Non Satis Scire Summer 2016

SUMMER 2016

Non Satis Scire THE HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE FOR ALUMNI AND FRIENDS

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STUDENT POSTER DESIGNERS o n t h e A r t o f C o m m e n ce m e n t

I was working on paintings exploring the conflict between structure and entropy. There is vitality and possibility, and at the same time a tranquility and balance. It reflected my own world. Hampshire was an incredible time for me, and I was experiencing in tangible ways the tension between who I was, who I was becoming, and the forces that surrounded those changes. This theme has prevailed over the course of my life.

DAVID SULLIVAN 84F P12 Head of school at Breakwater School, in Portland, Maine

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Graphic Details

I wanted to highlight the audacious spirit of Hampshire (hence my friend Devon doing a backflip), celebrate the beauty and bittersweetness of our time at the College coming to an end (Mt. Norwottuck at sunset), and showcase the diverse nature of all of our work (the Div III titles hand-lettered in the background).

MOLLY MCLEOD 05F Artist, zine maker, and educator, in Oakland, California

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Graphic Details

How do we honor students, staff, and faculty who organized tirelessly for social justice within Hampshire and out in the world? To this end, I avoided symbology that emphasized individuality. My design includes a network of trees and birds to represent how students learned collectively in asymmetric paths to graduation. It features a James Baldwin quote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.�

JULES COWAN 10F Graphic arts and website designer for social justice organizations, in San Francisco

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Holding Hands with Ilse AS TOLD TO NSS BY ABRAHAM RAVETT

Unlikely Connections

During a visit to Poland in 2009 — I had been invited to give a retrospective of my films at the WRO Art Center in Wroclaw — I felt an unaccountable unease while riding the Communist-era trains. I thought of my family’s 1950 relocation from Eastern Europe. The decision to leave had to have been difficult for my parents.

They were Polish Jews who survived Auschwitz but lost their previous spouses and children there. They met and married after the war, hoping to build a new life in the border city of Walbrzych. But they couldn’t bear the lingering legacy of anti-Semitism, tried unsuccessfully to emigrate to America, and wound up in the newly formed state of Israel. I was just three years old when we moved.

Riding those trains, I also became aware of the difficulty of such a long journey and of the looming, haunting presence of the German teenage girl who had taken care of me while my parents worked. I had a single blackand-white photograph taken of the two of us standing in a meadow outside Walbrzych in 1950. All I knew was her first name. Ilse.

In 2011, a major change in my personal life brought up feelings of abandonment that were somehow rooted in the emigration from Poland to Israel and also in the loss of that intimate relationship I’d had with a caregiver I couldn’t even remember. I decided to try and find Ilse and make a film about my search. Based on what little I had to go on, I never imagined that I’d find her.

Last summer, after months of fruitless leads, an unlikely chain of connections led to a major

feature about my film project in the Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s leading daily, coupled with a mention of my project in a monthly newsletter for former residents of Walbrzych now living in Germany. Ilse Gerda Kaiser, 82, saw the newsletter and immediately recognized herself and me. In a few weeks I was on a Lufthansa flight to Ibbenbüren, Germany.

Over five days together, Ilse filled in gaps about my early life. I learned that she looked after me as much as twelve hours a day, six days a week, for two years while my parents ran a grocery store. I learned that her father, a coal miner, had been forced, not asked, to stay in Walbrzych because war-ravaged Poland desperately needed coal. I wasn’t expecting the epiphany of reunion, but the new connections I sensed felt profound.

And of course I had more questions for which she had no answers.

The film, when it’s completed, will expand the tapestry I’ve been trying to weave through all of my work: between the present and the past, between self and family, between a desire to know and the limits of what can be revealed.

. . .

Abraham Ravett is a filmmaker, photographer, and avant-documentarian who has taught film and photography at Hampshire since 1979. His independent films and short movies have been screened in festivals and other settings both nationally and internationally, including several one-person shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “In some ways,” he says, “the act of making film is an opportunity to continue a relationship, a way of living with people who left so much unsaid and untouched, whose presence continues to haunt me.”

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Contents

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GRAPHIC DETAILS

Student Poster Designers on the Art of Commencement UNLIKELY CONNECTIONS

Holding Hands with Ilse IN CONVERSATION

Setbacks, Outtakes, and a Little Gem of Hampshire-ness COLLISION COURSE

A Bright, Shining Moment OFF THE RECORD

When Bill “Spaceman” Lee Pitched for Hampshire TRAVEL COMPANION

Bridge on Two Wheels POETRY TO PROSE

Can Art Fight War? DEDICATED SPACE

My Father, the City Kid . . .

TITLE SEARCH

What’s in a Name?

LOST & FOUND

“ I Miss It Dearly. Thank You Very Much”

40 Hampshire News 47 Books 49 Notes from Alums

FACING PAGE In August 2015, professor and filmmaker Abraham Ravett posed for a photo

with Ilse — reconnecting with the ghost of a memory that had hovered over him for 65 years.

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SETBACKS, OUTTAKES, and a LITTLE GEM of

Hampshire-ness Professors and dancers Becky Nordstrom and Deborah Goffe, in conversation

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Videographer: This is just for sound check. Can I ask each of you, one at a time, to count to five?

Deborah: Sure. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Becky: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

This is the first in a series of conversations

Videographer: Thank you.

between faculty members, one who has decades of experience at Hampshire and

Becky: We’re already choreographing.

the other fairly new to the College. Becky Nordstrom and Deborah Goffe spoke together last spring, with a camera rolling, at the Music and Dance Building in the Longsworth Arts Village. Becky is professor emerita of dance; former member of Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians in New York City; and the cofounder of Collaboration Danceworks, in Putney, Vermont. She has performed throughout the United States and in Europe and was, for many years, a member of Chaos Theory Dance Company, directed by her UMass colleague Billbob Brown. Deborah is assistant professor of modern and contemporary dance; founder of Scapegoat Garden, a Hartford-based collaborative dance theater company; and former dance coordinator at Charter Oak Cultural Center. She has taught dance and related courses at California Institute of the Arts; CulturArte, a youth arts summer

Becky: How are you surviving? This time of the semester can be intense.

Deborah: I feel like I’m finding my stride, actually. The start of the semester was full and a little confusing since it was my first, unfiltered experience with Hampshire. Daphne had been so nurturing, and in a way I saw things through her eyes, which had been a comfort. Then, suddenly, it was, Oh, I’m out here alone. What does this look like to me? What do I think about it?

Becky: Took off the training wheels.

Deborah: Absolutely. They were off and we were moving. By this point in the semester I understand the rhythm better. I also have a stronger sense of what I care about in this context.

It feels a little more like my place. But I have to tell you that Aliza, our intern, and I have been joking about What Would Daphne Do? What Would Becky Do? We need bracelets.

residency program in Cape Verde, Africa; and CREC Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. Daphne Lowell, referenced in the conversation, is a professor of dance, a colleague, and mentor.

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Becky: There’s always improvisation, which is part of what we do in our field anyway. But watching you last year when we overlapped, you were a quick study. One of the things you brought here, in addition to your experience and background, is an aesthetic vision. I’ve seen you bring that to your teaching, in how you talk with students about their creative process. The way we work with students here, and mentor them, the model is not so much critique — let’s see what’s wrong with this picture — but more of a conversation, an engagement, trying to help them articulate and embody the ideas they have more fully. Often their interests aren’t just with dance, but dance in relationship to neuroscience or social justice . . . different combinations. It presents an interesting challenge for us. It means that as we’re helping them shape their questions, we’re learning right along with them.

In Conversation

“ Yes, it’s quite a gift for students to see creative engagement modeled for them.

But there are ways that dance can evaporate over time. Things happen to the body and things happen in life that can be a barrier to continuing. In some of the videos I’ve watched of you and Billbob, the really exciting thing, to me, is seeing how you reinvent.”

Deborah: I won’t forget the first moment I really understood that Hampshire is its own place entirely. I was meeting with a student and she was talking about her Div III plans in a way that was so self-possessed and so clear. But the topic was something I’d never heard of in my entire life. In that moment I felt absolute intimidation — and excitement. How does one work with this? The blurring of the line between student and colleague, and the way it happens so early for these undergrads, is magical. After I had been in the trenches and saw how it all unfolds over time, I moved from simply engaging with students and their ideas to really advocating for them.

Deborah: Yes, it’s quite a gift for students to see creative engagement modeled for them. But there are ways that dance can evaporate over time. Things happen to the body and things happen in life that can be a barrier to continuing. In some of the videos I’ve watched of you and Billbob, the really exciting thing, to me, is seeing how you reinvent. The span and the evolution in your work, both solo and together — it’s inspiring. I imagine it’s inspiring for your students to witness that, too, to imagine a life in art and not just a moment.

Becky: That’s where the nudging comes in, right? You help bring them to a new place.

Deborah: So you got a push from having a partner. How did you manage in the absence of that? I ask because I’m doing solo work right now.

Deborah: Absolutely. Make it manifest. Nurture and be supportive, but challenge them to dig deeper. And the intimidation part goes away.

Deborah: I have a question for you. Maybe this is common to Hampshire people. You had a rich artistic practice. I’m curious how you managed to balance that in a place like Hampshire, or does it get nurtured in a place like this?

Becky: It’s tricky. Part of what helped me was having a creative partner, Billbob Brown at UMass, who egged me on.

When I felt I just didn’t have the time to do my creative work, he would insist. He’d say, “We’ve got a date. We’re going to do this piece at such-and-such a time, and we have to make it work.” If he hadn’t been doing that, I would have let more go. I would have let myself get subsumed under the weight of the academic workload. It’s a challenge. I have concerns about that for you. I want you to have your full, rich, creative life — because that’s what nurtures us and feeds our teaching. If you’re not juiced with your own work, the teaching becomes less juicy, too.

Becky: Exactly.

Becky: Well, I really loved performing. I loved it more than choreographing. I found if I wanted to perform, I had to make work, and it was easier in some ways to make work on myself, for myself, because I could fit in rehearsal time around the other things I was doing. Also, I had an early sabbatical some years ago and did a solo concert. I spent the time going around the country and having colleagues and friends of mine from various walks of life either make work for me, or restage a solo of their own on me. That’s how I ended up doing a full solo concert. It was a wonderful way to engage with other artists, try to get inside their skin. It stretched me as a performer.

Deborah: There’s pragmatism in solo work, too. Logistically, it’s practical and economical.

Becky: Yes, that’s the other part of it.

Deborah: Then there’s the thrill that can come from working with other people, the spark that can happen when you’re in a room together. You have an idea, and it’s a little lame, but through the togetherness it turns into something you

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In Conversation

“ What will break through that barrier that people have around dance?

We all have bodies, they’re all expressive, and yet dance can be off-putting. I’m really curious about the ways that can be bridged, and what the implications are for people who want to go into the field. That’s always been a challenge for me.”

couldn’t have imagined. I’m a little addicted to that. There’s a kind of relinquishing that happens, too. I’m not somebody who’s going to cast pieces on bodies that move like mine and look like mine and have a similar kinesthetic impulse. So there’s compromising, is one way to think about it. Right now I’m asking myself what actually lives here, what’s actually in me. If I don’t have to negotiate it in another body or, as you described it, stretching into another’s skin, which is a really beautiful picture — what does that look like? How is that different from what it had been a while ago? These are vessels that are ever changing.

Becky: And how can that be perceived by an audience? How do you create a character or a place or an idea that resonates with an audience? One of my concerns is how to work with dance in a humanistic way. It’s not about technique. I mean, there’s technique under there, and that’s important. But what humanizes it? What makes people engage and somehow empathize with whatever character I’m portraying?

Deborah: That makes me think of another question. It’s a big question, actually.

Becky: Oh, good.

Deborah: What will break through that barrier that people have around dance? We all have bodies, they’re all expressive, and yet dance can be off-putting. I’m really curious about the ways that can be bridged, and what the implications are for people who want to go into the field. That’s always been a challenge for me.

Becky: Actually, one thing I’ve seen you do so beautifully, and that really helps in this area, are the talk-backs after your performances. You’re brilliant at it, having a conversation with the audience, the opportunity for them to ask questions

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and for you as a choreographer or for the dancers to talk about the experience. It demystifies it. In the conversation, audience members start to realize that they have ideas about what they saw. Often, they just don’t think their ideas are legitimate because they didn’t have a frame of reference.

Deborah: There must be some secret language for it . . .

Becky: Yes, the secret language. You see people light up as they talk about what they saw and what they understand.

The performance becomes not only an artistic enterprise, but also an educational one.

Deborah: I was in an advising meeting recently with a student who was grappling with the challenge of creating space for people to claim their body’s expressive capacity.

She’s interested how it might put people in communication with their emotional capacity, as well. She created an evening around a piece that she had choreographed, and was going to perform it in a fairly traditional way, like a Div III concert. But before the performance, she pulled back. I was like, Really?

I wasn’t sure if she was motivated by fear or was thinking that the format really wouldn’t serve her purpose. Maybe it was a little of both.

The event turned into sort of a workshop, where she guided the guests through a process that made it possible for them to receive that one little morsel which was her performance. She had been concerned that the audience wouldn’t be prepared, that they’d show up with the fear we talked about earlier, and might miss what she was trying to communicate. So she built a series of engagements over two and a half hours that were so playful and warm and rooted in a lovingness that by the time she got to the piece itself, everybody was ready for it. They were kind of beyond ready for it.

In Conversation

For me, it was an amazing experience to see a student be that clear about how she needed her work to be received, to think through how it could best happen, and then do it expertly. Then she processed it afterward, and considered ways that the performance context might shift in her hands in the future. I’ve learned that Hampshire makes that kind of play possible. She was able to think quite big, change her mind and scale back, and then let it grow in the new place.

That there’s room for all that experiencing was challenging for me. To trust that her work would turn into something fruitful, and to witness that fruitfulness, for me it was a huge education. It felt particular to a Hampshire education that something like that could happen in a year. It seems like it would normally happen over ten years of working at it.

Becky: Or over a career.

Deborah: Absolutely. That to me feels like a little gem of Hampshire-ness.

Becky: This happens again and again with Hampshire students because often their ideas or interests are coming from a very particular place, a particular question, a particular interest, or sometimes a particular fear. When we’re working with students, we’re not just thinking about the final product, what it’s going to look like in the end. It’s really about the journey, the process, the growth and the changes. It’s about the setbacks, the outtakes, what you throw on the cutting-room floor. And some of those snippets you throw out in a given project aren’t really gone.

Deborah: There can be good stuff in there.

Becky: They live somewhere. Often when we throw something out we say it’s a great idea but it just doesn’t belong here. It’s something that needs to grow on its own somewhere else. That traveling through all the stages can be difficult and sometimes painful for students. But it’s an important part of the process.

Deborah: I’ve been thinking that we act as a kind of midwife.

Becky: We make the call about whether this is the moment to push, or to nurture and nudge, or to embrace and support.

Or just wait. Another big, big idea in working with Hampshire students is learning to listen. The impulse will be to jump in and try to fix, to help them do it. But to be able to sit back and be patient . . .

Becky: I had a student who was a terrific choreographer and dancer and mover. She was interested in teaching children, so she went on to graduate school, to Harvard, to study dance education, movement education, multi-arts education.

She moved back to the tiny town in Vermont where she’d grown up, went into the schools, and started creating dance programs. She came back to Amherst and talked about her work, about the kids, the poverty, and she was quite upbeat about what she was doing. She could have done anything.

She could have been a dancer in New York. But this was her calling. That inspires me.

Deborah: It makes me think of a course I’m teaching now.

We’re having conversations about place. I’ve asked my students to research a place they might call theirs, whether it’s somewhere they’ve lived or would like to live, and to pull information about the creative resources that exist there.

What’s the ecology of the arts community there? The project has started wonderful conversations about who gets to have art, and students are starting to build projects that fill a gap. You just mentioned New York. In my mind, New York has plenty. But if we really think dance has power, where are the other places that can be served by that power of the body? Among the students in this class are dancers, a theater person, a visual artist, a glassblower, and a musician.

Becky: I like that, glassblower.

Deborah: They’re discovering realities about the way arts infrastructure has worked. To see them start to have a love for place in a way that’s nurturing, where they’re gathering resources and knowledge with the intent to give it away — ­ I’m really partial to that.

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A BRIGHT,

Shining Moment

BY LUCY MCFADDEN 70F

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Collision Course

On July 3, 2005, NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft released a robotic impactor on a collision course with comet Tempel 1, 83 million miles from Earth. The impactor, about the size of a washing machine and sheathed in copper, would hit the comet at 23,000 miles per hour. Both the spacecraft and the impactor had cameras trained on the comet. We hoped that the crater and impact debris would contain spectral fingerprints, giving us clues to the nature of remote materials at the far edges of our solar system.

More than 100 satellite- and Earthbased telescopes were pointed at Tempel 1, including the Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra. More than 10,000 people gathered to watch on a giant movie screen at Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach. It was one of the most widely watched projects in NASA history.

I was in Room 358 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, with fifty or so people waiting to see the culmination of an experiment we had been working on for five years. We sat behind arced rows of computer consoles facing a 30-foot-tall projection wall at the front of the room.

We clapped when the impactor spacecraft separated from the flyby.

We watched in awe as pictures popped up of scalloped ridges and mottled terrain no one had ever seen before.

Then the images stopped. We got word that we’d lost signal from the impactor.

Nothing like this had ever been attempted. There was no guarantee the impactor would even hit its ta rge t . P roje c t m a n age r R ick Grammier told people it would be “like a bullet trying to hit a second bullet with the third bullet.” For seven long minutes we waited.

All of a sudden, the projection wall lit up with a flash of blinding light — for an instant it felt like we all held our breath — and then I heard my colleagues scream and saw them jumping up and down and hugging each other. We saw the ejecta from the impact lit up by the sunlight.

We were stunned by the light. Linear spokes radiated away from the impact site in long bright plumes, and reflected sunlight illuminated most of the comet surface. The images were spectacular. Grown men in here cried because they had been thinking of this moment for so long.

I cried. It was an awesome moment.

It was a beautiful sight. . . .

Lucy McFadden, a physical scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, investigates the surface composition of the solar system’s moons, asteroids, comets, and meteorites.

She currently serves as co-investigator on NASA’s Dawn Mission to the asteroid 4 Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. In the months following the Tempel 1 impact, analysis of long-wavelength emission spectra revealed a list of mineral and ice signatures that formed not just at cold temperatures very distant from the sun, but also at high temperature very early in our solar system’s history. The discovery proved that the development of our solar system “is far more complex than our earlier assumptions,” says McFadden. “It changed the paradigm.”

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OFF THE RECORD WITH

BY JIM COLLINS

WHEN BILL LEE PITCHED FOR HAMPSHIRE

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Off the Record

I STILL HAVE MY HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE UNIFORM. Bill “Spaceman” Lee was a left-handed Major League pitcher who won 119 games between 1969 and 1982 for the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos. As a player he had a reputation as a quirky, outspoken, radical free-thinker with a social conscience and a broader view of history and the world than most professional athletes. After his release from the Expos, Lee began a second career as a peripatetic amateur player, coach, and ambassador for the game. Now 69 years old, Lee estimates he travels a million miles every five years to play the game, which he has done in Cuba, Russia, China, Venezuela, and Alaska, among other places, and on one memorable spring day in Amherst, Massachusetts. Bill Lee spoke with writer Jim Collins last spring.

