Elspeth Kursh, A&S ’06
Natural Wonders
Cleaning multimillion-year-old dinosaur skeletons? It’s all in a day’s work for exhibits manager Elspeth Kursh. through a magnifying glass. “I was always encouraged to be curious and to ask questions and to do research and learn,” she says. “Being aware of my environment was one of those ways to learn more about what was going on around me.” A year after receiving her history degree from Johns Hopkins, Kursh hit a crossroads: She could go to law school or change direction altogether. She chose a change. To celebrate the museum’s 40th anniversary in May 2012, Kursh will be designing an 800-square-foot exhibit that focuses on the use of collections in research and education. It’s a fitting theme: Researchers travel from around the world just to see the museum’s exhibits. Kursh remembers a man from Canada who came to look at the museum’s collection of birds’ eggs, which is the second largest on the continent. “It seems like we’re a small museum, but we really do play with the big boys,” she says. “That kind of intellectual environment is so rare and it’s such a pleasure to be a part of it.” —JW
Courtesy of Delaware Museum of Natural History
M
ollusks. A polar bear claw. Q-tips and paintbrushes for cleaning multimillion-yearold animal skeletons. You never know what you might find on Elspeth Kursh’s desk. As exhibits manager at the Delaware Museum of Natural History, she could be designing an exhibit on space exploration, feeding turtles, or painting the walls in the permanent exhibit halls, depending on the day. The museum, which was founded by John E. du Pont (yes, those du Ponts), houses more than 2 million mollusk specimens, 118,000 bird specimens and nests, a Hall of Mammals, a giant squid replica, and the state’s only permanent dinosaur display. It’s Kursh’s job to plan and maintain all of these permanent and special exhibits. That’s meant climbing ladders with a special vacuum attached to her back to clean the dust off a Tuojiangosaurus and a Yangchuanosaurus, which are Asian relatives of North America’s Stegosaurus and Allosaurus. It’s meant reattaching a polar bear claw to a taxidermy specimen; gathering mollusks from Delaware, Bermuda, and the South China Sea to be displayed in the Shell Gallery; and tracking down a company to remove the 700-pound pane of glass that covers the Great Barrier Reef, a permanent exhibit, so she can crawl inside and change a burned out lightbulb. Growing up on a Pennsylvania farm, the natural world “was always presented as way more interesting than anything on television,” Kursh says. For fun, her parents encouraged her to see how many mosquitoes, wasps, and flies she could find on a square foot of their lawn. Kursh remembers being fascinated by the varieties of life she saw through a microscope and
Shelf Life
Blooms Eternal The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, by Molly Peacock, A&S ’77 (MA) (Bloomsbury USA) An established Toronto poet, Molly Peacock has rendered an intimate prose biography of an extraordinary English gardener, artist, and letter writer, Mary Delany, 1700–1788. Late in a rambunctious life, Delany created an art—she called it “mosaick”—by painting paper bits and cutting them into flowers that leap up from the page as though nature’s own. Along her petal-strewn path she linked up romantically with Lord Baltimore, befriended royalty, and intrigued Jonathan Swift. Peacock uses the letters to bring Delany to life and adds to the book’s sense of a collage by matching the import of its chapters with the artist’s images, reproduced prettily.
The Taker, by Alma Katsu, A&S ’04 (MA) (Gallery Books) To borrow the famously misquoted Cole Porter line, “And though I’m not a necromancer,” those folks who are have here their answer—in The Taker, “Anything Goes.” The novel is complex chronologically, but at its root is an alchemist in ancient Hungary who achieved a potion for perpetuity. To extend the Porter metaphor, the heroine becomes a poster girl for “Love for Sale.” Her first taker, a beautiful lover in the Maine woods, does her wrong and she falls in with a fiendish cult of never aging fornicators living in Boston. But as the decades descend, she tires of never aging. It ends reminiscent of “Miss Otis Regrets,” the Porter tune in which the sweet young thing pulls a revolver from beneath her velvet gown and shoots her lover dead. In this case, though, she walls him up in the cellar. —Lew Diuguid, SAIS ’63
Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2011 63