HGS 2847 Collsp05 FNLrev - Harvard University

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

The graduate school of arts and sciences | harvard university spring 2011

The Mind’s EyeAcross the disciplines, probing theintersections between the brain andthe mind to unlock the mysteries ofperception and experience

Alumni Day 2011

A conversation with theChronicle’s provocateur

Reunions for Economics andfor Dudley House

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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

BariWalsheditor

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, sociologyMia de Kuijper, MPA ’83, PhD ’83, economicsStacy 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 sciencesRobert E. Knight, PhD ’68, economicsFelipe 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 mathematicsDennisVaccaro, 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

Alumni DayWith reunions of graduate economics programsand of Dudley fellows adding to the mix, ourannual rite of spring was both interdisciplinary andintergenerational.

Colloquy withWilliam Pannapacker, PhD ’99On the humanities conundrum with the Chronicle’sprovocateur.

Fertile GroundIncreasingly, humanists are turning to cognitive andneuroscientists — and vice versa — to gain newinsights into perception and experience, makingdisciplinary barriers irrelevant.

Alumni BooksThe architecture of a war-ravaged country,a comparative look at hip-hop and high school,tips for awakening creativity, and getting humanrights right — our alumni authors tackle thosetopics and more.

I Choose Harvard . . .How a global business leader found value insupporting graduate research in internationaldevelopment — and how a PhD student is usingthat support to study conflict in Africa.

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On the cover: Portrait of woman by Natsuo Ikegami, Getty Images.

HARVARD IS

the opportunity to foyour research wheretakes you

This fall, the Graduate School of Arts andSciences will welcome what is probably themost remarkable class of students in itshistory. Our top applicants this year broughtcredentials that looked in many cases as ifthey had been pulled from a promotiondossier for an assistant professor. Many ofthese students are already becoming leadersin their fields.

We received 12,000 applications in all,affirming once again that students from allcorners of the world continue to seek out theextraordinary opportunities that Harvardoffers. The 615 or so new students (thenumber is still not final at press time) whowill join us at Orientation on August 24 werechosen by our faculty, after close and carefulconsideration, as the very students thoseleaders most want to work with to advancescholarship in their fields.

Our faculty takes graduate admissionsextremely seriously, as I discovered anewwhen I visited each of our programs thiswinter to review applications and discuss theprogress of current students. And that’sappropriate, since this faculty is a magnet forstudents, giving Harvard a clear advantage asit recruits new graduate students.

And yet we know that many of our bestapplicants also applied to, and were eagerlyrecruited by, our peer institutions in the IvyLeague and beyond. Among that exception-ally talented and promising group of topapplicants, admission is really just the begin-ning of the process. Successfully recruitingthose candidates — as the playing fieldgrows ever more competitive — is where thereal work lies.

I spend a good deal of time thinkingabout what it will take to ensure thatHarvard continues to attract the very bestgraduate students in the world. As fiscalchallenges mount, I believe that those of uswho steward higher education must makea new commitment to innovation as we artic-ulate our priorities. We need to reallocate ourexisting resources to align with emergingrealities and to serve the students who will oneday take the reins, and we need to deploy our

new resources in creative and efficient ways.Offering financial aid packages that

strongly compete with those of our peers is,of course, the first and most essential step inattracting and retaining the best students.That’s why funding for our graduate fellow-ships will continue to be a central priority.

But as I think about our needs over thenext five years, I see other key priorities.

We must invest in innovation in teachingand learning, so we can help our graduatestudents become the educational leaders thatthe world needs them to be.

We must invest in a diverse studentpopulation, both by fortifying the pipelinethat will prepare the most talented minoritystudents to come to Harvard and by creatingstructures to support them fully once they arehere. And we must assure that we are educat-ing the finest minds, irrespective of gender,across all fields of inquiry. To achieve genderequity in the Graduate School, we need tooffer better support to our students who areparents.

We must invest in better writing programsfor our students, so that we ensure they buildthe communication skills that are increasinglyessential to professional success in every field.

Finally, we must examine the relation-ship between disciplinary excellence andinterdisciplinary opportunity. Increasingly,our top applicants crave the opportunities forinterdisciplinarity that Harvard’s resourcesmake so compelling. They expect to be ableto move fluidly across traditional academicboundaries, and we need to create contexts inwhich they can do so.

GSAS is responding by continuing toexpand our roster of secondary fields —intellectually coherent courses and experiencesin a given field that offer students desirablebreadth as they chart their professionalpaths. This past year, we added new secondaryfields in critical media practice, computationalscience, and science, technology, and society— all with exciting interdisciplinary possibil-ities. As we go forward, this is precisely thekind of cost-effective innovation we mustencourage.

Colloquy Spring 20111

Harvard Alumni AssociationAppointed 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 ShinagelPhD ’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 theWebAccess current and back issues of Colloquy, as well asa 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].

Moving?Please send your Colloquy mailing label and your newaddress to Alumni Records, 124 Mt. Auburn Street, 4thFloor, Cambridge, MA 02138-3654.

Colloquy is printed by PrintResource/DS Graphics.

from the dean

The Brightest and the Best

Allan M. BrandtDean, Graduate Schoolof Arts and Sciences; AmalieMoses Kass Professor of theHistory of Medicine, HarvardMedical School; professorof the history of science,Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Harvard University GSAS2

SECTION TITLEALUMNI WEEKEND 2011

Photographs by Jessica Scranton

ALUMNI WEEKEND 2011

By Bar i Walsh

This spring’s AlumniWeekend celebration at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences had

a notably intergenerational flair. Enlivened by the presence of current students and young alumni —

some drawn back by a celebration of Dudley House — the weekend featured opportunities to

connect and network, to share and seek advice, and to get to know the members of this diverse

and collegial community. Faculty symposia reflected that diversity, but the state of the world’s

economy provided the theme that unified two days of events. On Friday,April 1, graduate alumni of

Harvard’s economics programs held a reunion that featured talks by renowned senior thinkers and

up-and-coming new voices. And on Saturday, April 2, global economist Kenneth Rogoff delivered

the Alumni Day keynote address at Emerson Hall.

Generations ofGSAS


At left, Leo Beranek,

SD ’40, applied science,

and Fotis Constantine

Kafatos, PhD ’65, molec-

ular biology, share

a chat before the Alumni

Day keynote address.