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They had the best uniforms. The jersey said Hampshire on the front, in the Dodger script. It was unbelievable — they looked like the away Dodger uniforms. Every time I play on a team, I keep the uniform. I must have 75 uniforms up here in Vermont.

Not the hats though. I give all my hats to Cuban teams in need.

I’ve taken something like 250 hats to Cuba.

I pitched for Hampshire one game. I got a call from Mal Thursday. Bad Thursday. That wasn’t his real name; it was his stage name. I think he was a Hampshire grad. I remember he had long dark hair, and had a great radio voice. He was a D.J. in Greenfield and the organizer of the game. He thought it would be fun. He called me up, and I drove down to pitch. We played Springfield College on the University of Massachusetts field.

It was a beautiful May afternoon, 74, wind blowing out of the south, toward right field. I have an uncanny ability to remember details like that. I think that’s due to reading Deepak Chopra, the guy from New England Memorial Hospital over in Stoneham who combined Ayurveda — that’s traditional Hindu practices — with Western medicine. It has to do with the neuropeptides in your brain. You can recall everything, you just have to be able to make that bridge to the memories — memories of everything you’ve ever done.

There’s a famous neurosurgeon, Dr. Wilder Penfield, from McGill University in Montreal, who discovered a lot of what we know about that stuff. He was the first surgeon to insert electrodes into the brain and touch areas and bring back repressed memories from childhood. I have this ability. I don’t know why.

Off the Record

The game was back in the early ’90s, just before Ken Burns came out with his Baseball documentary. All the players knew about Burns. You might think the players were Bad News Bears guys. Hampshire in those days was a pretty Bohemian culture, a lot of the guys were long-haired, they all dressed differently — they dressed kind of like Burns, come to think of it, though they were all bigger than him, he’s a diminutive guy, maybe he could have played second base on that team, though I don’t know. He’s left-handed like me.

But no, those guys could play. I was very impressed. They reminded me of the semipro team I played with in Longueuil, Quebec, after I left the Expos. They were real athletes, just like on a club team at any university — people who had played before, who had played high school ball. They weren’t like soccer players. Soccer players can’t play baseball at all.

They called themselves Division IV National Champs. There is no Division IV. The game was dead serious. I had a good curve ball that day, had a good changeup. And I was throwing in the 80s back then, so I was still pretty healthy. One thing I remember was that the Hampshire catcher was very good. He had long hair, and I was worried about him at the plate because his hair was so long, and the wind was blowing it up around his helmet. I thought that strands of it would wrap around the bat and he’d end up breaking his own neck.

I had a great game that day, and we beat them. Afterward we went out for barbecue and beers, and found a nice little joint, heading back toward the Connecticut River. I can still picture it there, on the righthand side of the road.

I played my college ball at USC, Southern California. If you ever get out there, go to a ballgame over at Dedeaux Field, walk around, and you’ll see all the pennants we won. I had to be on my toes on that campus, though. It’s really a rightwing university, at least it was in those days. It was one of the yuppiest places on earth. If I hadn’t gone there, I wouldn’t have gone to Hampshire, though I might have liked to. I finished at USC two years before Hampshire was founded. I would have gone to Humboldt State, up near the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, and majored in forestry. I would have been a forest ranger in the Pacific Northwest, and I probably would have gone to Alaska and built a cabin on Twin Lakes like Dick Proenneke did, you know, the self-taught naturalist who lived by himself in the wilderness for thirty years. I have this strange desire to run away right now even as I speak.

The thing about Hampshire is — it’s not a place, it’s an idea.

It’s like, in your memory, the space between the neurons.

It’s quantum, it’s the quantum mechanics between the reality.

That’s how I think of it. I visualize that place as really smart people who don’t fit inside convention — they live outside of the box. And I think that makes all the difference. As Robert Frost and Yogi Berra said when they got together, they came to the fork in the road and took the road less traveled by. That’s Hampshire College. I was thrilled to play there.

Jim Collins is a magazine editor and writer and the author of The Last Best League (Da Capo Press, 2004).

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BRIDGE ON

TWO WHEELS

BY ZILONG WANG 09F

Travel Companion

I got on the road by 7:30 a.m., eager to greet my loyal travel companion: the shadow. The shadow and I make a good team. Every day, we take turns to lead the way and push away the wind for one another. In the morning, my shadow takes the lead. Somehow, I am always able to catch up with him by noon. And in the afternoon, he trails behind me. But we mostly travel at the same speed. No competition. Occasionally, I would catch him trying to pick sunflowers on the side of the road, which I certainly do not approve of.

BLOG ENTRY, “FROM COLORADO, JUST WEST OF THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE, 08/11/13”

In summer of 2013, after graduating from Hampshire, Zilong Wang bicycled from western Massachusetts to San Francisco. The journey took 74 days, 3,400 miles, and 7 flat tires.

He traveled alone, knocking on strangers’ doors to ask if he could camp in their backyards. He wore normal sandals, never locked his bike, never spent a dime on lodging, and never encountered a single bad person. Along the way, he listened to audio versions of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran, Moby-Dick, and the Book of Mormon (the religious text, not the Broadway show). He encountered thunderstorms and pouring rain, 117-degree heat, days on days of corn, corn, corn, and skies as blue as ocean.

He rode past an Amish funeral. He rode past deer skeletons scattered across pristine deserts. He rode

past dry lake beds. He was passed by Priuses and BMWs and oil tankers and drilling rigs.

Along the way, he recorded his observations and reflections on a blog he called The Bridge on Two Wheels. “I have benefited from the social pyramid,” he wrote at the outset, “where my comparative advantages have allowed me to thrive in a liberal arts college. Other people cooked my food, cleaned my dishes, planned my trips, hauled my trash, and paid for my insurance. I simply needed to think smart thoughts, read smart books, say smart things, perform smart acts, and be handsomely rewarded for the exercise of my ‘higher faculty.’

“Now, preparing for the bike trip makes me feel like a member of Homo sapiens again. I need to worry about clean water, proper nutrition, where to sleep, how to stay dry in the rain, etc.

How refreshing, how humbling, how necessary!”

His hope for connection with fellow human beings was rewarded time and again. He was welcomed into the homes of Catholics and Mormons, self-identified rednecks, libertarians — in fact, people of all faiths, colors, and backgrounds went out of their way to help him, a Chinese traveler in a strange land.

The experience, he wrote, after finishing in San Francisco on August 21, touched him deeply, and changed his life for the better.

In February this past year, Zilong set off on a yet more ambitious, even more intentional journey: a two-to-three-year bicycle trip from San Francisco around the world back to China. You can read about the adventure on his blog, www. journeye.org/

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Can Art Fight War? POLINA BARSKOVA, FROM POETRY TO PROSE

BY MIKE MEDEIROS

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Polina Barskova

Poetry to Prose

The House of Books, St. Petersburg’s largest bookstore, won’t carry Polina Barskova’s The Living Pictures. A collection of short stories, essays, and a play that explore life during the World War II–era siege of Leningrad, The Living Pictures brought her the Andrei Bely Prize, Russia’s oldest independent literary award, in November 2015, and has drawn praise from numerous critics. It has also brought criticism.

“The Putin government orients people toward seeing history as a wonderful, glittering historical narrative about victory,” says Barskova. “But the Soviet government neglected more than one million people, knowing they were starving during the siege. Most people don’t want to read about this. But I guess I’m in a strange kind of role. I’m the person who wants to read this.”

Barskova, associate professor of Russian literature at Hampshire, is one of her country’s most famous poets of her generation. She was born in Leningrad — known as St. Petersburg prior to 1924 and returning to that name in 1991 — and was a prodigy who began writing poetry at the age of eight. Her debut collection was released when she was 15.

the letters and diaries of a young artist, Moses Vakser, and his lover, arts historian and critic Antonina Izergina, who lived in the Hermitage during the siege. Barskova discovered their story while researching the history of that era over the past decade.

“I wrote this play to ask, What does this conflict between art and war mean, how can art fight war, or can it at all?” says Barskova. “The main characters are thinkers and idealists, but they cannot defend themselves against history and famine.”

The initial plan was to stage The Living Pictures at the Hermitage, but concern over its subject matter in Russia’s current political environment made that impossible. Its eventual staging at the Theatre of Nations, Barskova says, came about through the enthusiasm of director Victor Alferov and other young theater professionals.

“It’s important for me to work on reminding my readers what the price of the last century was,” she says, “and what the price of not caring about one single human life can be. In the process of chasing noble and sublime and huge ideas, people are often left without defenses. I’m opposed

“I’M INTERESTED IN STUDYING WHAT IS HUMAN RATHER THAN HEROIC.”

The Living Pictures is her first book of prose, and the image on the book’s cover is the official reason the bookstore won’t carry it. Artist and writer Pavel Zaltsman’s “Masks and a Woman” features a nude that the bookstore’s management says is incompatible with stories of the Nazi German siege, which lasted from 1941 to 1944 and cut off Leningrad almost entirely from the rest of the country as one of the first targets in Germany’s goal of defeating Soviet Russia during World War II. Barskova, though, found the image to be an ideal match.

“Zaltsman was lucky to escape the siege,” she says. “His beloved parents died of starvation in front of him. He wrote about every taboo subject imaginable — the black market, party privilege, prostitution, theft — so we decided to put this image on the cover as a symbol of the siege that was silenced. The image produced by the witness was too daring for the keepers of the siege ‘decency.’”

Despite the bookstore ban, Barskova’s work has proved popular in addition to acclaimed. Last March, the play that gave the collection its title premiered at the Theatre of Nations in Moscow, where The Living Pictures has been sold out during its run. Set in the Hermitage, one of the largest and oldest art museums in the world, it’s based on

to the state notion of heroism. I’m much more interested in studying what is human rather than what is heroic.”

Growing up in Leningrad and earning her BA at St. Petersburg State University, Barskova was intrigued by the history of the siege. Her research began in the Leningrad archives, and while that would remain her most important source for exploration of the siege of the city during World War II, information would eventually begin pouring in from other places.

“When you’re there in the archives,” says Barskova, “it’s like a treasure trove. But once people found out I was doing this research, they began sending me materials. You start talking to people and they tell you they have a diary from their grandmother, or letters from their grandfather.”

After focusing on poetry for more than thirty years, the shift to prose and drama was a challenge: “You feel like you’re at the very beginning of your writing path, which is both exciting and terrifying. You have no good or bad habits. You’re just trying to trust your intuition and, strangely enough, to have fun.

“For me, to love means to be difficult,” she says. “We care through being difficult and saying difficult things.”

TO KNOW IS NOT ENOUGH | SUMMER 2016

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“MY FATHER, THE CITY KID, TAUGHT HIMSELF ABOUT THE WIND, THE TIDES, THE CYCLES OF THE MOON” A Remembrance, April 29, 2016

BY BILL KERN 75F

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R.W. Kern Center Ribbon Cutting

Dedicated Space

IT’S KIND OF BITTERSWEET BEING HERE. IN PREPARING MY REMARKS FOR THIS MORNING, I REALIZED THAT WHAT I REALLY WANTED TO DO WAS TO WALK THROUGH THIS BUILDING WITH MY DAD.

Many of you know that my dad was a builder. But I’d like to talk a little about Ralph Kern the person. Because once we cut this ribbon, the name R.W. Kern is going to be just a name — like Merrill, Dakin, the Crown Center, and . . . the Donuts.

My father was from a tough, can-do generation. Born during the Depression, he grew up in the Bronx, the son of immigrant parents.

My father told me that there was once a carpenter who worked for him who was building a boat. One day, the boat was finished, and the carpenter quit his job and took off to sail around the world. Of course, it could have been that he simply built a small fishing boat and took a job across the street. Anyway, in the mind of this impressionable young man, my father, the guy sailed around the world.

That’s when my father decided he wanted to have his own boat and to be a sailor.

My father’s dream became a family priority for the next fifty years. My mother, brother, sister, and I have the scars to prove it. Mary and Frank are here today.

They’ll tell you. It’s true.

My father, the city kid, taught himself about the wind and the weather, the tides, the currents, the cycles of the moon, and how this planet works. He taught us how to conserve and to be self-sufficient. When I took over stewardship of our 36-foot sloop, Our Shack, my father gave me this piece of advice: The whole boat is too overwhelming to comprehend, so think of it as a collection of interconnected systems. Learn and master each system separately. There’s the running rigging, standing rigging, sails, hardware, engine, the freshwater, the toilet, the bright work, and that’s just for starters. It’s all inside a self-contained shell called “the hull.”

And that’s what this is, this beautiful structure behind me. My father would have loved it. He would have loved the intricate and interconnected systems, the beautiful workmanship, and the meticulous attention to detail all contained in a delicately designed and artfully constructed shell that we call “the building.”

To all of you who helped create this, I want to say as passionately as I can: You would have earned my father’s respect. You have my respect and my admiration.

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Dedicated Space

MY FATHER NEVER HAD THE LUXURY OF BUILDING A CUTTING-EDGE PROJECT LIKE THIS. HE BELIEVED YOU DON’T HAVE TO REINVENT THE WHEEL, AND HIS GENERATION BELIEVED THAT, TOO. NOW, IN THE 21ST CENTURY, WE DO HAVE

TO REINVENT THE WHEEL BECAUSE THE TIMES THEY ARE A–CHANGING.

This building is a prototype. Nothing more, nothing less. Going forward, we’re going to have to build and inhabit more of these, a lot more of these. In order to do that, we’re going to have to demonstrate that this one works. And to do that, I give you the same advice my father gave me: Think of this as a collection of interconnected systems. Learn and master each system separately.

We’re about to cut the ribbon to open this building, but I think it’s more like we’re launching a ship. This is just the start of the journey. To all of us on this journey, I promise that you will be in good company with the spirit of that boy from the Bronx who wanted to be self-sufficient, who knew how to conserve, and who made himself into a sailor — a man who understood and appreciated the world one interconnected system at a time. That’s the legacy of R.W. Kern.

BILL KERN 75F delivered this remembrance of his father at an April 29 ribbon-cutting ceremony to open the R.W. Kern Center. In her remarks, Leona Kern, Bill’s mother and the wife of Ralph W. Kern, said the new building is “the personification of everything Ralph believed in.” (Portrait of Bill and Leona, facing page.) The 17,000-square-foot facility embodies the College’s values and is designed to meet the world’s most advanced green building standard, the Living Building Challenge. The Kern Center makes its own energy, harvests its own water, treats its own gray water, and was built from materials mainly locally sourced, avoiding chemicals dangerous to those who produce, use, or are exposed to them. It will house the offices of admissions and financial aid, welcome areas, classrooms, and caffeinated social space. The Kern family made the lead gift to the project, and was joined by more than 90 other donors. In all, $8.9 million toward the project goal of $9.3 million has been raised through philanthropy. The April ceremony was held almost four years after a committee of faculty, staff, and students began the planning process. Last year, the building’s advanced systems were studied by faculty and students in tutorials and labs.

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Title Search

What’s in a Name?

In the Harold F. Johnson Library, at the heart of campus, you’ll find Hampshire’s soul. It’s in the second-floor stacks, bound in black, red, and blue covers in volumes representing Div III projects. This is what dethroning the course looks like. Each book affirms the courage and creativity with which five decades of students have harnessed their curiosity, channeled their passion, and set off to explore something they care about. Open Remapping Pakistan or Molecular Mechanisms of Melanoma or seek out the rich-media versions of original works of dance, animation, or poetry criticism. Where some might see a senior thesis, we know these as something else altogether. These are about synthesis. Where is there another institution that requires every undergraduate to turn their ideas into action by pulling together so many loose strands? That requires them to find those strands in the first place by imagining their own questions and then wrestling with the maddening way that the search for answers only deepens the question? That requires them to recruit a faculty committee to guide them, challenge them, and negotiate a rigorous path of discovery?

What’s in a name — in a 2016 Div III title? The essence of Hampshire.

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Is fearr Gaeilge briste, ná Béarla clíste: Reconfiguring Irishness • Humane Picture Book • Citizens’ resistance and the housing and eviction crisis: Barcelona, 1975-present. • Skin Femme: Femininity as Affect through the Late-Capitalist Carceral Continuum • Conservation and use of crop wild relatives: A viable approach of enhancing agricultural resilience • Pink Archive: Nothing Applies • DIV III Contract • Recordations • First in the Family: Institutional structures that support first generation college students • Agroforestry: Regenerative Agriculture & Land Use in the Face of Climate Change • “How Can We Help You Make Better Choices?” A Case Study of Nonprofit Urban Agriculture in New Haven • Sleep’s Impact on Emotion • Transforming Historical Architecture: Case Studies from Renzo Piano • Of Dogs and Drones: Narrative Ruminations on Colonialism and Agriculture in the US • Figural Perception • Photography as a Language to Come • Into a Woman’s Hands: Performance and Design in Venus in Fur • Creating Varied Simulated Crowds • “I’m in charge of my body!”: Human Rights and Agency in a Preschool Classroom • Using CO2 as a Building Block: Designing a Metal Catalyst to Incorporate Carbon Dioxide into Dienes/Enynes in the Synthesis of Small Useful Molecules • Development of Algorithm for Identifying Ancestors of Charge • Deposits From EXO-200 Experiment via Compton Scatter • Analysis of Clusters • Gouge Away: The Local Music of the Pioneer Valley Past and Present • Black/Criminal Deportations as a Racial Project Under Global Capitalism • Social Justice Education/Facilitation and Transformative Bridges: Knowledge + Power + Resiliency of Relationships • Theater as Expression of Self: A Div III • THEY DIDN’T KNOW WE WERE SEEDS: growing heart-centered movements from the ground up • Photography and Photo-Voice • Music Composition and Improvisation • Held Together With Tape: A Short Film • Assume a Spherical Cow: Mathematical Modeling of Bovine Dynamcial Systems • How Flies Perceive Motion : A Computational, Biological, and Information Theoretical Investigation • Media Composition and Computer Animation • Analytic Number Theory and Questions of Family, Humor, and the Grotesque in Russian Literature and American Southern Gothic Literature • The Effects of Training on Athletic Performance: 3 Investigative Studies • CD147 Research • Through the Roses: Dreaming about Chronic Illness in Film • Locating Race In Utopia • The Role of Transient Amplifying Cells in Epidermal Senescence • Transparency, Democracy, and Intersectionality. • A Practicum in Building Student and Worker Power in Hampshire’s Food Transition • ASD Screenplay • Dereliction: A Multimedia Installation • Conservative Architecture: Birding and the Built Form • The Radical Potential of Rupture: Protest as Performance & Theatre as Social Dialogue • The Political Economy of Payment Card - A Case Study on DS413 “Certain Measures Affecting Electronic Payment Services” and Retail Payment Market in China • Finding Process in a Form That Thrives on Chaos • Lymphoma & Lyricism: A Division III in Cancer Immunology & Poetry • Understanding Nature through Awareness • Creation of Hampshire’s Student Led SRI Investments Fund • Life Cycle of Plastic Water Bottles: Raising Consumer Awareness through Art and Local Youth Empowerment • this outer blue • The Power of the Festival: an Exploration of Feminist Producing and Production Management • To Heal is to Hold: A Multimedia Exploration of Disability & Resilience • What Happens to You • Implicit Bias in Autism Spectrum Disorder • Rethinking Creative Learning • Kern Digital Dashboard: Real-World Software Engineering • “Be Ye a Good Knight:” Justification of Warfare in Three Evolutions of Idyllic Knighthood • GRID: Historical Fiction looking at treatment of early HIV patients • ‘It was only a section of castle’: Kant, Proust, and the experience of the sublime • “Nona” a short film • Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India: Virtual Motherhood, Race, and Surveillance • We the Pathetic (Neuroatypicality through Interactive Media) • Dominicans Forgotten by History: Palo and Dominican Identity • Encounter and Transculturation: A Critical and Creative Investigation • A Practicum in Building Student & Worker Power in Hampshire’s Food Transition Electromechanical design and fabrication with a focus on custom electric vehicles, ecological sustainability, and social responsibility. • Creating an immersive environment that encapsulates subtle beauty from the world around me, through fine art and artistic craftsmanship • DEAFinitions: A Deaf Studies Conference and Audience Research Analyses • The Body Canvas: Experimental Narratives Inspired by Young Women and Research Analyses on Feminine Ideals, Identity, and Violence • “May Life Be” A Psychological Novel • MORE FUNNY SHOWS ABOUT BROKEN PEOPLE: Writing about people who rarely see the sun and laughing at the shade • Triggered Regeneration of Molecular Circuit Components to Implement Iterative DNA Strand Displacement Operations • An Audiovisual Exploration of Travel and Global Human Interaction • Board Game Design Using Simulation. • Advanced Film Production- Franz Kafka’s “The Judgment” • The Subject of Value: Reading Marx through Lacan • I Dissolve in Time While the World Watches: Using Metaphorical Narratives in Film to Empathetically Immerse Audiences in the Experience of Depersonalization/ Derealization Disorder • Magic at the Margins: Exploring the Power of Queer Witches • The Bunker • A Civic Ecological Approach to Cannabis Discourse • Frontier Economics: The Intersection of the Sharing Economy and the Cultural Encounter • Intentional Unity: The Challenges of Creating Social Justice Within Niches of the Environmental Movement •

