E V E N T S

G SAS NEWSdecember /january 2010– 11 Volume 13, number 3

Finding A Lost City 7

Life After Yale 8

www.yale.edu/graduateschool

Graduate School of arts and Sciences – yale university

Whiting Fellows 4

Modernism Lab (http://modernism.research.yale.edu/about.php) is a brilliant example of the application of technology to scholarship. Inspired by the collaborative environment of laboratories in the physical sciences, Pericles Lewis, professor of English and Comparative Literature, developed a virtual space designed to promote collaborative learning. Humani-ties research has always been collaborative, he says, with scholars revising or adding to the pool of accumulated knowledge, but often only after their articles or books have been printed. “In an online environment, that type of collaboration assumes a real-time character that pre-Internet research just didn’t offer,” he says. “We hope, by a process of shared investigation, to describe the emergence of modernism out of a background of social, political and existential ferment.” The main components of the Lab are an innovative research tool, Ynote—conceived by Lewis and developed by Yianni Yessios, manager of Yale’s Web Technologies—and

Gaurav Vazirani and Arik Ben-avi (Philoso-phy) have set up an outreach program with funding from the Graduate School at Hill Career Regional High School, where they taught a pilot course last year. This year they received a grant from the Squire Foundation to continue the project. Career High School was chosen as the pilot site for the program because it already had a Philosophy Club led by one

Continued on page 2 Continued on page 3

F r i d AY, d E C E m b E r 3, 5 p mF3: First Friday at Five, Graduate students’ happy hour. McDougal Center Common Room

S AT u r d AY, d E C E m b E r 4, 7 p mGrad Night @ Yale Rep. Bossa NovaTickets at www.yalerep.org

W E d N E S d AY, d E C E m b E r 8, 5 – 6 : 3 0 p mDean’s Winter Reception. McDougal Common Room and 119 HGS

m o N d AY, d E C E m b E r 1 3, 5 – 8 p mHGS Holiday Dinner. HGS Dining Hall. $ or meal plan

S AT u r d AY, d E C E m b E r 1 8Fall term ends

d E C E m b E r 2 4 – J A N uA r Y 3 Winter Recess. McDougal Center offices & facilities closed

m o N d AY, J A N uA r Y 1 0, 8 A mClasses resume

S AT u r d AY, J A N uA r Y 2 9, 7 p m Grad Night @ Yale Rep. The Piano LessonTickets at www.yalerep.org

S AT u r d AY, F E b r uA r Y 1 2 , 8 p m – 1 A m Eleventh Annual Winter Ball. Tickets on sale online starting February 1. www.yale.edu/mcdougal/studentlife

F E b r uA r Y 2 0 1 1Chocolate Fest–Grad Life events with chocolate all month long.

Full information on events above: http://calendar.yale.edu/cal/gsas

Technology Enhances pedagogyA hundred years ago in a bustling corner of London,

some of England’s greatest literary and artistic fig-

ures established a network of social, intellectual and

aesthetic connections that made them famous as the

Bloomsbury Group.

philosophy in High School

At the same time, Ezra Pound was discov-ering the work of James Joyce, and in Paris, Ernest Hemingway was learning from the strange cadences of Gertrude Stein. Together, the web of these contacts comprise what we think of as Modernism, and it flourished without tools like Facebook and Twitter. Now technology is deepening our understanding of Modernism. The Yale

Not many public high

schools offer courses in

philosophy, but students in

New Haven are luckier than

most, thanks to a couple of

Yale graduate students.

Sam Alexander

Technology Enhances pedagogy, continued

The Modernism Lab is a collaboration involving more than 100 graduate and under-graduate students and faculty at Yale and 12 other universities. Its roots lie in Lewis’s own courses on modern British literature. In 2005, he received a grant from the eli/Davis foun-dation to develop a website for the study of the Modern British Novel. That website became the nucleus for the Modernism Lab, and his book, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, became the basis for some of the first wiki entries posted there. Sam Alexander, a ph.d. candidate in English literature, has been working on the Modernism Lab since 2007 and has written articles for the site on authors including W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Richard-son and Lytton Strachey. He currently serves as managing editor for the site. A student of British modernism, he is writing his dis-sertation on population and the problem of character in the twentieth-century novel. This semester, Sam and a group of students in Lewis’s Ulysses seminar have been working with Abraham Parrish and Stacey Maples of the Yale Maps Collection to design an interactive map of James Joyce’s Dublin. Using gis (geographical informa-tion systems) software and a digitized map of Dublin in 1900, students will be able to

reconstruct the setting of the novel, follow its characters as they wander the

streets of the city, and begin to map the sociopolitical context of Joyce’s Ireland. “Reading

Ulysses is an immense challenge, and not only

because of Joyce’s experi-mental prose style,” Sam says.

“The novel ranges across an entire city and includes a very large

cast of characters. gis gives students an unprecedented opportunity to visualize the novel and reach new insights about the way in which characters and events relate to one another.” Lewis says that in the years ahead, the Modernism Lab will continue to support projects that allow participants to enhance their own learning experience while at the same time creating useful resources for a broader audience of students and teachers.

course in English and Comparative Literature, “Moderns, 1914–1926.” Students in these classes contribute to the website and use it as the platform for their ongoing research. Their notes on the primary sources and criticism they consult are entered into a shared database, creating a collective pool of material they can use when writing papers. Information in the database can be sorted by year, place, keyword, notable people and more. Users can instantly locate every reference to psychoanalysis by Virginia Woolf, for example, or every work published by James Joyce in a given year. Appended to the Modernism Lab is a wiki, a website that allows users to create and edit interlinked web pages via a web browser.