Above, clockwise from top

left, Susan Milmoe,AB

’65, PhD ’74, psychology

and social relations,

and Jennifer Sheehy-

Skeffington, a PhD candi-

date in psychology; Erin

Henry, a PhD candidate

in organizational behavior,

whose research interests

combine economic

sociology, entrepreneur-

ship, and development;

Louis and Anna Sebok

joined their daughter

Veronica Sebok,AB ’83,

SM ’83, applied sciences,

MBA ’88, for lunch at

the Faculty Club.

A recurring highlight of Alumni Day islunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, and thisyear, guests had the chance to socialize atdiscipline- or department-specific tables.Many alumni took advantage of the oppor-tunity for these interest-based points ofconnection, which were facilitated bycurrent PhD students designated as hostsfor the day, alongside GSAS Alumni Councilmembers. The students joined alums forlunch to talk about their work, prompting

discussions of how life as a graduate studenthas changed — or not — over the years.After lunch, alumni and students headedback to Emerson Hall to sample offeringsfrom an interdisciplinary menu of facultysymposia — on computer science andcomputer-assisted political science, onempire and insurgency, on punishmentand inequality, on the science of blindness,and on the philosophical comforts ofthe classics.

Table TalkSAVE THE DATE

Alumni Weekend 2012

April 13–14


ALUMNI WEEKEND 2011

ALUMNI OF ALL AGES MINGLED WITH CURRENT STUDENTS AND FACULTY, GIVINGTHIS ANNUAL RITE OF SPRING A TRULY INTERGENERATIONAL FLAIR.

Clockwise from left,

Alice Adler, PhD ’61,

chemistry, celebrated

her 50th Harvard

reunion with Ed

Ginsberg; GSAS Dean

Allan Brandt on stage

for the Alumni Day

keynote address; Jessica

Tollette, a PhD candidate

in sociology, whose

interests include racial

identity, class, gender,

and inequality; Keith

Stone, a PhD candidate

in Near Eastern

Languages and

Literatures, specializing

in the Hebrew bible,

chats over lunch with

George Bates, AB ’54;

GSA ’56, physics;

MBA ’58.


Eight Centuries (and Counting) of Financial Folly

Kenneth Rogoff is a premier thinker onmatters related to national and global economic policies, and his keynote address atAlumni Day was full of colorful history andinsider’s tidbits, drawn from his experienceas section chief at the International FinanceDivision of the US Federal Reserve Bank.

In discussing his latest book, This TimeIs Different: Eight Centuries of FinancialFolly — he joked that it spent a week infourth place on Amazon’s bestsellers list,behind three Stieg Larsson novels — Rogofftraced the history of debt crises and defaultsback to 1340, when Edward II, invadingFrance as part of the Hundred Years War,defaulted on loans to Italian lenders. Rogoffhighlighted a connection between earlyEuropean debt crises and the aspirations of

those developing nations to grow and colo-nize. He noted that today, it is the rich coun-tries whose debt is at or near all-time highs,a reality that will hinder growth over thenext 5 to 10 years.

Drawing on his experience as formerchief economist at the InternationalMonetary Fund, Rogoff described how heand his coauthor, economist Carmen M.Reinhart, were able to collect voluminousdata from vastly disparate global archives,data that prior to their work was difficult tofind and use. Noting the rhythmic cycle ofdebt crises over history — and the seeminglyendless varieties of “folly” that precededeach — he consoled his audience with oneconclusion of his research: all economiccrises do eventually end.

Top, Kenneth Rogoff,

a professor of economics

and the Thomas D. Cabot

Professor of Public Policy,

delivers the Alumni Day

keynote address. At right,

from left to right, faculty

symposia leaders Gary

King of the Department

of Government, Caroline

Elkins of History and

African and African

American Studies, Bruce

Western of Sociology,

and Hanspeter Pfister of

Computer Science. Sean

Kelly of Philosophy

and Constance Cepko

of the HMS departments

of Ophthalmology

and Genetics also led

symposia.

Surveying the history of economic meltdowns produces one bit of cheery news, says Ken Rogoff.“So far, all financial crises have come to an end.”


ALUMNI WEEKEND 2011

Top, left to right, Carmen

Robinson Henry and

LaVaughn Henry, PhD

’91, economics, at the

economics reunion

luncheon; Professor

Jerry Green, chair of the

business economics PhD

program, welcomes

alumni and reminisces

about his predecessors,

John Lintner and Dick

Caves. At left, from left to

right, Henry Rosovsky,

PhD ’59, the Lewis

P. and Linda L. Geyser

University Professor

emeritus and former

Dean of the Faculty of

Arts and Sciences;

Nava Ashraf, PhD ’05,

an associate professor

at Harvard Business

School; Benjamin

Friedman, AB ’66,

PhD ’71, William Joseph

Maier Professor of

Political Economy.

Welcoming alumni to the graduate reunionof Harvard’s programs in economics, business economics, and political economyand government on April 1, GSAS DeanAllan Brandt described the impact ofHarvard’s economics programs on private,public, and nonprofit sectors around theworld. And impact was the catchword of the day, it turned out, as junior and seniorfaculty talked with alumni about some of the most pressing issues facing the world — and some of the most hopeful ideas for new directions.

Economics chair John Campbell kickedthings off by talking about tradition. “TheHarvard tradition is embodied not just inbuildings but in people,” he said over lunchin the intimate confines of the Faculty ClubLibrary. “It’s a living tradition that evolvesover time. You can see that living tradition in

this room.” He went on to describe how tradition enriches a department likeEconomics, which has especially benefittedfrom the “wonderful chain of influence thatconnects faculty of one era to their students,who become faculty of the next era.”

But then Campbell talked about buckingtradition, saying that one of the things hewas most excited by was the infusion ofyouth and energy into the faculty ranks inrecent years. The department today boasts an “intellectual breadth that envisages economics as a big tent,” he said — and thatpoint was driven home during afternoonpanels that featured just the vibrant mix ofaccomplished scholarship and energeticexpansiveness that Campbell cited.

In the first panel, Raj Chetty, PhD ’03,and Roland Fryer talked about their innova-tive work in education. Chetty has correlated

the quality of one’s kindergarten experiencewith earning power in adulthood, and Fryerhas worked on measuring the impact ofincentive-based reforms in US public schools.On the same panel, Nava Ashraf, PhD ’05,and Erica Field looked at correlationsbetween wealth and health and at ways toincrease the effectiveness of global health initiatives by focusing on the behavior of thepatient/consumer.