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Title Search

Designing for Change: How to Give Students the Tools to Change the World • Into the Void: The Strategy and Development of Martian In-Situ Manufacturing Technology • Performative utterances and the Japanese particle ‘ne’ • In The Garden: Pathways of Mourning • Radom 1921; Los Angeles 2015 • How To Express Yourself With One Weird Trick! (Pics) • Film Production: Directing and Storytelling • Confrontations with Mortality • Designing and Engineering Hardware and Software for an Arduino Music Player • Mapping the Dancing Landscape • My Little Field • Autonomy is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government Through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language • Perspectives on Cochlear Implantation • Vessel: a Graphic Representation of the Human Form • The Ecology of Symbioses Between Grasses and Endophytic Fungi • Programming Interactive Digital Art • Eli Friedberg - Div III • Eros of Stone • Vocal repertoire and affective state of the arctic fox • How are you studying this at Hampshire? • Children of Poverty and Vice: The Child Welfare System as Counter Revolutionary Strategy • A case for infidelity: translating Enrique Pinti’s standup comedy • Talk Naughtilusly To Me: Behavioral Science Education Across the Spectrum • Afros and Prose: An Exploration of Black Past(s) and ReImagining of Black Future(s) through Afro-Futurist Fiction • Controlling light: Computer generated Holographic solar cells • The Evolution of Mindfulness: The Problematic Transmission of Mindfulness from Buddhism to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction • Walking the road of Play and practice • Contemporary Lampworking and Fermentation Science • Museums and Learning: How Exhibit Design Effects Learning in Participants • Part I: “Securing Palestine: The Development and Role of the Palestinian Security Forces” Part II: “Just Remember to Let them Ignite You: An Ajnabiia in Palestine” • Zoo Design Manual • Doing something while wondering what is to be done? Socially Engaged Art • Reenvisioning the Urban Landscape Manufacturing and Cluster Development: Strengthening the Precision Machining Industry in Greater Franklin County, MA • Staghorn (Acropora cervicornis) and Elkhorn (Acropora palmata) Corals Coral Restoration Techniques, and their benefits on Ecological Systems • Being Bitch Enough: Feminist Direction & Taking Back Space • Several Gigabytes • Directing Marisol • The Destructive Psychology of School Shooters • Planting Seeds, Growing Gardens: Critical Storytelling through Digital Media with Queer and Trans Youth between Denver and Springfield • Quilt: The Habit/Ritual of Hands • The Life of Genevieve Burnett • The Wound is a Bird with a Thousand Tongues: Stories of Resistance, State Repression, Displacement and Resilience in the Sudanese Diaspora • An ecology of color: The spatial and temporal distribution of leaf pigmentation in Acer saccharum during autumn senescence • Giving Space: alternative community building in the Catskills and the Pioneer Valley • Managing the Stage and Mentoring the Managers • Constructing Expertise in the Courtroom • The Art of Belonging • The Impact of Community • A Theatrical Approach to Creating Critically Literate Elementary Classrooms • Attempts to do Anything • “The Value of Haunted Things”: A study of the Material Culture and Women of Shirley Jackson’s Late Novels. • Splines and GKM Theory • Appropriate Surgical Procedures in Older Patients with Spinal Deformity: A Retrospective Cohort Study • Discourse Coherence and Mood in Central Alaskan Yup’ik • Embracing a Biocultural Synthesis through an Examination of the Human Superiority Complex and Neanderthals • The Health Impacts of Colonialism on the Ancient Mayans of Lamanai, Belize: A Trace Element Determination of Dental Remains Using LA-ICP-MS • Genocide and Violence in Guatemalan Contemporary Art • Exploring Chinese Foreign Direct Investment in the United States • Conservative Architecture: Birding in the Built Form • Language-Specific Effects on Semantic Categorization • Transhumanism & The Making of Gods • Little Jerusalem: City of Shalom • To Feel is to Know: A Permission into the Felt Wilderness of the Nervous System • Disrupting the Cycle of Poverty/Closing the Tech Disparity Gap: Engaging and Empowering Communities Through Enterprise • The Influence of the charter school’s neoliberal ideology on the people of color within New Orleans • ~*hysterical*~ • Paracosm • The Children of Santa Isabel Convent: An Osteological Study of Syphilis in Colonial Mexico • From Me, To It, To You • Building A Food Culture At Hampshire College; A Landscape of Hampshire’s Local Food Movement: Past, Present, and Future • Secrecy & Power in the Wars on Terror and Drugs • La Femme Noire: A Choreopoem • After the Apocalypse: Frederick Douglass’s Poetry, Prophesy and Reform, 1880-1895 • Against a Global Lockdown: Demythologizing the Global Prison Framework • The Fall of Kalea: Building An Immersive Setting • Gender, Identity, and Power in Metal Music Communities • Parisian Techno: A Music and Culture • Determining the Mechanism for Bromoform Formation by Diatoms and Stable Isotopic Differences of 4 Bromophenol • By Our Powers Combined: Case Studies in Cooperative Farming • Political Dysfunction Through Game Design • Attention, relevance, and the frame problem • The Witch and the Gargoyle • Pasamontana: Walking the Zapatista Path of Autonomy • Social Entrepreneurship Ecosystems. A Strategy for a Developing Nation. • Understanding the Transport Infrastructure Development Boom in Lahore • ‘He Thought He was God’: An Examination of Trauma and Witnessing in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker • Breath by Breath, Stone by Stone: Journeys between the dancing body and the earth • Strongly Marked Subjects: Anti-Black Racism and the Development of United States Cinema •

III

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Title Search

Cyborg Aesthetics: Technology, Feminism, and the Body in Experimental Electronic Music • Intersectional Performance • Edward Bunton • Youth Power! Exploring Empowerment and Change Through Youth Organizations • Fry Me a River: The Rise of Celebrity Chefs, Worker Inequality, and a New Form of Organizing • Cats, Dogs, and Human Cues • … • Lets Get Folk’d: an Investigation of Traditional Homesteading and Folk Traditions in New England • DIVIII: An Exploration in Micro-(Non)fictions • Critical Studies in Cross-Cultural Intellectual History and Creative Writin • Take Me to the River: Salmon fishing in Alaska • A technical system for monitoring water consumption of cows for the Agrigatr group • Documenting The Millennial Generation • The Body Empowered: You Are Not Failing • Industrial Furniture Design: From Dumpster to Living Space • Who’s Story Is It Anyway?: Translation and Adaptation of Russian Folktales • Environmental Activism in the Anthropocene: Hope in the 21st Century • Urine as Resource: The Economic and Environmental Necessity of Phosphorus Recovery • Trying To Be A Hot Girl Is Dangerous: Consent and Sexual Agency in the Digital Age • The “Land Grabbers”: Separating Fact from Fiction in China’s International Farmland Investments • Designing Social Media Platforms To Engage Gen Z Users • Chinese Photography: through history, market and a lake • The Role of Soluble CD147 in Matrix Metalloproteinase Induction and Metastasis • In Vitro Characterization of Daam2 in Colorectal Adenocarcinoma • Developing Brain Machine Interfaces • The Self and the Other: Rethinking Chinese Nationalism • Funding Structures and Profesionalization: Community • Organizing in the 1970s • Bitches, Dykes, & Whores: An Examination of Militarized Masculinity and Sexual Violence • Warm vs. Cold: The Realities of Climate Migration on a Global Scale • Approaches to Urban Design in Springfield, Massachusetts Following the 2011 Tornado • The Clash of Dreams: Mexican, Undocumented Immigrant Students Beyond the Campus • Buddhism and Movement: Healing for the mind and body • R.C.A. • Refugee Crisis in Greece: An Exercise in Contradictions • Staging the Voice in the Theatre of Limits: Gender, Vocality, & the Creative Act • Design and Implementation of “Winter Break”: Team Project Management in Game Development • Indigenous Mexican Migrant Community Organizing: Transnational Identities and Grassroots Empowerment • Tartufo; documenting the Tuber Aestivum (The Black Summer Truffle) • Perspectives on the Greco-Persian Wars • Autobiographical Memory and Depression • Variants of Darkness, Versions of Night: Translations of Gardner McKechnie 20th Century Russian Poetry • Habitation: The Living Nature of Mental Illness - A Multimedia Gallery Exhibit • Narratives of College Womyn’s Experiences with Intimate Partner Violence • Youth Without God: Theatrical Experiements In Adaptation, Collaboration, and Seriality • Music composition, performance and research • Curriculum Design for Multilevel English Language Learners • Game Theory and Analysis: How the Games we play affect Society and convey ideas • Right of Blood: Exploring Italian American Radical History Through Music • Green Chemistry: Synthetic Methods for the Incorporation of Carbon Dioxide into Useful Molecules • Living Gross National Happiness Bhutans philosophy of organic agricultural growth • Possessing History: Contextualizing the Use of Narrative History in Moroccan-Jewish Studies • Modern Agricultural Technology for Smallholder Livestock Farms • Urban Education and Africana Studies • The Civil War over General Purpose Computation • Remote Control of Orexin Neurons and the Subsequent Behavioral Correlates upon Neuronal Inhibition.

• Screenwriting and Film Production • Tears of Repentance: Missionary Towns in Colonial Massachusetts • Don’t Take Away the Fun!: Theatre and Video Activities to Promote Early Literacy • It’s Just Good Teaching: Helping Educators Encourage Young People’s Literacy Through Theatre and Photography • House of Bones: Exploring Mental Illness and Femininity Through Film and Writing • Paper Cut-Outs Fall Out of My Sleeves: Illustration for Plays, Posters, and Graphic Novels • ‘And the Weak’: Writing and Directing a Film about Intergenerational Trauma and Adolescent Development • Rethinking Admixture Genomics: Epistemological and Mathematical Critiques of an Emerging Technology • Computer Graphics Production as a Leader and Generalist • Digital Multimedia • Fantasies Hungry as Bodies: The Cat O Nine Tail Whip During US Chattel Slavery and Contemporary BDSM • Transfer Error Identification in English Language Learners • Environmental Integration in Secondary Science Curriculum • Handstand Technique Training: An investigation into the biomechanical and somatic technique training of circus handbalancers • Choreographing a Collage: The Process of Making Dances • Patching The Past • Traveling Shot Over 26000 Miles • More Than A Market: Fostering Prosocial Intergroup Relations Through Neuromarketing and Sensory Branding • La FronTierra Chingada • Transboundary River Conflict • Riverine Ecosystem Management in Oregon: Thermal Credit • Trading, Quantified Conservation, and Adaptive Change • The Evolution of Layer Based Neural Networks • The Battle Over Sex Education: Creating Solutions for a Failing System • Investigation of Stress Effects in Zebrafish Model • Translation of Worlds: Producing and Designing for the Stage and Screen • What Will We Do For the Land? Stories of Pipeline Plans and Resistance • An American Abroad • Women’s Representation in U.S. Elected Politics: Why, When, and How Does it Matter? • Art-making in recovery: Exploring the self through creative processes • Orientalism and Media Discourse on Egypt’s ‘Revolution 2.0’ • Digital Modeling Through

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Title Search

Novel Technological Methods • Harbored Gardens: A Trans-Medium Horror Film • Gilgamesh & Aristotle: Friendship in the Epic and Philosophical Tradition • Altered Altars: Western ‘Shamanism’ in the Modern World • The Indictment of white supemracy through an Indigenous Epistomology • Impaired Neurogenesis in Connective Tissue Disorders • Resistance and Choice: The German Occupation and Post-War Existentialism • Deep Genomics: Rethinking Genetic Engineering in Agricultural Ecosystems • The Mandalay of the Midwest: The experiences of teenage refugees in Fort Wayne • Creating a Story Driven Video Game: Exploring Humanity’s Future • Seeds and Their Keepers • Tap, Swipe, Pinch, Spread: Desire and the Touch Screen • Hyper-Collage • Feminism Without Grown-Ups: Anti-racism and the matter of childhood • Social Awareness in Corvids • From silly puns to serious business, AgriGatr: The tales of a start-up • Stereotypies in Animals • All Shots Double: The American Barista • Sudden Death & The Medicolegal: Anthropology and the Disembodiment of Death in the United States • The Convivencia: Toleration and Myth • The Business of Music • Technologies of Discretion: The War on Terror and UFO’s • GUISE: A Fashion Show • The Pearl Diver’s Union • Inclusivity in Independent Schools • Fiction and Fantasy: Inter-Imperialism and the Turkish Female Voice • Navigating The Landscapes of Memory and Nostalgia • Sight, Fuel, Evidence: Anti-Black Police Violence and Politicizing Emotion • Gli Sfollati-The Displaced • Sailing Rough Waters: Making Coping With Microaggressions Accessible • A Process Philosophy of Creativity, and Fictional Screenwriting • Advancing the Warp • Voices of Transition: Re-centering the Narratives of Refugee • Women from Burundi and Bhutan After Resettlement in Springfield, Massachusetts • Karachi Hai Kya(What is Karachi)? • Gentrification: It’s Not All That Sweet • Racial Ideology and the Mass Media • Authorship, Publication, and the Devil: Post-Romantic Questions of Textual Control • Trafficking protein CD147 • Faces of Foreclosure:Documenting Stories of Struggle and Resistance • Music Composition and Production • The Values of Online Business: Connection, and Content. • Analysis of Three Prog-Rock Albums and Their Associated Music Scenes • Reincarnating Bill Nye: The Practices and Principles of Educational Media Production • Prohibition Era Through The Creative Lens • Predicting Average Enjoyment, Appreciation, Interest, and Nostalgia for new products • Soul Portraits: Visions of Change • “Keeping Up” • Reclamation: A Co-Created Photographic Exhibition Surrounding the Representation of Black Women. • Drawing Conclusions: Printmaking and the Illustrated Book • Crazy Stage: Playwriting with Mental Health, Femininity and Magic • Refugees • emBODYing Black Liberation: Culturally Relevant Liberatory Healing for All Black Lives • A Psychotechnological view of Augmented Reality Systems • Computational Design • Understanding the Threat of Systems Collapse: A Case Study of the National Environmental Policy Act and A Recommendationto Address Excess Pesticide Use As Made Apparent by Colony Collapse Disorder and the Crises of the Honeybee • Re-centering the Stage: Political Theatre for Marginalized Voices • Confucius 2.0: How Successful Has The United Stated Confucius Institute Project Been At Achieving Its Goals • Monitoring, Assessing, and Restoring Urban Streams: Fearing Brook Restoration Project • LEMONADE?: ReConceptualizing the intersections of Resistance, Reverence and Revolution in Black Womxn?s Self- Care • Mythological Twins and the Underworld • Dostoevsky and Camus: Christian Existentialism and Secular Existentialism • Exploration in Design and Patenting • Investigating the Ivory Trade • “Acquisition and Processing” • Jacques-Laurent Tiktin • Racialization and Persecution of Latin@ and Muslim Bodies under U.S. Security Systems: Stories from Springfield, MA • Rising Tides: An Interdiciplinary Game Design Project • La Rebelion de las Shangos: The resistance of Black Cuban womyn in Ocha-Ifa. • The effects of hearing loss on human balance. • Shear: Consumption of the Animal Body • A Critical Perspective on the Production of Psychedelic Knowledge • Chasing the Good Life: A Millennial Search in Rural Maine • The Object & the People: The Evolution of Material Culture in Romania and Bulgaria • Enzymatic Cyclopropanation • The Effect of the 5-HT2A Receptor Agonist DPT on Anxiety Behavior in Zebrafish • And Beloved: Portraits of LGBTQIA+ Christians • Prolonged Exile: Constructing Tibetan Identity in Dharamsala, India • aTHeNA: Coordinating a Trans* Health Needs Assessment in Western Massachusetts • Made in China • Cure, a User’s Guide: Democracy and Reform in Community Mental Health Care • The Tiny World • Taking the Scenic Route • Perceptional Realities • The Home in my Belly: A Study of Place, Comfort, and Belonging in Restaurant Spaces • Cat and Owl’s Dream • Unfolding the shirt • The Convergence of Activism, Politics, and Doula Work: Building a Movement for Birth Justice by Radically Transforming How We Care for Pregnant People • Picture Her Story: An arts-based participatory project and Veintimilla practice-based multimodal research thesis on sexual violenceagainst women and girls • CALM DOWN! • Adoption and Identity , Truama , Pop- Up Artist Books • Welcome To Sol Town: An Original Play Written and Directed by Angel Zeas • Welcome to Our Classroom: Inclusive education for Upper Elementary • Research on Combinatorics curriculum for CS majors • Internet Plus: Economic Reform and Strategy-making in the Xi Jinping Era • The Value of Livestock Production in Hamer Woreda South Omo Zone, Ethiopia: A critique of Modern Development Strategies

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Lost & Found

LOST Large black & red scooter with big wheels and duct tape on the handlebars. Responds , to Newtons 3rd law. It is very much a part of me. I miss it dearly. Thank you very much.

Posted February 29, 2016 Hampshire Intranet

TO KNOW IS NOT ENOUGH | SUMMER 2016

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Cuba Travel Program: Invitation for Alums, Parents, and Friends January 6–14, 2017 EXPERIENCE CUBA TODAY. The program will be led by Professor Emerita Carollee Bengelsdorf and Professor Margaret Cerullo. Through their intimate knowledge of Cuban society, culture, and art, you’ll dive deep into the nation’s evolving discussions around gender, race, and sexuality and get to know artists, activists, and critics.

hampshire.edu/alumni/cuba-travel-program

Hampshire News

Teaching, Advising, and “Impacting the Lives of Others” THE ANNUAL David Gruber Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Advising were bestowed this year on faculty members Chris Tinson and Karen Koehler, respectively. Chris Tinson is an assistant professor of African American studies. Karen Koehler is the Marilyn Levin Professor of Architectural and Art History.