The wiki functions as a storehouse for the assigned papers students write and

for their individual research. Students can add links to the database and to inter-related passages in each other’s writing.

MediaWiki, the open source software that powers Wikipedia. The Lab’s content focuses on the activities of 24 leading mod-ernist writers, including T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Catherine Mansfield, Oscar Wilde and Rebecca West. “The project as a whole aims to reconstitute the social and intellectual webs that linked these writers—correspondence, personal acquaintance, reading habits—and their influence on the major works of the period,” Lewis says. “We are interested, too, in broadening the canon of works studied in the period by paying attention to minor works by major authors, major works by minor authors, and works that may have been influential in their time but that are no longer much read.”

The Modernism Lab supports courses on modern poetry, the modern British novel, and Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as a graduate

pericles Lewis

“in an online environment, that type of collaboration assumes a real-time

character that pre-internet research just didn’t offer.” pEriCLES LEWiS

JUANITA ARISTIzáBAL Juanita Aristizábal (Spanish & Por-tuguese) was honored for the paper she presented at a recent conference, “Cri-ses and Opportunities in Latin Amer-ica,” organized by the Latin American

Studies Program at the University of California, Riverside. Juanita’s essay, “Dandyism and Modernity: A Return to Decadence in the Litera-ture of Fernando Vallejo,” explores the way the contemporary writer and filmmaker Vallejo (b. 1942) shaped his critique of modernity by returning to the “discourse of decadence that was prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century,” she says. Her essay focuses on Vallejo’s creation of his narrator by adapting the figure of the dandy to the context of contemporary Colombia. The paper is part of Juanita’s disserta-tion, advised by Aníbal González. She completed her undergraduate degree at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

DANIELLE WARD - GRIFFIN Danielle Ward-Griffin (Music) has been awarded the 2010 Temperley Prize for her paper, “‘The Tower and the Lake:’ Interior and Exterior Spaces in Benjamin Britten’s The

Turn of the Screw.” The Temperley Prize is awarded for the best student paper read at the biennial conference of the North American British Music Studies Association. Drawing upon primary sources, including libretto drafts and production photographs, her essay examines how the English coun-try house and park were represented in the 1954 Venetian premiere of the opera. She argues that Britten and his collaborators blurred the boundary between interior and exterior spaces to produce a sense of menace. The essay is part of her dissertation, “Setting the Stage: The Construction of Place in the Operas of Benjamin Britten.” Danielle earned her undergraduate degree at McGill University and is currently conducting archival research in England, supported by a MacMil-lan Dissertation Research Grant.

K u d o S

Yale actively encourages using technology to enhance pedagogy.

The Innovation Fair, part of the Graduate Teaching Center’s

annual Spring Teaching Forum, showcases effective, unusual

classroom techniques by some of Yale’s most creative teachers.

Many, but not all, of these instructors use high-tech, computer-based approaches, and Yale’s Information Technology Services (its) is always well represented among the exhibitors at the Fair. Under the broad umbrella of its, the Academic Technologies division provides support for the entire academic enterprise: teaching, learning, research and scholar-ship. Its subunits—Academic Computing Resources, av Systems Integration & Learn-ing Space, Classroom Technologies & Event Services, the Film Study Center, Photo &

Design, Research Services and the Instructional Technology Group—support Yale’s learning environment. The Instructional Technology Group (itg) assists teaching fellows and faculty members across the disciplines in the use of technology to achieve their pedagogic goals. Four years ago, leaders from itg, Sterling Memorial Library, the Center for Language Study and the Graduate Teaching Center formed the Collaborative Learning Center (clc), located on the lower level of the Bass library.

Encouraging Technology “Through the clc,” says Bill Rando, director of the Graduate Teaching Center, “we have been able to marshal three central elements of teaching innovation—pedagogy, technology and academic content—in service to the faculty. It’s been a powerful collaboration.” One of the clc’s signature projects, Teaching with Technology Tuesdays, gives faculty members and graduate students access to the latest technological innovations. Recent sessions have explored laptops in the classroom, video games to convey subject matter and ways to teach quantitative reason-ing through technology. itg also helps instructors explore emerging technologies for educational use. Its Digital Commons is a collection of online tools for students and faculty to use in creat-ing websites, blogs, podcasts, interactive maps and timelines, virtual field trips and databases. itg also assists in the use of class-room response systems (clickers), Smart-boards, pen-based computing, PowerPoint, Keynote and other presentation software.

philosophy in High School, continued K u d o Stion of it. I think it is invaluable for students to have the opportunity to explore the limits of their own understanding, and this course allowed them to do so. Most of the students came away with a respect for philosophy, and also with a greater respect for their own intel-lectual abilities,” he adds. The program this year includes six weeks of philosophy led by Gaurav and then six weeks of training in critical thinking led by Arik. Guarav presented an ethical dilemma—cyberbullying—during the first meeting and, with input from the students, identified the

component parts of the issue, such as the role of consent and the concept of fair play. During sub-sequent weeks, they will examine each of these aspects in depth, then

revisit the initial dilemma and write about it. “My hope is that with a deeper under-standing of some of these factors, students will be able to engage with their normal ethi-cal issues—bullying, cheating, dealing with parents, etc.—in a more thoughtful manner,” Gaurav says. He and Arik are currently working with the high school to construct a curriculum unit on critical thinking that can be incorporated into existing classes next year, independently of a course devoted specifically to philosophy. They also hope to introduce an elective phi-losophy course that will be offered during the school day. Kelley Schiffman (Philosophy) will take over the course next year. “Being able to reason analytically is required to do good work, regardless of your field, and although people talk about ‘critical thinking,’ they don’t explicitly teach

it,” says Gaurav. “If we gave students the tools to understand and evaluate arguments, that fundamental skill set would aid in all aspects of their education. And perhaps even more importantly, it would offer them the opportunity to reflect on their own lives and to work out their own thoughts in a manner not usually available in school.”