In the second panel, several of thedepartment’s senior leaders weighed in onthe global financial crisis. BenjaminFriedman, Andrei Shleifer, Jeremy Stein, andGita Gopinath engaged their audience with a fascinating look at how things reached crisislevel, how financial models malfunctioned,how risk was neglected, which correctivesteps were successful (and which not so), andwhat lessons were learned.

Celebrating the Old and New in Economics


Showering affection — and flowers — on Dudley House’s longtime administrator, Susan Zawalich, are former

Dudley fellows (from left) Bayliss Camp, PhD ’03, sociology; Oliver Dinius, PhD ’04, history; Luca Marinelli, PhD

’02, physics; and Daniel Kramer, PhD ’03, Germanic languages and literatures. Photo: Jonathan Ruel

When Dudley House was dedicated as thegraduate student center at GSAS 20 yearsago, the idea of building community amonggraduate students was still considered exper-imental. The move was the culmination ofyears of effort by the GSAS Alumni Council,deans and administrators, and studentsthemselves, all of whom recognized a needfor graduate students to come together, todecompress, to leave the lab or library (onoccasion), and generally to maintain theinterests and hobbies that brought them toHarvard — interests that would enrich notonly their own lives, but their Harvard community.

It has been a grand success, a model forpeers, and a refuge for students — especiallythose at the beginning of their programs,seeking to find their place at Harvard.“There really is nothing like this at mostgraduate schools,” says Jim Hogle, theEdward S. Harkness Professor of BiologicalChemistry and Molecular Pharmacology andchair of the PhD program in biophysics. He has been co-master of Dudley Housesince 2002, with his wife, patent attorneyDoreen Hogle.

GSAS celebrated the 20th-anniversarymilestone by hosting a laugh-filled reunionover Alumni Weekend for Dudley fellowsfrom each of those 20 years. About 85 fellowsand guests mingled at a casual open house on

Friday, April 1, an evening that featured specially crafted Dudley-themed cocktails —the Dudley Daiquiri and the LehmanLemonade, served in embossed pint glasses.They attended Alumni Day events onSaturday and then returned to the House fora soiree that evening.

From its commanding location inLehman Hall, on the southwest corner ofHarvard Yard, Dudley is a central point ofconnection for the Graduate School’s 4,000students. Under the direction of the HouseMasters and longtime administrator SusanZawalich, as well as the fellows (GSAS students all) who plan activities each year,Dudley has its own orchestra, jazz band, literary magazine, dining hall, coffee house,film series, game room, and intramuralsports program, among other gems. It sponsors student outings to museums, plays,and performances around Boston and torecreational sites further afield.

The Harvard community will pause tomark Dudley’s 20th anniversary as the graduate student center in October, when —as part of the University’s 375th anniversaryfestivities — the House will host a gala dinner to celebrate not only the special qualities of the building and the people whohelp it flourish, but also the central role thatgraduate students play in the life of theUniversity.

20th ANNIVERSARY REUNION

Dudley House

AnthropologyDanielT. Potts,AB ’75, PhD ’80, announces thata collection of twenty of his papers — entitledMesopotamia, Iran and Arabia from the Seleucids to theSasanians — has been published by AshgateVariorum as part of its Collected Studies series.Potts is the Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor ofMiddle Eastern Archaeology at the University ofSydney in Australia.

AstronomyDavid Barrado, GSA ’96, has contributed to therecent publication Postcards from the Edge of theUniverse: An Anthology of Frontline Astronomy fromAround the World (ESO, 2010).The book is based onthe science carried out by a hand-picked selection ofthe best bloggers from the “Cosmic Diary,” one ofthe 12 cornerstone projects of the InternationalYear of Astronomy 2009. It provides a unique snap-shot of contemporary astronomy.

EnglishLeon Guilhamet, PhD ’67, has published his thirdbook in eighteenth-century studies, entitled Defoeand the Whig Novel: A Reading of the Major Fiction(University of Delaware Press, 2010). Recentlyretired as professor and former chair of English atthe City College, City University of New York,Guilhamet presents a reassessment of RobinsonCrusoe and five other works of fiction by DanielDefoe in light of Whig culture in the late seven-teenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Germanic Languages and LiteraturesWm.A. Little,AM ’53, has published Mendelssohnand the Organ (Oxford University Press, 2010),exploring Felix Mendelssohn’s lifelong engagementwith what Little argues was his instrument ofchoice, the organ. The book examines the resultinginfluence on the composer’s professional and personal life.

GovernmentRobert H. Binstock,AB ’56, PhD ’65, has pro-duced the seventh edition of The Handbook of Agingand the Social Sciences. He is professor of Aging,Health, and Society at the Case Western ReserveUniversity’s School of Medicine. A former presidentof the Gerontological Society of America, Binstockhas served as director of a White House Task Forceon Older Americans.

HistoryLeslie Dossey, PhD ’98, has published Peasant andEmpire in Christian North Africa, tracing the region’ssocial and cultural history from the Punic times tothe eve of the Islamic conquest.

alumni notes

continued on page 9


n the world of education journalism,there are few opinion voices as potent asthat of William Pannapacker, PhD ’99,history of American civilization.

Writing under the pen name ThomasH. Benton in the Chronicle of HigherEducation, Pannapacker has caused sensa-tions — and jammed up the online commentsection — with articles like “Why Do They Hate Us” (September 26, 2010), about a certain kind of public disdain foracademia, and “The Big Lie About ‘The Lifeof the Mind’” (February 8, 2010), aboutwhat he sees as an institutional failure toaddress the realities of graduate education.Perhaps his most notorious piece is“Graduate School in the Humanities: JustDon’t Go” (January 30, 2009), whichenjoyed a long shelf life among the most-readarticles on the Chronicle’s website.

An associate professor of English atHope College, in Holland, Michigan,Pannapacker has a knack for illuminating the anxieties within contemporary academicculture. Reader reactions, ranging from virtual shouts of hallelujah to strong rebuttals, collectively testify to his skill atfinding issues that resonate.

You have — pretty dramatically — advised peoplenot to go to graduate school in the humanities.Why?Pannapacker: The problem is the dramaticconversion of full-time, tenure-stream academic positions into part-time, non-tenurable, no-benefit positions. Institutionscan exploit teachers when there are no regulations and so many graduates willing towork under those conditions. Since thosepractices are not likely to change out of goodwill towards academic workers, I focus myefforts on the supply side of the problem. Ifwe could reduce the number of PhDs on themarket — and expand their career options —we might see some improvement in the

conditions of academic employment, particu-larly in humanities.