David Gruber 72F established the prize in 2012 to honor extraordinary teaching and advising at the College.

Faculty are selected each year by a committee of students deliberating over a slate of candidates nominated by students (current and former), coworkers, and other members of the Hampshire community. The award winners each receive $10,000 and are asked to give a lecture or organize a symposium to encourage new ideas for effective teaching and advising among the faculty.

“I chose to teach because of the incredible, patient, and committed teachers and mentors I have had in my life, from grade school through graduate school,” Tinson said. “They taught me the joys and responsibility that come with impacting the lives of others, especially young people.”

Committee members noted his commitment to students’ well-being and his ability to engage them in the challenging discussions around race and racism in the U.S. and the world.

LEARNING COMMONS 3.0 WILL PILOT MAKER SPACES, SUPPORT SERVICES IN NEW LIBRARY HUB In the spirit of experimentation on which the College was founded, Hampshire is now launching a far-reaching initiative to reestablish the library as the hub of campus learning, a reimagined space in which students can develop projects from concept through collaboration to completion. And the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has endorsed the effort by awarding Hampshire $1.2 million with the expectation that its pilot program could be a model for other institutions.

The reconfigured hub will support the arc of student projects: from concept to collaboration, publication to sharing. It will also make student work more visible.

Koehler was cited for inspiring her students to produce their best work and creating networks of peers and mentors to support them. “That this award is from students themselves makes me truly honored,” she said. She heard the news upon landing in Copenhagen after an all-night flight. “I thought I was dreaming,” she said.

Learning Commons 3.0, its working

title, will bring together a wide range of academic support services from offices across campus to reside with research librarians and instructional technology.

New work spaces will be created: open, flexible, technology-rich. Maker spaces will be expanded. And peer mentoring will be enhanced with a strong training component across the curriculum.

The effort is the result of more than

two years of planning by a 15-member steering committee of faculty, students,

Save These Dates We invite you to join us on campus during the next academic year for the following events. Keep an eye out, too, for invitations to get-togethers we’re planning in your region. We’ll reach out by mail and email, and post to alumnievents.hampshire.edu

and staff chaired by the library’s director, Jennifer King. It will unfold over four years and in several stages.

“It will support the whole work arc of

student projects,” said Laura Wenk, dean of curriculum and assessment and a committee member. “Conceptualizing,

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016 R.W. Kern Center Dedication

collaborating, publishing, sharing work . . . all of that can happen in the new

OCTOBER 21–23, 2016 Family & Friends Weekend

space. It should make student work

APRIL 1, 2017 45 Years of Cognitive Science: Neil Stillings Celebration & Symposium

with other students, faculty, and staff

more visible and will enable connections there. It will affect how students feel about their college experience.”

TO KNOW IS NOT ENOUGH | SUMMER 2016

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Hampshire News

Preserving a Legacy in Chorus

NSF SURVEY OF DOCTORATES: ALUMS AMONG TOP EARNERS OF THE PHD IN THE NATION The federal government has published its annual census of U.S. colleges whose graduates are most likely to earn a PhD. Hampshire ranks number 40 on the list of the nation’s almost 3,000 institutions.

The National Science Foundation’s

Survey of Earned Doctorates, released in February, tracks the number of research doctorates earned by a university’s and college’s alums over a ten-year period.

From 2004 to 2013, an average of 8.4 out of every 100 Hampshire College alums earned the advanced degree, which puts Hampshire among the top 1.4 percent of colleges nationwide.

HAMPSHIRE CHORUS ALUMS! Retired professor of music and choral director Ann

Kearns, who passed away this spring, had a huge impact on so many who sang with her over the years. Dan Sroka 85F and Tasha Harmon 80F are working to preserve her legacy by collecting concert tapes, programs, and photos to be digitized and held in the Hampshire College archives. Make your contributions at http://bit.ly/hampchorus

NEW FULBRIGHTS ANNOUNCED: TO THREE GRADUATES IN 2016, TWELVE IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS Three Hampshire alums have received a Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant from the Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Eve Allen 14S, Leanna Pohevitz 08F, and

Padlet to Prezi: “Locating Analyses in Space with Images”

Kristina Moss Gunnarsdóttir 08F are among 1,900 U.S. citizens who will teach, conduct research, and provide expertise

AN APRIL 11 Forbes article featured

abroad for the 2016–17 academic year.

the work of assistant professor of German and comparative literature Alicia Ellis and her “ingenious way of using Pinterest to help her students analyze challenging novels, poems and essays.” The piece acknowledges Ellis’s innovative use of digital tools and references a fall 2015 class where she immersed her students in poet Claudia Rankine’s widely acclaimed Citizen: An American Lyric.

Supported by a Mellon Foundation Five Colleges grant to blend digital tools into her courses, she encouraged students not only to use Padlet, Prezi, Wordle, Google Maps, and Pinterest to build their critical research projects — locating their analyses in space with images and maps rather than solely through text — but also to push

Recipients are selected on their academic

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and professional achievements as well as their record of service and leadership in their respective fields.

A total of 12 Hampshire graduates have received Fulbright Awards in the past five years.

Allen will do research on the conservation of wild potato species in Huancavelica, Peru, looking at gene flow between cultivated and wild potatoes. Pohevitz will work in Turkey as an English teaching assistant. She is

boundaries through the technology.

The online platforms advanced students’ own impassioned causes, and a number of Padlets and Pinterests they made in the class are still growing months after the end of the semester.

completing her second year in the Peace Corps in Morocco, engaged in improving the developmental skills of Moroccan women. Moss Gunnarsdóttir will be in Mexico to teach English and to develop the entrepreneurial skills and financial literacy of female artisans.

Hampshire News

How Mummies Speak

KNOW OF THE PERFECT HAMPSHIRE STUDENT?

When professor of chemistry Dula Amarasiriwardena studied Chilean mummies more than a decade ago, his research on the accumulation of trace metals in their hair revealed evidence of arsenic poisoning.

We rejected SATs. We made our admissions about mission (see #DisruptHigherEd). Now, with your help, we’ll recruit the next generation of thrivers.

LAST MONTH he returned to Chile on

a Fulbright Specialist Program award and directed his research toward determining the mummies’ exposure to other toxins. He is also studying a lithium-contaminated region in the Atacama Desert and the modern-day population of people exposed to it.

“All sorts of minerals — lithium, arsenic, lead, boron — are unusually high in this particular area. They’re leaching into the drinking water,” he says. “Research on mummies helps us learn from the past exposure and to apply that to modern populations in the region.”

With a specialty in environmental

pollution and metal contamination in soils and water, Amarasiriwardena and many of his students have done research around the world attempting to understand how heavy metals in the environment can be absorbed by humans, and their impact on human health. China’s Huangshan mine, which has the world’s largest deposit of antimony, was a site for some of his recent studies.

Fulbright funding enabled him to teach short courses at the University of Tarapacá and a graduate workshop at the Universidad de Concepción. “The collaborations,” he says, “will enable new Div III projects for our students.”

Our students say that talking

with someone who went to the College, like you, influenced their decision to apply. Since you know better than anyone the qualities a student needs to thrive here, why not refer a prospective student to the admissions office? We’ll be quick about sending them the information they need, and we’ll note on their application that they were referred by an alum.

Frogbook. hampshire.edu/ referastudent

Competitive NEH Grant Funds New Course on Art History and Aesthetic Theory HAMPSHIRE STUDENTS who undertook a sweeping, immersive

arts and humanities course funded by a coveted grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently capped their studies by presenting their work to the campus community.

The presentations — written analysis, original creative writing, and artwork — were the culmination of in-depth studies in Art Questions, a course developed and taught over two semesters by professor of architectural and art history Karen Koehler. The NEH “Enduring Questions” grant was awarded to only 11 percent of applicants nationwide and funds only 20 projects annually.

The grant supports faculty in the preparation of a course on a fundamental concern of human life addressed by the humanities.

Courses are designed for students and teachers to collaborate in a deep, sustained program of encountering influential works and thinkers over the centuries.

Koehler says she developed Art Questions to combine a history of art with a history of aesthetic theory to ask, What is originality?

What is creative expression? “The investigation of what it means to be an intellectual and artist, while destabilizing conventional modes of teaching: that links this program to Hampshire’s legacy of experimentation in the arts and humanities,” she says.

From a student’s presentation on Russian posters, from the Hampshire College Archives.

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Div III: Voice and Visibility “As much as my work is about art, it’s really about social change and how both disciplines are more powerful when joined together,” says Nikolai Humphrey-Blanco 12F. For his Division III project, “Genocide and Violence in Guatemalan Contemporary Art,” he analyzed ways that art provides an alternative narrative to the violence perpetuated by the Guatemalan government during the nation’s 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996, and how art can address ongoing issues of violence and injustice.

I HAD NOTICED that the civil war

and human-rights violations that occurred there for almost forty years were not often talked about in the United States,” he says. “I wanted to use my Div III as an opportunity to change that.”

Humphrey-Blanco’s father is from Guatemala, so his connection to the country and his interest in politics and art history “quickly fueled the emotional motivation,” he says.

Studying ten artists in depth, he divided his thesis into three themes: racism as the motivating force of the genocide; voice and visibility in the counter-narratives of art; and how artists use literal and symbolic traces

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of violence and transform them into art and sites of discourse.

One of the artists is photographer Daniel Hernández-Salazar, whose famous work Para que todos lo sepan (So That All Shall Know)/Street Angel features a photograph of the scapula bones (shoulder blades) of exhumed genocide victims overlaid as wings of an “angel” shouting the truth of the genocide. “By plastering this image throughout cities, he was creating a counter-propaganda,” HumphreyBlanco says, “shedding light on the government violence and reclaiming the agency that had been denied the Guatemalans for so many years.”

The Div III process broadened his

experiences and challenged him. “I wasn’t fluent in Spanish before my project,” he says, “but quickly had to become comfortable enough with the language to read detailed histories and interview artists about abstract theoretical concepts in their work. It made me take a more active approach to the research, contacting the artists personally, making the first written analyses of many of their works, and often not having secondary sources available to help the process.”

He plans to increase exposure to these artists by adapting his Div III work for publication in an academic journal and helping to get the art into U.S. museums and galleries.

Hampshire News

AS MEDIA MOVE: STUDENTS TRACK CAR CULTURE’S IMPACT ON COMMUNICATIONS Hampshire students are amassing an online archive documenting the history of automobile media, from car radios to Wi-Fi, that have shaped the evolution of car culture and experience. The new course, Media in Cars, is taught by professor James Miller, whose research on emerging media

A New Entry in Sandra Matthews’s “Timeline”

dates back to the earliest years of the American automobile.

COMMEMORATING 34 years teaching

at Hampshire, Sandra Matthews had a retrospective, two-part photography exhibit to mark her retirement last spring. One part showed the portraits from her acclaimed Timelines series, featuring Hampshire people as seen over time or in generational groups.

(Above: Matthew in 1993, Sandra and Matthew in 2016.) In the second part, she reprised alum David Rosten 81S’s Div III, displaying his portraits of College staff to honor his life and work.

“David was one of my first students,” Matthews wrote to the

Hampshire community, “He passed away two years ago after a very long illness. This significant project, which he completed in 1984, increases in meaning over time.”

Matthews came to Hampshire in 1981 to teach film and photography, and has expertise in the photography from China. “There was different and interesting work going on in China from what I had been exposed to in the U.S.,” she says. She founded and edits Trans Asia Photography Review, a journal showcasing scholarship, both historical and contemporary.

A New Title in Ken Rosenthal’s Hampshire CV

a space and take it over,” says Miller.

“In the seminar, we’re trying to collect the evidence to back that up. That’s the practical goal of the archive, but in building it, students are learning how to use technology as a means of collaborating.”

Amassing an online archive to document the history of automobile media — from car radios to Wi-Fi — that shaped car culture. The car as a case study in the way media move into a space, and then take it over.

KEN ROSENTHAL P04, as so many

of his friends affirmed at a May celebration to recognize his decades at the College, is one reason that Hampshire exists. In 1966 he was called on by the first president, Franklin Patterson, and his cofounder Charles Longsworth to help bring about an “experimenting” new college that would “be a more effective intellectual and moral force in the world.”

Rosenthal completed his term on the Board of Trustees this spring, one of numerous roles he’s held here over the last five decades. He now holds the position Historian of the College.

Longsworth, who served as second president after Patterson, said, “Ken is one of the finest human beings I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. No

“My argument is that the car is a

case study in the way media move into

The use of technology is one reason

that Justin Byler 14F, whose focus is architecture, decided to take the class. It is an opportunity, he says, to learn about project-management applications like Trello, which many students are using to collaborate beyond the classroom.

Miller’s seminar is supported by a

Five College Blended Learning grant from the Mellon Foundation, which encourages the use of technology to

one I know has done more for this community than he has.” Rosenthal helped raise funds to get the College built, served as its treasurer, and is a generous benefactor. President Lash said, “Nothing appeals to Ken like a complex problem that needs solving.”

enhance the classroom experience.

Assistant director of IT Asha Kinney is closely involved.

“These are accomplished students.

They’re running with it and going all out,” Miller says. “Maybe we’ll fall on our faces, but we’ll learn from it.”

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Hampshire News

From Osage to Kafka (With No Musical Skill): Q&A with Daniel Altshuler What don’t we know about you?

DANIEL ALTSHULER is a first-year linguistics professor at Hampshire.

He joined the faculty after three years as an assistant professor of semantics at Heinrich-Heine-University, in Düsseldorf, Germany.

I come from a huge family of twins.

I have a twin sister. I have two half sisters who are twins. My sister’s husband is a twin, and they’ve had twins for the last five generations going. I don’t know if that’s cool, but it’s the first thing that came to me.

Why the passion for linguistics?

My specialty is in meaning. What are the rules that we follow that make our communication effortless, on the one hand, but such a beautiful, creative, communal process on the other? How is it that we’re able to understand each other, and what does that tell us about the human brain? What draws me to linguistics, and especially to semantic theory, is that developing a theory of meaning lets us know a lot about how the mind works.

How many languages do you speak?

Two natively: English and Russian. I speak a little Spanish and, sadly, not enough German, considering I lived there for three years. I do research on a bunch of languages that I don’t speak. I’m currently researching and teaching Osage, a recently extinct Native American language. The Osage tribe is still big, and doing well, but their language, unfortunately, has ceased to exist. So that’s a language I know quite a bit about, even though I don’t speak it.

EDITOR David Gibson COEDITOR Melissa Mills-Dick 01F ART DIRECTOR Mary Zyskowski CLASS NOTES MANAGER Matt Krefting 99F CONTRIBUTORS John Courtmanche, Joshua Murray, Michael Medeiros, Andrew Hart, Jim Collins, Max Halper 08F COPY EDITOR Doris Troy CHANGE OF ADDRESS alumni@hampshire.edu

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What books can you recommend to us?

Where did you grow up?

Long story. The first eight years of my life I lived in Moscow. As a refugee I immigrated through Vienna and Rome to come to the U.S., Southern California, where some of my family members were living.

Does that give you a unique perspective?

Everyone has a unique story to tell.

The immigrant experience gives it an interesting perspective, but America is a land of immigrants. Being part of academia in linguistics forces you to be part of a worldwide community, and I’ve traveled the world. I feel extremely fortunate for that. That’s really at the heart of why I enjoy my job: to be part of academia is to be part of an international community.

Non Satis Scire is published twice a year by the Office of Alumni and Family Relations and mailed to alums, current students and parents, donors, and friends of the College. Diverse views are presented and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or official Hampshire policies. Send correspondence to communications@ hampshire.edu or Non Satis Scire, Office of Communications, Hampshire College, 893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002. The office of Alumni and Family Relations can be reached at 413.559.6638 or alumni@hampshire.edu. Printed on FSC-certified paper. Produced by 100% Green-e-certified renewable energy.

Anything by Franz Kafka. He’s my hero, so any Kafka novel. One of my dreams is to teach a course in which we learn Kafka from a cognitive and linguistic perspective. The first-person, existential experience Kafka is able to provide is awesome linguistically, and I want the tools to understand that one day. And Nerval is another favorite. I’m a big fan of nineteenthcentury French literature.

If you could design your own Div III . . .

Because I’m a linguist at heart, I think it would have a linguistic component.

But one thing I’d love to do is a Div III that’s visual or performative in some way. I have no musical skills, so it would be a motivation to explore that side of me — in either a music domain, where there’s a rhythmic component and a performative element that ties in with language, or a visual domain.

One of those two routes is probably what I’d do now. I wish I could have done it when I was younger.

PHOTOS Elena Alferova; Ryan Fagan, Sporting News; Kate Mills 73F; NASA/JPL-Caltech/ UMD; Abraham Ravett; Amanda Schwengel; Zilong Wang 09F; Jennifer White Photography; Jess Marsh Wissemann ILLUSTRATION Nate Padavick COVER Detail, “Hampshire College Commencement,

Sunday, January 23, 1983”

Books

by Hampshire Alums and Faculty

ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR by Elizabeth Brundage 78F. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Professor George Clare comes home to find his wife murdered and his threeyear-old daughter alone in their home, and instantly becomes the suspect of his wife’s murder in this suspenseful thriller.

THE HIGHEST GLASS CEILING

by Ellen Fitzpatrick 70F. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Best-selling historian Fitzpatrick tells the story of three women who set their sights on the American presidency: Victoria Woodhull (1872), Margaret Chase Smith (1964), and Shirley Chisholm (1972).

THE BLACK MARIA by Aracelis Girmay. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2016.

Poetry Professor Girmay is the recipient of the 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry.

Her newest work explores why and how people migrate and immigrate and is expressed in the book through every facet of the human experience.

CHINA’S HIDDEN CHILDREN

by Kay Ann Johnson.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Professor of Asian Studies Johnson dispels the Western trope of “the unwanted daughter,” and combines research of the One Child Policy with firsthand accounts of the parents forced to give up their daughters.

DOOR TO DOOR by Ed Humes 75F. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Humes illuminates the world of transportation through the lens of a typical week in carcentric Los Angeles and explores the future of transportation (3-D printing, delivery drones, and driverless cars).

WHAT IS A DOG?

By Raymond and Lorna Coppinger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Books, 2016. Professor Emeritus Coppinger and his collaborator, Lorna Coppinger, take a look at the approximately 750 million wild dogs in the world, and what they tell us about dog evolution and the species as a whole.

WILD DRINKS AND COCKTAILS by Emily Han 96F. Beverly, MA: Fair Winds Press, 2016. This book provides recipes for making sophisticated, garden-toglass artisan drinks and cocktails in your own kitchen, with ingredients found in your own backyard, farm, foraging expedition, or local market.

OCCUPYING DISABILITY: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO COMMUNITY, JUSTICE, AND DECOLONIZING DISABILITY edited by Pamela Block 86F, Devva Kasnitz, Akemi Nishida, and Nick Pollard.

Medford, MA: Springer Science + Business Media Dordrecht, 2016. Engaging clinicians, social scientists, activists, and artists, this text redefines disability.

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Books

THE LOGIC OF COMPROMISE IN MEXICO: HOW THE COUNTRYSIDE WAS KEY TO THE EMERGENCE OF AUTHORITARIANISM by Gladys I. McCormick 92F. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

McCormick studies the troubled history of the practices of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).

