Bryn Mawr Pops!
Welcome to the Working Week
Reunion 2017
p. 28
p. 34
p. 42
A lighthearted look at the College in popular culture
Alumnae talk careers with students
Summer 2017
Alumnae Bulletin
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A picture gallery from a fun-filled weekend
View From the Hill
Reunion 2017 Jessica Pui Wong ’12 (left) and Kady Ruth Ashcraft ’12. Photograph by Roy Groething
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See the gallery photos.brynmawr.edu/2017/Events/ Reunion-2017/Reunion-Gallery/
View From the Hill
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Table of Contents
On the Cover The Bryn Mawr lantern goes pop. Illustration by Joe McDermott
FEATURES
28
34
42
A lighthearted analysis of Bryn Mawr in popular culture—what resonates for us as alums, what doesn’t, and why it matters. By Kaaren Sorensen ’85
Courtesy of the Leadership, Innovation, and Liberal Arts Center, two alumnae meet with students for talks about career and the world outside the Bryn Mawr Bubble.
More than 1,000 alumnae/i and guests returned to campus in May to celebrate a glorious Reunion weekend. Take a look inside for a gallery of photos from the event.
Bryn Mawr Pops
Welcome to the Working Week
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Reunion 2017
Table of Contents
DEPARTMENTS
ALUMNAE BULLETIN SUMMER 2017
Chief Communications Officer Jesse Gale jgale@brynmawr.edu Editor Nancy Brokaw nbrokaw01@brynmawr.edu Contributing Editor Nancy Schmucker ’98 nschmucker@brynmawr.edu
4 Letters 6 President’s Message
It's a Small (Bryn Mawr) World
7 Archways
For Starters: A new garden, an award-winning renovation, a record-breaking campaign, and more Lore: The Bob and the Chop
U-Curve: Mawrters in Mid-Life By Elizabeth Mosier ’84 In the Know: Developing Photography By Michelle Smiley ’12, M.A. ’15
Art Director Jodee Winger
Class in Session: Border Crossing By Cathy Campo ’19
Contributing Writers Cathy Campo ’19 Matt Gray Melissa Learn Maureen McGonigle ’98 Elizabeth Mosier ’84 Zachary Silvia, M.A. ’15 Michelle Smiley ’12, M.A. ’15 Louisa Wilson
Faculty Research: The Origin of a Species By Matt Gray
GSAS: The Wired Academic By Zachary Silvia, M.A. ’15
Books: A Trifecta
Student Profile: Hive Mind By Melissa Learn
41 Our Bryn Mawr
Debate: What Health Care Issues Should Our Communities Be Addressing? Faculty Profile: A Q&A with Theater Professor Catharine Slusar Crowd Source: Your Happy Place
Class Notes Liaison Diana Campeggio dcampeggio@brynmawr.edu
Bryn Mawr Woman: Single Parent by Lantern By Elizabeth Catanese ’08
GSSWSR: Shapiro Steps Up By Louisa Wilson
15 Discourse
Photographer Aaron Windhorst
Editorial Advisory Board Alison Kosakowski ’01, chair Julia Kagan Baumann ’70 Elizabeth Mosier ’84 Magda Pecsenye ’94 Saskia Subramanian ’88, M.A. ’89, Alumnae Association President (Ex Officio) The Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin (USPS 068-360) is published quarterly in February, except April (May), except July (August), and November. Bryn Mawr College Alumnae Association © Vol. 99, No. 1, Summer 2017. Periodicals postage paid at Bryn Mawr and other offices. Postmaster: send form 3579 to Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, 101 North Merion Avenue, Wyndham, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010-2899. Please send address changes to the address above, or email to bmcalum@brynmawr.edu.
Association News: From the Alumnae Association President By Saskia Subramanian ’88, M.A. ’89 Anassa Kata: Mawrters at Heart By Nancy Schmucker ’98 Anassa Kata: Design & Justice By Nancy Schmucker ’98 Class Notes
106 Generations
Like Mother, Like Daughter By Maureen McGonigle ’98
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Contact us alumnaebulletin@brynmawr.edu
Letters
History Lesson Regarding Living as LGBTQIA+ [Spring 2017]: While at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research in 1975, I established the first gay students organization, a collaborative effort between BMC and Haverford College. In the spring of 1976, we proudly sponsored a Spring Dance GayLa at Haverford. During the dance, some young men (not students) taunted one of the gay male organizers. A physical altercation ensued, campus police were summoned, and the intruders were escorted away. In the weeks that followed, the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Gay Student Alliance organized a fundraising drive, obtained legal representation, and brought charges. A district court judge heard our case, and the defendants were found guilty. Over the years, I have thought of my sisters and brothers at the Colleges and wondered how the LGBTQIA was doing. Thank you for these personal anecdotes in the Bulletin. In struggle, still, and liberation of all oppressed peoples. —MARJORIE L. ROBLIN, M.S.S. ’77
A Note on a Class Note
In the last issue of the Alumnae Bulletin, a Class Notes entry cited an alumna teaching in “Palestine.” This term, when it refers to a country, is inaccurate. There is not currently a nation called Palestine, although statehood is a complex issue and there are hopes that there will be a solution in the future. While I congratulate any person who is willing to go to this region and work to build an educational resource, we need to be accurate. —LAUREN SCHWARTZ ’88
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Send letters to: alumnaebulletin@brynmawr.edu
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Thanks so much for taking our comments to heart and giving us an Alumnae Bulletin that is attractive, portable, legible, and fulfilling! Danielle Roomes ’07, on page 10, Marianne Moore, 1909, at the ballpark on page 11—what's not to like??? —MELODEE SIEGEL KORNACKER ’60
Ed. Note: We continue to work on improving the Bulletin. With this issue, we’ve increased the font size in Class Notes and upped the size of group shots. Plus, we're using a darker shade of blue in running text.
We’d like to hear from you! The Bulletin welcomes letters expressing a range of opinions on issues addressed in the magazine and of interest to the extended community. Letters must be signed in order to be considered for publication and may be edited for length, clarity, accuracy, and civility. Comment online at bulletin. brynmawr.edu or send letters to alumnaebulletin@brynmawr.edu or to Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, 101 North Merion Avenue, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010-2899.
Corrections In the GSAS Class Notes, Gordon Kelly, M.A. ’93, Ph.D. ’99, was identified as a graduate of the Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology program. In fact, he received his Ph.D. in Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. The Performance Artist, on page 79, incorrectly referred to Whitney Lopez ’15 with the pronoun she. Lopez uses the pronoun they.
Letters
Code Talking
It's wonderful to hear about all the innovative courses that are being taught at Bryn Mawr [Cracking the Code, Spring 2017]. I work in Special Collections at Washington University in St. Louis, and one of our gems is the Philip Mills Arnold Semeiology Collection. It features lots of rare books on ciphers and cryptography dating from the early 16th century to the present day. If Mawrters find themselves in St. Louis, they will have to pay us a visit!
YOUR LEGACY.
BRYN MAWR’S FUTURE.
—KATE GOLDKAMP ’09
My sister, Ann Wayland Peters ’59, a math major (and Jet Propulsion Lab “rocket girl” during her summers), and I, a double major in archaeology and Greek, worked together to develop statistical approaches to deciphering such scripts as Linear A, the Bronze Age script of Crete. At grad school at the University of Wisconsin, Ann met Dr. Emmett Bennett, one of the decipherers of Linear B. He got us funding for computer time, and our data went into my undergrad honors paper for Prof. Mabel Lang. At Yale, I continued the work, which culminated in my Ph.D. thesis and a book, Archaeological Decipherment, still the only one of its kind. But I had to publish it as E.J.W. Barber, so as to appear to be the appropriate male scholar! How far we have come. — ELIZABETH (“BETCHEN”) WAYLAND BARBER ’62
The gifts Taylor Society honors Planned honor the past, whilealumnae/i funding theand future. friends who have made planned gifts for the
To learn more about The Taylor Society and how you College, included Bryn their will. can join overor 650 alumnae/I andMawr friendsinwho have created gift annuities, bequests and other planned Thank you to the Taylor Society gifts for Bryn Mawr,
members for supporting Bryn Mawr’s legacy of excellence.
contact Dianne Johnson, Director of Gift Planning. To read about members of The Taylor Society, To learn more, visit visit giftplanning.brynmawr.edu/taylor-society
giftplanning.brynmawr.edu/taylor-society
OFFICE OF GIFT PLANNING 610-526-6597 GIFTPLANNING@BRYNMAWR.EDU giftplanning@brynmawr.edu
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President’s Message
It’s a Small (Bryn Mawr) World Dear Friends: In late June I had the opportunity to travel to China (my first visit!) and to Hong Kong. In the course of the week I had many productive meetings and wonderful conversations, but the highlights of my trip were several gatherings, large and small, with alumnae/i (and with current and incoming students). Across generations, I encountered entrepreneurial spirit, energy, and affection for the College. Alumnae/i asked thoughtful questions about Bryn Mawr today, about how international alumnae/i can help the College, and about how the College can remain meaningful in lives unfolding far away from campus. Currently 1,496 of our alumnae/i live outside the U.S. Some are U.S. nationals, but most are citizens of other countries (and of course many international alumnae/i are currently living in the U.S. temporarily or permanently). The College has aspired to educate its students in world citizenship since its beginnings and has enrolled international students throughout its history. Our international student population grew substantially in the 1970s during the presidency of Harris
Wofford. A co-founder of the Peace Corps, President Wofford charged legendary Director of Admissions Emeritus Betty Vermey ’58 with acting on Bryn Mawr’s “special responsibility” to contribute to the global advancement of women. The College’s international student population has increased again in the past 10 years, reflecting the increasing pace of globalization. Following my trip to East Asia, I have been reflecting on how Bryn Mawr can sustain strong relationships with international alumnae/i—and in fact with all alumnae/i who are unable to visit the College regularly. Some of the young alumnae I met in China are pointing to one way we can achieve this. They have built a Bryn Mawr group on WeChat (a social media platform) that has 385 members (both alums and students). This virtual community provides career guidance and mentoring, college advice, and a place of social connection. The College, too, is turning to digital tools to build resources for alumnae/i. Associate Dean and LILAC Director Katie Krimmel has created a LinkedIn Bryn Mawr Alumnae/Student group that I hope we can mobilize to
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provide professional connection and support for alumnae/i in the U.S. and around the world. I invite all alumnae on LinkedIn to join this group and to both benefit from and contribute to LILAC’s growing Alumnae/i Connections program (www. brynmawr.edu/lilac/alumnaeiconnections). The College seeks to expand such opportunities for alumnae/i to engage wherever they may be. In particular, we hope to create new ways for alumnae/i to sample the current intellectual life of the College, whether online or in person. In turn, I ask our alumnae/i, with a special invitation to international alumnae/i, to take Bryn Mawr out into the worlds in which you live and work. Mentioning Bryn Mawr to a talented young woman in Manila or Geneva or Nairobi or London (or Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle, or Phoenix) may bring us a wonderful new student. Talking about the impact of attending a liberal arts college can help educate companies about the value of hiring students who have received this distinctive form of university education. Offering an internship to a current student helps her build a pathway to her professional future. Even in this digital age, personal contact remains the most meaningful. We look to you as our best partners in building a vibrant Bryn Mawr network that supports students and alumnae/i around the country and around the world. With best wishes,
Kim Cassidy President
In this Section
Archways
Lore p. 11 GSSWSR p. 12 Student Profile p. 14
To Call It Home Kristal Sotomayor ’17 was living her dream this spring when her film, To My Mother Land, screened at the Kurzfilmfestival in Germany. Her exploration of identity and the meaning of home appeared in a curated program of 11 films about belonging and acceptance.
