News from Arts and Humanities

2008 Conlon Awards
On behalf of the entire staff of the Writing Center, it is our distinct pleasure to announce the winners of the 2008 Conlon Awards, given to the best analytical writing by a first-year student. These awards commemorate Michael Conlon, a former Writing Center Consultant, and the winners are chosen by a committee of students. 

Take the opportunity to congratualte these winner, and the winners of the Wooten Prize, in person at a reception in their honor, Wednesday, April 30th, 5:30-6:15 p.m. at the Glavin Chapel. Surround yourself with peaceful architecture, eat and drink on a Spring afternoon, and bask in the reflected glow of these winning writers:

          1st Prize: Marissa Mignone: "The Em Analysis"
          2nd Prize: Rigel Barros de la Parra: "Socrates: The Martyrdom..."
          3rd Prize: John Chartier: "Flickering in the Window"

The Conlon Awards Committee: Charis Teddy, Sarah English, Victoria Gibson, Lyndon Mouton, and All the other Writing Center Peer Consultants
 and Kerry Rourke, Director of the Writing Center

2008 Wooten Prize for Excellence in Writing
It is my pleasure to announce the winners of this year's Wooten Prize for Excellence in Writing.

This year's judges: Prof. Kevin Bruyneel (History and Society); Prof. Elizabeth Goldberg (Arts and Humanities); Prof. Michael Goldstein (Finance); and Prof. Joanne Williams (Accounting and Law). They were rigorous in their reading and insightful in their responses. I am most grateful for their engagement and expertise.

To this year's entrants: you are thanked and commended for filling that entry box in Hollister with your work. Each year the volume of entries increases. Your enthusiasm indicates an abiding interest in the importance of close reading, creative thought, committed writing, and the pursuit of intellectual curiosity at Babson College. Well done.

And so to this year's winners…

          First Prize to Rigel Barros for the essay “Dirty Advertising.”
          Second Prize to Kathleen Murphy for the essay “Gender Relations in Harry Potter.”
          Third Prize to Iryna Neskoromna for the essay “The Garb of Modernity in the Context of Tradition.”

Congratulations to all! Please join us at a reception in their honor on Wednesday, April 30th, 5:30-6:15 p.m., Glavin Chapel, where we will also celebrate winners of the Conlon Prize for First Year Writing.

Mary O’Donoghue
Assistant Professor of English, Co-ordinator of Wooten Prize for Excellence in Writing
Arts and Humanities

Professor Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg
         Ropes Lecture Series      
Professor Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Author of Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights, presented "Of Manifestos and Manifesting: Professing Literature and Human Rights in the Age of Terror" as part of the 2008 Ropes Lecture Series on Violence and Literature: The Humanities in a Post-9-11 World.   The 2008 Ropes Series  held on February 12 at the University of Cincinnati,  sponsored by the Department of English and Comparative Literature, explores the interrelations of violence and literature in a post-9/11 world and seeks to understand how human rights issues are central to the humanities.

Prof. Goldberg has published articles in journals and edited collections in the areas of multicultural literature and pedagogies, gender studies, and human rights. She is currently co-editing a collection of essays on torture since 9/11, along with a special issue of the journal Peace Review devoted to literature, film, and human rights. She teaches courses in international literatures and human rights, as well as Babson's interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities Foundation course.  Prof. Goldberg earned both a B.A. and M.A. at Northeastern University, and a Ph.D. from Miami University of Ohio.   At Babson in 2007 Prof. Goldberg was named Teacher of the Year by undergraduate students, and earned the Dean’s Teaching Award in 2006.

Deans' Award for Excellence in Teaching
The Arts & Humanities Division’s Professor Mary Pinard recently received the Deans’ Award for Excellence in Teaching, granted in recognition of her innovative and integrated teaching in the Undergraduate School, her creativity and innovation in the classroom, and her passion to make the humanities matter.

In the Undergraduate foundation program Mary Pinard has played a central role in the development, implementation, and continued success of the Rhetoric Program. Earlier, as Writing Program Director, Mary developed the Writing Center into a centrally located and inviting place for students and increased usage exponentially for student writers from across the curriculum.

Mary has also collaborated in the development of several iterations of the team-designed Arts and Humanities Foundation course and in that context, she has been instrumental in integrating the work of contemporary writers and artists into the course design. Mary naturally brings her experiences with creativity and poetry writing to bear on her own courses as well, such as Place and Landscape in American Literature, Introduction to Poetry, and Poetry Writing.

Mary has been a long-serving member of the Teaching Task Force which has designed several campus-wide teaching seminars. She has served as a Faculty Advisor and participated in the design of the new First-Year Seminar and now serves as a Posse Program Mentor. She initiated and continues to work in and administer the Creativity Stream of the Two-Year MBA Program. 

Mary is a treasured source for ideas about teaching creatively and has been exceptionally willing to share her talents with colleagues and students.

Carpenter Prize Winner
Professor Kathleen Kelly, Professor of English and Chair of the Arts and Humanities Division, was recently awarded the Walter H. Carpenter Prize for Exceptional Contributions to Babson College for 2007.

 President Barefoot’s recent announcement included the following description of the Carpenter Prize: “Every year since 1982, Babson College has awarded The Carpenter Prize to a staff or faculty member who has demonstrated the following attributes: 1) a commitment to high standards in his or her professional and personal life; 2) outstanding service to the College over a period of years; and 3) sensitivity and concern for students and colleagues. This award was named for Walter Carpenter, former Professor Industrial Relations, Chair of the Management Division, Dean of Faculty, and Vice President of Academic Affairs, and it is considered one of Babson’s most prestigious awards for a faculty or staff member.”