of the social studies teachers. Gaurav and Arik attended club meetings several times “and that just led to a natural starting point for developing this course,” says Gaurav. The course ran for about 20 weeks as an after-school, for-credit program, with the first five weeks devoted to basic critical thinking, such as how to distinguish prem-ises from conclusions. The students then chose topics in bioethics (ethical implica-tions of abortion and biomedical enhance-ment), theology (arguments for and against

the existence of God, especially the problem of evil) and metaphysics (the conditions for maintaining personal identity over time, despite physical and psychological changes). “Responding to student interest that was revealed as the course progressed, we also decided to throw in a couple of sessions on free will and determinism, a session on distributive justice and a session on cour-age,” says Arik. Justin Boucher, who advises the Phi-losophy Club and teaches history, psychol-ogy and government at Career, says that the Yale students “brought a level of philosophy and education to the table that we otherwise lacked. Their love for the subject inspired the students, and so did their generosity with their time.” The study of philosophy had a strong positive impact on the high school students’s overall academic performance, Boucher says. “Last year’s students made admirable strides in improving their literacy skills, improv-ing both comprehension and retention over the course of the semester. Those strides appeared greater than those of their peers in the same period of time. Many students made impressive gains in terms of their abil-ity to frame an argument and justify their position.” In addition, “The students really came alive in class, actively engaging in difficult material for the pure intellectual stimula-

“The Yale students brought a level of philosophy and education to the

table that we otherwise lacked. Their love for the subject inspired the

students and so did their generosity with their time.” J u S T i N b o u C H E r

“by exposing high school kids to philosophy, i think we have opened

them up to both a subject matter and a way of thinking about their

education that most high schools can’t provide.” G Au r AV VA z i r A N i

dean’s Winter receptionWednesday, december 8, 5 – 6:30 pmmcdougal Common roomand 119 HGS

DOUG CHUNG Doug Chung (Management) has been awarded Yale’s Harry and Heesun You Fellowship, given to an outstand-ing doctoral candidate in the field of management. His dissertation on sales

force compensation includes an essay titled “Do Bonuses Enhance Sales Productivity? A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Bonus-Based Compensa-tion Plans.” His advisor is K. Sudhir, professor of marketing and director of the Yale China India Consumer Insights Program, an initiative of the Yale Center for Customer Insights at SOM. Doug completed his under-graduate degree at Korea University in

Seoul, South Korea.

HELEN ANNE CURRYThe History of Science Society has awarded the 2010 Nathan Reingold Prize to Helen Anne Curry (History) for her essay, “Vernacular Experimen-tal Gardens of the Twentieth Century.”

The prize, awarded annually since 1955, honors an outstanding original graduate student essay on the history of science and its cultural influences. Assessing that home gardens have been largely ignored as sites of scientific practice in the twentieth century, Helen reveals a tradition of amateur experimental science that suggests such gardens are more significant to the his-tory of genetics and horticulture than previously realized. Her dissertation, “Accelerating Evolution, Engineer-ing Life: Science, Agriculture, and Technologies of Genetic Modification, 1925–1955,” is advised by Stanley Woodward Professor of History Daniel J. Kevles.

Arik says they both wanted “to impact lives through philosophy” by teaching teenagers “how to think in a more engaged, critical way about deep, big questions whose answers serve as important assumptions in our lives. We hope this will enhance their ability and desire to be authentic, self-trans-forming thinkers who can consume informa-tion intelligently and productively engage in discourse with others, even those with whom they passionately disagree.” Taking a more pragmatic view, Arik adds, “On the off chance that this idealistic goal is not reached, I also hope students will leave our classes as improved critical thinkers who are more attractive to colleges, better prepared for college and primed with enough of a sense of the value of philosophy to pursue it further in college.” Gaurav became involved in the outreach project because expanding the horizons of public school students “seemed like the right thing to do.” He was inspired by the Rutgers University Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy, in which he participated after his senior year of college. That program exposed people from a wide range of racial and socio-economic backgrounds to academic philoso-phy. “I wanted to continue that tradition,” he says. “By exposing high school kids to philosophy, I think we have opened them up to both a subject matter and a way of thinking about their education that most high schools can’t provide.” Arik was looking for “a way to con-tribute that would be true to me, reflective of my particular combination of strengths and weaknesses.” Philosophy was the natu-ral choice for an outreach project. He was drawn to study philosophy “after unsatisfy-

ing stints as a pre-med stu-dent and in a job in public policy,” he reports. “This turn to philosophy was driven by a desire to find a way that self-reflection and genuine engagement

with other points of view—what I see as two of the core elements of philosophy in its best moments—could be brought into our everyday lives and into our societal deci-sions in such way as to enrich and improve them.” And now he and Gaurav share that way of thinking with young people in one of New Haven’s public schools.

philosophy graduate students Arik ben-Avi (standing, far left), Gaurav Vazirani (seated, second from left) and Kelley Schiffman (seated, far right), with Justin boucher (standing, second from right) and Career High School students.