GRIT AND WHIMSY by Karen Braucher Tobin 71F. Dunlo, PA: Cawing Crow Press, 2015. Tobin’s collection of poetry melds fantasy, wit, and hard reality to create a bold female voice. Tobin’s poems invent a world where Sylvia Plath lives and Emily Dickinson gets Facebook in between the studies of everyday life.

RIPE FOR CHANGE by Jane S. Hirschi 79S. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2015. Hirschi takes a big-picture view of garden-based learning in public K–8 education, providing case studies and resources to show how garden-based learning is being implemented in public education.

MOON FULL OF MOONS: POETRY OF TRANSFORMATION

by Kat Lehman 87F. Guilford, CT: Peaceful Daily, 2015.

This collection of poetry is “a conversation with nature and one self.” The book weaves together images of nature and couples them with the phases of the moon, simultaneously opening up the reader’s heart and eyes.

If you would like your recently released book to be considered for the Books section of the next issue of Non Satis Scire, please send a copy to: Alumni and Family Relations NSS Books Hampshire College 893 West Street Amherst, MA 01002

BENEATH BLAIR MOUNTAIN

by Shannon Barnsley 07F. Orange, CA: Blackhill Press, 2015. This novella tells the story of Lara Rae Bracken, a young woman raised on Irish fey folk stories who escapes her small coal-mining town for a life in New York and later Boston. This magical story is set against the backdrop of World War I.

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HOME IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS FOR THE BUSY & BROKE: HOW TO GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER AND LIVE LIKE AN ADULT by Christina Salway 00F. Skyhorse Publishing, 2016.

Using her own experience renovating her Williamsburg apartment and her New York farmhouse, Salway gives you the know-how to decorate your home and stay within budget.

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSES TO MASS ATROCITIES IN AFRICA by Kurt Mills 83F. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

When genocide and other war crimes occur, the global community has an obligation to respond. Mills explores this responsibility to protect and provide aid to those in need, as well as to prosecute.

Please note: Non Satis Scire publishes every six months.

Due to space limitations, books will not be included if they are not recent publications or if they are self-published. All books can be posted in class notes online at alumni.hampshire.edu/.

Class Notes

Notes from Alums

“ I visited campus last summer with my 6-yearold daughter. We enjoyed a picnic from Atkins among the wildflowers on the lawn.”

LORI GOODWIN 89F, PAGE 60

Class Notes

Notes from Alums

1970

Class notes printed here reached us since the last issue of NSS. Alums can post their own class notes on the Hampshire Alumni website, and can also view one another’s posts there. Please go to alumni.hampshire.edu and then click on Frogbook: Alumni Community. You will need to set up an account and, when it’s authenticated, log in to view the notes already there and write your own. The deadline for submitting class notes for the next issue is September 1.

We’re always working to improve and update the website. If you have any questions or difficulties, please e-mail us, at alumni@hampshire.edu.

Andi Stander writes, “Greetings – I’ve been long absent from these pages. In January I started my fifth year as executive director of Rural Vermont, a small, feisty nonprofit in Montpelier that advocates on behalf of smallscale farmers and a healthy, sustainable, community-based food system. This is the best and hardest job I’ve ever had, and it allows me to work with some of the most wonderful people on the planet: farmers!

“However, I am now starting to plan my succession strategy and a transition away from such demanding full-time work. This is in part because my next adventure is to design and build (with professional help) a Tiny House that will enable me to shrink my personal footprint and sustain myself in some kind of semiretirement.

Would love to hear from any Hampsters of my vintage or of any other year who have been exploring or living this dream too. Looking forward to the DIV IV ‘Create, Build, Design’ gathering in June.”

1971 Richard Barber writes, “I don’t think I’ve mentioned any of the news about The Whole Gritty City, the documentary about

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The Whole Gritty City by Richard Barber 71F

New Orleans marching bands I completed in 2013, so I’ll stuff it all into this note. The Whole Gritty City premiered in the 2013 New Orleans Film Festival.

It aired nationally in 2014 as a two-hour CBS News special hosted by Wynton Marsalis. It’s now available on Amazon, VHX, Vimeo on Demand, and the new streaming service for African American films, KweliTV. Educational distribution through Filmakers Library.

“The film has screened in a few US cities. It premiered in Paris in February, and will be screening there again and in other French cities this spring. It was also introduced by David Simon at a Barcelona screening.

The website is http:// thewholegrittycity.com.”

Cathy Gorlin writes, “I became a grandmother, on March 7, to the sweet son of my daughter

Class Notes

Lauren and her husband, Boris.

So excited! He’s a keeper!”

Paul Park writes, “I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone else, but several things have happened since graduation.

Though I didn’t prepare myself for an academic career — to put it mildly — I find myself a senior lecturer in the English and art history departments at Williams College. The younger of my children is off to college this year. Last year I published my thirteenth novel, called All Those Vanished Engines, and this year a new collection of stories, called Other Stories. Western Massachusetts turns out to be a pleasant place to live.”

1972 Steven Axelrod writes, “My third Henry Kennis mystery, Nantucket Grand, is available from Poisoned Pen Press, and I’m currently running excerpts from various Hollywoodthemed fiction on Nikki Finke’s Hollywood Dementia website.”

“We send our best to the College and all alums. I continue to try to inspire my congregation at Sunderland’s First Congregational Church.

This year Nick celebrates 30 years running the Black Sheep Deli and Bakery, in Amherst.”

Corey Levenson writes, “Still living and working in San Antonio. Developing OTC and prescription products containing a traditional medicine: East Indian sandalwood oil. Galderma’s acne product line, Benzac, contains our oil. Also living my Walter Mitty alternate life as a moto-journalist, getting stories about classic motorcycles published. Both my daughters are living up the road in Austin. Lauren is a PA for an orthopedic surgeon and Maia is a lawyer. My wife, Kathy, and I ride our tandem (not often enough) and continue to resist becoming completely inTexicated (I still get the New York Times delivered to my house seven days a week). Onward . . .”

Leslie Fleming-Mitchell writes, “I’ll be in the season 5 finale of Veep, playing Senator Willis.

Can’t say anything about it, though — top secret! Love to all my old Hampshire companions.”

Barbara Kline writes, “Nick Seamon 75S and I are well and still live on a farm here in Leverett, Massachusetts. Our fourth child, Caleb, of only 16 years, was invited to try out for the Jr. World Ultimate team this year, an honor! . . . and will be (God willing) a coach with Ultimate Peace in Israel this summer with his bother Joshua. Jesse (32 years) and Joshua (35 years) were both accomplished Ultimate National players in high school oh so long ago. Nick and I remember Ultimate fondly at Hampshire in 1975.

Bob McCarthy writes, “We keep getting older! The four children are in their 20s and going out on their own. I managed to have all four of them together in Madagascar last year, which was an unusual treat. And my work continues with Spinnaker, an emerging-markets investment fund. I also had the pleasure of providing selections from my collection of medieval art to the Hong Kong University

Museum for an exhibit over the Christmas holidays. I continue to enjoy my visits back to the Hampshire campus for the four trustee meetings each term.”

a Hampster, after all!) to a system with 35,000 students and a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Wish me luck or get involved at bobwalserformps.org.”

Andrew Duff Parker writes, “After a motley but fun career directing several organizations including a wind-energy company, a police department, and several social service agencies and charities, five years ago I chucked it all, got my French nationality, and moved to Antibes, the hometown of my lovely wife of 17 years. Enjoying ourselves at a leisurely pace, but sad to see that so many old friends have passed on. Kinda puts any petty complaints in perspective.”

Jay Vogt writes, “Happy to report: alive and well. Daughter fully launched from college into real world. Entering new life phase of downshifting and shapeshifting. Downshifting: scaling back Bostonbased consulting practice; spending winters in Mexico.

Shapeshifting: building online business (EssentialWorth.com) and home-building business in Mexico (HomeSanMiguel.com), both of which can be done from anywhere. Enjoying the learning and challenge.”

Bob Walser writes, “After years of work in schools as a visiting artist (see bobwalser.com), I’m now running for a seat on the Minneapolis School Board.

I hope to bring my lifelong fascination with learning (I’m

Michael “Mudcat” Ward writes, “I’ve received my sixth nomination from the Blues Foundation, Memphis, for bass instrumentalist, and also share a band nomination: Sugar Ray & the Bluetones. You’ll find upcoming gigs at www. sugarrayandthebluetones. com. If you happen to attend any performance I’m playing, please make a point to say hello. Also, look for our contribution to the tribute CD Blues for Big Walter (Horton) on the EllerSoul Records label.

Proceeds go to charity.”

Arthur Zerbey writes, “It’s been awhile since Camp Hamp sent us all packing. Following those halcyon days, I had a short-ish career in the drywall business. It ended abruptly when I figured out that the stuff I was dragging around was really heavy and likely to get heavier with time. Deciding that sit-down work was the thing for me, I started medical school at age 30 and have been a practicing radiologist in northern Massachusetts for more than 20 years. I started being a dad kind of late, too, and have two awesome daughters, Abigail and Madeline, who are 14 and 15.

My wife, Michelle, and I take turns carting them around since they can’t drive yet.

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Class Notes

“I still play some music, not much better than when Nogoboggins (or was it Asparagus Valley String Band?) was roaming the hill towns, but what the hell. It’s fun. I fly airplanes for fun, too. I keep in touch with Tom Hale, who has a young daughter to keep him company in his dotage, but I don’t keep up with much of anyone else. Sloth, I guess, more than intent.

“I was back on campus last spring for a medical school interest event organized by Hampshire students. It was touching to see kids so filled with hope and enthusiasm for their futures. And Hampshire was looking pretty good too. So that’s my 40-year update. My best to all my old friends.”

1973 Patricia Aldrich writes, “Thanks to Cheri Butler, I had the great pleasure recently of catching up with Ray Coppinger, Bill Kimball 70F, Dick Hurd 74F, Steve Nadis, and others and attending Ray’s talk about his book How Dogs Work. At the moment, I’m using my best herding skills (think Ray and Border Collies) to organize volunteers and a Paddle-a-thon to raise awareness and funds for the Ipswich River. Good thing I continue to learn from and be inspired by Ray and all things Hampshire. Also playing a ton of squash, doubles mostly, and loving it.”

Robert Epstein writes, “Life continues to evolve, and all of my family members are in interesting phases of life and work. My wife, Melanie, does Hampshireesque work these days: She’s the executive director of the U.S.-Pakistan Women’s Council, a joint creation of the U.S. Department of State and American University.

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In that position, she leads a team in promoting women’s entrepreneurship and employment in Pakistan, a very exciting project. She meets with corporate heads and reps, works with influential folks in Pakistani society, and works to open up internships and help women start or build businesses.

“My daughter, Emily, is — shockingly — in the last year of her high school career, and will enter the freshman class of the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the fall. Slightly bemusing and astonishing to me is her choice to go in as a philosophy major, which was my area of concentration at Hampshire. It’s also exciting.

Apple/tree, I guess. These days I’m a Zen practitioner, and my daughter has a feel for that as well. Following my wife and me, both musicians, she’s a gifted singer-songwriter.

I can tell she’s good because I feel a little jealous when I hear her sing.

“On my end of things, I’m very excited about my work these days, teaching, writing, and directing. I’ve got a new Feature Quality camera, and it has transformed my work and my studio. I’m able to do high-quality tapes of class scenes and audition submissions for students (and sometimes myself) and I’m working on directing two films with students in-studio, one from my original screenplay and another based on a play I wrote last year. In 2014 we got a very nice response to our DC Fringe production of The Big A, based on my family’s long bout with cancer and Alzheimer’s, and I hope to turn parts of that into a film as well, in addition to rewriting the longer (non-Fringe) version of the play. I also have plans to write another Fringe play for four women actors from my current and former student body, as an all-female

ensemble, looking at the relationships between mothers and daughters, which is targeted for summer 2017. And I continue to ruminate about my plans for a play that deals with the shock experienced by those who, during World War II, first discovered the concentration camps, a project for which I have already received a small grant from the Puffin Foundation.

“Writing and directing plays and films has been the icing on the cake of my career as an acting teacher (now going on 30+ years). I love it and continue to enjoy projects as they unfold. At the same time, I’m eyeing my saxophone and plan to start practicing up for some jazz recordings; working on several songs that I want to sing and record; and writing new poems, which I hope to collect into a book along with older ones. I also have a book on Zen history and practice in the works. My dad, an artist, who passed away in 2013 and has two works in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, left an enormous body of original work. A curator has joined us in looking through his art and begun plans to inventory and catalogue it, along with a photographer. I just wish I had more things to do! I guess I’m basically still at Hampshire, but without the minimal supervision.”

Leslie Hiebert writes, “It was a year of change in 1973. The only chance I would go to college materialized with my acceptance to Hampshire: it was either Hampshire or Delhi University. A semi-promise of help with tuition by a lying father made Hampshire possible. Thank you for admitting me, for making my return to the United States possible, for having professors so connected to students that I survived! As a recent white

girl from India, I trusted dark skin over light; light skin was suspect. But that was okay.

Hampshire took all of me, including my weird biases.

Glad I met my future husband.

Glad I went to law school even though so many options existed. Glad Hampshire survived. Love you guys.”

Amy Levi writes, “I was just appointed director of interprofessional education at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center.

I’m pretty sure I’m the only Hampshire graduate who is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, but if there’s another one out there, I’d love to connect with you.”

Steve Nadis writes, “I am pleased to reassure all those people out there that their confidence in me has not been misplaced. I recently received a royalty check for the sum of $1.88 from Prószynski Media Sp., publisher of the Polish edition of a book I wrote in 2010. It’s hard enough to get a book published these days but even harder to earn royalties — especially in ‘experiential journalism,’ a milieu I’ve been working in (op. cit., Midnight Cowboy in Porter Square, Soccer Dad, Fully Loaded, and Fear and Loathing on the Mohawk Trail) long before Sean Penn entered the game (Chapo who?). The latest feather in my cap is a testament to hard work, a modicum of luck, and a good literary agent — arguably the best in the business, and make no mistake, it is a business. Speaking of business, I’m thinking of framing this check (even though I could use the money!) and displaying it somewhere, perhaps Cambridge City Hall, where it might inspire others thinking of getting into the experientialist trade.”

Class Notes

than eight years. I’m currently training a tiny Shetland pony to do the same. In January, I became PATH (Professional Association for Therapeutic Horsemanship) certified as an equine specialist in mental health and learning. I’m now pursuing certification as a therapeutic-riding instructor.”

Robert Epstein 73F

New Year’s Eve in Concord, Mass. with Sig Roos 73F, Ruthie Rohde 75S, Tom Garrett 81F, Shepley Metcalf 72F, Prilly Cobb 73F, Sarah Shulman 82F, Dan Cherneff 73F, and Ann Avery 77F

Roger Sherman writes “After five years, my film In Search of Israeli Cuisine, a portrait of the Israeli people told through food, is finished and making the festival circuit, 50 at last count. Presenting it to 1,500 people at Symphony Hall in Atlanta in February at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, the largest in the world, was quite a thrill. Come fall the film will begin a theatrical run, then community screenings, PBS, and the universe beyond. And who knew the reaction to the film would prompt a call for tours based on it? Tours began in May, then October and January. For more information about screenings near you and the tour, visit www. israelicuisinefilm.com.”

1974 Joel Heller writes, “Working with children with autism since 2008 and have a new great employer, SPIN in Philadelphia.

I’m both therapeutic support staff (1:1) and behavioral health worker (1:3). In the spirit of Hampshire, what I learned to do this career was not in school.

Still leading and practicing Shotokan Karate.”

Polly Kornblith writes, “After years of designing online learning programs for schools, universities, nonprofits, government agencies, and corporations, I’ve turned my attention to animal-assisted therapy with dogs and horses.

I have two certified therapy dogs with whom I’ve been visiting schools, libraries, colleges, and so on for more

Scott Haas writes, “Indians in America: A Cross-Cultural Celebration in the New World is my latest book. It’s a lively, anecdotal work that examines, through interviews, the psychology and resiliencies of success among immigrants to the United States from India. I’m otherwise engaged in writing extensively about Japan, where I am several times a year: culture, food, travel. When not writing, I work as a clinical psychologist a few mornings each week, chiefly in urban communities of color.”

1975 Nancy Gershman writes, “On March 4, I became NY1’s New Yorker of the Week for my volunteer work at VNSNY Haven Hospice as a memory artist. What I do there for the bereaved-to-be is create a storytelling portrait (‘dreamscape’) about their loved ones that they can carry into the future. In other words, hope of a different sort. John Schiumo’s report featured one dreamscape of a rumba dancer ‘dressed’ as the Virgin Guadeloupe, another of a writer whose radio play starred a polar bear, and a husband who proposed to his wife on the D train in the 1970s.”

Lauren Thaler writes, “Bill Null 72F and I are looking forward to the birth of our third grandchild, in late July.

Our daughter and son-inlaw, Danielle and Yaniv, are

doing well and their older children, Eden and Tal, will be six and four by then.

Being grandparents is totally amazing!

“Our son, Evan 08F, is planning his fifth season of farming sustainably with his partner, Sarah Steadman 09F, two draft horses, and a lot of Hampshire pals working with them in New Lebanon, New York, at the Abode Farm. Their CSA grows and grows and their crops continue to impress!

“Forty-plus years together and still in love — with gratitude to Hampshire, where it all started.”

1976 Henry Howard writes, “After several years of frustrating anonymity, my writing recently took a step closer to the light.

My poem “The Last Refuge,” about the only surviving abortion clinic in Mississippi, was recently performed at the first-ever Reproductive Freedom Festival, a theatrical celebration of women’s empowerment held on March 20 in New York City. This event consisted of 25 short plays and poems by 30 authors, out of 150 submissions from 25 states and seven foreign countries, and staged live by real actors at the TACT Theater in Lower Manhattan.

“In addition, thanks to the miracle of streaming technology, the entire event was broadcast live on the Internet for free. As a national clinic defender since 1988, I was deeply honored to participate — as I will continue to do until ALL reproductive rights are fully respected and defended with the irrevocable force of the law.”

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Class Notes

Wende Skidmore writes, “This is a love letter to Hampshire College: “My loyalty to and gratitude for Hampshire College has been a constant in my life and work ever since I graduated, in 1980, and yet I feel it growing recently as I approach the mark of living exactly half my life outside the United States, in Latin America.

“As a young child and teen I had direct, immediate exposure to ethnic and socioeconomic diversity. As a teen and young woman I became increasingly confused by how the cultures I lived in during the day at school and in our neighborhoods conflicted with my New England Puritan birth culture and the different expectations each culture had of me. I became increasingly tormented and enraged by the injustice of unequal opportunity that my classmates and neighbors lived because of their race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic standing.

It was in this mind-set that I discovered Hampshire College, through the wonderful college counselor, Loren Pope.

“Hampshire College understood me when I felt no one else did: It understood that diversity enhances creativity and the gaining of ‘a greater grasp of the range and nature of the human condition, past, present, and possible future’ (from Making of a College, preface). It was based on the tenet that each of us is whole, creative, and resourceful.

Hampshire College attracted and held the likes of David Smith and Barbara Yngvesson, whom I met when I arrived as a young, scared, unprepared 17-year-old. They both accompanied me through Div I, II, and III and their mentoring has stayed with me through my almost-30-year career in international public health, education system reform, and social marketing for change

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as well as through my creative pursuits in photography, haiku, poetry, and fiction writing.

“I left high school a semester early for Hampshire, which, thankfully, accepted my application because it was the only place to which I applied.