 As President Barefoot noted, “Kathleen Kelly certainly exemplifies the characteristics of teacher, scholar, community builder, and colleague. Please join me in congratulating Professor Kathleen Kelly as the winner of the 2007 Walter H. Carpenter Prize.”

The Nan Langowitz Women Who Make a Difference Award
We congratulate Professor Elizabeth Goldberg as the faculty recipient of The Nan Langowitz Women Who Make A Difference Award in 2007 This award is presented annually to students, faculty and staff of the college who have coordinated and implemented a program or event that has assisted in bringing the campus community together in a positive way.

In Memoriam
The Arts & Humanities and History & Society Divisions mourn the loss of a dearly loved colleague, Professor Martin Tropp. A division member for over 30 years, Marty, died of lung cancer on  December 29, 2006. Professor Tropp taught courses such as The Literature of Travel, Literature and Family, and Growing Up in Victorian England . He was known for his robust sense of humor and wide reading, and was liked and admired both inside the classroom and across the campus. He specialized in Victorian literature and in the genres of mystery and horror stories, and he published two scholarly books, Mary Shelley’s Monster and Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Shaped Modern Culture— and just recently a mystery novel, Alive Again: The Launay Case. He served the divisions and the College in many important ways, most recently as a member of the Honors Council. For several years he rallied the Babson team members for the annual Wellesley Spelling Bee, christening the team the Toolachs, for the first word that his team went down on, and winning the Bee in 2004. He is sorely missed.  

Other News
The circulation of images from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has brought the problem of torture to the forefront of public attention, and has produced a surge of literature debating the practice of torture in the post-9/11 context. None of these works, however, include the voices of those who have survived torture, many of whom were intellectuals, academics, and activists in their own contexts, which is often precisely why/how they became targets for repression through torture. Working with members of Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition (TASSC) International, Professor Elizabeth Goldberg and co-editor Professor Eric Zolov (History, Franklin and Marshall University), are producing a collection of essays on torture by torture survivors and academics, activists, and clinicians working in the field of human rights. Currently, the literature of human rights, globalization, and peace and conflict more broadly is quite strictly divided between academic, analytical books, on the one hand, and books written by survivors in a testimonial voice on the other. This collection of essays will be the first to bring these two groups together, to bridge the divide between survivors and non-survivor academics/activists to offer analyses of the pressing problems of human rights, representation, and identity in the post-9/11 world.

 Prof. Goldberg is currently completing a manuscript entitled Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights that addresses the ethics of representing grave violations of human rights in twentieth-century novels and feature films.

Kathleen and Christopher: Christopher Isherwood’s Letters to His Mother, introduced and edited by Professor Lisa Colletta was published in fall 2005 by the University of Minnesota Press. This collection of letters from novelist Christopher Isherwood to his mother Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood presents correspondence which has never been available to general readers before. Isherwood is best known for the Berlin Stories, which later became the academy award-winning film, Cabaret. With the recent publication of his biography and a growing interest in “the Auden Generation,” he has come to be understood as an important writer of the thirties.

Wild Colonial Girl: Critical Essays on Edna O’Brien, co-edited by Prof. Colletta and Maureen O’Connor, was published spring 2006 by the University of Wisconsin Press. The first critical collection examining O'Brien's work, this works includes essays that examine the transgressive power of O'Brien's performance of identity and show how her manipulation of personae questions the constructed nature of national and sexual identities.  

Professor Colletta’s book, Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien, has been nominated for the Robert Rhodes Prize for a Book on Literature. The award is sponsored by the American Conference for Irish Studies. The American Conference for Irish Studies is a multidisciplinary scholarly organization with approximately 1500 members in the United States, Ireland, Canada, and other countries around the world. 
 

Professor Lydia Moland spent the 2005-2006 year in Europe where she continued her work on the history and philosophy of patriotism. She held fellowships at the American Academy in Berlin and the Bogliasco Study Center in Italy and was also a guest of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Her research focuses on the philosopher Hegel’s use of the word patriotism and the conceptual history that informs that use. Her project also explores the current meaning of patriotism, its distinction from nationalism, and its role in the European Union.

Publications: Books

MaryEllen Beveridge, Looking for Signs - Stories, iUniverse, Inc., 2006.

Lisa Colletta, Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel, Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.

Lisa Colletta, editor, Kathleen and Christopher - Christopher Isherwood's Letters to His Mother, University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Lisa Colletta (and Maureen O'Connor), editors, Wild Colonial Girl - Essays on Edna O'Brien, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Beyond Terror - Gender, Narrative, Human Rights, Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Pamela Hoffer, Reflets réciproques: A Prismatic Reading of Stéphane Mallarmé and Hélène Cixous, Peter Lang Publishing, April 2006.

Lydia Moland, "History and Patriotism in Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie", History of Political Thought, forthcoming 2007.

Mary O'Donoghue, Among These Winters, The Dedalus Press, 2007.

Mary O'Donoghue, Tulle, Salmon Poetry, 2002.

Brian Seitz (and Ron Scapp), editors, Etiquette - Reflections on Contemporary Comportment, State University of New York Press, 2007.

Deborah Vlock, Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre, Cambridge University Press, 2006.