Read a Q&A with Kristal bulletin.brynmawr.edu
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For Starters
2.
Doctor, Lawyer... Firefighter?
1. A Garden Spot
Occupying the site of Perry House, the new Perry Garden preserves its outlines. At the official unveiling in April, Dani Cadet ’17 said, “Perry Garden provides an excellent opportunity for our community to develop a healthy relationship with our past—one filled with contemplation and healing.” Perry House served as the Black Cultural Center from the 1970s until its closure in 2012. In 2015, the Enid Cook ’31 Center opened; it serves as a residential space and the Black Cultural Center.
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For more about the Black Cultural Center cookcenter.blogs.brynmawr.edu
Members of the Class of 2017 have set out for the future, and true to their Bryn Mawr spirit, their choices are impressive—and eclectic. As many pursue advanced study in professional and academic fields, their classmates have ventured out in the workaday world in just about every field of endeavor, including finance, business, government, education, nonprofits, engineering, and research. Samantha Heyrich is working in the U.S. Senate, Muhui Chen is in Estée Lauder’s research and development program, Hanna Fields has landed a gig as a software engineer, Hannah Rifkin is a paralegal at a California law firm, Ellen Cohn spent the summer studying acting at the Stella Adler conservatory, and Ariana Hall is on a teaching Fulbright to Colombia. And then there’s Alison Spain, who spent the summer as a trails technician for the Caribou-Targhee National Forest. At the same time, she was enrolled in fire school and wildfire chainsaw classes to qualify for dispatch to wildfires throughout the region.
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brynmawr.edu/news
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For Starters
3.
4. Study Abroad
Owls Get Some Strokes
It started with a bronze at the Murphy Cup Regatta in March, and the winning streak continued with a victory in the Kerr Cup's Dill Varsity Eight Grand Final in April. The wins didn’t go unnoticed. In April, BMC cracked the top 15 in the College Rowing Coaches Association’s weekly poll—the first-ever national ranking for Bryn Mawr crew. In their next showing, the team proved their mettle as the Owls took second in the grand final of the Women’s Varsity Eight event at the Mid-Atlantic Rowing Conference Championships.
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5. Still In
President Kim Cassidy was among those pledging to remain committed to the goals laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Cassidy joined more than 250 college and university presidents, nearly 180 mayors, more than 1,300 businesses and investors, and nine states. The letter, directed to the international community, was released in response to the Trump administration’s announcement in May that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris agreement. “In the absence of leadership from Washington, states, cities, colleges and universities, and businesses representing a sizable percentage of the U.S. economy will pursue ambitious climate goals,” the pledge states.
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The federal Boren Scholarship program has sent four Mawrters abroad this year to study less commonly taught languages in regions critical to U.S. interests. For Caroline Cosby ’17, that means a year in Dakar learning the Wolof language and studying Senegal, a stable democracy in a volatile region. “If the U.S. wants to be a productive partner against extremism in the region," she says, "Washington has to maintain respectful and amicable relations with partners like Senegal.” Cosby is also a winner of the 2017 McPherson Undergraduate Award for Excellence. Meanwhile, three of her classmates have landed in Kazakhstan. Zahabya Mama ’17, who hopes to become a Russian/Eurasian specialist for the U.S., is interested in Kazakhstan’s extensive links to the U.S. “Just because a country isn’t on a warning list,” she says, “doesn’t mean that it isn’t critical to U.S. security.” Sydney Stotter ’17 is looking at how Russian media cover news (including the recent American presidential election). “I couldn't have anticipated how U.S.-Russian relations would develop and lead to the situation today, but it has been extremely interesting to follow,” she says. Lindsey Marinello ’17, who's aiming for a career with NASA, is honing her Russian and studying physics and engineering. “The collaborative U.S.-Russian partnership in space persists in spite of political tension and conflict," she observes. "Scientists have long served a very interesting diplomatic role.”
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For Starters
7.
How We Defy
6. Work Has Begun The first phase of a major renovation to Park Science Center is underway. The $21-million project includes a 10,000-square-foot addition and renovation of existing square footage to create new collaborative learning spaces, technology-rich classrooms, and student study areas. The project's most visible aspect is a glass-enclosed addition and entry plaza that, combined, will transform the character of the building. The existing courtyard will be redesigned—to provide a more intimate outdoor gathering and learning space—and will include a pollinator garden. Also on the drawing board are updates for classrooms, teaching and research labs, and the science library.
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Learn more
brynmawr.edu/giving
8. In the Summertime
This year, more than 100 students took part in the Leadership, Innovation, and Liberal Arts Center (LILAC) summer internship program that helps students connect summer work to their personal, intellectual, and professional goals. Hannah Griggs ’18 studied at the Max Planck Institut für Gravitationsphysik in Germany, Sydney Huff ’18 learned organic farming with Grow Ohio Valley in West Virginia, and others worked in the on-campus Summer of Science program, in Philadelphia's city planning office, at TV news station in Utah, in a rural school in China.
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Thanks to more than 6,200 donors, The Bryn Mawr Fund contributed $6.3 million to the College’s operating budget in fiscal year 2017 in support of essentials such as financial aid and academic programming—$1 million over the Fund's goal and the largest total in the history of the annual fund. “The Bryn Mawr Fund provides support that the College can use immediately to meet student needs, to support faculty innovation, and to steward the campus,” says Campaign Chair Denise Lee Hurley ’82. “That’s why annual giving is a priority of Defy Expectation, The Campaign for Bryn Mawr. In addition to the vital current funding it provides, we see it as a clear measure of alumnae pride.” Gifts of every size meant that alumnae/i were collectively responsible for $5.5 million of The Bryn Mawr Fund’s chart-topping total. Both the Archways (giving for three or more consecutive years) and Slade (leadership giving) Societies saw a boost in membership. Many thanks to all who participated in helping to break the record!
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Learn more about Defy Expectation and The Bryn Mawr Fund
Read the Summer Internship blog summerinternships2017.blogs.brynmawr.edu/
brynmawr.edu/giving
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Photo: Jessie Tarbox Beals / Museum of the City of New York
Lore
The Bob and the Chop After graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1904, Helen Criswell found work as a teacher but didn't last long in the classroom as she decamped for Greenwich Village to unloose her inner Bohemian. Taking the name Jimmie, Criswell wore smocks and sandals, and even bobbed her hair, back when bobbed hair was newsworthy. A New York Times piece on the subject quoted her: “’I could hardly wait to come to Manhattan and have it done.” In the Village, Criswell ran The Mad Hatter, a below-ground tearoom that drew an artsy crowd. As proprietor, she described herself as “cook, cashier, waiter, bouncer, bus boy, check room boy, official chaperone, arbiter, elegantiarum, chess scorer, peace maker, drainage system, book keeper, cat nurse, censor, and goat of said coffee house.” Like Criswell, The Mad Hatter was decidedly alternative. According to the 1939 Federal Work Administration’s New York City Guide, “Commercialism, even on the part of the proprietress, scarcely existed. Meals were written on the cuff, never to be erased; but all ‘true’ Villagers were welcome so long as they kept the conversation flowing well into the night.” BRYN MAWR //
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The Bryn Mawr Chop
The updated bob called the Bryn Mawr Chop is “a rite of passage” and a “milestone in a Bryn Mawr career,” explains Angela Motte ’17. "It’s symbolic of shedding long ‘girlish’ hair for something more modern and businesslike. In addition, it can be seen as a way of coming out. So the Bryn Mawr Chop has a history of both queerness and maturing.”
GSSWSR
Shapiro Takes On a New Role The GSSWSR welcomes veteran professor Janet Shapiro as its new dean. BY LOUISA WILSON
“I’m excited to mentor the next generation of social work faculty and to collaborate with my colleagues in developing innovative curricula,” says Janet Shapiro, newly appointed dean of the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research (GSSWSR). Shapiro has been a professor of social work at Bryn Mawr for more than 20 years and served in several positions, including director of the GSSWSR’s doctoral program and director of the Center for Child and Family Wellbeing. She holds PhDs in both social work and developmental psychology, and that academic training complements the GSSWSR’s dual commitment to both social work education and rigorous research. “I’ve always been interested in how theory and research can be applied to social problems and how the practice of social work can determine questions for social scientific study,” says Shapiro. “This combination of disciplines has framed how I see myself as a social worker and educator.” The value of interdisciplinary study is also why she wanted to join the GSSWSR faculty two decades ago. “Bryn Mawr’s GSSWSR is unique,” says Shapiro, “because many of the social work faculty also have advanced training in other disciplines such as economics, public health, sociology, and psychology. The graduate curriculum is grounded in research.”
“I’ve been at the GSSWSR for 20 years because I love it.”
As a scholar, Shapiro’s research remains within this interdisciplinary framework. Her current work focuses on topics like the developmental impact of trauma on children and adolescents and the application of neuroscience to the practice of social work with at-risk children and adolescents. As dean, her vision for the GSSWSR’s future is centered
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upon two aspects of a recently completed strategic plan: health and mental health across the lifespan; and children, families, and society. “These areas of focus are our guiding principles as we develop curricula, introduce innovations, and hire new faculty,” explains Shapiro. “They connect to the expertise of our faculty and to the social issues that today’s students will face as social work practitioners.” Aligned with these key foci are two new courses: Integrated Health Care and Social Work and Caring for an Aging America. Across the graduate curriculum, there will also be a greater emphasis on the impact of trauma on physical and mental health. And the GSSWSR is welcoming two new faculty members, who were selected by their hiring committees with the two strategic foci in mind. “Looking to the future, I want to build on our connection to Bryn Mawr’s undergraduate college,” says Shapiro. “I’m also interested in innovation that benefits today’s students, who are often working adults with many responsibilities. How can we increase the flexibility of courses to make social work education more accessible to more students?” For Shapiro, it’s an exciting time at the GSSWSR, and she’s thrilled to take on the role of dean. Says Shapiro: “I’ve been at the GSSWSR for 20 years because I love it, and I’m looking forward to being part of its future.”