I regularly meet students who have beenencouraged to enroll in programs that offerno funding and no reliable informationabout job placements after graduation. Afterall, we are trained to believe that more education always equals more opportunityand that educational debt is always “gooddebt.” And professors who deviate from that message are seen as undercutting higher education. But I am not saying anything that has not been said by the AAUP [American Association of UniversityProfessors], and backed up by their data, formore than 30 years.

Do the emerging practices of digital humanitiestrigger hopes for more jobs? I wish I could provide a Horace Greeleymoment: “Go into the digital humanities,young scholar.” But I do think the digitalhumanities offers new possibilities for intel-lectual collaboration and dissemination ofwork. It allows us to visualize data in newways, and to see patterns that were previouslyobscured in the mass of archival information.And there are some good positions emerging

as universities become aware of the value ofthis constellation of fields. But the number ofpositions is much smaller than the number ofoutstanding candidates.

One positive sign is that digital human-ists tend to have an “alt-ac” [alternate academic] sensibility: they see themselves asadaptable to a variety of employment contexts — technology, information, educa-tion, administration, programming, and soon. I am seeing some success stories (in a traditional academic sense), but I am alsoseeing more people in the digital humanitieshaving careers that look more like the normfor people in non-academic careers: multipleshort-term and concurrent positions, free-lance work, and a lot of moving around.

Have your opinions evolved since you first took on this issue in the late 1990s?Yes, my concerns are less self-interested now.I am no longer reflecting on my own jobsearch. Mainly, I care about what happens tomy students at Hope College. I also identify,sympathetically, with what’s happening tograduate students and all those faculty members who do not have reliable academicpositions. And, of course, I also care about

William Pannapacker, PhD ’99, history of American civilization, in his office at Hope College.

I

By Bar i Walsh

col.lo.quy: a conversation, a dialogue...with WILLIAM PANNAPACKER

On the humanities conundrum with the Chronicle’s provocateur

Courtesy William Pannapacker


the future of higher education, particularly inthe humanities. Contingent labor is a symptomof a much larger problem; namely, as MarthaNussbaum [PhD ’75] has argued, the UnitedStates has become so focused on profits —and education has become so expensive —that few people can afford to study anythingwithout direct, practical applications, unlessthey are already financially secure.

There are some points of light— includingHarvard, I am sure — but nearly all trendspoint in the other direction: funding cutbacks,program consolidation, for-profit education,and declining support for the liberal arts(largely caused by fears about employment).It doesn’t help that we are living throughanother era of politically motivated hostilitytowards higher education. I wish I could saythat things will get better, but, for mostgraduate students, the best advice seems tobe to make alternate plans for the future. ButI know that’s hard to do when just being a successful graduate student requires everybit of energy you can muster.

The Graduate School has amplified career services for students on nonacademic tracksand offered transition workgroups for studentsconsidering the switch. What else should univer-sities be doing to assist graduate students?Harvard’s Office of Career Services provideda refuge for students like me who were wondering what they were going to do withtheir degrees. I am glad to know those effortsare expanding. Most of all, I would supportcreating alt-ac or non-ac internships, prefer-ably paid ones, to allow graduate students toget relevant experience and build networksthat might lead to job offers. I also hope thatseeking alternate career paths is less stigma-tized now than it was a decade ago.

At the same time, I think individual programs need to provide more detailedinformation about job placement after graduation, not just the success stories, tradi-tionally understood as tenure-track positionsat major research universities. They shouldalso inform prospective students aboutacceptance rates, time to degree, attritionrates, and funding. If they do that, my hopeis that competitive pressure for the best students will bring significant reforms.

If we were to see a substantial decline in PhDs,what would that mean for our country and itsresearch landscape? I do not think that most PhD programs in thehumanities effectively use the talents andenergies of the students who populate them.On the contrary, I think they tend to use their

students’ labor, harvest their tuition payments,and send them into a marketplace that hasno room for them. We need to re-envisionsatisfying and productive career paths forpeople with the humanistic values and intel-lectual capacities that led them into graduateprograms in the first place. Our current system is a tragic waste of resources; it hasbeen that way for generations now, and itmust change.

Let’s talk about the rewards of a scholarly life.Why were you drawn to this life?Because I like doing research. I enjoy literarystudies, particularly 19th-century Americanliterary culture in an interdisciplinary context.I often like teaching — though I mostly teach out of my field — and I like workingwith students.

I was drawn to this life because I believed that I could continue the experi-ences I enjoyed as an undergraduate andmake a living at it. I got lucky, and I do notbelieve for one second that I have a tenuredposition because I was more qualified thanmost of the PhDs of my generation who didnot. Increasingly, I see my role as creating a context in which students — and facultymembers — can cultivate their scholarly passions and find a way to make a living atthat. One way I try to do that is by directingthe Andrew W. Mellon Scholars Program in the Arts and Humanities at Hope College. It’s designed to integrate traditional researchmethods with digital technologies and to encourage students to explore careerdirections that may not lead directly to graduate school.

What about your own scholarly interests?I am considering writing a book on student-faculty collaborative research based on myrecent experiences with the Mellon ScholarsProgram. I want to find ways to integrate theliberal arts with digital technology and tocultivate students who are prepared toexplore options besides graduate school, orto at least select graduate programs with aneye toward their applicability for a range ofoptions besides college teaching.

I have an ongoing interest in the relationship between literature and place,and I hope I’ll find time in the next five yearsto complete a project on Whitman andPhiladelphia and Camden (my two home-towns) that integrates literary history withgeographic information systems — if provi-dence grants me, as Melville says, “time,strength, cash, and patience.”

alumni notes continued from page 7

MusicComposer Faye-Ellen Silverman,AM ’71, musiccomposition, has recorded a CD titled TransatlanticTales with guitarist Volkmar Zimmermann. All theworks feature guitar, ranging from solo to guitarquartet to works for voice with guitar. Silvermanearned her DMA from Columbia in 1974 andhas been a member of faculty at The New Schoolsince 1991.

Near Eastern Languages andCivilizationsCarrie E. Duncan, AM ’04, was awarded the2011 CharlotteW.Newcombe Doctoral DissertationFellowship. The Newcombe Fellowship is thenation’s most prestigious such award for PhDcandidates in the humanities and social sciencesaddressing questions of ethical and religious values.Duncan is now a doctoral candidate in religiousstudies at the University of North Carolina-ChapelHill. Her dissertation explores representations ofwomen in Jewish inscriptions from Late Antiquity.