Whiting Fellows

E L i N A b L o C H, Comparative Literature “ ‘unconfessed Confessions’: Strategies of (Not)Telling in Nineteenth-Century Narratives”Advisors: peter brooks, margaret Homans, Katie Trumpener

This dissertation examines the interrela-tionships between non-telling and confes-sional “truth” and evaluates the reasons for the prominence of hidden narration in nineteenth-century writing. Elina demonstrates that the displacement of the confession into narrative and discursive modes can reveal veiled textual and stylistic strands. She elucidates realism’s orientation towards non-representation and highlights the relevance of narratology for examining the unutterable and the untold.

Whiting Fellowships are among the most prestigious student honors in the united States. Funded by

the mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, these fellowships are given at seven universities known to have

outstanding graduate programs in the humanities. At Yale, a faculty committee appointed by the dean

selects the very best students from among those nominated by their departments to be Whiting Fellows.

m iCHAELA broNSTE iN, English Language & Literature “imperishable Consciousness: The rescue of meaning in the modernist Novel”Advisor: ruth Yeazell

What is the relation between literary innova-tion and social change? Michaela examines Modernist novelists whose techniques are ani-mated not by a thrill at the literary possibilities of new social orders, but by a nervous convic-tion that “old verities,” as William Faulkner would call them, still existed and were worth uncovering. Modernism does not just represent a break from the past, but develops new literary techniques in order to preserve continuities.

m E G A N L i N d S AY C H E r r Y, History “Leisler’s rebellion: Anglo-dutch imperial politics in Seventeenth-Century New York”Advisor: Steve pincus

Megan’s dissertation explains the origins and consequences of Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–1691) in New York and reveals why its legacy continued to shape New York politics for the next three decades. Previous scholarship has portrayed the rebellion as an ethnic, class, or religious conflict. She shows that Leisler’s Rebellion was an ideological conflict that had deep roots in contemporary political develop-ments in England and the Netherlands.

T i m C L A r K E, philosophy “Aristotle and Eleatic monism”Advisor: Verity Harte

Tim’s dissertation is about Aristotle’s engagement with the Presocratic philosopher Parmenides of Elea and his followers (the ‘Eleatics’), philosophers who, notoriously, had denied the existence of a world of plurality and change. The dissertation reconstructs Aristotle’s understanding of and response to the Eleatic position and brings out what Aristotle’s criti-cisms of the Eleatics can tell us about some of his own positive metaphysical views.

S T E FA N E S p o S i To, Comparative Literature “The pathological revolution: romanticism and metaphors of disease”Advisor: paul Fry

Stefan’s dissertation will shed light on the association of Romanticism and the Romantic period with metaphors of disease by analyzing the ways in which dominant theories of health and organic structure both influenced and were creatively reformulated by writers such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Schelling, Keats, Hegel, Holderlin and Percy and Mary Shelley.

J E F F r E Y G o N d A, African American Studies & History “Home Front: The restrictive Covenant Cases and the making of the Civil rights movement”Advisor: Glenda Gilmore

This dissertation explores a set of Supreme Court cases from 1948 in which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged racial housing discrimination in America’s cities. The project looks at how the fight for access to decent hous-ing shaped black protest in the post-World War II era and transformed the legal battle against Jim Crow segregation.

C H r i S To p H E r G r o b E , English Language & Literature “performing Confession in post-modern America: poetry, performance and New media since 1959”Advisor: Joseph roach

Christopher’s dissertation offers a complete history of “confessional performance” in the contemporary period—from Robert Lowell to LonelyGirl15. His research and analysis range from the poetry readings of the confes-sional poets to the rise of the “confession booth” on reality TV and YouTube—from the autobiographical imperative of early per-formance art to the ubiquity of confessional monologue in theaters.

S u N G i L H A N, philosophy “unity in diversity: A Critical Examination of pluralism”Advisor: michael della rocca

Sungil’s dissertation places the concept of plu-ralism under systematic and critical scrutiny and reveals its problems. “You are one thing. I am another. We are not the same. In what sense are we different?” he asks. His disserta-tion argues against the pluralist framework from a scientific methodological perspective and sheds new light on some recent metaphysi-cal issues within a non-pluralist framework.

m i C H A E L Ko m o r o W S K i, renaissance Studies and English Language & Literature “The Arts of interest: private property, English Literature, and the imagination of public Conscience, 1640 –1700”Advisors: david Quint and John rogers

Michael’s dissertation explores a new way of analyzing human behavior that emerged in the seventeenth century. As honor, civic virtue and conscience proved inadequate explanations for ethical action during civil war or economic ex-pansion, writers like Marvell, Hobbes, Milton and Dryden turned to representations of self- or national interests—crucial for understanding the emergence of capital markets, individual rights, and the place of literature in society.

J A m E S r o S S m A C d o N A L d, renaissance Studies and English Language & Literature “popular religious belief and Literature in Early modern England”Advisors: david Scott Kastan and John rogers

James applies the concept of ‘popular religion’ to literary study, charting how early modern authors imagined supernatural beings within their fictions and giving particular attention to how ideas from traditional sources within their culture could be hybridized with tenets of of-ficial belief. By using these figures, writers were able to tap pre-existing religious sentiments to create intellectual and emotional engagement.

L Au r A S A E T V E i T m i L E S,English Language & Literature “mary’s book: The Annunciation in medieval England”Advisors: Alastair minnis and Jessica brantley

The most prominent model of female literacy in the Middle Ages was the Virgin Mary depicted reading at the Annunciation, when Gabriel brings the news of Christ’s conception in her womb (Luke 1:26–38). Laura’s dissertation explores the reasons behind the success of the image of Mary’s book and how Mary became a model of literate devotion that profoundly shaped the spiritual consciousness of medieval readers.