GSAS
The Wired Academic
With a little help from a quintet of graduate students, digital technologies are transforming scholarship on campus. BY ZACHARY SILVIA, M.A. ’15
Old-school scholars buried themselves in the archives where they pored over primary sources and rare books. Today, they’re just as likely to turn to digital technologies to ask, and answer, research questions. Among the tools that have become a fact of scholarly life are online exhibitions, 3-D mapping, illustration software, and data management programs. To help its scholars keep up in a rapidly expanding field, BMC has launched a Digital Scholarship initiative, staffed by five current graduate students. Charged with learning the range of tools available, they meet weekly in Carpenter Library’s Digital Media and Collaboration Lab and take what they learn back to their peers in the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics, and History of Art. The five come from each of the three Grad Group disciplines—Stella Fritzell from Classics; Elena Gittleman and Nathanael Roesch from History of Art; and Rachel Starry, M.A. ’13, and Andrew Tharler, M.A. ’13, from Archaeology—and their interdisciplinarity is a boon as they set out to understand the scope of digital methodologies available. Even though a fairly recent arrival on the academic scene, digital scholarship has already
made an appearance at Bryn Mawr. Using online digital exhibition platforms such as Omeka and WordPress, history of art students are building virtual exhibitions that bring together objects in previously unthought-of ways. But students often need technical assistance, and that’s where Gittleman’s experience with both tools has been a godsend. Roesch is also thinking about exhibitions, specifically how the 3-D modeling software SketchUp can help curators plan a physical art exhibition. Currently, he’s mapping the Rare Books Room in Canaday Library in order to help students troubleshoot different gallery configurations during the planning stages of exhibition projects. In addition to these visualization resources, the group is spreading the word about data management. Starry, who has a background in computer science, has used the programming language R to organize and visualize data from her dissertation research. To share what she’s learned, she has hosted several seminars for those interested in statistical analysis, computer graphics, and mapping. Tharler's contribution to the group has focused on bibliographic management tools by giving classroom tutorials
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on Zotero, a powerful tool that allows researchers to archive and organize resources, store notes, and automatically generate citations and references when writing papers. “One of our main challenges,” says Roesch, “has simply been raising awareness about the benefits of digital scholarship.” As part of their efforts, they’ve surveyed fellow graduate students to get a sense of what digital tools they’re already using and what methods they’d like to learn. Based on the response, they will put together new programming for the next academic year. And they'll be reaching out to the undergraduate community as well. Over the summer, Fritzell and Bryn Mawr's Digital Scholarship Specialist Alicia Peaker organized a selective, intensive fellowship program to train undergraduates in digital scholarship methodologies. Like their graduate student counterparts, the undergraduate specialists will then share what they've learned with other students in the coming academic year.
Student Profile
Hive Mind Growing up in Singapore, Ankitha Kannad ’19 knew urban spaces. But then she went to boarding school in rural India and discovered her appreciation for nature. It was that experience, she says, that “gave me the understanding of why preserving the environment is important.” BY MELISSA LEARN
Kannad—a rising junior and physics major—was a quick study. In India, she participated in activities aimed at preserving a biosphere reserve at her school and during a gap year before college, conducted wildlife research for an environmental group. And at Bryn Mawr, Kannad found a place where she could continue fostering her passion for the environment and sustainability: the community garden. As a co-coordinator of the community garden with Alison Aguiar '17, Kannad gardens but also organizes workshops, field trips, and volunteer days; works with the sustainability leadership group; and donates produce to the Eldernet food pantry. Established in 2010 and managed by staff member Vippy Vee, the garden is a volunteer program sponsored by the Leadership, Innovation, and Liberal Arts Center (LILAC). “I am very much a beginner at it,” says Kannad. “I only started gardening at Bryn Mawr.” She uses the summers to learn new gardening techniques, like organic farming and her most recent challenge: bees. “We really wanted to get a beehive on campus and make it part of the community garden because bees are such important pollinators,” she says.
Working with Haverford's official beekeeper Eli St. Amour, LILAC got a man-made beehive called a Flow Hive (which precludes the need to smoke the hive come harvest time) and a local species of bees from a nearby Amish farmer. “The bees come with the queen and the other types of bees—drones and worker bees—a colony needs,” Kannad explains. “When they start building honeycombs, you know they’re settling in.” St. Amour has been training Kannad, a handful of other students, and staff members on apiary care. “The honey will be like the produce from the community garden: people can use it,” says Kannad. “But I think the more important thing is teaching people about
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why bees are important—and also benefitting the campus ecosystem.” And, she adds, their value extends far beyond campus. “In a lot of countries, bee populations are declining because of habitat loss and intensive pesticide use. They're important pollinators, and their decline could have a huge impact on agriculture and biological diversity.” For Kannad, the community garden and the beehive offer her fellow students a hands-on way of connecting to the natural world. “People sometimes don’t feel very attached to nature,” she observes, and so the environment can seem like a remote concern. “But gardening is a tangible way of enjoying nature.”
In this Section
Discourse
Your Happy Place p. 19 Border Stories p. 23 The Origin of a Species p. 25
Jungle Love
“I got engaged in the Amazon,” says Hannah Stutzman ’01. “My now-husband was bringing this engagement ring with him expecting that we would be alone at some point. That day we hiked something like 12 miles in 90o heat. That was in 2014, the same year Stutzman became executive director of I almost passed out from Amazon Conservation Association, dehydration. The only time we the an 18-year-old nonprofit that works to were alone was after dinner in a protect and conserve biodiversity in the world’s largest rainforest. little river where the pigs and the chickens walk through, and he saw his moment— in the dark, in the mud, in our little stream.”
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Debate
Q: What health care issues should our communities be addressing? And what should a Mawrter be advocating for? Speaking at a Women of Color in Medicine panel, four Bryn Mawr health professionals weighed in.
Gail Stennies ’81, MD, MPH
How does the average bear navigate the U.S. health system? We have to encourage people who may not have the resources or the health literacy to understand it. Encourage them to ask questions, bring somebody else with them to their appointments, ask the doctor. It can seem that medicine is becoming formulaic or driven by other stakeholders. So, as consumers or deliverers of healthcare, we need to speak up. We have to be our own advocate and help other people advocate—not just for individual patient care, but also for broader health and wellness services and options. Something like Flint, Michigan’s water contamination should never have happened.
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Catharyn Turner ’91, MEd, MD, FAAP
I would advocate for a true single-payer system so that everyone’s needs could be met. The United States spent $3.2 trillion dollars on healthcare in 2015 alone. There’s no reason we can’t cover everyone. I took several humanities courses in medical school—one can do that now in some schools—and I learned a great deal about the history of single-payer systems throughout the world. During the Great Depression, the idea of a single payer system was raised in the U.S. as well, but it didn’t happen. One reason is that a single-payer system would have had to cover everyone, including Jews and Blacks. Our country's refusal to embrace universal health care is embedded in racism. It didn’t happen because some just didn’t think all deserved it, and special interests, i.e. doctors and insurance companies, have continued to fight to keep healthcare a premium instead of a basic human right.
Debate
GAIL STENNIES ’81, M.D., M.P.H., a 23-year veteran of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has devoted her career to public and population health. A senior advisor working on building capacity for emergency preparedness and response among health departments, she previously advised the President’s Malaria Initiative on reducing malaria-related morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.
CATHARYN A. TURNER, II ’91, M.Ed., M.D., F.A.A.P., is an attending psychiatrist in child and adolescent psychiatry as well as a general pediatrician providing primary care to adolescents at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Rita Louard ’76, MD What I would like to see is that, when we look at the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes, we don’t look for the solution from the medical community alone. We need to have government involved. We need to have schools involved. We need to have churches involved. We need to have communities involved.
I want to see more communication and partnerships addressing some of the chronic diseases that we face.
RITA LOUARD, ’76, M.D., is an associate professor of internal medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and director of the Clinical Diabetes Program at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. She is involved in clinical endocrinology, particularly diabetes, and educational programs for students, residents, and fellows.
NAKIYA SHOWELL ’03, M.D., M.H.S., M.P.H., is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on eliminating child obesity disparities, with the goal to develop interventions that address obesity disparities among low-income and minority children.
Nakiya Showell ’03, MD, MHS, MPH
We need continued policies to foster healthier environments. So many children, families, and adults live in environments that are poisonous to their health. If anyone—a child, an adult, a family—goes outside and there is no place to play, to walk, to feel safe, how can we expect them to walk, jog, or run around a track? If there is no place close by to get healthier food, how can we expect anyone to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables every day? We need to work as a society, not put all the ownership on individuals. This is on us—not just the medical community—to change the environments that people live in.
GAIL STENNIES ’81, M.D., M.P.H.
CATHARYN A. TURNER, II ’91, M.Ed., M.D., F.A.A.P.
RITA LOUARD, ’76, M.D.
NAKIYA SHOWELL ’03, M.D., M.H.S., M.P.H.
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Faculty Profile
I'M FLYING!
WHO’S AFRAID?
My “aha!” moment came in eighth grade, when I got to fly as Peter Pan in the eponymous musical.
I loved exploring the character of a brilliant woman thwarted in her ambition because of her gender. Her fury and frustration were epic.
GEOGRAPHY LESSONS
At the start of a rehearsal process, it’s like my character is in California and I am in Pennsylvania.
THOSE WHO CAN
One important way to learn one’s art is through teaching it to others. I am a better actor because I teach, and I am a better teacher because I constantly practice what I teach.
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IN THE CLASSROOM
Bi-Co students are marvelously curious; they ask questions and interrogate givens such that a deeper understanding is achieved by all.
Catharine Slusar A mainstay of the Philadelphia theater scene as well as the Bi-Co Theater Program, Catharine Slusar took home the 2015 Barrymore Award for her turn as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “I’ve never done anything so hard in my life,” she says of the role.
Read more here
bulletin.brynmawr.edu
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Crowd Source
Your Happy Place
Bryn Mawr is celebrated for the beauty of its campus. What's your favorite spot? @mattiewex: If you're standing in Taft garden, facing the fountain with your back to Canaday, then there is a bench off to the left, or at least there used to be, that is tucked beneath a short tree with somewhat weeping limbs. And that is my favorite spot on campus because it’s where I asked @thingshannahdid to marry me and she said yes!
Alex Solomon ’08 When it was free, I used to love going to Goodhart Music Room to play the grand piano in there. The acoustics were amazing, and I could easily lose a couple hours in there practicing. I also used to attend a lot of rehearsals and performances in that space so it always felt particularly conducive to creative pursuits!
Shannon Leigh Broughton-Smith ’80
The Cloisters. My dad tells of being a faculty brat and fishing for change (a forbidden undertaking) when he reached too far and fell in. He was a goner, drowned before his time because he did not listen to his elders—Oh! Wait. Nevermind. He could stand up. I remember peeking on tiptoe with great trepidation into the sarcophagus as a preschooler, half expecting a corpse to reprimand my impertinence, but finding, alas!, only dry leaves. The lanterns are so beautiful in the dark of Lantern Night. I got married there. Mashka Mitiuriev ’20 The Cloisters, the garden, English House, the woods in the back of it, the Duck Pond, the mirror in Rock. Too many places to pick!
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@achirmule: Pembroke dance studio, I spent the majority of my time at BMC there in class, rehearsals, and so much other time. Winter in those windows was so beautiful!!