Regional Studies–East AsiaAfter spending more than two years as a staffmember at the House Committee on ForeignAffairs, handling Asia-Pacific policy considerationsfor Democratic Chairman Howard Berman, JessicaLee, AM ’08, is now foreign policy adviser toCongressman Jim McDermott (D-WA). Lee wasrecently selected as a 2011 Spring Fellow at thePartnership for a Secure America, a think tank thatpromotes bipartisan national security solutions. Sheis participating in the Young Turkey/Young Americaprogram, sponsored by the Atlantic Council andSabanci University, with emerging leaders from twocountries.

Submit Alumni Notes to: Colloquy, Harvard University

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Holyoke Center

350, 1350 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-

3846; or gsaa@fas. harvard.edu. Alumni Notes are subject

to editing for length and clarity.

SECTION TITLEACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Fertile GroundIncreasingly, humanists are turning to cognitive and

neuroscientists — and vice versa — to gain new insights

into perception and experience

By Janel le Weaver

If you’ve ever seen Claude Monet’s Impression,

Sunrise, an 1873 painting of a misty harbor at

dawn, you may have noticed that the red-orange

sun glowing in the sky seems to pulsate amidst

the surrounding gray clouds. This jittery effect is

not just a trick of the imagination; it’s actually

a neuroscientifically measurable byproduct of

the disconnected nature of visual processing in

the brain.

While brain regions that respond to color

detect the boundary between Monet’s sun and

clouds, other parts of the brain that process

light intensity do not, because these shapes

reflect the same amount of light. In a black-and-

white version of the piece, the sun would vanish.

Because of the lack of luminance information,

which normally helps us pinpoint items, the sun

appears to move around, and the work of art

comes to life.

This technique, called equiluminance, has

frequently been used by Impressionists and

pointillists to make their paintings sparkle.

But working artists are not alone in their

explorations of how our brains shape our

perceptions. Scholars from fields as seemingly

disparate as art and neuroscience, or

psychology and literature, are increasingly

recognizing how their knowledge can mutually

enlighten one another, and they are acting on

the need to break down longstanding barriers

between the humanities on one end, and

cognitive science on the other.

Having taken personal inspiration from art for decades, Margaret Livingstone, a professor of neurobiology at HarvardMedical School who works with PhD students in neuroscience, regularly includesart slides in her presentations to illustratehow vision works.

Early on, Livingstone didn’t know muchabout art history, so she decided to brush upon the topic. While reading an art book inher office in 2000, she came across a pictureof Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and pondered a question that has teased admirersof this masterpiece for centuries: Why isMona Lisa’s smile so elusive? “I looked at itas if I had never seen it before and noticedthat the effect had something to do withwhere I was looking,” Livingstone says.When she stared at Mona Lisa’s mouth, its outline was sharp and clear, but when she gazed at the background, the lipsappeared blurry.

As she was riding her bicycle one crispfall day, she was struck by an idea: Perhapsthe smile’s ambiguity is caused by differencesin spatial acuity between the center of gazeand the peripheral visual field. To simulatewhat the smile would look like to central andperipheral vision, Livingstone filtered theimage to exaggerate either coarse shapes orfine features, such as lines and edges. She


TheArt of Seeing

found that the blurry mouth seems morecheerful than the sharp one, and so thestrength of Mona Lisa’s smile depends onwhere the viewer looks.

A few years after logging this discovery,Livingstone traveled to Paris to find outwhether equiluminance could explain theshimmering quality of the sun in Impression,Sunrise. During a trip to the LouvreMuseum, she entered a room full ofRembrandt self-portraits and noticed thatthe painter’s eyes did not align properly,

suggesting that he had trouble perceivingdepth. This casual observation stimulated anexperimentally testable question: Is poordepth perception linked to artistic ability?“Some artists are so talented that you have toconsider the possibility that there’s some-thing about their brain that makes them better at art,” she explains.

Upon returning to the US, Livingstonepiled dozens of Rembrandt self-portraits onher desk and measured his eye alignment,confirming her hunch. She later found that

established artists are more likely to havedeviating eyes than the general population.Artists often close one eye to more easily portray three-dimensional scenes on flat surfaces using pictorial depth cues, such asperspective, occlusion, and shading. “Ifsomebody already sees the world as slightlyflatter, they have a built-in advantage whenthey’re kids that might make them tendtoward wanting to become an artist from theget-go,” Livingstone says.

Inspired by conversations with colleaguesin Cambridge, Stephen Kosslyn, Harvard’sformer dean of social science and JohnLindsley Professor of Psychology — and anexpert on mental imagery — has organized a two-week summer workshop exploringintersections between the humanities andcognitive sciences at Stanford University’sCenter for Advanced Study in the BehavioralSciences (CASBS). Advanced graduate studentsand young investigators were admitted froma variety of humanistic fields, from film studiesto philosophy, to explore fundamental prin-ciples of cognitive science and neuroscienceand relate them to work in the humanities.“The ultimate goal is to enrich both thehumanities and the sciences,” says Kosslyn,who now directs CASBS.

Participants will survey a range of topics, from perception and imagery to motivation and morality, and focus on such interdisciplinary questions as why audiences empathize with certain moviecharacters and how different types of musicelicit distinct emotions. “If you know basic

facts about how the mind works, you canbegin to understand why some pieces of art,music, and literature are more successfulthan others,” Kosslyn says. “I don’t thinkthere’s going to be any shortage of possibleconnections between various aspects of the humanities and cognitive science andneuroscience.”

Forging these connections has becomeeasier in recent years, says Anne Harrington,who is a co-director of the summer work-shop at Stanford and a professor of the history of science at Harvard. “Neuroscienceand the cognitive sciences have themselvesbecome more expansive and interested inthings that speak to intrinsic concerns of thehumanities,” she says. “That makes the perceived potential for dialogue much moreattractive and potentially much more constructive for a lot of people than it mighthave felt a generation or two ago.”

Dialogue between areas of study —engaging topics like information processing,memory, aesthetics, emotions, the uncon-scious, and ethics — is essential for a stronguniversity, adds Harrington, whose mostrecent book is The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine. “In the end we’reone academy, and over the long term the

academy can’t be as robust and can’t flourish if we set up these silos in which we burrow down and do our own workwithout asking about what our colleagues in the next building might know about thesame phenomenon,” she says. “The mostimportant thing going forward has to be totry to create a community in which the genuinely important insights and methods of people in both camps can be understoodand respected.”


ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Professor of neurobiology Margaret Livingstone

pursues an active side interest in using “what we

know about vision to understand some of the

discoveries artists have made about how we see.”

Left Brain, Meet

Right Brain

Professor of the history of science Anne Harrington

has long been interested in mind-body interactions,

particularly focused on clinical treatments and

outcomes.

Harvard News Office

Harvard News Office


Many Minds

Together

Harvard’s Mind/Brain/BehaviorInterfaculty Initiative (MBB) hasbrought together faculty and studentsfrom many disciplines since 1993,when then-President Neil Rudenstinecalled for programs that would unitescholars in the brain and mind sciencesacross Harvard’s schools. Co-directedby Alfonso Caramazza, a professor of psychology at FAS, and AlbertGalaburda, a professor of neurologyat Harvard Medical School, the MBBprovides courses, seminars, lectures,and research awards and builds community for undergraduate andgraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty who are examiningthe nature of the mind using a varietyof approaches, such as behavioraltesting, electrophysiology, computermodeling, biochemical techniques,genetics, neuroimaging, and philosophy.

The MBB has long offered trackprograms and secondary fields toundergraduates, but starting this fall, a secondary field in MBB will beoffered to graduate students, who“oftentimes provide the connectivetissue between faculty members indifferent departments,” Galaburda says.

PhD students in the core MBBdisciplines will be able to follow aspecialized secondary field, while ageneral track will be offered to othergraduate students. A steering com-mittee composed of eight graduatestudents has led to alliances withrelated graduate-student groups, suchas the Student Association for Lawand Mind Sciences at Harvard LawSchool, in addition to symposia and a seminar series that have exploredtopics including the history of violence,moral cognition and the law, the usefulness of emotion for computerscience, and complex decision makingand the brain.

By describing the way dappled light streamsthrough a window and falls onto a chair, orthe way a man and a woman circle aroundone another on a dance floor, writers canevoke mental images that are almost as vividas objects we see in front of us, creating richsensory worlds out of nothing but blackmarks on a page.

As literary theorists are coming toappreciate, the effectiveness of these writerlytechniques can be explored not only throughthe narrative itself, but through experimentalresearch in fields such as psychology. “A lotof great thinking about the mind goes on across the University, within different disciplines,” says Elaine Scarry, the WalterM. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and GeneralTheory of Value, who considered questionsof how literature produces rich interiorimagery in her 1999 work, Dreaming by the Book. “There’s more and more good will toward the idea of working across disciplines” — taking research and newmodes of thinking out of the silos that limittheir impact.

To encourage interaction amonghumanists and scientists, Scarry cofoundedthe monthly Seminar in Cognitive Theoryand the Arts in 2000, with Alan Richardson,PhD ’85, a professor of English at BostonCollege who published The Neural Sublime:Cognitive Theories and Romantic Textsin 2010. The seminar, held at Harvard’sMahindra Humanities Center, is still goingstrong, attracting faculty and graduate students from neuroscience, literature, music,philosophy, and art history.

Joshua Rothman, a PhD student in theEnglish Department, is a regular attendeewho gave a talk last fall about 19th- and20th-century novelists’ descriptions of thevarying timescales of conscious experiences,from a single day to a lifetime. “Novel writ-ing was the real psychology before there wasexperimental psychology,” he says. “Reading

literature tells you a lot about people — howthey behave, what they’re made of, and howto think about them.”

People read fiction because they enjoythinking about the intentions of others, saysAnna Henchman, PhD ’04, an assistant professor of English at Boston Universitywho is one of the directors of the seminar.“We can learn a lot about our mental abilities from studying texts, which are muchmore complex than a lot of psychologicalexperiments.”

To understand these elaborate psycho-logical scenarios, more literary scholars areturning to cognitive theory, includingHenchman herself. For her new book, she is applying what she has learned in the seminar about theory of mind — the abilityto attribute knowledge, intentions, and feelingsto others — to crawl into the heads of tinycreatures, such as worms and ants, as theyburrow into the ground or walk along a bladeof grass. “There’s not one objective perceptualworld that we as humans have access to,” shesays. “We all have certain perceptual organsand certain things that we try to pay attentionto in the world, and the world is constructedby those perceptual organs.”

At the same time, neuroscientists areasking questions that pertain to literary studies. For example, seminar participantJoshua Greene, an assistant professor of psychology, has used neuroimaging to examine the influence of emotions and reasoning on moral judgments, and DanielSchacter, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professorof Psychology, has used the same method toinvestigate the relationship between remem-bering the past and imagining the future.

“Moral conundrums are constantlyexplored in the arena of fiction, and acts ofprediction and forecasting are at the center of what a reader does in moving through a narrative,” Henchman says. “By the end ofthe story, there are all these possibilities and shadow plots that have already beenimagined by the reader.”

The Literary Brain

RECENTLY RECEIVED


Violence Taking Place(Stanford University Press,2010) explores thedestruction of architec-ture in the KosovoWar (1998−99). AuthorAndrew Herscher (PhD’02, urban planning) firstsurveyed the wartimedamage to Kosovo’s

architectural heritage for the InternationalCriminal Tribunal. This book broadens the story, looking back to socialist urban renewalefforts beginning in the late 1940s, which razedOttoman-era bazaars to erect modernist government buildings and apartment blocks.During the 1980s, rising tensions betweenKosovo’s ethnic Serbs (Orthodox) andAlbanians (Muslim) led to vandalism of mosquesand Orthodox churches. Herscher notes ironiesin the representation of destructive acts —Serbian actions were viewed as ethnic cleansingand genocide; UN and NATO bombings, inhumanitarian terms; and postwar destruction ofOrthodox churches by Muslim Kosovars waslargely ignored.

Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps toMaximize Imagination, Productivity, andInnovation in Your Life (Jossey-Bass, 2010)

is more than a typical self-help book. And itsfocus is far broader thanthe title suggests. ShelleyCarson (PhD ’01, psy-chology) surveys researchon the brain to plumb thephysiological sources ofcreativity and provide an

accessible introduction to synapses and neuro-transmitters, brain-wave studies, imagingresearch that has identified functional regions ofthe brain, and 1960s-era studies of patientswhose brain hemispheres were surgically split(to treat severe epileptic seizures). Carson

stresses that discussions of creativity are broadlyapplicable outside the rarified world of theMozarts, Einsteins, and Van Goghs among us. We all can nurture and draw on creativity everyday, she argues, and her book includes a varietyof exercises to help do just that.