S A r A H E L L i oT T N o VA C i C H, English Language & Literature “Ark and Archive: Narrative Enclosures in medieval and Early modern Texts”Advisors: Alastair minnis and roberta Frank

“Ark and Archive” investigates the ways in which writers and artists variously figure Noah’s ark, the human heart and the underworld: as strongholds of the past, as sites of temporal mediation and as spaces within which to forge and structure new worlds. Sarah considers how each archival model becomes a nexus for thinking through the dangers and desires associated with the amassing and ordering of knowledge.

responsible for attaching proteins to the cell wall. “It’s as if the cell thought the molecules were its own proteins rather than recognizing them as something foreign.”

The finding, described online in the journal ACS Chemical Biology, represents the first time scientists have engineered the cell wall

of pathogenic “Gram-positive” bacteria. The research focused specifically on the cell wall because it contains many of the components the cell uses to relate to its environment, Spiegel explains. “By manipu-lating the cell wall, we can, in theory, perturb the bacteria’s ability to interact with human tissues and host cells.” They used three different small molecules in their experiment—biotin, fluorescein and azide—but their technique could be used with other molecules and with other types of bac-teria. They did not have to genetically modify the bacteria in any way in order for them to incorporate the small molecules, meaning this new approach should work on naturally-occurring bacteria in the human body.

Being able to engineer the cell walls of not only Staphylococcus aureus but a whole family of bacteria could have widespread use in combating these illnesses. “If we tag these bacteria with small fluorescent tracer molecules, we could watch the progression of disease in the human body in real time,” Spie-gel notes. The molecules could also be used to help recruit antibodies that occur naturally in the bloodstream, boosting the body’s own immune response to bacterial diseases. “This technique has the potential to help illuminate basic biological processes as well as lead to novel therapeutics against some of the most common and deadly diseases affecting us today,” according to Spiegel. One member of the team was gradu-ate student Patrick McEnaney (Chemistry), whose contribution to the ground-breaking research included both the synthesis of the compounds they tested and the development of assays to test the molecules in biological systems. “In the beginning of this project I was involved in the synthesis, purification and characterization of the peptides we used,” he says. Synthesizing compounds involves “tak-ing simple building blocks and connecting them in a way to make larger and more com-plex structures in a controlled fashion,” he explains. “Developing biological assays con-sists of finding a way to measure or visualize the response of a living cell to the variable that you are attempting to understand. After that, I aided others in the biological testing, specifically, some of the earlier labeling and imaging of the bacteria.” This research will be part of Patric’s dissertation.

The bacteria can invade the lungs, the heart, the bones, the intestines and the blood, caus-ing staphylococcal pneumonia, endocarditis, osteomyelitis, food poisoning and sepsis.

The good news is that Yale scientists recently made a breakthrough that may lead to new methods of combating Staphylo-coccus aureus, which is responsible for so many life-threatening diseases. Led by assistant professor and Yale alumnus David Spiegel (ph.d. 2004, Chem-istry; m.d. 2004), the team altered the cell wall of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and caused it to incorporate foreign small mol-ecules. By engineering one end of the small molecules to contain a peptide sequence that would be recognized by the bacteria, “We tricked the bacteria into incorporat-ing something into its cell wall that it didn’t actually make,” says Spiegel. In Staphylococ-cus aureus, an enzyme called sortase a is

More Americans die each year from Staphylococcus aureus

infections than from HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s disease or

emphysema. Staph infections range from boils to menin-

gitis, toxic shock syndrome and antibiotic-resistant MRSA.

It has been a busy month for the GSA. Dean Thomas Pollard came to a meeting to identify areas of future cooperation with the Assembly. He emphasized the need to enhance the quality and frequency of men-toring in the Graduate School, encouraging students to schedule regular research group meetings that include their advisors and fel-low students, expect regular thesis commit-tee meetings with feedback regarding areas of excellence and concerns, seek coaching on writing and other skills, organize reading groups and more. “We should raise the expectations of the graduate students regarding the mentoring they get,” said Dean Pollard. GSA is now in the midst of organizing Mentoring Week, planned for the last week of February 2011, which will “raise expectations” by providing a platform for dialogue between faculty and students regarding best mentoring practices. If you have suggestions concerning the speakers or the subjects of the panels, or if you would like to contribute to the organization of Mentoring Week in any other way, email GSA Secretary Andrea Stavoe (Cell Biol-ogy) at andrea.stavoe@yale.edu or come to our biweekly Wednesday meetings (the next one is December 8). GSA representatives are also working to improve registration and TF assignments during the shopping period. Luke Thompson (Political Science) is assembling a report about undergraduate registration, enrollment and TF allocation. Please contact him to share your experi-ences (lucas.thompson@yale.edu). In addition, the GSA is concerned with infrastructure issues and has been identifying problems at the gym (e.g. mal-functioning equipment or poor heating/AC). Contact Luke about those concerns. The lack of 24-hour study space for graduate students is another impor-tant issue. The GSA continues to gather information about the availability of space where students can collaborate, study and hold office hours. The GSA recently met with the Provost and established a pipeline for addressing these issues. Please email Andrea (andrea.stavoe@yale.edu) with questions or comments about study space. Sigma Colon (American Studies) has been named the GSA Student Advo-cacy Officer for the coming year – a new post created to provide personalized advice and support to graduate students at Yale. The Steering Committee is currently in the process of establishing a peer mentoring program managed by Sigma. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more informa-tion! If you have any questions about this program, please contact Sigma (sigma.colon@yale.edu).