I still believe it was the only place for me: the only place where I would be supported to take full responsibility for my education, the only place where ‘to know is not enough,’ where interdisciplinary learning is the norm rather than the exception, and where my learning out of the classroom was valued as richly as what I learned in the classroom.

“What I learned with Hampshire College I use every day, with everyone, in every place, wherever I am, to create environments in which all can thrive, not just survive.”

Jennifer Zorek-Pressman writes, “Just returned from a family odyssey with my brother following the footsteps of our father, who was a kinder transport child. We had stolpersteines laid in front of his family home in what is now Wroclaw, Poland, and followed his route through to Gloucester, England. An amazing journey.”

1977 Liz Baechler writes, “Life is good: both of my sons have a master’s degree and a job, and both of my parents are still actively alive. I’ve been working as an independent contractor for many years now, still living in Las Vegas for the warmth and fabulous outdoor adventure opportunities. I married a wonderful man a few years ago and we spend our time exploring the desert, boating, fishing, and diving.

I have been participating in the German dog sport of

Wende Skidmore 76S

Jennifer Zorek-Pressman 76F’s stolpersteines in Wroclaw, Poland

Schutzhund for a few years. I’m blessed to visit with old friends and family.”

Chuck Connell writes, “Life is good in Bedford, just outside of Boston. I’m working for UpToDate, which provides doctors with summaries of journal articles. My son lives in Austin, working as a programmer. One daughter is a student at Mount Holyoke, so I get back to the Valley a lot. And my youngest is in eighth grade, which keeps me young.”

Paul Foer writes, “I’ve started a sailboat tour company in historic Galesville, Maryland, on a 38-foot sailboat I restored.

She is named Non Sea Quitter,

which says a lot, I suppose, but has nothing to do with Non Satis Scire — or does it?

In addition to some traveling, writing news and feature articles, and contributing to three nonfiction books, I wrote a weekly newspaper column and hosted a morning radio show. I’m writing a book about the history of Jewish sailors and mariners, which isn’t as esoteric as some may think.

My older son is completing a year of teaching English in Japan after graduating from Rice University. My other son is studying illustration in Philadelphia — and my nephew is in his first year at Hampshire! Galesville is less than an hour’s drive from D.C.

Class Notes

or Baltimore, but a world away!

Who wants to go sailing?

This fall, join me as I sail to Florida . . . and Cuba? Mexico?

Division V?” Kathy Kelley writes, “I’m busy running a solo practice as a psychiatric nurse practitioner.

I specialize in perinatal mental health and provide both counseling and medication prescription and management.

I love my work, and working for myself, after spending the first half of my career as a maternal child home visiting nurse for the local health department. (I loved that, too, just not working for a bureaucracy.) My kids are grown — Sarah 00F graduated from Hampshire and then went on to complete most of her PhD in animal behavior at the University of Washington.

She and her husband are running a program for the critically endangered Mariana Crow, on the small Island of Rota in the Northern Mariana Islands. They had my first grandchild, Tor, at our home last summer, and it’s as wonderful as everyone says it is. I have just returned from my third trip to Rota since Tor was born — it’s hard to be so far away. My son, Brendan, is living in The Netherlands with his wife and earns his living as a modern composer and percussion instructor. His wife is a baroque violinist. My husband, Aron, continues to work hard as an architect and civil engineer and plays cello in his spare time. I’d love to hear from anyone I knew at Hampshire.”

Beth Nelson writes, “I enjoyed going back to Hampshire last October to see our son John play in the Ultimate Frisbee tournament with his team from Unity College (Maine).

He made a video of their day at the tournament for a class (search YouTube for ‘Big Worm

at Hampshire College by John Nelson’).

Yes, their team mascot is Big Worm — oh my . . .

“It was fun to show my husband around the campus, which is looking great. We are still married after 31 years. Our oldest son graduated from UNH and our youngest son is about to head off to college, fall 2016. I still enjoy doing software development work at Epsilon in Wakefield, Massachusetts, which helps pay those college bills. Life is good.”

Rick Rasa writes, “In 2015 the daughter of the writer Robert Anton Wilson and I started a new publishing house, Hilaritas Press. We are beginning by republishing 19 of Bob’s 35 books, starting with one of his most popular, Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati, which is now available in print and eBook editions. I don’t say this just as a new publisher working to sell a lot of books, but if you don’t know the writings of Robert Anton Wilson (most of us called him Bob, or Uncle Bob, or Pope Bob, depending on whim), you’re in for a treat.

“His mind-bending fiction and nonfiction have left their mark on our culture.

Long before Dan Brown was constructing stories about Vatican and anti-Vatican intrigue, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! laid the groundwork. Although intrigued and amused by conspiracies, he was far more interested in why people believe what they do. The comedian George Carlin said, ‘I have learned more from Robert Anton Wilson than I have from any other source.’ You can see the roots of Carlin’s social commentary in Bob’s writings.

The writer Tom Robbins called Bob ‘a dazzling barker hawking tickets to the most thrilling tilt-a-whirls and daring loopo-planes on the midway of

higher consciousness.’

“There’s a community of RAW enthusiasts around the world, and the last years of connecting with many of them have astounded me. They embody something of Bob’s playful, optimistic intelligence and curiosity, but also his ideas on Model Agnosticism, drawn from the Copenhagen Interpretation in quantum mechanics, of which Bob said: ‘Any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself.’ Alan Watts said, ‘The menu is not the meal.’ Bob takes that idea further, suggesting that since we each interpret, often poorly, the world around us with a unique set of filters, from the eye to the body to the brain, we each essentially have our own ‘reality tunnel.’ Examining the ramifications of this idea (brilliantly and humorously accomplished in Bob’s books) helps a lot in understanding primate behavior.

“A production of Bob’s Cosmic Trigger was staged in London and Liverpool in 2014, and in our edition of the book we added an introduction by John Higgs. He writes, ‘The many hundreds of people who were drawn to the November 2014 Cosmic Trigger play and accompanying ‘Find the Others’ festival, as cast, crew or audience, all had their own reasons for being there. They were very different people, with very different histories, prejudices, hopes and beliefs.

There were new-age heads and materialist rationalists, American libertarians and British socialists, the focused and the vague, and the serious and the silly. The only thing they had in common was that they had read Robert Anton Wilson, and felt that their lives were better for his philosophy. And that was enough. That was enough

for all their own personal stories to harmoniously mesh with all the others, into what we soon began calling the Ever-Thickening Mythos. The shared love of Cosmic Trigger was the grit around which a tribal pearl formed.’

“This January, I moved from western Massachusetts to Northern California, to a remote location far outside of the city of Weed and about 10 miles as the Google arrow flies from the peak of towering Mt. Shasta. With the blessings of a good Internet connection, I’m planning on devoting a lot of peaceful time to Hilaritas Press.”

Ellen Sturgis writes, “I continue my 30+(!!)-year travels among nonprofits. I started as interim executive director of this wonderful, small arts center in downtown Framingham, Mass., in January 2015 — but just couldn’t leave, so here I am a year later at Amazing Things Arts Center. We’re here to ensure that live music survives and that emerging artists have a place to play. We have two art galleries in our restored firehouse, primarily for shows

by Metrowest (Boston) artists.

It’s a gift to hear live music almost every day, especially for this non-artist/non-musician.

The challenge is to keep the place viable AND affordable.

Anyone with suggestions or experience, please call me.”

1978 James Brewer-Calvert writes, “The Martin Luther King Jr. College of Ministers and Laity at Morehouse College inducted me as an Honoree for Preaching on March 31 in Atlanta. I have served as the senior pastor at First Christian Church of Decatur, Georgia, since 1998, and recently celebrated both 30 years of

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Class Notes

pastoral ministry and 30 years of marriage to Betty. We have two adult children and are owned by two cats and a black Lab. I send a shout-out to faculty, classmates, and former SAMs at Merrill.”

Andrew Mossin writes, “After a long period since my last poetry collection, The Veil, was published (Singing Horse Press), I’m very pleased to announce that my new collection, Exile’s Recital, will be published this summer,

by Spuyten Duyvil Press, in New York City. Another new work that’s recently come out in Hambone, Conjunctions, and Golden Handcuffs Review and a portion of another manuscript, The Torture Papers, will be published in Shadow Graph Magazine later this year. Otherwise, I’m still teaching in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University, in Philadelphia, a gig that has really sent me back to school, as I’ve had to learn to teach Thucydides, Aristotle, Dante, Marx, et al., and do so in a way that makes sense to my students and doesn’t bore them half to death.

“Both I and my wife, Monica, who directs the Center for American Language & Culture at The College of New Jersey, continue to raise my two daughters in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a town that’s close to a highway that’s close to everything else. We’re preparing to send my oldest off to college in the fall, as her sister settles into her last two years of high school. Looking forward to what’s ahead, as we do, and back at all that’s already behind us.”

Mike Strmiska writes, “This spring I am readjusting to life in New York State after a great fall semester in the Czech Republic. I taught two courses in the Department for the Study of Religions at Masaryk

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University in Brno, ‘Myth and Religion of Northern Europe’ and ‘Neo-Paganism and New Religious Movements.’ Both courses have Hampshire connections. The Myth and Religion course was inspired partly by a class I took at Hampshire with Clay and Joanna Hubbs back in 1980 or so. The Neo-Paganism course was modeled on one I taught at Hampshire last spring and hope to teach again. The Czech Republic was wonderful, except for seeing up close the terrible racism and bigotry being extended to the Muslim migrants and refugees who came into Europe during the fall. Eastern Europeans have not had much recent experience dealing with ethnic diversity, and sadly, it shows.”

David Wiener writes, “Among my many activities as a serial entrepreneur, I recently created a series of limitededition, fine-art prints entitled Photographic Constructs.

This collection combines my love of photography with my passion for high-tech design and exposes viewers to new ways of seeing technology, architecture, nature, and many other subjects through a unique and creative lens. www.DavidWienerArt.com.”

1979 Kevin Brown writes, “Have developed a habit of playing golf really badly and wonder if any other alums want to play a round for the 50th reunion, in 2020. I’m still a major gifts officer at the University of Pennsylvania. Wondering when my winning lottery ticket number will hit and I’ll be able to become a man of leisure. Shout-out to former members of Mod 65! We called wandering aimlessly at age 18 ‘floundering.’ What do we call it at age 54?”

James Brewer-Calvert 78F

Maeve Cullinane writes, “Career #3 is under way! After a decade in book publishing, a decade in elementary education, and more than a decade focusing on my family’s needs, working, and volunteering part time, I’m back in the professional fulltime workforce. I’m the family programs coordinator at the Seneca Park Zoo, a position that excitingly unites my various skills and interests. I still live in western New York, with Stephen and two of our three children. One is launched, one is about to graduate from high school although will stay close to home for another year or two for continued support and advocacy, and another is just hitting the world of middle school and rehearsals for school musicals. Change is the one constant in our lives.”

Joe Fletcher writes, “I’m the finance director for Jimmy Panetta for Congress, on the National Finance Committee for Hillary Clinton for President, and talent producer for events at the Democratic National convention.”

1980 Carol Colgate Del Aguila (née Yoon) writes, “I’m happily dancing and designing my own line of dance and performance wear in San Francisco. Any choreographers/ dancers/multimedia artists/ figure skaters who need performance or dance wear, let me know. I’m also a passionate animal advocate.”

Clare Garfield writes, “Amazingly (to me), I’ve been living in central Pennsylvania for almost ten years. I’m no longer working full time; am doing freelance grant writing for several local nonprofits. I’m still an avid hiker and am ‘section-hiking’ the Appalachian Trail with a couple of friends — we’re currently working on the longest section, which is in Virginia. I recently ran into Leslie Resnick at the Whitney Museum, in New York, and it was fun to catch up with her.

I will attend the wedding of Leslie Schneider this summer.

I keep in touch with many other Hampsters.”

Class Notes

heritage language, or learn a world (foreign) language. We are supporting legislation to release schools districts from the current ‘one-size-fits-all’ mandate restricting program types for English-language learners, allow the expansion of bilingual programs, and establish a state Seal of Biliteracy to recognize high school graduates who speak, listen, read, and write proficiently in a language in addition to English.

Find out more at www.

LanguageOpportunity.org.”

Carol Colgate Del Aguila 80F

Tasha Harmon writes, “I was saddened to hear of the untimely death of Ann Kearns in March. Singing under Ann’s baton was one of my great joys at Hampshire. I also did my H&A DIV I with her. I was astonished that she encouraged me to do a solo vocal recital, as I wasn’t doing my DIV II in music, and was nervous about it, but it was a life-changing experience. I remember her saying ‘You sing best when you’re singing about something you believe.’ She was right, and that thought has guided my choices about music for the years since.

My band, Kendálin, is in the midst of recording our second CD, and I’ll add a thank-you to Ann in the liner notes, for encouraging me to continue to make music even when I thought saving the world (clearly my job) required that I study politics. I, and so many

others, was blessed by her grace and passion and her dedication to both good music and all of us who sang with her. Here’s hoping that Hampshire does a memorial concert for her and invites alums to sing — for that, I’ll fly across the country.”

Lisa Napoli writes, “I had a delicious dinner with Kevin Brown 79F at classmate and dear friend Liz Dubelman’s home, in Santa Monica, recently. Ray and Joan, my book about the philanthropist and McDonald’s heiress Joan Kroc, will be published by Dutton in the fall.”

Helen Solorzano (née Mooers) writes, “I’ve been working with the Massachusetts Language Opportunity Coalition, a group I helped found with the goal of increasing language-learning opportunities for students to learn English, develop a native/

Adam Sweet writes, “I majored in expressive arts therapy and opened my studio in 1986. I’ve taught all over the Pioneer Valley and have been honored to be able to participate in various bands and ensembles including the Pioneer Valley Symphony, the Valley Light Opera, and the Keene Chamber Orchestra.

In 2012, I started to form a mandolin orchestra out of a group who were studying the mandolin. Four years later, the group has grown to 16 regular members, with more joining each year. I’m pleased to extend an invitation to anyone who can read music to join us on one of our instruments.

We’re always looking for mandolin, mandola, mandocello, and mando bass players. Of course, any bowedstring player is welcome as well. To find out more about the group, visit the website http://mandolinorchestra.org.”

Gretchen Westlight writes, “It’s been quite a while since I’ve written in, but the same is true for many of you! I love knowing how and what everyone, even the lightest of acquaintances, is doing, so I hope this will inspire some of you to share your news, privately or publicly.

Here’s what’s been going on in my world:

“After 11 years, we left the cohousing community we helped develop and moved back to the funkier east side of Portland, where we belong.

We’re happy in a very old house with a great garden (no lawn!). Last year I left the food co-op where I had worked in administration for nine years and have returned to the nonprofit sector. I’m now the office manager at CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) in Oregon City.

“I hoped my daughter would develop an interest in attending Hampshire, as a handful of other graduates from her small alternative high school have. She’s decided on Quest University, in British Columbia, a nine-year-old college with a fresh take on higher ed (sound familiar?), and will start next fall, after a three-continents gap year.

Quest combines the block system (one class at a time) with designing your own major. Because my parents went to Antioch, in the ’50s, she’s definitely carrying on the family tradition of attending an innovative college. If all goes according to plan, she’ll graduate right at Hampshire’s 50th — hope I can fit it all in.

“In the meantime, Tasha Harmon 80F and I attended a Hampshire event this spring and got our portraits taken (photo booth courtesy of hosts Erica 87F and Soren CoughlinGlaser 88F). Tasha and her band, Kendálin, are working on another CD. I love going to their performances: hearing her sing is a flashback to the many hours she, her guitar, and assorted other folkies spent playing in the Airport Lounge.

What a treat!”

1981 Bruce Conover writes, “After 28 years, my run with CNN has come to an end: not

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exactly of my own volition; the corporate lexicon likes to use the word restructuring. But I leave with no regrets; it’s been an incredible ride. Thanks to CNN, I had front-row seats to an amazing assortment of fascinating and epochal events.

“I take away a host of memories of my time there, and here are just a couple of them.

I was able to witness, from the inside, the implosion of the Soviet Union. As nationalist movements ripped apart the USSR, I got to hang out for weeks at a time in Tbilisi, Georgia; Yerevan, Armenia; and the Baltic states as they fought for full independence from Mother Russia.

“And there were lots of adventures and misadventures: Flying into the Soviet nuclear test site on Novaya Zemlya. In an apt testimonial to the Soviet work ethic, our plane crash-landed after one engine flamed out.

Being beaten up and having CNN’s camera taken from me by the secret police in Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution, but getting to have tea with Ambassador Shirley Temple Black and CNN correspondent Richard Roth as a consolation prize.

Spending many months in Afghanistan, but on the Russian side of the story, as we were based in Moscow.

On one blacked-out, nighttime plane ride from Herat back to Kabul, a Russian journalist leaned over and asked me how I felt right at that moment about the CIA supplying the Mujahedeen with ample stocks of Stinger antiaircraft missiles.

“I’ll miss the dedicated and idealistic people who work there, most of whom got into journalism from a desire to make the world work better.

Misquoting a line from one of my favorite films: ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe . . . now those memories

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JASON GROW

Class Notes

John Livermore 81F

will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’

“Time to move on.”

Jennifer Lee writes, “I’m living in beautiful Los Angeles and still working in the film industry, but now as an independent filmmaker. My last project, Feminist: Stories from Women’s Liberation, has been screening internationally and it even brought me to Islamabad, Pakistan. I also just had an essay published in a new book called Love Her, Love Her Not: The Hillary Paradox. I still see Richard Sinrich every time I’m back home in Atlanta.”

John Livermore writes, “Hi, folks. We just completed our 10-minute film on the making of Massachusetts’ first net-positive-energy renovated home, www.

HealthyHomeHealthyPlanet. org, and are in the process of creating a nonprofit organization, Healthy Home Healthy Planet, which will be dedicated to empowering people to reduce their carbon footprint.”

1982 Liz Carter writes, “I have been leading Amherst Writers & Artists creative-writing workshops in the Waltham, Massachusetts, area since 2003. While doing per diem work at McLean Hospital, leading various activity and psychoeducational groups with inpatients, I became interested in stress management. Now, after training at Boston’s Benson Henry Institute of Mind Body Medicine (an MGH & Harvard Medical School affiliate), I’ll begin running the Stress Management and Resiliency Training (SMART) program as developed at the BHI in and around Waltham. It’s for anyone who would like to make lifestyle changes to promote long-term health and wellbeing. The two-month program is based on scientific research in the fields of neurobiology, positive psychology, and epigenetics, with elements of cognitive behavioral therapy and millennia-old spiritual

wisdom. Please check out my sites, studiowriting.org and ManageMyStress.net, both also on Facebook.”

Dale Geist writes, “Living at the Rockin’ Heart Ranchito, a half acre of mortgaged paradise in the town of Sonoma, in Northern California, with my wife, Laura Hinerfeld, my two young boys, Amos and Guthrie, and a rotating menagerie of goats, chickens, cats, dogs, and bunnies. I just finished a two-year gig as the design director for No Depression, ‘the roots music authority,’ and am on the hunt for what’s next.

Meanwhile, I’m finally getting out there regularly performing my original tunes, which I’ve been writing forever. If you’re in the neighborhood, say hi.”

Robert Harmon writes, “Still living on lovely Vashon Island, in the Puget Sound, with my wife and our now five-yearold son. Attempting to remain patiently tenacious in my efforts to help utilities evolve to meet this century’s needs.”

