuan in the late 1930s and early1940s, at a time when few women in any part of the world were doing so.

Hu has spent the later part of her career in Asia, serving as an honorary professor of Chinese medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and senior college tutor of Chung Chi College.

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GSAS deans and alumni met in London on January 20 for a day of networking,learning, and reconnecting. The Global GSAS series, in partnership withthe Harvard Club of the United Kingdom, brought Harvard economistBenjamin Friedman, AB ’66, PhD ’71, to town for an evening presentationin the City on the financial crisis and the moral threats arising in its after-math. Earlier in the day, a smaller group of alumni, along with GSAS DeanAllan Brandt, Administrative Dean Margot Gill, and several graduate studentsworking in London, met for lunch in Pall Mall at the Oxford and CambridgeClub. Quentin Davies, the United Kingdom’s Minister for DefenceEquipment and Support, an M.P. for Grantham and Stamford, and a formerFrank Knox Fellow at Harvard, was a special guest at the table. Davies leda lively conversation, during which he reflected on what his time atHarvard had meant to him — he recalled every faculty member withwhom he’d had a course — and pointed to recent issues in Europe thathe felt deserved greater attention from both American and European governments. After lunch, the group embarked on a private tour ofWestminster Abbey and School.

Shiu Ying Hu, PhD ’49


ON DEVELOPMENT

How can we expand the distribution ofpotable water supplies in Kenya? Can weimprove international agreements on climatechange? How do large-scale natural disastersaffect local economies? These are just someof the questions debated and tested by graduate students and faculty in theEnvironmental Economics Workshop, one ofmany Graduate Research Workshops spon-sored across the disciplines by the GraduateSchool of Arts and Sciences.

Matthew Ranson, a PhD candidate inpublic policy, is untangling data on air pollution. Evaluating the impact of nationalemission standards since their inception,Ranson is grappling with how to analyze regulations that vary by industry and date ofimplementation. “It depends on what kind ofstory you want to tell,” volunteers a peer, oneof many students sitting around a rectangulartable at one recent lunchtime session.

The feedback he receives from fellowstudents and faculty provides immeasurablehelp to Ranson, a predoctoral fellow in theHarvard Environmental Economics Program(HEEP). It’s one of the reasons he helps tocoordinate the workshops. “It’s a place tosolve problems, put assumptions to the test,and invite people’s opinions,” he says.

Professor Robert Stavins, center, is one of the faculty leaders of the Environmental Economics Research Workshop.

With him are student coordinators Matthew Ranson and Kelsey Jack, both PhD candidates in public policy.

By Leigh DuPuy Car l i s le

WHEREINNOVATIONINCUBATESGraduate Research Workshops

provide a friendly venue for

testing out new ideas

Jona

than

Rue

l

In this and other Graduate ResearchWorkshops, peers become collaborators andconstructive critics, assisting fellow studentsas they share works in progress and sharpentheir research. GSAS is now funding almost80 workshops, on subjects ranging fromhuman evolutionary biology and Indo-European linguistics to urban sociology andEast Asian archaeology. Faculty and studentssubmitted 86 workshop proposals for theMarch 2010 funding round, and 19 of those were entirely new. The value of thesegatherings is being felt across all fields.

Whether presenting a few slides, unveilingnew research, or preparing for interviews,students use the workshops as an informalenvironment for honing rigorous scholar-ship. “They are a supportive crowd,” saysRanson, “but they won’t hold back. They’lltell you their concerns.”

These are key experiences for studentspreparing for careers in academia. “It isextremely important for graduate students tohave regular opportunities to exchange ideasand receive feedback in a nonthreatening, user-friendly forum,” says HEEP director RobertStavins, the Albert Pratt Professor of Businessand Government at the John F. KennedySchool of Government. “These sessions are

foundational for future job talks, major publications, and groundbreaking findings.”

The workshops also help to foster a “community of scholars,” says Stavins. Forenvironmental economics, a relatively newfield, they offer a valuable opportunity forspecialists to connect. The sessions regularlyattract not only PhD students but also graduate students and scholars from as nearas Harvard Business School and MIT and asfar as Beijing.

“Our discussions form a perfect comple-ment to work with an adviser,” says coleader Kelsey Jack, a PhD candidate in public policy who researches how incentives for environmentally friendly land-use practices affect environmental out-comes. “The difference is, instead of getting feedback from a one-on-one encounter, you are getting a myriad of responses in a focus-group setting.”

Unrestricted funds help make theGraduate Research Workshops possible,underwriting the critical stewardship thatstudents need to develop innovative ideas.“This is a great way to ferret out bad ideas —and you can spend a lot of time on badideas,” says Ranson with a smile. “It’s key tobe able to present early and often.”

For information about how you can support

the Graduate School Fund, and about how that

support helps students, visit alumni.harvard.edu/give/

graduate-schools/gsf.

ALUMNI EVENTS AND NOTICESQuestions? Contact the GSAS Office of Alumni Relations at www.gsas.harvard.edu/alumni, [email protected], or 617-495-5591.

ALUMNI ASSOCIATIONHolyoke Center 350 • 1350 Massachusetts AvenueCambridge, Massachusetts 02138-3846 USA

Nonprofit OrganizationUS Postage

PAIDBoston, MA

Permit No. 1636

The graduate school of arts and sciencesharvard university

REGIONAL ALUMNI EVENT | APRIL 22, 2010 | TORONTOHarvard Club of Toronto “Veritas in Spring” 2010 Annual DinnerOne King West Hotel & Residence1 King Street West,TorontoReception at 6 p.m., dinner at 7 p.m.

Featuring a keynote address by GSAS Dean Allan M. Brandt. Please [email protected] for registration details.

STAY CONNECTED!Follow HarvardGSAS on Twitter and facebook for updatesfrom Cambridge about research, people, and networkingopportunities.

THE HAA GLOBAL PASSThe HAA Global Pass connects more than 190 Harvard clubs in morethan 70 countries by allowing members of participating clubs to attend

events at other participating clubs, on a space-availablebasis, at the local member price. The perk gives alumni an opportunity to engage with an integrated yet diverse global Harvard community. Find out more atwww.clubsandsigs.harvard.edu.

CALL FOR NOMINATIONSThe GSAS Centennial Medal and Graduate School AlumniAssociation CouncilHelp GSAS recognize its most distinguished alumnithrough nomination for the Centennial Medal. Themedal recognizes contributions to society as they haveemerged from graduate study at Harvard. Past recipientsinclude theological scholar Elaine Pagels, historianBernard Bailyn, author Susan Sontag, biologist E. O.Wilson, economist Jeffrey Sachs, and historian and memoirist Jill KerConway.The medal is awarded annually at a ceremony held in Cambridgeduring Commencement Week.

Alumni are also invited to submit nominations for the GSAACouncil, the governing body of the Harvard Graduate School AlumniAssociation.Typically, Council members have achieved distinction in theircareers or their community service. Council members share a strongcommitment to Harvard and to graduate education.

To nominate: Submit a letter stating your reasons for selecting thecandidate, marked either for the Centennial Medal or for the GraduateSchool Alumni Association Council, to: GSAS Alumni Association, HolyokeCenter 350, 1350 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138.Nominations may also be e-mailed to [email protected].

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