C o n t r i b u t e d b y J o l a n ta J a s i n a ( european & russian studies)

G S A u p d AT Ehttp://gsa.yale.edu

Tricking bacteria

S T u d E N T r E S E A r C H : Chemistry

“This technique has the potential to help illuminate basic biological

processes as well as lead to novel therapeutics against some of the

most common and deadly diseases affecting us today.” d AV i d S p i E G E L

aS eaSy aS pie...Graduate students are as capable in the kitchen as in the lab

or library. Some non-bakers came to sample and judge the

goods (left photo). Winners of this year’s pie baking Competi-

tion, pictured from left to right: Jimmy Stamp, Ellen Furlong,

markus Labude (judge), Lauren martini (judge), Andrew

Fleischer (judge), Lucian Ghita, rachel bezanson.

patrick mcEnaney (left) and david Spiegel

To some, education is a fall-back for a rap career. I wonder how

my life at Yale compares to Lil Wayne’s life at Young Money.

To be honest, I feel like my days are less overtly exciting than

his: my morning kick is Panamanian, his is probably Irish, possibly

purple; I’ve been locked in the ivory tower, he in Rikers; I’m neck

deep in arXiv printouts, he’s knee-deep in... other things.

But overall I think my day-to-day existence at Yale is pretty

solid. I enjoy living in Helen Hadley Hall, noted for its themed

parties, extremely helpful staff and semi-pro table tennis enthu-

siasts. Even its lack of architectural significance has the upside of

Two years ago, then-candidate Obama, in an effort to encourage young students to focus on their education, offered the following rationale: “You are probably not that good a rapper. Maybe you are the next Lil Wayne, but probably not, in which case you need to stay in school.”

Hometown connections: Opportunities abound for Graduate School

alums to become involved in the Yale alumni community. Many of

these are at the local level, and activities and organizations are

as varied and creative as the people who comprise them.

For example, Marie-Rose Logan (ph.d. 1974, French) reports that yawala (Yale Women of Los Angeles) grew out of prepa-rations for the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of women’s admission to Yale College. Logan, Professor of European and Comparative Literature at Soka Univer-sity of America in Aliso Viejo, California, reports that her “very congenial group” of undergraduate and graduate alumnae met monthly and became a tight-knit group of friends who are eager to continue holding

yawala events. Cornelia Emerson (Yale College 1971, ph.d. 1980, English), direc-tor of development at the Musical Theater Group in l.a., was an active participant who found the potluck offerings and informal networking to be a pleasure. The importance of local alumni groups like yawala was seconded by gsaa Executive Committee member Dina Consolini Dommett (ph.d. 1993, Italian), associate dean of programs for the Depart-ment of Management at the London School

Alumni AssociationNotes from the Yale Graduate School

online: www.aya.yale.edu/grad

L i F E @ YA L E

Graduate Career Services has purchased “The Versatile ph.d.,” a web-based resource that demystifies nonacademic careers for humanists and social scientists, showing many plausible career paths and providing robust support for students interested in preparing for a nonacademic career. “The Versatile ph.d.” provides a thriving, supportive, web-based com-munity where students can participate in discussions, network with humanists and social scientists outside the academy and listen and learn. The site also provides an online collection of first-person narratives describing how others have established their post-academic careers. There are also “Career Panel” discussions where Versatile ph.d.s working in a given field share their specific professional experi-ences and answer questions. The site has an associated LinkedIn group where students can begin to build an online presence and network with other profes-sionals in a wide variety of fields. “The Versatile ph.d.” is confiden-tial. Its protected areas are invisible to search engines, and user identities are not known to anyone at any university. Reg-istering for membership at www.yale.edu/graduateschool/careers gives pre-paid access to the Premium Content Area.

Nonacademic Career information

This is the first in a series of personal essays by current graduate students. if you’d like to contribute an essay about your life at Yale, please send it to gila.reinstein @ yale.edu

conor Frailey (math)

For registration: www.yale.edu/graduateschool/careers

granting me righteous disdain for the pampered undergraduates,

i.e. the “street cred” that Lil Wayne constantly strives for.

While I call Helen Hadley home, like many other graduate

students, I essentially live in my office with my work. However,

unlike many graduate students, chained to their labs as punish-

ment for not doing pure theory, a mathematician’s office is any-

where he or she can take books and laptop. Some days my office is

my cubicle (highly sought after for its uplifting view of a wall and

the cemetery). Others, it’s the law library (where they remind us

interlopers of our 0-L status by withholding access to all but the

basement bathrooms).

But most days, my office is a café. Nearest and dearest to my

heart is McDougal Center’s Blue Dog Café, where I have worked

the past four-and-a-half years. But I also like Willoughby’s on

Grove and Blue State on Wall. Every once in a while I will even

venture to the Willoughby’s on York, but that is usually just to

learn from the Art, Architecture and Drama students how skinny

my jeans will need to be next season.

Outside of math, I actually enjoy having a few student

jobs. Besides the cash-money, my jobs at the Blue Dog Café, as a

Graduate Career Services Fellow, as a Morse tutor and as a Daven-

port affiliate have allowed me to build amazing relationships with

Yale students, faculty and staff I might never have gotten to know.

In addition to studying and work, though, a lot of really

crazy stuff happens at Yale. But I don’t know about that. I do,

however, know that intramural soccer is a blast, that squash is the

best-kept secret in the world and that the Yale hockey games are

shockingly entertaining.

When I last spoke with my advisor, he used the phrase,

“When you graduate...” which was the first time that I felt confi-

dent I would eventually be forcing my siblings to call me “doctor.”