Class Notes

Joseph Steig writes, “I don’t have an advanced degree, so no college or university (including Hampshire) would hire me as a professor (thank goodness!).

But I’ve been spending part of my time over the last year managing curriculum development and teaching at the most Hampshire-like start-up accelerator there is.

Village Capital runs social mission business programs around the world in a dozen locations, soon growing to more than 30. The programs are unique in featuring peerselected capital — investors turn over responsibility for allocating funds to the cohort of entrepreneurs. The result is a dynamic, collaborative learning community.”

1983 Alison Brett writes, “I love my job as an art teacher at a charter school in Pacoima, California.

I was having a conversation with someone recently and newly recognized the value of my time with the children. So much is poured into the kids during their school hours, and during my time with them they get to pour out. It’s extremely rewarding. I also have a deep love of sailing and we sail on our boat almost every weekend.

We’ve had close encounters with super pods of dolphins, whales, and mile-long flocks of birds. The winds and waves may vary but my joy out there on the water remains the same.

“Our daughter started college this year at the University of California Merced. The school reminds me a bit of Hampshire even though its significantly larger (6,600 undergrads). When I started at Hampshire, it was a mere 13 years into its existence.

UC Merced is celebrating its 10-year milestone. At 10 years, Hampshire was building its reputation, as is UC Merced

now. UC Merced is also forward thinking, and it’s the maverick of the UCs. The school is highly diverse, lots of professors are doing very innovative work, and there’s a palpable sense of community. All the school’s buildings are LEED certified, and there’s a giant solar array that provides about 20 percent of their power needs; plans are to increase that, and to focus on sustainability. The change has been fine. My daughter is doing well and has made lots of good friends. Given the four-hour drive to campus, she has been able to gain independence, and with her out of the house, I’ve been able to say yes to business trips with my husband. We went to Zurich in the fall, and I loved that city. I’ll get to check out Toulouse soon.

“Hampshire cultivated some of the skills I use all the time, like creativity, adaptation, and allowing curiosity to guide me.

I’m full of gratitude for the abundance in my life.”

Kurt Mills writes, “Still at the University of Glasgow, where I’ve been since 2004. Continue to run the MSc in human rights and international politics (we are always looking for students who want to make a difference!) and the Glasgow Human Rights Network. 2015 was a big year, as I published two books — International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa: Responsibility to Protect, Prosecute, and Palliate, and Human Rights Protection in Global Politics: Responsibilities of States and Non-State Actors.

Also became a vice president of the International Studies Association, my primary global professional organization. I spent part of 2014 as a visiting scholar at the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Queensland. If you’re coming to Scotland, drop me an e-mail.”

Mharia Ross-Walcott writes, “Working with personalized learning with middle school students at Hearthstone School, in Oroville, California, is rewarding. This is my 16th year with this district. We have a hybrid program in which students attend classes two days a week and work independently the other days.

I was awarded a CTA Project Grant for $20,000 for Teacher Driven Change and we now have an 18-tree fruit orchard (planted with Common Vision volunteers: investigate commonvision.org) and an expansive school garden on site. Our Garden Club meets weekly and students are learning where real food comes from. Engagement with STEM (I’m participating in a threeyear iSTEM Academy through CSUChico) and PBL (Project Based Learning) gives kids the opportunity to get involved with activities and issues that interest and concern them.

We really need to invest in our children to secure a future that is viable and focus on living in balance with other organisms and ecosystems on our planet. On a personal note, my husband and I run a small organic farm and our daughter was recently married.”

Ben Teifeld writes, “Shalom aleichem. I’m writing to mention that I’ve traveled a long way from digital sound synthesis in my Hampshire days. Today I’m involved in kosher food manufacturing supervision (hashgacha), fine art inkjet printing, and an unusual application of my printing interest: printing on the top and/or bottom of skateboards and/or longboards.”

Liz Tree writes, “I’m still farming and being a mom in southern Oregon. Our farm grows organic veggies, beef, pork, and cannabis. I spend my time going to farmers

markets and advocating for one of my children, who has Down syndrome. My son is the first and only child with a ‘significant disability’ fully included in the general education classroom in our district. I’m proud of this and work almost daily to help other students be part of the ‘regular’ learning community alongside their ‘non-disabled’ peers in their home school that their brothers/ sisters and neighbors attend. Shout-out to my old Mod mates (43 and Greenhouse) as well as my old Deadhead friends.”

1984 Matt Bosson writes, “In December of last year, I completed my short film — Desperate Manny — my first as writer and director.

Several Hampshire alums were instrumental in making it: Morgan Russo 92F (whom I originally met at an alum function here in Los Angeles) produced the film; Christopher Earl 84F edited; Chris Anderson 86F composed the score; and Geralyn Flood 85F was the casting director.

Manny is a noir suspense drama about the power of love, addiction, courage — and unintended consequences. I’m very proud of the film, which is being submitted to festivals now. Please take a look at our website and watch the trailer: desperatemanny.com.”

Susan DuMars writes, “In April, my fourth collection of poetry, Bone Fire, was published by Salmon Poetry.

Like most of my classmates, I turn 50 this year; I wrote this book looking over my shoulder at the past. Some of my old friends have died. Others have taken roads down which I can’t follow. It’s hard to let them go. I’m working on mourning what’s lost and loving what is.

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Class Notes

This is where I’m writing from now. To hear more about Bone Fire, read some sample poems, or order a copy, visit its page at salmonpoetry.com.”

Eric Steig writes, “We spent a glorious year in Scotland, where I had a Leverhulme fellowship to support a sabbatical. Lots of castles, beaches, and mountains, and lots of visits to friends and colleagues in Aix-en-Provence, Copenhagen, Cambridge . . .

Most important was simply living in a normal lowermiddle-class neighborhood in Edinburgh, where our kids were in school. Great kids, great parents, totally different (and more balanced) view of life than we’re used to in the United States. Great to catch up with Amy Rose 84F a few times when we were in England. Now back in Seattle, where Juliet recently got tenure (yahoo!) at the University of Washington. Still spending lots of time (and all summers) in Bellingham, our favorite place and real home.”

Louise Zamparutti writes, “I teach business and technical writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and am finishing my PhD in rhetoric and technology. I was awarded a research fellowship at the Mary Baker Eddy Archives in Boston for this summer and also received a fellowship from the University of Wisconsin for the following academic year.

My husband, Chris Hanson, and I live in Milwaukee and enjoy long bike rides along Lake Michigan.”

1985 Elizabeth Gorski writes, “My large cat and I are living in Portland, Maine. I work in the public school system in special education (largely with autistic kids). I still choreograph, dance,

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and perform physical theater when the opportunity comes my way. I’m currently working on a piece with two pistols and a hula-hoop for a friend’s birthday party. I recently acquired some stilts, which I’m just starting to get the hang of.

So much fun!”

Michael Samstag writes, “I’m excited to be releasing my fourth feature-length documentary this year. A Southern Fix is our 5,000mile journey to put an end the unnecessary slaughter of millions of companion animals every year. You can see the film online at https://vimeo. com/ondemand/asouthernfix.

We’ve also begun production on The American Tiger, in which we investigate the plight of captive tigers in the United States. I’ve settled happily with my girlfriend, four dogs, and one cat in Knoxville. In the next year we hope to leave our suburban existence and open a sanctuary for animals in a more rural setting.”

Dan Sroka writes, “Chorus alums! Ann Kearns had a huge impact on all of us, and I’d like to see us acknowledge and preserve her legacy. I’m trying to find as many tapes as possible so we can digitize and preserve them in the Hampshire archives. Please check to see if you still have any recordings of our concerts with Ann, and if you do, contact me.

“As for me: it’s been a busy time. The kids moved up to new schools, with my older child starting (gasp!) middle school.

My art business has been growing, and I recently created artwork for several cruise ships, as well as for resorts from the Southwest to Taiwan.”

Sarah Mount Elewononi 86F

Lori Goodwin 89F

Chopsticks by Erica Moody 89F

Class Notes

1986

1987

Pamela Block writes, “I finally get to hold in my hands the book I coedited: Occupying Disability: Critical Approaches to Community, Justice, and Decolonizing Disability. The paperback edition is coming soon. You can find it on springer.com.”

Joanna Ballantine writes, “Life in Amherst is good! Clay and I love living down the road from Hampshire. Our 17-year-old, Hannah, is on the college tour (yes, she’s looking at Hampshire), our 13-year-old, Caleb, is a dancer, and I’m loving work with The Trustees of Reservations. When you visit Amherst, be in touch.”

Sarah Mount Elewononi writes, “Life is very full with my work as pastor and my two little girls. In January 2015 I completed my PhD at Boston University School of Theology with a focus on liturgy and the sociology of religion. My dissertation is a history of Methodist camp meetings in 19th-century New England and how they promoted dramatic church growth.

I’m now teaching worship to United Methodist pastors in addition to leading my own congregation. Grace and Salem have been enjoying Erica Perl’s books from the library — Goatilocks made them giggle.”

Lise Solomon writes, “I’ve been in book publishing since graduating Hampshire, starting in 1988 at MIT Press, and have been a sales rep based in Northern California for various publishers since 1993.

In March I was named Rep of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly; the honor of being recognized by peers and colleagues is beyond amazing. And it’s especially fantastic because I get to sell books by Hampshire alum authors such as Erica Perl and Lisa Jahn Clough 84F, among others. Independent bookstores have been key to the Buy Local movements around the country, and I’m proud to be part of that effort.”

1988 Arianna Collins writes, “I recently became a published author! If you’re into historical fantasy such as the Mists of Avalon or Outlander, you’ll probably enjoy my novel too.

Read Hearken to Avalon!

Set against the backdrop of myth and legend, history is rewritten by those who didn’t get to tell their side of the story.

Meet the descendants of Avalon and Guy of Gisbourne, the Stag King. For more information, go to http://hearkentoavalon.com.”

Sven Davisson writes, “Last summer my husband and I, along with our two dogs, relocated to New Orleans, where I’ve taken on a new role heading up the Louisiana Cancer Research Center. The LCRC is a unique public–private partnership (LSUHSC, Tulane, and Xavier Universities and Ochsner Health System).

Though not our first Mardi Gras, we’ve been enjoying our first Satchmo, French Quarter, Tennessee Williams, and jazz fests. We’re still running Rebel Satori Press, now in its ninth year. The move has also afforded more time to focus on writing and photography. I’m currently working on an anthology of new poetry that should be out in the near future.”

Chase DeForest writes, “Currently living in Washington, D.C., and, comically, running my own business making cowboy boots: chasecustomboots.com.”

Jane Urry writes, “Coming up on 19 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I’m writing to let everybody know about a great postgraduation opportunity here at the Fed: the Research Group’s Research Analyst position. We have approximately 40 RAs, most just out of college, on the floor at any one time. If you — or someone you know — will be graduating this year with a Div III concentration in economics, math, policy, or statistics, this is a job to really think about.

Our RAs are researching, writing, and publishing on topics such as student debt, the myth of the college-graduate barista, and the gender-wage gap. A typical question: Since the passage of the ACA, do individuals who gain health insurance have more flexibility in job transitions to industries that previously did not typically offer insurance?

Competitive salary and benefits. The deadline to apply is in early fall. Pro tip: Start prepping your application now (get résumé help in the CORC).

Me, I’m also enjoying the city.

This summer, we discovered the fireboat John J. Harvey.

The Hudson looks completely different when every minute 18,000 gallons of water are gushing over your head!”

1989 Lori Goodwin writes, “I recently helped launch a travel venture, ExploringCircle.

We specialize in adventure expeditions worldwide that connect travelers with the world around them while offering a chance to fund hope — our call to action and

tagline is ‘Journey. Connect.

Pay It Forward.’ We donate up to 5 percent of each trip to an environmental or global social-justice initiative. I couldn’t be more thrilled; it really is a perfect merger of community values forged at Hampshire College, my Peace Corps service, and 12 years as an adventure-travel specialist.

I also visited campus last summer with my 6-year-old daughter, Haven. We enjoyed a picnic from Atkins among the wildflowers on the lawn.”

Sarah Karpinen writes, “I moved to Michigan shortly after graduating from Hampshire, in 1993. I left for a short time for a job in Connecticut, but came back to go to law school and have been here ever since. I live in the metro Detroit area with my husband and son. In 2014, after 13 great years as a trial attorney for the National Labor Relations Board, I decided it was time for a change. I’m now an assistant U.S. attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan. I work in the office’s Civil Rights Unit, where I have the opportunity to work on a wide range of civil rights cases.

I’m enjoying the challenges of my new job, and am grateful to be able to continue my career in public service.”

Erica Moody writes, “Our first year living in mid-coast Maine has been quite eventful, including finally starting to play in my own metal studio instead of just commission work at my main biz, Magma Metalworks Inc. The new design work is mostly small, handcrafted metal tools for the kitchen, for eating, and for woodworking. Some work can be seen at the site (still a work in progress) www. ericamoody.com and more thoroughly at my IG: @ ericaemoody. We still offer a

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Class Notes

sort of maker space B&B for those who want to enjoy midcoast Maine and learn some metalworking: workshops@ magma-metalworks.com. Yes, shameless self-promotion!”

Eva Obregon-Blasco writes, “I don’t think I’ve ever written a class note before. I’ve been living in Madrid for the last 20 years. After slaving away in the film and TV industry for many years, I decided to work for myself, so now I slave away as a freelance translator: adapting screenplays, series bibles, and press releases and subtitling — mostly documentaries — for Spanish media companies and independent producers.

I also occasionally coach actors working in English and have recently started teaching academic writing at an international university, which makes me think back to Hampshire with much gratitude. I’ve been lucky to have had the chance to travel extensively around Europe and Asia, and I don’t have kids, which gives me plenty of time for hobbies and personal projects: singing, restoring odd bits of furniture, gardening, and now preparing a documentary profile of a friend who is a fairly famous storyteller here in Madrid. Life is pretty good.

Would love to meet up with Hampsters traveling through.”

Tom Scully writes, “After a dozen years working in postproduction in the movie and TV industry, I decided to go to law school. This year I graduated, passed the California bar, and started practicing. Someday I may try to combine entertainment and law by working for a studio or litigate intellectual property issues, but for now I have simply hung up my own shingle to do general litigation. I still want to be the champion of ‘the little guy,’ so I’m attracted to the plaintiffs’

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Gaia Marrs 99F

Ilana Berman 95F

side: underpaid employees and those poor folks who have been cheated and injured.”

1990 Tara Flippo writes, “Life at the University of New Hampshire is going really well. I’m excited to have my first book coming out this month: Social and Emotional Learning in Action: Experiential Activities to Positively Impact School Climate. It would be great to hear from other Hampshire alums in the field of education. tara.flippo@unh.edu.”

1993 Kate Barnhart writes, “I gave birth to a nonprofit, New Alternatives for LGBT

Jonathon Podolsky 94F

Homeless Youth, in 2008. New Alternatives operates a drop-in center in New York City on a shoestring budget using a harm-reduction philosophy.”

Jenn Iannaconi writes, “I started my own online store called Valkyrie Apparel (www. valkyrie-apparel.com). We sell plus-size clothing for the goth, punk, and gamer set.”

Jane Jerardi writes, “This past season, I’ve been fortunate to be a resident artist at Links Hall in Chicago, where I premiered a new piece, Again, in late March. In addition, I’m still based at the Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago, where this term I’m teaching a course on improvisation and documentation in choreography.”

Bill Kte’pi writes, “Let’s see. I’m working as a freelance writer and independent scholar (in history and religion), and have published a few novels. I’m engaged to Caitlin O’Brien (the date is August 21, 2017).

We’re currently living in New Hampshire — I moved back here in my 30s — but plan to move to the South in the next couple of years.”

1994 Katherine Ong writes, “Well, I’ve gone and done it. After ten years of working both in-house and in agencies providing digital-marketing services, I’ve launched my own business: Taproot Digital LLC. We provide digital-marketing strategy and services to a range of clients, at the moment

Class Notes

those are both foreign and domestic-based projects. I get a bit obsessed about finding data insights that can drive a business forward, as well as teaching others how to execute and create digital-marketing strategies, so I’m doing a bit of both. Although running a business is challenging, I’m loving the work-life balance, flexibility, and the fact that I can pick my own clients.

“I’d love to connect with other Hampshire alums who are working in the digital-marketing and Webdevelopment space, so give me a shout at katherine@ taprootdigitalllc.com.”

Jonathon Podolsky writes, “I run the Doctor Who Club of western Massachusetts (www.DrWhoClub.com), which meets for screenings, potlucks, picnics, and cosplay and presents panels at conventions. Classic Doctor Who, the modern series, Torchwood, and other related programs are covered. I’m also part of the Into the Time Vortex podcast, in collaboration with The Gallifreyan Gazette (www.

IntoTheTimeVortex.com).”

1995 Ilana Berman writes, “I live in Los Angeles with my husband, Daniel, and two girls, Ridley, 6, and Margo, 2. For work, I’m writing a lot — the world premiere run of my first play, O Réjane, won the Stage Raw Los Angeles Theater Award for Female Leading Performance last year, and earned two additional nominations, one for me as playwright. My one-act play, In Her Voice, is included in the 2015 365 Women a Year project, and O Réjane will be included this year. A comedic monologue I wrote, ‘Sugar Coat It,’ will soon be published in the book LGBT Comedic Monologues That Are Actually

Funny, out this year from Applause Theatre and Cinema Books. My current commercial for FedEx, ‘Open Floor Plan,’ is running; you can catch it on-screen. My Pilates studio, recently renamed Corehouse — because it’s the best little Corehouse in the Valley — is in my backhouse, which makes for a wonderful commute. I’m especially excited that as I write, an avocado tree is being planted in my yard.

(I’m professionally known as Ilana Turner).”

Erica Wisner writes, “After 10 years developing and teaching this technology, we have a book coming out: the Rocket Mass Heater Builder’s Guide, available now.”

impact of their work through applied research, planning, and evaluation. An active distance runner, I live in the city with my spouse, 4-year-old son, two dogs, and a second child on the way, due in November. I’d love to hear from other metro Detroit Hampsters!”

1997 Ariele Foster writes, “In late 2015, I founded YogaAnatomyAcademy.com, a blog and online mentorship dedicated to high-quality, evidence-based yoga anatomy education.”

Heidi Reijm writes, “I’m enjoying life in Detroit, where I’ve lived since moving from Brooklyn in 2011. In January, I completed my doctoral degree at City University of New York Graduate Center in political science, studying local responses to the mortgageforeclosure crisis in Baltimore and Detroit. I work for a woman-owned, Detroit-based consulting firm that assists nonprofit organizations and foundations in increasing the

Janell Rothenberg writes, “My post-Hampshire schooling has finally come to an end. In December 2015, I completed my PhD in cultural anthropology at UCLA. I conducted research in northern Morocco on questions of infrastructure design, urban change, and the everyday work of global logistics. Based on my dissertation, I’m now working on a manuscript entitled Morocco’s Mega-Port: Circulation, Infrastructure, and Work in Global Tangier.”

1999

1996 Emily Han writes, “Who knew I’d wind up in Los Angeles, but here I am celebrating 14 years in my adopted city and with my partner, Gregory. As a recipe developer, educator, and communications director for LearningHerbs.com, I’m happy to be doing work that combines my love of nature and nourishment. I also wrote and shot my first cookbook, Wild Drinks & Cocktails: Handcrafted Squashes, Shrubs, Switchels, Tonics, and Infusions to Mix at Home (Fair Winds Press, 2015).”

want to say hey and play in my immense comic collection.