A child of Indian immi-grants, Natasha Warikoo(EdM ’97, PhD ’05, sociol-ogy) has a deep interestin the process of assimila-tion. In Balancing Acts(University of CaliforniaPress, 2011), she studiesyoung second-generationimmigrants in New York

and London, looking particularly at the impact ofrap or hip hop culture on their academic success. Efforts to address the superficial markers of that cultural influence — to ban low-slung pants, for instance — are wrong-headed,she argues. In a conclusion that should reassureparents and grandparents (who once likelyembraced musical/cultural styles that perturbedtheir elders), as well as the educators and policy-makers she seeks to reach, Warikoo sees thisyouth culture identification as being peer-driven(striving to fit in with peers) rather than oppositional — and not intrinsically opposed toacademic engagement.

In Confederate Minds(University of NorthCarolina Press, 2010),Michael Bernath (PhD’05, history) recounts the Civil War effort to create a distinctlySouthern literary culture.This undertaking failed onseveral grounds. Southern

defeat insured its political end; lack of literarytalent undermined it in a practical sense. Butmost telling was the programmatic approach

Southern intellectuals took toward their culture-building endeavor. During wartime, partisanship too often trumps all, and wartimeliterature is often short-lived. The lasting writings from this conflict (e.g., Crane’s RedBadge of Courage, Bierce’s short stories) camemuch later, a phenomenon hardly unique to theCivil War. Yet ultimately the South achieved literary greatness, from William Faulkner to Toni Morrison — a story that could have beenelaborated in the book’s conclusion.

After Evil (ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2011)critiques U.S.-dominatedhuman rights discoursesince the end of the ColdWar. Robert Meister(PhD ’76, government)contrasts post−Cold Warhuman rights thinkingwith the 1789 Declaration

of the Rights of Man. The Declaration, he argues, recognized the reality of victims and perpetrators and the need for justice, includingredistributive justice. Human rights actions in recent years have aimed at halting immediateviolence, without addressing underlying or preceding social injustices. Thus South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and ReconciliationCommission sought resolution through emotional catharsis, not redress involving(white) haves and (black) have-nots. Amongmany examples, Meister’s densely argued narrative addresses the reunification of Northand South after the Civil War, the 1994 Rwandangenocide, and — as its defining example — theFinal Solution.

alumni books


In Impressionist Children(Yale University Press,2010), Greg Thomas(PhD ’95, fine arts) exam-ines how the FrenchImpressionists have coloredour collective vision ofchildren and childhood.

This lavishly illustrated, large-format volumedraws on the paintings of Renoir, Cassatt, Monet,Manet, Morisot, and others, with topical chapters exploring the ways in which theImpressionists portrayed children and families— in public places and private gardens, out-doors and indoors, and as little bourgeois consumers (evidently providing a ready marketfor dresses, dolls, jewelry, and toys of all sorts).The Impressionists, Thomas notes, played a rolein making bourgeois family life the Westernsocial ideal. Most significant, however, theImpressionists wrenched themselves free ofpast allegorical models (biblical, mythological) tocapture children as autonomous individuals.

Common Sense (HarvardUniversity Press, 2011) isa meticulously researchedintellectual history. Itsauthor, Sophia Rosenfeld(PhD ’96, history), recountshow the concept of“common sense,” with itsclassical roots, emergedin the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries as a well-honed politicaltool. Scots and Englishmen from the northerncounties were centrally important in giving common sense its bite, making it a parry againstabstruse university scholasticism and a strategyfor closing the distance between intellectual philosophy and the general populace.Contemporary Holland, a hotbed of radicalism,was likewise instrumental in spreading thenotion. And Rosenfeld explores the influence of the best-known, most enduring call for

political common sense, Thomas Paine’s 1776pamphlet of that name. In more recent years,she concludes, common sense has had a rockyexistence, linked to anti-intellectualism and simplistic, “kitchen-table” political solutions.

In 2008, some commenta-tors pronounced thatBarack Obama’s electionrevealed a new, “post-racial” America. Theessays collected in Racein the Age of Obama(Emerald, 2010) critiquesuch views. This volume,

as editors Donald Cunnigen (PhD ’88, sociol-ogy) and Marino Bruce observe, helps clarify the“contours and complexities” of race — andunderscores its continuing relevance. Individualessays probe Obama’s foreign policy towardAfrica and initiatives in the area of college education; three essays focus on the challengesMichelle Obama faces as First Lady. Perhapsmost memorable are Nadia Kim’s firsthandaccount of her experiences as a volunteer in Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and a sobering discussion by Adam Murphree andDeirdre Royster on the depths of racial animosityexpressed by contributors to conservative Web discussions.

Philip Freeman (PhD’94, classical philology)envisioned Alexanderthe Great (Simon &Schuster, 2011) as “firstand foremost a story.”And Freeman’s Alexander— tempestuous, hard-drinking, and “exceedinglyfond of war, horses,

beautiful women, and handsome young boys” —leaps off the page and across the centuries.Freeman opens with a cinematic anecdote: a messenger breathlessly riding to tell Philip of

Macedonia that his horse has won the Olympics.That day Philip also learned that his troopsgained a major victory and that he was father to a son, Alexander. Philip issued a decree honoring “the good news he valued above allothers . . . the victory of his horse.” Alexander, ofcourse, eclipsed his father, conquering landsfrom the Danube to the Upper Nile to the frontiers of India.

The World War II–eradestruction of EuropeanJewry and the postwarexodus to Israel, theUnited States, and else-where have receivedmuch scholarly attention.But Shimon Redlich(AM ’64, regional studies,USSR) tells a story less

familiar — and equally fascinating. Life inTransit (Academic Studies Press, 2010)recounts the brief flowering of a postwar Jewishcommunity in Lodz, Poland. Redlich offers bothhistory and memoir, having lived in Lodz as anadolescent from 1945−50. With the end of hostilities, Jews returned to Lodz and created a vibrant array of community organizations, an active political life, and a strong presence in the arts. But endemic Polish anti-Semitism, the growth of Zionist organizations and senti-ments, and the imposition of a Soviet-backedregime brought an end to the Lodz Jewish community.

Reviews by James Clyde Sel lman, PhD ’93, h istor y

Alumni authors:Would you like your book (general

interest, published within the past year) considered for

inclusion? Send it to Colloquy, Harvard Graduate

School of Arts and Sciences, Holyoke Center 350,

1350 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Question? E-mail [email protected].