But it was also the first time I seriously thought about life after

Yale and by contrast life at Yale. And to be honest, I’m happy I

never entered the rap game.

eleventh annual

Winter ball

Saturday, February 12, 8 pm – 1 amNew Haven Lawn Club . Tickets on

sale online starting February 1

www.yale.edu/mcdougal/studentlife

of Economics. “There was unbelievable energy in the room” when former Dean Jon Butler visited London, she recalls. Working with gsaa “brings back fond memories of Yale and somehow makes me even fonder of those years.” Dommett is also a member of the uk Friends of Yale, a fundraising group, and she serves as a member of the London Alumni Schools Committee, interviewing Yale College applicants. Of this experience, Dommett says, “I was delighted that two of my inter-viewees—both incredibly talented young women—got accepted!” Her advice to alumni who want to stay involved with the Yale community but are not ready for a major commitment like the gsaa Exec-utive Committee: “Get involved in local alumni events such as the Yale Global Day of Service. Mentor younger alumni and students through the Career Services site. And give as much money as you can for unrestricted gifts.”

Finding a Lost City

“I also helped record and map the location of key features such as the ancient walls.” In addition, the students performed “some of the more manual tasks, such as taking down levels and hauling dirt to the sifter,” Marina reports. “Naturally, all this work occurs in temperatures that rarely fall below 85 degrees, and sandstorms whip up with regularity. It becomes quite dif-ficult to tell people apart as we are usually swaddled in hats, scarves and sunglasses. It is a testament to the fascination the material holds that these somewhat suffocating (and scratchy) conditions often pass into the background, becoming nothing more than a vague irritant, as the work holds our entire focus.” “I loved being out in the desert,” Tasha says.

“Yes, the conditions are harsh, and sometimes you feel like you are

actually being mummified in the heat and low humidity,

but there is such beauty

A Yale team led by Professor of Egyptology John Coleman

Darnell has unearthed a lost city — site of a massive

bread-making industry — that flourished more than 3,500

years ago in the Western desert of Egypt. Three NELC

graduate students, Julia Hsieh, Marina Brown and Tasha

Dobbin-Bennett, were members of the group that made

the stunning discovery.

S T u d E N T r E S E A r C H : Egyptology

land, but which, Darnell says, was actually a hub for caravan routes connecting the Nile Valley of Egypt to what is now Western Sudan. The bustling ancient city suggests that a fourth faction flourished in this region,

one with strong ties to Pharaonic culture. This faction may have formed an alliance with Thebes, leading it to prevail over its rivals and eventually to establish the Golden Age of the Egyptian Empire. Working at the excavation involves a lot of physical labor under uncomfortable cir-cumstances. The graduate students primarily process finds, sorting and quantifying pot-tery, drawing and photographing diagnostic material. “Pottery is the essential material culture and often the key to understanding the settle-ment processes at the site,” Tasha explains.

The remains of this mud-brick settlement, which functioned as an administrative center as well as major supplier of bread, stands to shed new light on an obscure era in Egyptian history, the Second Intermedi-ate Period, when rival factions contended for domination of what had been a prosperous state united under the rule of the pharaohs. During this period, the descendants of an immigrant group from Asia, the Hyksos, took control of the Nile Delta in the north. The Nubian kingdom of Kerma was centered in the south, and what remained of Pharaonic power struggled to survive in the region around modern Luxor. Egyptologists have been puzzled by the fact that the Pharaonic forces, based in the city of Thebes, managed to come out on top. Predating the only other major settlement in the area by some thou-sand years, the recently discovered town stretches over a kilometer in the south-ern Kharga oasis, a location long-held to have been an uninhabited no-man’s

predating the only other major settlement in the area by

some thousand years, the recently discovered town stretches

over a kilometer in the southern Kharga oasis, a location

long-held to have been an uninhabited no-man’s land.

in the early morning when the red sun rises up over the escarpment. There is a stillness to the air, and you can see for miles in every direction. In that moment, it really hits you that you are looking out over a landscape that has barely changed in 5000 years.” The Yale expedition that led to the discovery of the town is part of the “The-ban Desert Road Survey,” an ongoing mis-sion directed by Darnell to map and study the ancient caravan routes of the Egyptian Western Desert.

Top: members of the umm mawagir expedition pause for a break with John darnell, standing, second from left.

Left: Graduate students sort and sketch pottery fragments under a temporary shelter.

below: protected against the fierce desert sun, students work on all aspects of the project: photographing, sifting, drawing and taking notes of their findings.

“it is a testament to the fascination the material holds that these

somewhat suffocating (and scratchy) conditions often pass into

the background, becoming nothing more than a vague irritant,

as the work holds our entire focus.” m A r i N A b r o W N

Vo L. 13, N u m b E r 3 , d E C E m b E r /J A N uA rY 2 010 – 11

Yale Graduate School News is a publication of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Thomas Pollard, dean; Gila Reinstein, editor; Bjorn Akselsen, design/production; Yale P&P, production supervision; Michael Marsland, Harold Shapiro, photography.