Much love.”

Paul Rodriguez writes. “I returned to government from private practice, joining the de Blasio administration to serve as deputy counsel to the mayor of New York City.”

1998 M’issa Fleming writes, “I was applying a metric ton of glitter to my face in a swath of queens preparing for a severely queered-out Purim festivity when I overheard someone talking about starting a nursing program at UMass.

It turned out there were four Hampsters in the glitter cloud — we were delighted but relatively unsurprised, considering the nature of the party. New Orleans is treating me fabulously, and folks should come by the second floor of the Main public library if they

Zachary Bloom writes, “I’ve been living in the Bay Area since graduation and working in San Francisco independent schools for the past ten years.

I’m currently teaching second grade at a Quaker school in the Mission. I appreciate a Friends school’s value-based approach to education that honors the individual. This year I started a master’s program in educational leadership. I live in Oakland near a beautiful lake with my wife, Kali, and our two-year-old daughter, Liza. Liza enjoys buttered tortillas, the flying horses from Fantasia, running around naked, and wearing a Tom Brady jersey when she has to get dressed. All is well.”

Gaia Marrs writes, “I’ve spent the last decade running three guide services in remote Alaska with my husband.

Our companies are St. Elias Alpine Guides, Copper Oar Rafting, and Pangaea Adventures. We’re proud to be one of the largest and most respected outfitters in Alaska for hiking, mountaineering, rafting, and sea kayaking. I have my private pilot’s license

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Class Notes

and enjoy flying around the spectacular mountains of our amazing home. This winter we welcomed a baby girl into our family and look forward to having her join our adventurous lives.”

Jules Skloot writes, “I continue to collaborate and perform with the Ballez, a queer ballet company in New York. We premiered our second fulllength Ballez, Sleeping Beauty and the Beast, at LaMama Theater, April 29–May 8. Last September I had the great joy and honor of being a chuppah pole holder at the wedding of my dear Hampshire friend and classmate Maggie Shar 99F to her beloved Jessica Harwood.”

Arion Thiboumery writes, “Moved back to the region — southern Vermont. Started a new slaughterhouse, Vermont Packinghouse (www. vermontpackinghouse.com).

Doing work with Hampshire, hosting student tours. Funny how things come back around.

Look me up if you’re doing delicious food/farm stuff in the area.”

accessing resources (education, housing, food, shelter). The book serves as a resource to advocate for queer youth, who continue to suffer despite recent federal gains for LGBT rights. It’s also an exciting, engaging read aside from the advocacy goals.”

Vanessa Gravenstine writes, “Hi, classmates! I’m finishing an MS in environmental science in Syracuse. I work with several organizations to assess and improve bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure on campus and in a nearby town. I also recently got a job assessing sites for community solar projects. And, most exciting, I received a fellowship to go to Thailand in May and intern at an elephant reintroduction program. I’d love to visit Iceland in the upcoming year, and I’m looking for a travel partner . . .”

2000

Zane Thimmesch-Gill writes, “My book Hiding in Plain Sight was just named as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. The book explores the challenges of surviving the streets as a homeless trans youth and discusses the barriers to

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Pamela “Pam” Cargill writes, “I’m pleased to report that my solar consulting practice is growing. I’ve recently incorporated my business, Chaolysti, and I’m starting to expand my focus, as solar is edging its way into more mainstream energy production. Now I’m taking the decade-long shift in residential solar markets since I left Hampshire and applying it to how the future of distributed energy (for example, solar-energy storage and grid planning) affects the business of solar and

the consumers we serve. By the time you read this, my article in SolarPro magazine will have hit the stands. It’s a guide for solar installers to the growing ecosystem of software solutions specific to helping them run their businesses more effectively, the result of two years of study and interviews.”

Dan Inglis writes, “I’m doing better than ever as a freelance voice teacher, music director, and musician.

“After doing my Div III on the nature of musical ability, I started teaching private voice. This has become my Div IV and a joyous life’s work: building the voice studio of the 21st century. I’ve been busy teaching in Northampton ever since.

“Being dragged kicking and screaming to my first workshop in Estill Voice Training in 2007 led me to become a certified Master Teacher in 2013 and learn the technical framework that now enables me to perform three or four times a week, direct four choirs, and teach singers in many styles.

“What’s most exciting right now is adding online lessons and developing online teaching resources. Singing is an art that, in the information age, can’t be replaced by a machine and is never going away. I don’t think in-person, one-on-one lessons are going anywhere either. But the ways we learn, practice, and even perform this art are changing, and I continue to learn with my students.”

2001 Elisabeth Gambino writes, “I worked as a Teachers for Global Classrooms Fellow in Morocco in March. I’m teaching art full time at Bard High School Early College Baltimore and will be leading teachers at the Maryland Artistry Teaching Institute this summer. I recently received an NEA Learning and Leadership grant for designthinking instruction and a Generation Study Abroad grant from IIE. This spring, I’m piloting a social-justice poster project, a vertical gardening design charrette, and a unit on migration, visual storytelling, and empathy. Other visual arts educators and teachers interested in globalizing their classrooms can follow my blog at teachpeaceblog. wordpress.com.”

Lucia Green-Weiskel writes, “I’m teaching political science part time at Johnson State College, in northern Vermont, after recently moving here from Brooklyn. My husband and I had our second daughter, Aria Skye Williams Eddy, on October 30, 2015. Her older sister, Hero Iona Williams Eddy, was born May 2, 2013. I’m taking some time off from my career to be a stay-at-home mom but I plan to begin a full-time teaching position soon. I’m also finishing my dissertation on lobbyists and US–China relations and am a consultant to the Beijing-based Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation. I recently became a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York.”

Tim O’Neill writes, “My wife and I welcomed our first child, Miles Robert O’Neill, on October 6, 2015. Favorite activities include raspberries, grabbing his toes, and Donald Drumpf memes.”

Class Notes

cognitive rehabilitation for people who have experienced mild traumatic brain injury (concussion), and Price travels south to Springfield, where he works for the PVTA as an analyst. He’s also the author of an urban planning and design blog that explores the Pioneer Valley: pvplanner.wordpress. com. Please don’t hesitate to contact either of us, for business or for pleasure!”

Devin Bannon writes, “Just opened Romeo + Juliet with Seattle Immersive Theatre.

Hampshire theater students would be excited by our production for its immersive quality: the audience walks through an entirely constructed town of Verona — in masks. The show is also forward-thinking in that our version of R+J has gone very *queer*: Romeo is a trans man, the Nurse is a man, Tybalt is a lady, and yours truly brings a thoroughly queer lens to Friar Laurence.”

Lucia Green-Weiskel 01S

Sarah Saltwick writes, “This year I was so happy to marry Toto Miranda, in Austin, in the company of several Hampshire alums, especially Melissa Mills-Dick, Andrea DavisCetina, and Chelsea Miller 03F — three of my incredible bridesmaids. A joyful day!”

2002 Jessie Hendrickson writes, “I live in Los Angeles and currently have three national network commercials airing: BelVita, Comcast Xfinity, and Honda — the last one directed

by Roman Coppola. I recently signed with two regional talent agents (for Southeast and Pacific Northwest representation). I joined SAGAFTRA this year and go by the nickname Jessie Hendricks now. I also manage a YouTube page called Everyday Science

for posting the occasional entertaining science video.”

Mike Sal writes, “Celebrating growth of production company Land of ADM and second year of international work through music-outreach education in the Middle East, Asia, and Mexico. Also becoming a board member of the Georgia Music Industry Association. Also some exciting new publications of music and video and more than half a million plays on Pandora Radio!”

Tucker Slosburg writes, “In early 2016, I founded the marketing consulting firm Lyceus Group, to help asset managers tell their story and share their investment philosophy with the public.”

2003 Aryenish Birdie writes, “I’m currently pursuing a master’s degree in public management at Johns Hopkins University, and was recently awarded the prestigious Bryce Harlow Fellowship, which is given to graduate students pursuing careers in professional advocacy through lobbying and government relations.”

2004

Chrissy Rivera writes, “Andrew Bilir-Flock and I are sealing the deal with a pigeonthemed wedding in California this summer, 12 years after we first met, at Hampshire.

Good times! I’m finishing up my thesis at UC Berkeley on jumping-spider courtship behavior, and Andrew is putting his analytic philosophy and public policy background to good use as an analyst for a solar company. We live in Oakland with two cool cats.”

Tara Frady Armstrong writes, “After a number of years away from ‘home,’ my husband, Price Armstrong 03F, and I are more than thrilled to have moved back to the Pioneer Valley. From our new house in Holyoke, I commute north to Hadley, where I work as a speech-language pathologist specializing in

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Class Notes

2005

\

Noah Beit-Aharon writes, “My debut fantasy novel, Silent Hall, came out on June 7 from UK-based Angry Robot Books. The publisher has a distribution deal with Penguin/Random House in the United States, so the novel will be available at bookstores nationwide.

You can find author news, including information about book signings et cetera, at my website, nsdolkart.com.”

Will Colon writes, “My fulltime work during the past three years at Anzovin Studio has been creatively challenging and emotionally rewarding.

We currently employ three Hampshire alums and would like to hire a fourth. Anzovin Studio is also expanding to form a separate division that I’ll be creatively managing. I’ve been teaching animation as an adjunct at Hampshire for two years, and it’s been a wonderful and fulfilling experience that I hope to continue. I also started teaching at Lighthouse Holyoke, founded by a fellow Hampshire alum, Josiah Litant 00F. As a James Baldwin Scholar alum, I take great pride in being able to give back to the Hampshire community with my time. I thank everyone who has made that possible.”

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Rachel Figurasmith writes, “Stephen 04F and I welcomed our daughter, Maisy Lev, on September 22, 2015. The family is doing wonderfully.”

Linnaea Furlong writes, “This makes my third year as the education outreach director at Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue, in Petaluma, California.

I love that I’m never bored and always learn new things at our small wildlife rescue and environmental education nonprofit. If you love wildlife and can afford to do an unpaid internship, we have a very hands-on program. See our website, www.scwildliferescue. org, for more details. Or if you love animals and have buckets of cash stashed in your closet for lack of knowing what to do with the money, we’re happy to put it into rehabilitating wildlife and getting kids excited about all the cool creatures that live in their backyards.”

Vinny Nero writes, “On February 1, Jill Erwich 05F and I brought Eleanor Twyla Nero into this world. Both mother and baby are happy and healthy.”

Anne Ziemba writes, “Jonathan Ziemba and I live in Oregon. Jonathan is working at Raptor Ridge Winery with a fellow Hampshire alum, Annie Shull 87F, who runs the winery with her husband. I’m working as a midwife at a small community hospital.”

2006 Heather Dodge writes, “I’m graduating from the University of Cincinnati with a master’s in social work and a concentration in macro practice. My partner, Ian, and I are moving back to western Massachusetts this summer with our Labradoodle, Chino.”

Lizz Goldstein writes, “I finally finished school and received my rabbinic ordination in May.” Kierstin Hettler writes, “My life and heart are so full right now! My husband, Judd, and I welcomed our little girl, Jemina Bea, into the world on January 22. Her birth has filled our lives with sweet cuddles, heart-melting smiles, coos and grunts, and seemingly endless poopy diapers. Maternity leave has been a nice break from both graduate school (I’m studying youth development) and a full-time job with the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Austin Area, where I’m the director of education. In my spare time (of which there isn’t much) I teach and perform improv at The Institution Theater here in Austin.

Juggling pregnancy and new motherhood, full-time work and school, and nights at the theater would certainly be daunting if not for the practice run that was my Hampshire education.”

Jonathan Kirschenbaum writes, “I earned my master’s in city and regional planning from Rutgers University in 2012. I’ve been an urban planner in Toronto and then moved back to New York City.

Today, I’m an urban planner for the City of White Plains (coincidentally, the basis of my Div III). I’m a project manager for a major transportation and land-use study the city is conducting in its downtown. I also conduct and write reports for the city’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program.”

Liz Looker writes, “In August 2015 I became the assistant director of undergraduate education at MIT Sloan School of Management. I advise undergraduate students, manage program marketing and communications strategy,

and create events to build community and promote business education. I also recently completed a 200hour registered yoga teacher training through JP Centre Yoga and am beginning to teach vinyasa yoga in Boston.”

2007 Allison Smartt writes, “I’m still producing political theater made by Hampshire alums Madeline Burrows 09F and Andrew Figueroa 10F around the United States. Most recently, Mixed-Race Mixtape,

by Figueroa, performed for 1,000+ public school students and the general public at William Paterson University.

My biggest and latest life change was moving to Los Angeles, where I began working with the nonprofit arts advocacy coalition CreativeFuture as its Youth Outreach Partnerships and Special Events manager. I also recently worked my first IATSE call in L.A., at the Grammys. As soon as I pay off my car loan, I plan to get a dog.”

Ananda Valenzuela writes, “I‘m moving to Seattle to be the managing director of Rainier Valley Corps, an innovative nonprofit doing leadership development and capacitybuilding in communities of color. If you live in the area, I ‘d love to connect.”

2008 Caroline Correia writes, “I recently returned from Savoonga, Alaska, a remote Siberian Yupik village of 700 on Saint Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait, where I was living and working.

Capitalizing on all the frequent-flyer miles, I went to Southeast Asia for a month to meet up with Krista

Class Notes

Mangiardi 10F, who had just completed her Fulbright ETA post in the Isan region of Thailand. In early February, I accepted a position at Suffolk University’s office of advancement. I live in Lowell, Mass., with my husband, David Zick (married on New Year’s Day), and our cat, Samuel.”

Leah Grossman writes, “This summer I’ll be moving to Charlottesville to pursue a master’s degree in landscape architecture at the University of Virginia. I’m excited to spend the next three years focusing my passions and developing my technical skill set. Since Hampshire, I’ve been living in Austin and working for a nonprofit that is focused on youth STEM education and workforce development.

I’ve also been a part of one of Austin’s oldest housing cooperatives.”

Mia Metivier writes, “Nate Gershaneck and I are happy to announce that we’re planning our wedding, to take place in Lyndonville, Vt., in July. I’m an administrative assistant at Harvard College in the Program in General Education, and am also pursuing my graduate degree in museum studies from the Harvard Extension School. Nate is a software developer for Hitachi Data Systems.

We live in Boston.”

Kierstin Hettler 06F

Hampshire’s Cuba Travel Program 2016. Top row: Angie Ayre 90F, Geoff Taylor 80F, Cathy Barber 73F, Paul Bockelman 73F, Anna Joseph 05F, Kelly McCafferty 98F, Ana Keck 08F. Bottom row: RJ Sakai 08F, Rosita Fernandez-Rojo 77F, Megan Meo 09F, Tracy Calvan 74F P10, Kate Mills 73F

Ryan Mihaly writes, “Back in September 2015, I began volunteering for Asymptote, an online literary journal dedicated to literature in translation. As its Interview Features editor, I’m responsible for interviews on the journal’s blog and newsletter. I recently interviewed Oonagh Stransky, who translated the pope’s latest book. I also interviewed Richard Zenith, who has translated the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s major works;

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Class Notes

that interview was translated for the Romanian literary journal Observator Cultural’s February 2016 issue. If you live in Romania, will you pick up a copy for me?

I was also recently awarded the Anne Waldman Fellowship to attend Naropa University’s Creative Writing and Poetics program. Over the next two years, I’ll be working on a manuscript of poetry, planning the program’s literary events, and studying writing pedagogy. If you live in Boulder, be in touch.”

Rachel Stiles writes, “I’ll be spending this summer in Colorado as a wigs/makeup intern at Central City Opera Festival. After two years of working as a freelance makeup artist in the Chicagoland area, doing corporate work and photo shoots, I’m excited to return to the theater.”

Abigail Tyson writes, “I recently accepted a position with Adult Swim Games, and as of February am a production assistant.”

2009 Morgan Drewniany writes, “In my journey after Hampshire, I decided to pursue my passion for community building in the nonprofit sector. This eventually led me to being named executive director of the Springfield Central Cultural District, in February 2016. In this role, I’m working to make Springfield friendlier to arts and culture in a number of ways. I also work with the Mass Cultural Council for more statewide

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funding for arts programs and advocate for the arts as an economic-development engine. Hampshire prepared me well for the cross-sector connections I talk about every day.”

2010 Josh Reynolds writes, “I recently started a job as a 1:1 paraprofessional at Riverdale Elementary School, in Dedham, Mass. — my alma mater! I’m supporting a very bright student with navigating the social challenges of autism, and love the opportunity to immerse myself in a community of educator colleagues. The paraprofessional job comes after I completed a 10-month service program with SCA Massachusetts AmeriCorps.

Run by the Student Conservation Association and based in rural Plainfield, this program was a bit like an amplified Hampshire Mod: I lived with 24 other young adults in a former logging camp at Kenneth Dubuque State Forest that consists of a single shared bunkhouse, a bathroom up the hill, a kitchen, an office, and absolutely gorgeous surroundings. Besides learning to coexist in very close quarters for almost year, the corps spent five months teaching environmental education lessons in a dozen western Massachusetts public elementary schools, followed by five months traveling around the state in small crews to complete trail-work projects on conservation land.

A fantastic and unforgettable learning/growing experience!”

In Memoriam Since the last issue of NSS, we have been saddened to learn of the deaths of the following members of the Hampshire community.

For a complete list of community members we have lost, you may refer to the In Memoriam page on Hampshire’s alumni website, http://hamp.it/InMemoriam, which contains obituaries. If you would like more information, please contact us at alumni@ hampshire.edu. We may be able to put you in touch with the family or friends of the deceased.

Stephen Dunbar 71F Roland Legiardi-Laura 71F David Johnston 78F FORMER TRUSTEE

Blair Brown FORMER FACULTY

Ann Kearns, professor emerita of music and choral director

2011 Margo Dalal writes, “Almost a year after graduating, I’m a member of AmeriCorps VISTA with Detroit Food Academy, a youth food entrepreneurship nonprofit. I’m also a board member of the Tricycle Collective, a nonprofit that assists families through the foreclosure process and ultimately helps buy back their homes. In addition, I’m the leader of Southwest Soup, a tri-monthly community dinner that raises funds democratically for local projects that have an impact on southwest Detroit. I just got back from visiting Martha Pskowski 09F in Mexico City with Erika Linenfelser 10F.” Derek Pyle writes, “Fell down a rabbit hole, running an international project setting

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to music, including original music and readings from numerous Hampshire students and alums, as well as folks such as Mike Watt, David Kahne, Mary Lorson. www. waywordsandmeansigns.com.”

2012 Luna Goldberg writes, “Since graduating, in May 2015, I moved to Tel Aviv on a Fulbright postgraduate fellowship where I am conducting research on artists whose works are rooted in issues of historiography, as well as the politics of national and cultural identity in Israel and Palestine. I recently met with the Israeli artist and Hampshire alum Guy Yanai 97F for a conversation about his current work and upcoming shows.”

Alumni and Family Relations 893 West Street Amherst, MA 01002-3359

Moser at Hampshire A COLLECTION of works by artist and illustrator Barry Moser

has been acquired by the Hampshire College Archives and Special Collections through a gift from Leon Pyle and Cathy DeForest. An exhibit of select works opened at the Hampshire College Art Gallery on June 2 and runs through September 30.

Portrait of Tommy, Vance Studley’s Cat (Wood Engraving) Self-Portrait as Mad Hatter (Wood Engraving)

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Hampshire College