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HARVARD HONORS FOR HARVARD’S OWNTwo alumni of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences were amongthe nine people awarded honorary degrees by Harvard University at its360th Commencement, on May 26. Nobel Prize–winning chemistDudley Herschbach,PhD ’58, chemical physics, the Frank B. Baird Jr.professor of science emeritus, who has been a member of the faculty since1963, was praised not only for his own scientific achievement, but also forhis warmth and his dedication to advancing the scientific enterprise atall levels. He was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize during thehonor society’s annual Literary Exercises in Sanders Theatre on May 24.Historian and theorist of 20th-century art Rosalind Krauss, PhD ’69,fine arts, a University Professor at Columbia, was honored for helping todefine the post-structuralist mode of art criticism in writings on artistsfrom Picasso to Pollock, as well as in her work on minimalism, surrealism,and the development of photography.

SECTION TITLENEWS AND NOTES

WORKING FORTHE PUBLIC GOODThree GSAS students were among the first cohort of winners of Harvard’s new Presidential PublicService Fellowships, established last year by President Drew Faust. Ten students won grants of up to $5,000 for undergraduates and $10,000 for graduate students, out of more then 100 who applied.The inaugural class of fellows includes Evelyn Boettcher, an AM candidate in regional studies–East Asia who hopes to expand her efforts to build a strong US-China bilateral relationship.She will serve in the US military’s China Strategic Focus Group at US Pacific Command (PACOM)in Hawaii, working on the development of foreign policy as it relates to China, and the groundworkshe’s laid has opened the door to other Harvard students interning at PACOM. The cohort alsoincludes John Hulsey, a writer, artist, and filmmaker pursuing a PhD in film and visual studies. Thissummer, he will work with Boston community organizations City Life/Vida Urbana, the Bank Tenants Association, and others to build a media production group that will generate performances, projections, and public actions to speak about the experience of people facing foreclosure. The final GSAS fellow for 2011 is Tsione Wolde-Michael, a PhD candidate in history,with a secondary field in African and African American studies, whose research interests include theintersections of gender and race, particularly as they relate to comparative nineteenth-century slavery. She will take a curatorial internship at the National Museum of African American Historyand Culture in Washington, DC, contributing to exhibitions that will connect her interest in publichistory to her commitment to community engagement.

Dudley Herschbach, PhD ’58; Rosalind Krauss, PhD ’69

Harvard News Office

Harvard News Office

AM candidate Evelyn Boettcher


I CHOOSE HARVARD...

“Harvard has a broad impact on the world, and I wanted to help advance its world-class research,” says Hartley R. Rogers, who, along with his wife, Amy C. Falls, funded the Hartley R. Rogers Dissertation Completion Fellowship, an endowment administered by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in direct partnership with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

The most recent recipient is PhD student Janet Lewis, who researches insurgency and counterinsurgency in Africa.

“Africa is the last great emerging market, with potential for eco-nomic growth and development that could go a long way in alleviating human suffering,” says Rogers, who has been immersed in global business ventures since 1981 and travels to Asia fre-quently as chair of Hamilton Lane, a private equity fi rm located in Pennsylvania.

“I know there is an acute need to help graduate students, and I’m delighted that my gift helps international development,” says Rogers. He gives for personal reasons, too, which include his time at Eliot House and his studies as a concentrator in geology. Whether it’s the memory of running An Evening with Champions, a Jimmy Fund benefi t, or working alongside professors Stephen Jay Gould and John A. Wood, remembering his time at Harvard inspires Rogers to give.

“Harvard laid the foundation for a wonderful career, tremendous friends, and a formative experience like no other,” he says.

Choose Harvard today with a gift to the Graduate School Fund. Visit alumni.harvard.edu/colloquy/I-choose-harvard.

Support the

Hartley R. Rogers ’81, MBA ’85

HARVARD IS . . .

the opportunity to follow your research wherever it takes you

Janet Lewis, a PhD candidate in government, interviews civilians in eastern Uganda about their experiences living near rebel militia groups. Lewis is exploring why some people become powerful insurgents in Africa and others do not. “Once they become major threats, it’s much more diffi cult to stop them and the humanitarian costs that typi-cally accompany them,” says Lewis, who is a recipient of the Hartley R. Rogers Dissertation Completion Fellowship. To read more about Janet’s research, visit alumni.harvard.edu/colloquy/harvard-is.

INCREASING OPPORTUNITY

AND ACCESS

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

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Boston, MAPermit No. 1636

The graduate school of arts and sciencesharvard university

CALL FOR NOMINATIONSThe GSAS Centennial MedalHelp GSAS recognize its most distinguished alumni through nominationfor the Centennial Medal. The medal recognizes contributions to societyas they have emerged from graduate study at Harvard. Past recipientsinclude historian Bernard Bailyn, author Susan Sontag, biologist E. O.Wilson,economist Jeffrey Sachs, and historian and memoirist Jill Ker Conway.

To nominate: Submit a letter stating your reasons for selecting thecandidate, marked for the Centennial Medal Nominations Committee, [email protected] or GSAS Alumni Association, Holyoke Center 350,1350 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138.

POINT OF CONNECTIONDo you want to connect with Harvard's alumni services? Reconnect withthe Graduate School? Learn about upcoming events, and stay on top ofnews about GSAS students and alumni? We invite you to make the GSASalumni web portal your central point of connection. Access all the servicesand information you need here: www.gsas.harvard.edu/alumni.

STAY IN TOUCHJoin HarvardGSAS on Twitter and Facebook to stay connectedwith goings-on in Cambridge. You’ll get short updates about

career events, research achievements, campus happenings, and issues relatedto graduate research education at Harvard and across the country.

PUBLIC SERVICE ON THE MAPGSAS alumni, we invite you topost your public service experiences on the HarvardAlumni Association’s “PublicService on the Map” website,which functions as a clearing-house of volunteer opportuni-ties around the world —

as well as a testament to Harvard’s impact. Let other alumni know about the causes and organizations that are important to you.Visit onthemap.harvard.edu.

A GLOBAL PASS FOR ACCESSConnect to the 190 Harvard Clubs that exist in more than 70 countriesaround the globe through the HAA’s Global Pass program. Members of participating Global Pass Clubs can attend events held by any of the other participating Global Pass Clubs, on a space-available basis, and pay the local member price for that event. Learn more atwww.clubsandsigs.harvard.edu.

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