U-curve
Mawrters in Midlife
On the “FitMawrter” Facebook page, late-blooming athletes are rebooting their personal strength and joy through exercise. BY ELIZABETH MOSIER ’84
“I owe my Bryn Mawr degree to Jen Shillingford,” says Irene Segal Ayers ’82, who credits the compassionate former director of athletics for letting the “overweight, chain-smoking English major” fulfill her entire gym requirement during second semester, senior year. Now an Ironman triathlete, marathoner, hiker, and backpacker, Ayers quit smoking by temporarily
switching to candy (“For the health effects of obesity to be as bad as smoking, you’d need to weigh over 300 pounds,” she reasoned), then dropped the weight she gained and gradually got fit by doing what she loves. “I’ve never liked team sports— but as a kid, I loved biking, swimming, and running,” she says. Exercise eased the stress of career and family demands
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as Ayers jogged, then ran, then raced her way to middle age. Training for her first triathlon, she rode her bike in the hardest gear “because I didn’t know how to change gears! This was a rediscovery.” The FitMawrter Facebook group is full of such women, rebooting their personal strength and joy through exercise. If the group had a motto, it might be
U-curve
Ayers’s response to my query, loosely translated from Latin: “I don’t care what other people think, I don’t care if I don’t look good in Spandex, and I don’t care if I finish in last place. [No, that's not true. I still care, but I’ve learned to adjust my goals—a last-place finish in an Ironman is still an Ironman finish].” To a desk-dweller like me, their resolve is impressive. But what’s surprising is the source of the group’s camaraderie: a contagious sense of humor and fun. “At this age, it doesn’t matter if I look foolish. It's about having fun while getting stronger,” says Carol Bergstresser Quick ’90, who reinvented herself from an “uncoordinated and introverted” college student terrified of public speaking to a fitness instructor leading classes in weight lifting, yoga (with Pilates), and indoor cycling at Gold’s Gym. For the former computer programmer with a master’s degree in public policy, her son’s long-term illness necessitated a job with flexibility. “Getting certified in Body Pump was harder for me than graduate school!” she says. “This is a new way to use my brain.” Of the mental hurdles she cleared to join her first group fitness class—and later, to lead—she says, “I had so many misconceptions about what fitness was and what a fit person looks like. I thought, I can’t be on stage (teaching) unless I look better than I look now! That
was a complete fallacy. I’m not graceful, but I’m willing to try anything. I’ve found power being in front of people and having them listen to me.” “My happiness is cued to swing dancing,” says Cynthia Burr Ramsey ’92, who took it up at 40, while dating after her divorce. An accomplished clarinetist and Night Owls vocalist in college, Ramsey couldn’t suppress her impulse to move while playing or singing. “I’m enthusiastic, loud, and vivacious,” she says. “I’ve been a dancer all along—I just didn’t realize all the different types of bodies dancers could have.”
“The quicker you and your partner can pick up on what you’re telling each other with your bodies, the more fun it is,” she says. Now, managing a new job, coursework towards an MBA, a relationship, and family demands, Ramsey still tries to dance every week. “My great epiphany was understanding how dance affects me socially and psychologically. This is where I find the most joy and freedom.” Midlife offers an opportunity to refit our lives to our aspirations; to borrow a computer metaphor, new values won’t be in force until
“I don’t care what other people think, I don’t care if I don't look good in Spandex, and I don’t care if I finish in last place.” Devoted to a style called West Coast Swing, she prefers this “conversational” form to ballroom dance, in which the “lead” gives directions that the “follow” executes. The “intensely social connections” swing dance inspires remind her of her a cappella days; long experience listening and responding as voices blend to create sound gives her sure footing as she communicates physically through dance.
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we reboot. “I used to think that I had to do something really big and important, but I didn’t know what that was,” says Carol Quick, whose clients convey her work’s significance with their gratitude. For Cindy Ramsey, the satisfaction dance brings isn’t an end but a means to measure engagement she seeks off the dance floor. She speaks for many of us when she says, “My life is a search for the kind of intense, joyful connection I first found at Bryn Mawr.”
In the Know
Developing Photographs A city of firsts, Philadelphia can also lay claim to being the birthplace of photography in America. BY MICHELLE SMILEY ’12, M.A. ’15
Over the past 25 years, art historians have been rewriting the early history of photography. Now, instead of reading only of Louis Daguerre’s eponymous invention in 1839—the daguerreotype—one encounters a number of contemporaneous stories about inventors, artists, and chemists working on a range of techniques for capturing and fixing images. For my dissertation research, I have been diving into archives to learn about a number of important Philadelphians whose experiments and discoveries had a direct impact on how photography developed before and after Daguerre. In the early 19th century, Philadelphia offered the best scientific training in the country. At the time, chemistry was not yet its own discipline. Instead, that work was being done in medical colleges, and Philadelphia, which boasted the first medical college in the country, was home to a thriving community of chemists and instrument makers. And in the years just before and after the announcement of Daguerre’s invention, those Philadelphians—chemists and scientists and instrument makers and inventors—had precisely the kind of technical knowledge needed to improve on the daguerreotype process. One such inventor worked at the U.S. Mint and made use of materials readily at hand there to
SNAPSHOT
Michelle Smiley ’12, M.A. ’15, received a fellowship from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine to work on her dissertation on the history of U.S. photography with a focus on the impact of technology.
try out Daguerre’s method soon after it was made public. On September 25, 1839, Joseph Saxton coated a coin blank in silver nitrate to make an image of Philadelphia Central High School, now the earliest-surviving photograph made in the U.S. Later that same year, Paul Beck Goddard, a medical doctor and chemist, discovered that bromide could dramatically accelerate the photographic process. Around the same time, a local metallurgist, Robert Cornelius, stood before his camera and
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made what is considered the world’s first daguerreotype self-portrait (left.) Figures like Saxton, Goddard, and Cornelius made Philadelphia a center for photographic development. Also contributing to the city’s importance in the refinement of the medium was the collaborative spirit that characterized the community. For example, both Saxton and Goddard consulted with Cornelius, an expert in metallurgy and employee at his father’s Philadelphia metal works factory, to better understand how to produce smoothly polished daguerreotype plates. While similar discoveries and improvements on the photographic process were occurring simultaneously across the globe, many of these ideas did not circulate beyond their local communities until many years later. By speeding up exposure times and improving image quality, American innovations opened new commercial opportunities for the medium. In Philadelphia, a burgeoning middle class that wanted portraits created a market for daguerreotypy, and a number of entrepreneurs from the city’s rising merchant class responded in force. And indeed, in the winter of 1840, Robert Cornelius, with Goddard as his silent partner, opened the world’s first photographic studio in Philadelphia.
Class in Session
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View the class Instagram http://bit.ly/migrations_360
Border Stories
A 360° focused on migration and gives students a firsthand look at the human face of an issue much in the news. BY CATHY CAMPO ’19
“Although my father is now a permanent resident of the U.S., he was undocumented when he immigrated to the country 20 years ago,” says Sandra Torres ’19. A student in the Migrations and Borderlands 360°, Torres had her father’s experience brought home to her during a visit to the Tucson federal courthouse, where the class was observing the legal proceedings of Operation Streamline, an initiative that sentences unauthorized border-crossers. “The hard part was that the detainees were all in shackles from their wrists, waists, and ankles, making them look as if they were some kind of criminals, which they were definitely not,” says Torres. “My father too was detained and stood in those same ¿QUE HARIAS TU?
In Tijuana, a woman approached Torres and asked her to deliver a message to her daughter Cinthia, whom she had last seen 26 years ago on the day the woman had been deported. The question that burned for Torres was, "What should I do?"
shackles. Nothing hurt more than to know that nothing has changed over the past 20 years.” For the 360°, Torres’s fellow students used the lenses of cultural studies and sociology to examine migration in different national contexts and historical moments. The class had a particular focus on the complex factors shaping migrations between Latin America and the United States, Latin America and Spain, and Asia and Latin America. They probed questions of imperialism, economic and political policies, xenophobic discourse, transnational belonging, cultural citizenship, and how individuals and families are transformed through the process of migration.
CLUSTER COURSES Latina/o Culture and the Art of Migration (English), Sociology of Migration: A Cross- Cultural Overview of Contemporary Challenges (Sociology), and Migration in the Hispanic World (Spanish).
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On returning to Bryn Mawr, the 360° students compiled their notes from their observations of the proceedings in Tucson and sent them to the End Operation Streamline with the hope of abolishing this practice.
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The 360° took students to the U.S.-Mexico border and included time in Tucson, in Tijuana, Mexico, and at the border wall itself. “I thought I was prepared,” Torres says of her encounter with the wall, “but I honestly wasn’t. Just seeing the long bars dominating the landscape outside my window, I was honestly shocked.” The itinerary included dinner with migrants at Casa del Migrante, a walk along a desert migrant trail with members of the organizations BorderLinks and No More Deaths (pictured above), a discussion of a production of La Calle at the Borderlands Theater, a photography workshop at Hacienda del Rio, and a meeting with an immigration lawyer.
ON DISPLAY
For a Canaday Library exhibition, students paired one of their own photos with one that appeared in an exhibition at the Mexican research and graduate institution El Colegio de La Frontera Norte. See the catalog repository.brynmawr. edu/bmc_books/32/.
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THE WALL
As of late 2015, there were 652.7 miles of wall along the roughly 2,000-mile border. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the cost to build it was around $2.3 billion.
Bryn Mawr Woman
Single Parent By Lantern BY ELIZABETH CATANESE ’06, M.A. ’07
My first Lantern Night, I stayed up late in my single room on the first floor of Erdman and stared at my dark blue lantern. My customs people said that if your lantern went out first, you would get married first. If it went out last, you’d be the first to get your Ph.D. Like many others in my customs group, I was hoping that mine would go out last. We each kept track of the exact time our individual lanterns went out and compared notes in the morning. As it turned out, the candle in my lantern extinguished third to last, which was disappointing. When I asked a customs person with genuine concern what it meant if your lantern went out third to last and if it had ever happened before, she took my question very seriously and said, “It means you get to choose.” I nodded vigorously. Over my scrambled eggs, I wondered what it was I would get to choose. My academic choices at Bryn Mawr set me up for a meaningful career as an English professor. However, as an undergraduate, I chose not to be in romantic relationships. After I graduated, my first girlfriend and I coined the acronym LAG (lesbian after graduation), and while I learned a lot through that and subsequent relationships, I have ultimately not wanted long-term partnership. However, I have known for a long time that I would like to have children, so I am currently trying to become a single mother by choice. At this point, I am a baby in my journey toward parenthood. After Bryn Mawr, male friends who learned I was queer would spontaneously offer that I could
have their sperm whenever I said the word. However, saying the word universally changed their minds. Overwhelmed by the sperm donor choices at California Cryobank, I decided to gather with friends so that they could help me choose a sperm donor while we ate pizza. Once we had decided, I put all his information (baby pictures, medical history, and even a USB of a musical composition he wrote in college) into a dark blue binder marked “biological father,” on which I drew some doodles of DNA strands. Then I used all my savings to purchase enough sperm to be able to try three times to get pregnant. I sometimes tell myself that my Bryn Mawr–nurtured feminism and confidence are so strong that I haven’t looked back since deciding on this path. I want to believe this because mythological rules (and those associated with Lantern Night) clearly state that if you look back, you’ll be cursed forever. To be truthful, I am a person who looks back. I have internalized a more linear, patriarchal order, even though such an order doesn’t suit me. A part of me can’t stop hearing the voice that says marriage comes before children or that I am already ruining my unborn children’s lives for
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multitudinous unspecified reasons. The other part is grateful to have support for the choice to do it “out of order” and for the friends and Mawrtyrs who have paved this and adjacent ways. The two most important life lessons that I have not yet fully learned are first, that everything is already happening out of order, and second, that it is harder in the short term and easier in the long term to choose one’s inner voice. At this point in the process, I find myself spending many mornings visiting the reproductive endocrinologist to get blood drawn and have transvaginal ultrasounds. Then I rush to teach. It’s not exactly what I would have expected, but it makes for a good story. Maybe third-to-last lantern out means becoming a successful single mom or getting pregnant with one of the first three vials of sperm. Or maybe in a twist not related to the number three, my lantern order means finding long-term partnership upon signing adoption papers. If and when I do have the opportunity to be a parent, I would like to teach my children to make up their own stories about my lantern and, more important, to make choices guided by their own light. An assistant professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia, Elizabeth Catanese '06, M.A. '07, was a creative writing and history of art double major and earned an M.A. in English from Middlebury. She has been published in Anomalous, Referential Magazine, OVS, Adanna Literary Journal, and The Stillwater Review.