Send news and notification of upcoming events togila.reinstein@yale.edu.

outstanding Alumni For alumni news, see www.aya.yale.edu/grad

Or has it? For me, there is no life after Yale because Yale remains a critical part of my everyday life. Skills learned in skimming (sorry, reading!) over 200 monographs for my oral exams inform my daily preparations for discussion sections and afternoon seminars. My teaching reflects that of my Yale mentors, from whom I learned to value both sides of personal connection. But most importantly, writing. I have come to see myself as a writer who teaches, as a writer who is a historian, but as a writer above all. Along with my ongoing connection with South Africa, that’s the passion that sustains me. It’s not for everyone in their post-Yale life (my great friend and fellow African history ph.d. Wiebe Boer has just been appointed founding ceo of the most important emerging founda-tion in Africa), but writing is that for me. During my second year at Yale, in my uncle’s guestroom in Toronto while the rest of the family celebrated some momentous occa-sion or another, I composed (in long hand on a yellow legal pad) a dinner-party scene set in a stately London townhouse in 1836. The scene became part of an experimental paper in narrative history. A project was conceived. It was nurtured and sustained by a core group of friends and mentors in the Andrew’s Society Writing History working group. It demanded years of research that, thanks to Yale, I was able to conduct. It went through revising, and adding, and editing, and revising, and editing, all in conversation with friends from Yale, mentors from Yale, with the legacy of Yale. If this all sounds a bit too much like an Obama campaign speech—from the summery green lawn of a suburban Toronto backyard to the rustle of fall in the desiccated leaves of the tree behind hgs 204, from the southeaster that buffeted the solid walls of the Cape Archive in Cape Town, to the long limpid spring evenings of Sewanee, Tennessee, as seen from my office window—I apologize. But yes, I could. The Press tells me to expect bound copies of A Living Man From Africa any day now. Yes, I did. Now, that’s life!

Editor’s note: Levine’s biography of Jan Tzatzoe (born circa 1792), A Living Man From Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary, and the Making of Nineteenth Century South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), will be available online and in book-stores in late December.

“but most importantly, writing. i have come to see

myself as a writer who teaches, as a writer who is

a historian, but as a writer above all.” r o G E r S . L E V i N E

L i F E A F T E r YA L Eroger S. Levineassociate professor of history, Sewanee: The university of the South. yale college, 1995; pH.d. 2004 (History)

Life after Yale is a lot like life after

Eden: all of a sudden one finds oneself

outside the walls, blinking, dumbstruck,

asking an unresponsive universe, “Did

I really deserve this?” To paraphrase

Adam: I never realized I had it that good.

Nostalgia and angst, and, yes, 3/3 teach-

ing loads, tenure committees, budget

cuts, commuting and some variation of

the colleague who BLANK. After Yale, as

after Eden, real life’s just begun.

Send your “Life After yale”essay to gila.reinstein @ yale.edu

H o W A r d d E A N H o S G o o d i i i The National Cancer Institute has honored Howard Dean Hosgood iii (ph.d. 2008, eph; mph 2005) with two Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (dceg) Fellows Awards for Research Excellence. At nci, his research on lung cancer susceptibil-ity in populations with indoor air pollution exposures from solid fuel combustion, such as coal and wood, has shown that improve-ments to stoves in rural China can reduce lung cancer mortality by about 50 percent. He primarily focuses on studying the causes of lung cancer among nonsmoking females in Asia. His work has led to more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters. Hosgood has also received the nih Outstanding Graduate Research Award, the Outstanding Paper by a Fellow Award, an Intramural Research Award, a Molecular Epidemiology Research Funding Award and a dceg Fellowship Achievement Award. Hosgood was given the Eric W. Mood New Professional Award from the Association of Yale Alumni in Public Health. He is cur-rently a Research Fellow in the Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the nci. While at Yale, he helped improve recy-cling during the year-end move-out, along with his wife Sara Elizabeth Smiley Smith (ph.d. candidate, fes; mph 2007; mesc 2007), bringing the total from 18 to 34 tons in one year. He traveled to El Salvador with

Yale Health Community Outreach and Edu-cation (core) to assess the quality of the drinking water and was chosen by his peers to lead the group back to El Salvador to help implement a sustainable water sanitation intervention.

S i o b H A N p H i L L i p S A book by Siobhan Phillips (ph.d. 2007, English), The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse, was published earlier this year by Columbia Uni-versity Press. Focusing on Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, Phillips shows how these writers used the repeating patterns of daily life in their poetry and argues that such patterns led to a rethinking of both twentieth-century lit-erature and the function of the lyric. Phillips is now a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows with a three-year research appoint-ment that enables her to devote her time to scholarship. At the Society, she is working on a new project about poetry and personal letters from 1950–2000. Next fall, she will join the faculty of Dickinson College as an assistant professor of English. Phillips’s book was based on her dissertation, “The Poetics of Everyday Time in Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill,” advised by David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer.

K A T H E r i N E m E L L E N C H A r r o N Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (University of North Carolina Press) by Katherine Mellen Charron (ph.d. 2005,

History) has won the 2010 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians for the best pub-lished book on Southern women’s history. Septima Clark (1898–1987) was a lifelong educator, civic activist and civil rights leader, most known for developing the Citizenship Schools, a civil-rights-era adult program that taught African Americans to read and write so they could register to vote. Clark also aimed to guarantee that the newly enfran-chised made informed decisions after they left the voting booth and could assume lead-ership roles to bring improvements to their local communities. Her political activism began in the era following World War i and continued beyond her retirement from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1970. Placing the worldview and deeds of southern black women activist educa-tors like Clark at the center, Charron shows how segregated schools functioned as sites of citizenship struggles and how Clark adapted the organizing traditions of southern black women to the post-World-War-ii civil rights movement. In so doing, she demon-strates the ways that citizenship education enabled black women to define the issues that concerned them as women, while the civil rights movement offered them a vehicle for taking action. Their ongoing activism at the local level also extends the movement’s chronology beyond 1965 or 1968. Charron is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. Her dis-sertation, “Teaching Citizenship: Septima Poinsette Clark and the Transformation of the African American Freedom Struggle,” was advised by Glenda Gilmore.

Howard dean Hosgood iii

Siobhan phillips

Katherine mellen charron