Faculty Research
The Origin of a Species BY MATT GRAY
Only a year and a half after discovering fossil remains of a new hominin species, scientists—among them BMC Visiting Professor of Anthropology Caroline VanSickle—have come to a startling conclusion about the species they dubbed Homo naledi. A relative of humans, the small-brained hominin lived in Africa during the early Middle Stone Age, some 335 to 236 thousand years ago, and was perhaps a next-door neighbor of early Homo sapiens. The original find was made in the newly discovered Rising Star cave system, which would prove to be one of Africa’s richest fossil sites. Scientists were baffled by the tiny-brained creature that had apelike shoulders but, in some parts, bore a striking resemblance to humans. At the time, VanSickle joined an international team examining thousands of fossils to figure out what they were, how the parts fit together, how many individuals were represented, and what species they were.
“My focus was on the pelvis, which in hominins tells us how a species walked, what their posture might have been like, and how they may have given birth,” VanSickle explains. “The Homo naledi pelvic remains are a collection of small fragments of incomplete bones, so many of these questions are still unanswered. “In many ways, the pelvis of Homo naledi most closely resembles that of the threemillion-year-old hominin Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), which is strange since the rest of the skeleton does not particularly resemble Lucy, and now we know that H. naledi lived much more recently than Lucy.” This May, when scientists announced their conclusions about H. naledi’s age, they also revealed the discovery of additional remains—of a child and an adult male—unearthed in Lesedi, a newly explored chamber of the Rising Star complex.
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Among the new material the excavation team found was a hip fragment. Researchers sent a 3-D scan of that fragment to VanSickle, who collaborated with the South Africa team to compare it to those from the original site. “The Lesedi fragment is the most complete immature hip fossil we have from this species so it can potentially tell us something about how the species grew,” she explains. Today, she continues to lead a research team with expertise in torso reconstruction, hominin growth and development, and the hominin pelvis. Together, the team is comparing the remains from each cave site to each other—and to that of other hominin species. “In 2015, I thought this species' mosaic anatomy was the most interesting part of the story: the small brain, Homo erectus-like head shape, australopith-like torso and pelvis, human-like foot, and gibbon-like shoulder shouldn’t belong in one body, and yet we had clear evidence that they all went together,” says VanSickle. “Now, I find it incredible that this unusual skeleton belongs to a species that lived so recently that it overlaps with the earliest members of our own species.”
BREAKING NEWS
Among the classes VanSickle teaches is an anthropology class on human evolution. “You can bet my syllabus will be updated to reflect this news about Homo naledi,” she says.
Dispatch
The product of 20 years of fieldwork, Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium is populated by the peasantry of the late Byzantine era— agricultural workers, mothers, the priest, the miller, and even the local witch. It has won accolades for Sharon E. J. Gerstel ’84—and three awards: the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award, the inaugural book prize from the International Center for Medieval Art, and the Maria Theocharis Prize for the best publication on monumental painting. According to the Runciman citation, Gerstel “manages, in essence, to summon up a whole world—real and imaginary—of past experience.”
A Trifecta The Pulitzer Prize jury named The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery by Micki McElya ’94 as a 2017 finalist for general nonfiction. Cited as “a luminous investigation of how policies and practices at Arlington National Cemetery have mirrored the nation’s fierce battles over race, politics, honor, and loyalty,” McElya’s latest tells the story of the country’s official resting place. Resting on a former
plantation built by slave labor, Arlington was designated a federal cemetery in 1864. Until 1921, when the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was erected, it was seen primarily as a memorial to the white Civil War dead. But as a century of wars secured its centrality in the American imagination, inclusion within its gates became a prerequisite for broader claims to national belonging.
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Coming late to the imperialist game, Germany acquired African colonies—in present-day Namibia, Tanzania, Cameroon, and elsewhere—only in the 1880s and promptly lost them with the Treaty of Versailles. Despite the brevity of its empire, its colonial venture had an enduring impact on architectural practice with the functionalist, less-is-more aesthetic associated with modernism. Colonialism and the Archive of Modern Architecture in Germany by Itohan Osayimwese ’97, which takes on that history, received the 2016 Society of Architectural Historians/Mellon Author Award for scholars publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment.
Books
THE LAST BATTLE by Tamar Anolic ’03. A top-ranking Army officer, Col. Zac Madison grapples with PTSD, a dysfunctional family, and the VA’s bureaucracy. Then, she learns that she'll be called to testify against her mentor, a general now charged with treason. (CreateSpace, 2017)
Bookmarks In her literary nonfiction debut, Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse '03 delivers a scorcher. A crime procedural, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, has it all: courtroom theatrics, forensics worthy of CSI, gossip, and sex. American Fire recounts the aftermath of an arson spree that hit Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the 2010s. Hesse covered the trial of the culprit—a local mechanic—and became fascinated by the story of the arsonist and his accomplice, a girlfriend who the New York Times reviewer described as “one of the great femme fatales in recent American crime stories.” As tabloid-worthy as the tale Hesse tells may be, she never loses sight of the larger story. Once one of the country’s most prosperous areas, the Eastern Shore today is mired in rural poverty, with soul-crushing, low-wage jobs. (Liveright, 2017)
As an Army chemist in the World War I, James B. Conant oversaw the production of poison gas. As Harvard’s president, he championed meritocracy and open admissions. As an advisor to FDR, he led the cause for the U.S. entrance in World War II. As administrative director of the Manhattan Project, he oversaw
NEWSMAKER: ROY W. HOWARD by Patricia
the development of the atomic bomb. As Eisenhower’s high commissioner to Germany, he was one of the architects of Cold War policy. In Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist, his granddaughter Jennet Conant ’82 draws on documents, diaries, and interviews to tell his extraordinary life story. (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
In My Soul Looks Back, Jessica Harris ’68 recalls the New York of her youth and how she made her way into a charmed social circle that included James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and others. Harris traces her evolution from “‘bourgie’ girl from Queens” into a journalist and habitué of New York’s Black intelligentsia. She meets everyone—Baldwin reading aloud an early draft of If Beale Street Could Talk, Angelou cooking in her California kitchen, and Morrison relaxing at Baldwin’s house in Provence. Along the way, Harris launches a writing career, first as a theater critic for New York Amsterdam News and book review editor for Essence and then as a food historian and cookbook author. (Scribner, 2017)
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Dranow Beard ’64. The story of the man who built the Scripps-Howard news empire, this biography draws on previously unpublished documents. (Lyons Press, 2016)
EVERYTHING I UNDERSTAND
by Lux Cunningham (aka Jennifer Elizabeth Brunton ’92). Who killed the feminist professor? Was it the grad student? The genius who loves her? This thrilling read starts out as a whodunit and ends up a tragic love story. (CreateSpace, 2016) THE RENAISSANCE DIALOGUE edited by
Roberta Ricci. A celebration of the 500th anniversary of Orlando Furioso’s publication, this monograph stresses the role Ariosto played in remapping knowledge in 16th-century Italy. Contributors include BMC professors Ricci and David Cast. (NEMLA Italian Studies, Vol. XXXViii, 2016)
THE WOMEN OF TOTAGADDE by Helen
Ullrich ’60. During a 50-year period, women’s education became a possibility—and then a reality—in India. Looking at one South Indian village, Ullrich considers how that shift has altered women’s lives and society at large. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
Bryn M awr
Pops!
A lighthearted analysis of Bryn Mawr in popular culture—what resonates for us as alums, what doesn’t, and why it matters to us. BY KAAREN SORENSEN ’85 What do Betty Draper, Liz Lemon, and Midge Maisel, the protagonist of a new series produced by Amazon, all have in common? They all went to Bryn Mawr. Well, not really, because of course they’re fictional. They got their degrees not from four years of academic sweat but from the keystrokes of Hollywood writers, landing them in a pop culture pantheon that includes, among others, Katharine Hepburn’s character in Adam’s Rib, Bart Simpson’s fourth-grade teacher, and a covert operations specialist who helps G.I. Joe save the planet from the archvillain Cobra.
Perhaps because these allusions are relatively rare, they feel like little treasures when we stumble upon them—with our initial jolts of pleasure and excitement followed inevitably by a vigorous examination of their authenticity. Here, by way of sharing the delights of discovery, are some of the ways Bryn Mawr has been presented to the world through popular culture.
Mimesis and MythMaking But first, why is it so absurdly exciting when Bryn Mawr gets a nod on the big or small screen? “That’s mimesis,” says Amy Villarejo ’85, a professor of performing and media arts at Cornell. “We like to see ourselves reflected back to us—that’s how we know who we are. It’s the basis of psychoanalytic theory and of sociological theories of recognition. It goes to fundamental aspects of human recognition.” For most of us, Villarejo continues, Bryn Mawr is a “significant part of who we are or were, so we are measuring those images for verisimilitude, for recognition, for something of our own experience. There’s critical pleasure, too, in watching as a Bryn Mawr person, with a kind of cultural authority.” Hence our visceral thrill of ownership at the shots of Rhoads beach during the opening flashback sequence of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, while the voiceover of the just-married Midge fondly recalls her college
years. Hence, too, our keen interest in the details of the show’s richly construed version of Bryn Mawr in the 1950s. Did the students really wear gray blazers to dinner in Rhoads? Did they find butter molded with BMC monograms waiting for them on tables set with white linen? (For the record, the gray blazers were popular, but not a uniform; linen tablecloths were used, but not every day; and the butter molds are popular lore, but not documented.) By the same token, the investment of our own identity in how Bryn Mawr is portrayed to the world explains our bristle of indignation when the writers get it wrong—as when Mad Men’s Betty Draper refers to the sorority that never existed. Bound up with mimesis, there is some myth-making, too— myth in the sense of the stories that reflect, inform, and inspire our cultural identity. Mimesis is most satisfying when what it reflects back the best possible version of ourselves. What we want to see are the ideals of the institution embodied and projected into the world. In other words, we want Kate.
Iconic Kate Given her iconic status within both American film history and the history of the College, Katharine Hepburn ’28 is in some sense the standard against which we measure any on-screen reference to Bryn Mawr. Both in the characters she played, from Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story to Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter,
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and in her life in the world, she embodied the qualities we value most in what Villarejo calls our “cherished mythology” of Bryn Mawr—not only intelligence but also independence, passion, creativity, quirkiness, and often, an explicit embrace of female empowerment. Among Hepburn’s many strong female leads, Amanda Bonner, the attorney who takes on her husband in the classic 1949 battle-of-the-sexes comedy Adam’s Rib, gives
us the complete package—a trailblazing professional, dripping with confidence and wit, who also went to Bryn Mawr. The college reference is so quick you might miss it, but significantly it coincides with Amanda’s explicit articulation of the feminist values we associate with the institution. Careening along the highway at the wheel of a convertible, she lectures Spencer Tracy on society’s double standard in its treatment of men and women. When he suggests that “mostly females get advantages,” she insists, “We don’t want advantages and we don’t want prejudices.” “Oh, now you’re giving me the Bryn Mawr accent,” he shoots back with an eye-roll.
Amanda’s resonance with “our cherished mythology” imbues her physical presence as well as her rhetoric. Taking a breakfast tray from her housekeeper in the film’s opening moments, she turns and deftly kicks the bedroom door shut with her foot, then practically dances across the floor with it toward her sleeping husband. Before she has even read the newspaper headline that sets the plot in motion or uttered a word about women in society, we see that she moves through her world with balance, grace, confidence, and insouciance. “There is so much in that gesture,” says Villarejo, “that embodies what the character was about and what Katharine Hepburn herself was about.” Bryn Mawr gets another nod later in the film, when Amanda parades a string of witnesses to make a point about the range and power of women’s abilities. To show physical prowess, she calls an acrobat who does handsprings across the courtroom and lifts Spencer Tracy off the floor with one hand; for success in the bluecollar workplace, a forewoman who oversees hundreds of factory workers including her own husband. For sheer brains, Amanda calls Dr. Margaret Brody, a chemist. Asked to tell the court what degrees she holds, Dr. Brody replies, “Well let’s see…A.B., B.S. Bryn Mawr; M.A., M.D., Ph.D., Columbia. Do you want the European ones, too?"
Braininess like Dr. Brody’s is one of two basic qualities that filmmakers use Bryn Mawr to signify. The other is privilege. In Some Like It Hot, Marilyn Monroe invokes Bryn Mawr, complete with a fake hoity-toity accent, to convince Tony Curtis’s character (disguised as a millionaire) that she and her band-mates are “society girls.” For us as alums, braininess is the sine qua non of our Bryn Mawr identity. Social privilege, although not
the defining and constraining force it once was, has the ring of historical truth to it. But when the Bryn Mawr label functions only to signify that a woman is smart and or privileged, the result is either a knowing, successful caricature—as it is for Dr. Brody and for Monroe’s Sugar Kane Kowalczyk—or tone deafness. That’s why Betty Draper disappoints.
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Betty and Jane and Midge Perhaps no fictional Bryn Mawr alumna has been subjected to more scrutiny than Don Draper’s wife on Mad Men, the AMC series that ran from 2007 to 2015. The likelihood of Betty, a privileged,
deeply conventional housewife, being a Mawrter has been vigorously debated by alums on social media as well as by television critics. In The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz called Betty’s Bryn Mawr degree the show’s “most egregious stumble in verisimilitude.” Most alums would agree that the more likely character to have a lantern on her bookshelf is department store executive Rachel Menken, played by real-life alum Maggie Siff ’96.
Betty is bored, brittle, and so constrained by convention that she lives in a state of barely contained rage and frustration. She’s also smart, from the Main Line, and painfully aware of her untapped potential. “We all have skills we don’t use,” she says to Henry, the man who will replace Don as her husband. “I was an anthropology major at Bryn Mawr. Can you believe that?” It’s not that it’s impossible that an individual like Betty could have gone to Bryn Mawr in the 1950s. It’s that for us as alums, Betty makes for a disappointing mimetic experience. She doesn’t reflect what we love most about Bryn Mawr, namely the insistence that convention not hold us back. Plus that sorority thing was just plain sloppy. Jane Hollander, in the regrettably short-lived Amazon drama Good Girls Revolt, comes closer to our expectations. Set 10 years later than Mad Men, the series tells a fictionalized version of the story behind the nation’s first anti-discrimination complaint against an employer. (The real-life account of the women who sued Newsweek in 1970 is chronicled by Lynn Povich in her 2012 book of the same title.) Jane oozes smarts and professionalism in her job as a researcher for a magazine where women aren’t allowed to be reporters. But while Jane’s brains and competence resonate, she is practically the last female in the newsroom to come around to the women’s efforts to fight discrimination. When she hisses, “I am not a career girl,” we think the writers made a mistake. Jane comes around, though—a few episodes later, we see her shouting, “I’m a career girl!” into the New York night.
In Midge Maisel, the protagonist of the new Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, we find plenty to love, mimetically speaking. A privileged housewife who, abandoned by her husband, becomes a stand-up comic in 1950s New York City? Sure, why not? We love that Midge is funny and strong as well as smart, that she dives into a traditionally male professional world, and that she makes lemonade of the
years, all live in the distant past, decades from the world inhabited by the far more diverse real women who attend Bryn Mawr today. For these characters, the Bryn Mawr affiliation bespeaks intellectual seriousness at a time when a Seven Sisters school represented the pinnacle of education for women. But it’s a logic that by extension, notes Villarejo, places “women’s colleges and their capacity to
lemons her husband handed her when he walked out the door. In Villarejo’s words, Midge resonates with “all of the things we value in our own myth-making, in the Katharine Hepburn model." It’s hard not to notice that Betty, Jane, and Midge, while created within the past 10
signify the best, most rigorous education for women, in the past.” We get a hint of this logic in Something’s Gotta Give, the 2003 romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton. It’s set in the present, but Keaton’s character, a successful playwright, is in midlife, so her college years are long behind her. Her ex-husband refers to her as
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“a Bryn Mawr girl” in a conversation with his new fiancée, a much younger physician who went to Penn. This tendency to associate Bryn Mawr’s academic excellence with the past might seem discouraging. But Villarejo chooses optimism here. “Popular culture mines the past for the present,” she stresses. “Young women who are watching Mrs. Maisel in 2017 are still seeing an association between the institution and female independence, and carrying that association into the current world.”
The long-running ABC comedy 30 Rock also made references to Bryn Mawr, suggesting to some that Liz Lemon, the comedy producer played by Tina Fey, was a Mawrter. The backstory is admittedly thin: during the first season, Alec Baldwin’s character Jack Donaghy admonishes her, “Lemon, this is not open mic night at the Bryn Mawr student union!” But many Mawrters have embraced Liz—a neurotic, quirky, driven professional in a male-dominated work world— as one of our own. Perhaps the most unexpected Bryn Mawr allusion comes from the Marvel comic world of G.I. Joe.
undercover success) conveys the requisite braininess, while her skills as a pilot and with a crossbow prove that Mawrters really can do anything, up to and including saving the planet. Ultimately, of course, pop culture references do more than reflect our identity and ideals back to us as Bryn Mawr insiders. They also telegraph impressions of Bryn Mawr to the world. Beyond whatever resonance we experience on a personal level, that’s why we care whether the writers get it right or wrong. In Villarejo’s words, “It matters that we have a public image that is so incredibly positive about women.”
Lady Jaye, the G.I. Joe team’s covert operations specialist, has a long history in comic books, television cartoons, and most recently, the 2013 movie G.I. Joe: Retaliation. She is also surely the only alum with her own action figure, her Bryn Mawr degree listed on the doll’s clip-and-save “Command File.” Her facility with languages (critical to her
In our ongoing mimetic treasure hunt, hopefully we’ll stumble on some new pop-culture jewels that reflect the College’s diversity, vitality, and powerful relevance in today’s world. In the meantime, let’s wish Midge and Mrs. Maisel many seasons of success—and maybe go buy the latest Lady Jaye action figure.
Back to the Future Bryn Mawr still pops up, sometimes in surprising places, in settings that postdate the Ivies’ admitting women. Edna Krabappel, Bart Simpson’s acerbic, slightly transgressive (she smokes and has an affair with the principal) teacher reveals to her students that she got her master’s from Bryn Mawr. But, she warns them, life isn’t fair: despite your degree, “you might end up a glorified babysitter to a bunch of dead-eyed fourth graders.” (Also on The Simpsons is the not-to-be missed dream sequence in which Lisa, Bart’s brainy, feminist little sister, is visited by the Seven Sisters in the form of Greek goddesses wearing college T-shirts.)
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WELCOME to the WORKING WEEK Every year, alumnae/i return to campus, courtesy of the Leadership, Innovation, and Liberal Arts Center (LILAC), to meet with students for talks about career and the world outside the Bryn Mawr Bubble. They share stories that trace their own trajectory from Bryn Mawr to the corner office and offer insights about the job hunt, work-life balance, and the definition of success. Last year, the Bulletin sat in on sessions with Brinda Ganguly ’97 and Meiko Takayama ’91. Here’s some of what they had to say.
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BRINDA GANGULY ’97
Economics and Spanish double major Senior Associate Director, The Rockefeller Foundation
When I graduated from BMC, I was interested in economics, law, and policy— so I ended up at an economic consulting firm in Boston called Charles River Associates. It was an exciting time to be in the workforce but, after three years in consulting, I recognized that I needed more technical skills—so I went to business school at Columbia. After obtaining my MBA, I lucked into a social investing position at George Soros’s Open Society Institute. There, I was able to further develop my financial skills, but in a way that aligned with my personal values and interest in international development. Soros was satisfying, but I was young and hungry. So I went to work for Citi in their corporate investment bank. I learned a lot: I was credit-trained, and I worked on some big transactions that were reported in the Wall Street Journal. But banking didn’t check all the boxes. My mind was learning a lot, but I wanted to go back to the social investing world. I ended up at the Rockefeller Foundation, where I manage a social investments portfolio. QUESTION: What does the Rockefeller Foundation do? And what’s involved in your work? The bulk of the Rockefeller Foundation’s activities lie in grant-making: the money goes out the door to fund a social project or organization or activity, and the money never comes back. But the work I do is different: we’re funding organizations that are doing socially motivated work and they're generating profit. It’s from that profit that they repay us. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on loans to companies in India that are building solar-powered plants in rural areas where the national grid doesn’t reach, to villages where there’s no power.
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QUESTION: How do you make a financial return as well as a social impact?
Here is an example. Within the portfolio of investments I oversee, we make loans to microfinance institutions. When we make those loans, they lend in turn to, say, a low-income woman who needs to borrow money but otherwise may not have access to credit. When that person repays the loan, the microfinance institution repays us. We also invest in private equity funds that have a social mission. We invest in a number of structured debt funds that might be financing low-income housing or the expansion of health clinics that serve low-income people.
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QUESTION: How effective is microfinance?
QUESTION: What’s the most challenging part of your job?
I am a big believer in access to credit. Think about all the access to credit that we enjoy in this country, with our very developed capital markets. We access credit for a lot of very productive things—like going to college. Then imagine not having access to credit, especially when you don’t have very much money and you need to borrow to pay for your kids’ school, or for a business you’re building, or for food for your family.
Probably 80 percent of my job is just like that of any commercial financier, but then about 20 percent gets funky. That’s the impact piece.
So, I think having access to credit that's given responsibly is important, and charging reasonable interest rates is important, and not using thuggish methods to get repaid is important.
Our typical investments have a positive correlation between social impact and our financial interest. Say we lend to a company that’s building solar-powered plants: they sell power to households and collect fees, and then the company repays the debt to us. Understanding the nuances of that relationship is part of the funky 20 percent. As an investor, we provide money that has a number of handcuffs. If the company we’re lending to doesn’t achieve XYZ social impact, we have the ability to do things that will not be good for it. And that forces a conversation about what they’re trying to do, what we’re trying to do, and whether we are the right partners for one another. That’s the part of my job that is personally very fulfilling: it’s the hardest intellectually and the riskiest. It's a puzzle, and you’re trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together.
QUESTION: How did your time at Bryn Mawr help you achieve what you have? When I entered the workforce, there wasn’t as much emphasis on being prepared as there is now. As a result, I was blissfully unaware of what I didn’t know, and Bryn Mawr didn’t have LILAC and all the programs it offers. But I did have internships. Internships are a great way to test out your interests, and they build a network of people. When you build relationships early in your career, it pays back 20 years, 30 years later. Also, then there’s the value of a liberal arts education. I work with a lot of people who have liberal arts degrees, and I wouldn’t underestimate the skills they bring: critical thinking skills, writing skills, working together.
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MEIKO TAKAYAMA ’91
History of Art Founder / CEO, Advancing Women Executives
After college, I got fantastic internships, first at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and then at the Guggenheim in Venice. From there, I moved to New York for a fundraising job at the Guggenheim and then went to the Museum of Modern Art, where I became head of fundraising. I began wondering, What else is there out there? So I went into consulting and then executive recruiting. As a recruiter, I saw how small the number of executive women is in the U.S. So, I started Advancing Women Executives, a business consulting service that works with VP-level and above corporate executives. Our mission is to accelerate the careers of women in business to improve the global economy.
10 THINGS I WISH I HAD KNOWN ABOUT THE REAL WORLD WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE #1
Do something that drives your passion and that you're good at.
I was fortunate. Early on, I was coordinating exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Back then, that was my passion—and I was good at it. But what I was really great at was selling, and I figured that out when I got into fundraising.
#2
Negotiate your very first salary out of college.
By the time they retire, women will have $500,000 less in wealth growth than men—largely because they don’t negotiate their first salary. I didn’t because I thought I was lucky to get the job. It’s not easy to do, and you may be dinged because we live in a world with double standards. But it’s important.
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#3
As women, we need to perform competently yet act warmly.
Men need to perform competently, but they can be jerks—and what’s more, they’ll be considered brilliant. That’s not the case for women.
#4
Set your professional goals and let others know what they are.
As young girls, we’re told if you study hard, you'll get good grades, and if you get good grades, you’ll get noticed. And then we go into the real world, and we think, “If I work hard, I’ll get noticed. If I get noticed, I’ll get promoted.” If we lived in a true meritocracy, there would be more women in power. But we don’t because no one just gets noticed for hard work.
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#5
Informally promote yourself to your boss.
When a boss hears casually but consistently that someone's working hard, it’s human nature to think that that person is doing more work than somebody who’s keeping quiet.
#6
Don't ask too many questions.
Support your female colleagues unconditionally.
If somebody is asking you for a recommendation for an internship or whatever, make sure that you give a good name for women. If you have nothing good to say about a woman, don’t say anything at all.
#8
The world is based on relationships. So build relationships.
A mentor is somebody that you bounce ideas off of. A sponsor is the person who has derived value from you and who will talk about you when you’re not in the room.
#10
Be confident.
If you're confident, then you’ll know your own value, and you’ll negotiate your very first salary. If you’re confident, then you will set professional goals. If you’re confident, you’ll promote yourself. If you’re confident, you won’t necessarily ask too many questions because you know the answers. If you’re confident, you’ll know to support your female colleagues and your classmates. If you’re confident, you’ll know that relationships are incredibly important. If you’re confident, you know the value that you bring to your sponsors. Remember. Every single one of you is a highly accomplished, highly intelligent individual. This is why you went to Bryn Mawr.
Use these relationships, but not just as friendships. As women we tend to have these very deep yet narrow relationships as opposed to men who go broad and shallow. Broad and shallow is great because it means that more people know who you are, and it’s all about who knows you. Walk around, build relationships, go out to lunch.
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Mentors are good, but sponsors are great.
Statistically more women have mentors than men do. Men get promoted more.
Again it’s human nature to wonder whether someone asking a lot of questions just doesn’t get it. And statistically more women ask questions than men do. Men know better than to appear as though they don’t know. So if you have a question to ask, start with a “listen how smart I am” statement: “Given that the cost of oil has decreased significantly across the past 24 months, I’m wondering what your strategy would be?”
#7
#9
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JOIN SCHOLAR OF DEMOCRATIC, FEMINIST, AND LEGAL THEORY
BONNIE HONIG FOR
THEATERS OF REFUSAL
THE 2017 MARY FLEXNER LECTURES OCTOBER 30 – NOVEMBER 13, 2017 THE LECTURES
GREAT HALL, 7:30 PM MONDAY, OCTOBER 30 INOPERATIVITY: Inoperativity and the Politics of Refusal—Bacchaes MONDAY, NOVEMBER 6 INCLINATION: How to Do Things with Inclination—Antigones MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13 IMAGINATION: Bacchaes, Revisited—Moby-Dick More about the Flexner lecture and programming—film series, courses, performance—at www.brynmawr.edu/Flexner
THE MARY FLEXNER LECTURESHIP Established in honor of Mary Flexner (Class of 1895), the Lectureship has brought some of the world’s most distinguished humanists to campus for a series of talks to the campus community and seminars with undergraduate and graduate students.
THEY REFUSED …AND
THIS IS WHO WE ARE AND WHO WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN. The education of every Bryn Mawr student is made possible by the generosity of those who came before them. We are asking for your engagement, your philanthropy, and your vocal pride to support a new generation of extraordinary students.
GO TO BRYNMAWR.EDU/GIVING TO SUPPORT DEFY EXPECTATION. THANK YOU.
In this Section
Our
Anassa Kata p. 49 Class Notes p. 52 In Memoriam p. 103
Bryn Mawr Anassa Kata
The campus awaits the arrival of alumnae/i to celebrate Reunion 2017. Photograph by Roy Groething
+
Read more
Visit brynmawr.edu/alumnae.
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2017 Reunion
This year, the College welcomed classes ending in 2 and 7 for a glorious Reunion weekend. Here are just a few of our favorite shots. You can find the full gallery at bit.ly/2rtwy8S.
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1
1
Roy Groething
2
From left: Millie Bond ’05, director of Alumnae Relations; Saskia Subramanian '88, M.A. '89, Alumnae Association president; President Kim Cassidy; and Nia Turner ’05 at the dedication of Perry Garden on the former site of Perry House. 2017 Alumnae Award Winners (from left): Gilda Maria Rodriguez ’07 (Young Alumna), Elizabeth “Libbo” Steinert Williams ’47 (Lifetime of Service), Rose “Posey” Johnson Randall ’47 (Lifetime of Service), and Sheila Cunningham ’72 (Distinguished Alumna).
2
Photographs by Jim Roese
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3
4
Members of the Class of 1992 came out in force to celebrate their 25th reunion. Photograph by Paola Nogueras ’84. Celebrating its 50th reunion, the Class of 1967 gathered at Rockefeller Arch for a group portrait. Photograph by Paola Nogueras ’84. Other photographs by Jim Roese
3
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1,119 total attendees 1942, 1962, 1997, and 2007
had record-breaking attendance for their reunion years.
REUNION by the numbers
1982
tied the record for a 35th reunion
15 classes attended, with 13 having above-average attendance for their reunion years.
81
non-reunion year alumnae/i attended reunion
4
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Roy Groething Alex Sanyal ’18
Roy Groething
5
6
5
President Cassidy with the Defy Expectation: Breaking the Glass Ceiling panel (from left): Barbara Paul Robinson ’62, President Cassidy, Fay Donohue ’72, Nancy Gellman ’67, Natica von Althann ’72, and Mary Clark ’87 (moderator). Photograph by Jim Roese
6
Members of the Class of 1992 (along with a future Mawrter?) enjoying their 25th reunion class dinner on Saturday night. Photograph by Jim Roese
7
7
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Our beloved Owl on Applebee Field for the annual GOLD Kickball game. Photograph by Alex Sanyal ’18
Association News
From the Alumnae Association President DEAR FRIENDS: I am writing this just before returning to Bryn Mawr for the Alumnae Volunteer Summit. For those of you who have never attended, once a year, the college invites to campus those individuals who volunteer for the College in a range of capacities. Over that weekend, typically in September, volunteers attend a variety of workshops as well as social functions. It’s a chance to train newcomers about their roles, ensure that we are utilizing our force of volunteers most effectively in “the field,” and thank the many folks who give of their time and talent to the College. As I look over the schedule of events for this year’s Volunteer Summit, I am reminded of my own journey to the position in which I serve currently. While being deeply connected to and engaged with Bryn Mawr is incredibly satisfying to me now, that was not always the case. As a younger alum, I was proud of my undergraduate college but didn’t give much thought to the school beyond keeping in touch with friends. It was not until almost a decade after I graduated, newly living thousands of miles away from campus on the “left coast,” that I discovered there are
local clubs across the globe, and I found a very welcoming home in the Los Angeles club, initially helping as an alumnae admissions and a career development representative. Since that first foray into volunteerism for the College, I have had the pleasure of giving my time to Bryn Mawr in myriad ways. In doing so over the years, I have met a wide range of the most remarkable women, spanning decades of classes, most of whom I would never have had the opportunity to meet but for my volunteer connection to Bryn Mawr. And giving some of my time to the College seems like the least I can do in light of how much the institution gave to me:
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a fabulous education, a strong sense of myself as a competent and intelligent woman, and a sisterhood that is enviable by any measure. Bryn Mawr volunteers help to keep the proverbial lights on at the College; I like to think that the place can function fine without us, but perhaps, just perhaps, not quite as well. If you have given thought to becoming more involved, please do! We welcome anyone who is interested and willing. You can learn more about volunteer opportunities at www.brynmawr.edu/alumnae/ get-involved. And supporting Bryn Mawr doesn’t have to mean hours of your time; recommending a Bryn Mawr education to the young women in your life, including the College in your LinkedIn profile, and even singing the praises of our school loud and proud in your social media are all meaningful and easy ways to serve Bryn Mawr. With the start of the new school year, join me in renewing your connection to Bryn Mawr; I think I can safely say the rewards in doing so are many. Best, Saskia Subramanian ’88, M.A. ’89 President, Bryn Mawr Alumnae Association
Anassa Kata
Mawrters at Heart It’s not the amount of time spent on campus that makes a Mawrter, but the personal transformation, lifelong friends, and enduring thirst for truth. BY NANCY SCHMUCKER '98 Ann Berthoff as a “brilliant mentor” and the two remain close to this day. She has returned for Reunion, supports the college financially, and, in 2011, gave the Bernard K. Rothenberg Lecture in Biology and Public Policy. “I still tell people that I think Bryn Mawr is the best school in the country. I owe my ability to write and to organize my essays to Ann and Bryn Mawr.”
MINA BISSELL '63 is a highly distinguished scientist who runs a cancer research lab bearing her name at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As a young girl, Bissell was the top student in her home country of Iran. When applying to U.S. colleges, the head of the American Friends of the Middle East encouraged her to apply to Bryn Mawr. “To his mind,” she has said, “and later to mine, Bryn Mawr was – and remains – one of the best colleges in the United States.” Bissell spent an “enchanting” two years at Bryn Mawr. “I was lucky to come to Bryn Mawr. It was all about smart, successful women, and the faculty were amazing.” She specifically recalls Professor
PHOEBE ELLSWORTH '65 understands exactly how Bissell feels, as we discovered recently when we unearthed the note that accompanied her 1978 gift to The Annual Fund (now The Bryn Mawr Fund).
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“I was promoted to tenure at the Yale Psychology Department a year ago,” Ellsworth wrote, “and although I didn’t take any psychology at Bryn Mawr, I credit you with teaching me the value of thorough scholarship and high standards of evidence. Since I transferred out of Bryn Mawr, you probably didn’t realize how much I loved it and valued it. I still credit Bryn Mawr with everything important I got from my undergraduate career: a rigorous love of truth in all its wealth of disciplinary guises, a fundamental understanding that women are smart, and the idea that the intellectually fortunate have a duty to contribute to the society that provided their good fortune…. my heart belongs to Bryn Mawr.” And the Bryn Mawr lessons continue to serve her today. Now a professor at the University of Michigan, Ellsworth holds dual appointments in the psychology department and the Law School, where she has conducted pioneering research on jury behavior, public opinion and the death penalty, eyewitness identification, and emotions and appraisal theory. Nearly 40 years after sending her love letter to Bryn Mawr, Ellsworth remains connected with her class and is a consistent donor as a member of both the Slade and Archways Giving Societies.
Anassa Kata
BRYN MAWR’S 1ST
Athletics Homecoming Weekend
OCTOBER 27-28, 2017
THE LINE-UP FRI, OCT 27 a joyful connection to my class and Rock dorm mates,” she says. “There’s a vibe that I don’t know exists anywhere else.” After leaving Bryn Mawr to raise a family, Morris climbed the corporate ladder—without a college degree. She went from accounting clerk to vice president at Burrell McBain (now Burrell Communications)—one of the country’s first African-American marketing agencies and currently one of the largest and most prominent multicultural firms in the world. For ANNA KIMBROUGH MORRIS '62, it’s all about the friends and dorm mates. Morris spent only two years at Bryn Mawr but has maintained close relationships, served as class president and songmistress, attended reunions, and has been a consistent donor to The Bryn Mawr Fund. In the 1960s, she and classmate Barbara Bauman Morrison ’62 worked with then Admissions Director Betty Vermey ’58 for greater diversity at the College. “Anna was an early class leader and has been among our most active and effective leaders ever since,” says Morrison. What keeps Morris coming back? “I loved it immediately and have
The agency’s creative director recognized Morris’s writing talent and encouraged her to try copywriting. Today, several of her ad campaigns are archived at the Smithsonian as examples of the trailblazing work done by and for the African-American community. These days, Morris is an adjunct professor at Columbia College in Chicago. She credits her Bryn Mawr experience with informing her work: “The liberal arts opened up my world and gave me a source of ideas to write about. I could talk about anything with anybody and was on comfortable footing with clients and competitors.”
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Athletics Alumnae Panel Alums share experiences & memories SAT, OCT 28 10 AM Alumnae Volleyball Match 11 AM Alumnae Tennis Match Varsity Field Hockey vs. Ursinus 1 PM Varsity Volleyball vs. Ursinus 2 PM Varsity Soccer vs. Ursinus 3 PM Alumnae Basketball Match 4 PM Alumnae Soccer Match (turf) Alumnae Soccer Match (turf) Alumnae Lacrosse Match (grass) 5:30 PM Happy Hour! Our first-ever Athletics Homecoming offers something for everyone—for returning alums, games with former teammates; for families and fans, a full day of varsity games against rival Ursinus; for everyone, tailgating and entertainment on Cambrian Row.
To register, visit GoBrynMawr.com.
Anassa Kata
Design & Justice
Can design—architecture, graphic design, city planning—ameliorate social inequality? Last year, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum set out to investigate that question with a thoughtful exhibition. No surprise that By the People: Designing a Better America featured contributions by a trio of Mawrters. BY NANCY SCHMUCKER ’98
A Magic Strategy for the Healthy City DR. MINDY THOMPSON FULLILOVE ’71 served on the exhibit’s advisory committee and co-wrote The Aesthetics of Equity: A Magic Strategy for the Healthy City for the catalog. It outlines the work of the Cities Research Group, which Fullilove helped found in the 1990s to better understand the myriad health epidemics ravaging low-income communities of color across the country—AIDS, crack cocaine addiction, violence, and more. The following excerpt describes a watershed moment when the group realized how physical changes to the landscape of Orange, New Jersey, were affecting citizens: William Morrish, a professor in the Design and Urban Ecologies program at Parsons, The New School for Design, describes “naming and framing the problem” as the first step of design. Our first consultant was Michel Cantal-Dupart, who came in 2009 to examine the issues in the center of town. He studied the area carefully, walked it with residents, examined historical maps, … and presented us with an unexpected observation. The 1960s division of the city by the construction of a freeway—the highway later known as Route 280—was
understood by all of us. But Cantal pointed out that a shift in the train line had also contributed to the fracture of the center of the city, creating a deteriorating island of buildings. “Look,” he said to us. “It is as if there are two rivers— the train and highway. In Paris we have an island like this. We call it Isle de la Cité, and it is a very popular spot. You should rethink your City Island, beautifying the ‘river banks’ and reconnecting the north and south.“ He used his blue colored pencil to show us how the train and the highway were rivers. Suddenly, City Island leapt off the page, giving us a new perspective on the city. The role of the train line in the division of the city was revisited by William Morrish. He and his students helped us to understand that New Jersey was in the middle of a spurt of transit-oriented, ‘smart’ growth that was pushing massive construction around train stations. In other cities, like Harrison, New Jersey, the new construction was completely unrelated to the historic city’s contents and form. A post-industrial city like Orange, Harrison was inhabited by working people
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who lived near the now-empty factories that once provided a good living. These were being bulldozed and replaced by luxury apartments for people who could take the train to work in New York City. “This kind of development,” Morrish told us, “focuses on a rail corridor and ignores the rest of the city. This will displace the poor and intensify
Heart of Orange, NJ, map to illustrate City Island by Michel Cantal-Dupart.
the fracture that you’re trying to repair. What you want to help people understand is that there is a larger city to restore, there are many modes of transportation, and there is much opportunity for creating jobs in Orange so that people don’t have to commute. You have the opportunity to carry out a real and effective urban restoration, not this latest form of urban renewal.”
Anassa Kata
Field Guides to Ensure Voter Intent Led by WHITNEY QUESENBERY ’76, the Center for Civic Design and its partner Oxide Design contributed a set of 10 pocketsized books containing design guidelines and best practices for ensuring voter intent. “Election officials are unacknowledged designers,” says Quesenbery. “They create letters, forms, notices, and ballots, but most
don’t understand civic design and how to meet the varying literacy needs of the general population. The Field Guides help officials bridge that gap to create tools that voters can really use.” Titles include Designing Usable Ballots, Designing Election Department Websites, and Effective Poll Worker Materials.
Designing Justice+Designing Spaces
“Mass incarceration is a major social problem, as is the overuse of punishment generally,” says BARBARA TOEWS, PH.D. ’14 (GSSWSR), co-founder of the DJ+DS initiative to explore the relationship between restorative justice and the design of justice spaces. “The result is that those who commit crime rarely understand the true consequences of their actions and victims rarely receive justice in a way that addresses their needs.” DJ+DS uses design to challenge how we think about justice, justice practices, and the spaces needed to accommodate those practices. The group works with incarcerated men and women to create new types of justice spaces that are inspired by the restorative justice philosophy. Its contribution to By the People included 3-D paper models and a perspective drawing of several of their design concepts.
THE CONTRIBUTORS A research psychiatrist at New York State Psychiatric Institute and professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia, MINDY FULLILOVE ’71 is an expert on participatory design. The author of Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America's Sorted-Out Cities, she can currently be seen in Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, a documentary about the urban activist Jane Jacobs. An expert in user research, user experience, and usability, WHITNEY QUESENBERY ’76 is a principal consultant at Whitney Interactive Design. She has served as chair for Human Factors and Privacy on the Elections Assistance Commission Advisory Committee, creating requirements for voting systems for U.S. elections. She co-authored Storytelling in User Experience Design, with Kevin Brooks. A practitioner and educator in restorative justice, BARBARA TOEWS, PH.D. ’14 (GSSWSR) studies the relationship between environmental design, especially that of correctional institutions, and psychosocial-behavioral and judicial outcomes. Publications include Critical Issues in Restorative Justice, with Howard Zehr, and The Little Book of Restorative Justice for People in Prison.
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Learn more
About By the People at www.cooperhewitt.org/channel/by-the-people/ About Mindy Fullilove at www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/ About the Center for Civic Design at civicdesign.org/fieldguides/ Read Whitney Quesenbery’s Democracy Has a Design Problem at theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/ democracy-has-a-design-problem/524898/ About DJ+DS at designingjustice.org/ BRYN MAWR //
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Generations
Like Mother, Like Daughter Two generations reflect on lives of purpose and share memories of Bryn Mawr. AS TOLD TO MAUREEN MCGONIGLE ’98
Marian Scheuer Sofaer ’70
Joan Gross Scheuer ’42
My mother had smart, funny, intellectual and talented friends from Bryn Mawr, so I knew it was a good place to learn and to find a path to professional opportunities. At Erdman, we had a birthday party for the building, and Louis Kahn came. We loved its dramatic lines and the way it opened into social spaces, and it was exciting to meet the architect who had designed it all. After dinner, we used to talk for hours in the Erdman living room about classes, public affairs and the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. People wanted to have an impact on policy. Many of us went to D.C. to protest, including to the March on Washington just before our final exams and graduation in 1970. My first legal job was at DC37, the union of New York’s non-uniformed employees. Then I was a litigator at the State Attorney General’s Office and at the NYC Corporation Counsel. In 1985, my husband joined the US State Department; in 1990 I started Holocaust restitution work, helping people recover property in East Germany post-unification. The Germans refused to publish Nazi-era records. To make a claim, you first had to find the confiscated property, records and heirs. I helped my clients get restitution of buildings the Nazis had seized. Ten years ago, I organized an exhibition in southern India. When Prime Minister Modi visited the Israel Museum this July, I presented a book to him that I published on the 38 synagogues that still stand in India.
I was in the first class to live in Rhoads. We had a lot of fun because they let us paint the “smoking-room” any way we wanted, and we had great murals going up the walls—they felt like a surge of Here I am. I came to Bryn Mawr in the Depression. My family was doing well enough, but around us people were standing in breadlines. I thought, It’s not working. I wanted to try to get some answers. Then the war broke out. With all the men drafted, lots of jobs were available for women. I worked as an economist in the War Production Board in D.C., allocating scarce materials for civilian use. We were 21-year-olds, telling the steel industry what they could and could not produce. After the war, I met my husband, and we had a family. As an economist, I wanted to understand how the local schools were funded. I wanted to work on reforming what was a discriminatory system, so I did some politicking and got elected to the school board. When my children were older, I got my Ph.D. and then landed a job in the New York City School Board, where I helped identify how the funding formula, which was supposed to be equitable, disadvantaged people of color, how New York school kids got much less per pupil than others in the state. I’m so impressed with people from Bryn Mawr. In the retirement community where I live now, there’s another person from Bryn Mawr, and I always know she’s going to be interesting and caring. It’s a wonderful place, full of rigorous work and purpose.
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3 1. EXPEDITION TO ANTARCTICA JANUARY 11‒25, 2018
Co-sponsored with Harvard and Yale
2. FLAVORS OF NORTHERN ITALY* MAY 12‒20, 2018 With Sharon Ullman, Professor of History 3. NAMIBIA: ENDLESS HORIZONS JULY 20‒AUGUST 3, 2018
With Jill Schneiderman, Professor of Earth Sciences, Vassar College, Co-sponsored with Vassar
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EXPLORE THE WORLD WITH
BRYN MAWR SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS, ISLANDS & NORWAY’S FJORDS MAY 17‒25, 2018
PROVENCE WALKING TOUR* JUNE 16‒25, 2018
JEWELS OF ALPINE EUROPE* AUGUST 6‒18, 2018
AMONG WOMEN: RUSSIA ISLAND LIFE IN ANCIENT GREECE SEPTEMBER 2018 Co-sponsored with Smith OCTOBER 1‒9, 2018
Co-sponsored with Dartmouth
EXPLORING ICELAND* AUGUST 7‒17, 2018
with Don Barber, Associate Professor of Geology
INSIDERS JAPAN* OCTOBER 13-25 2018
Co-sponsored with Duke, Vassar, and Dartmouth With Pamela Webb, M.A. ’83, Ph.D. ’89
*EXCLUSIVE BRYN MAWR DEPARTURE
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