Clark University Magazine, fall/winter 2024

“IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO STUDY ALL THINGS THAT MAKE US HUMAN.”

FEATURES

Humanities, Humanity, Human … Hope

Can we afford to pursue deeper meaning and elevated expression during these cynical times? The answer must be “yes”

iShakespeare

Why do the Bard’s works resonate in our modern age? Maybe because people still seek love. Go to war. Hunger for power. Have midsummer night’s dreams …

A Legacy in Bloom

The Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities boasts a rich history and prepares for a robust future 46

The Fourth Is with Him

Musicologist Ben Korstvedt ’87 has recovered the legacy of composer Anton Bruckner by helping reclaim his “lost” symphony

DEPARTMENTS

“We aim to get people directly connected with good food.”

Square NEWS FROM OUR CAMPUS GATHERING PLACE

The call of the mall; Sajed Ziade builds his legend; Amanda Dye finds Common Ground; Maximum Wage; and more

“The

mall had been her stage.”

Mater CELEBRATING CLARK’S ALUMNI COMMUNITY

Japan’s U.S. Muse; The Lives of Brian Silverman; Introducing Tom Hicks; When Springsteen lit up Clark; and more

President’s Message

David B. Fithian ’87

The things we most value never lose their relevance.

in reCent Months there has been a good deal of discussion and debate about the concept of relevance. What forces endow a cultural moment, a social movement, or a historic figure with the kind of relevance that can sustain an idea over time or reinforce a way of being in this world? And who ultimately determines what constitutes relevance—or, more ominously, irrelevance—on any given day?

These are hard questions to answer. But for institutions of higher learning, they are important questions to ask as we forcefully, and rightfully, assert our own relevance in the face of speculation and criticism from some who argue against the value of a college education.

I’m drawn to the theme of this issue of Clark magazine, which explores both the constancy and adaptability of the humanities. I was especially struck by this quote from Clark English scholar Justin Shaw, explaining why the universal lessons embedded in Shakespeare’s works never lose relevancy or potency for his students long after they’ve read his plays: “[Students are] going to encounter texts. They’re going to encounter politics. They’re going to encounter difference. I want them to be able to encounter anything in the world and say, ‘I know how to read this situation. I’ve seen this somewhere before.’ ”

The humanities reveal how relevance is both earned … and evolves. For Clark, it starts with a solid foundation of core values that guide our actions and reflect how we choose to be of service in this world. Even as the needs of society shift and the times grow more challenging, the things we most value—the pursuit of new knowledge, the cultivation of civil discourse, work that drives solutions to benefit the greatest good— never lose their relevance.

However, retaining our relevance means remaining agile in how we respond to disruption in its many forms—social, political, environmental, technological. For instance, our humanities faculty, as detailed in this magazine, are meeting the challenge of new technologies by incorporating them as instruments that augment, rather than threaten, a contemporary liberal arts education. Our scholars are also finding ways in which the humanities will inform our response to the unfolding climate crisis.

As Professor Shaw so aptly noted, some things, when they are honest, when they are true, and when they require us to think and act decisively, can stay relevant in perpetuity. We have seen this before.

Fall/Winter 2024

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Jill Friedman

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Jim Keogh

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Melissa Lynch ’95, M.S. ’15

DESIGN

MO.D

Patrick Mitchell

André Mora

EDITORIAL STAFF

Angela Bazydlo

Melissa Hanson

Meredith Woodward King

UNIVERSITY PHOTOGRAPHER

Steven King

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Andrei Cojocaru

Chad Hagen

Helena Pallarés

Nate Williams

Printed by Allied Press

ADDRESS CORRESPONDENCE TO: Jkeogh@Clarku.edu

OR MAIL TO:

Jim Keogh

Marketing And Communications 138 Woodland St. Worcester, MA 01610

Visit alumni.clarku.edu, the online community for Clark alumni, family, and friends.

Editor’s Note

Jim Keogh

Oh, the Humanities!

“WHAT’S

YOUR MAJOR?”

Does that question get asked as frequently as it did when I was a new college student? Back in the day, it was the ultimate icebreaker— the answer an indication not only of the courses you were taking or the career you may have been planning (or at least fantasizing about), but of how your mind worked.

I was an English major: a reader and lover of the written word. And yes, I was something of a cliché. Higher math gave me the shakes. Lower math, too. (That said, I have only goodwill, and not a little envy, for those who are comfortable with both.)

Defending your choice to be an English major comes with the territory. Those of us in this esteemed group will recall that the second question after “What’s your major?” was invariably, “What are you gonna do with THAT?” I suspect the same was true for anyone studying history, philosophy, theater, languages, or any other subject where the career trajectory could be mysterious. Today, we’re still defending the humanities from critics who insist they aren’t important for a functional society—and do so in grammatically challenged sentences. Despite the obvious headwinds, we are regarding the humanities in this issue not from a defensive crouch, but rather with deep curiosity about how traditional humanities are evolving for a new age in ways that keep them fresh and relevant—and even, yes, marketable. We’ve asked members of our faculty to describe how technology is altering the way we approach literature and language, and what role the humanities might take in interpreting the climate crisis. It’s also a joy to hear our resident Shakespeare scholar explain why the Bard still matters; to speak with a Clark music professor who is one of the world’s leading authorities on composer Anton Bruckner; and to celebrate the legacy and anticipate the future of Clark’s own humanities institute. We hope you enjoy this special issue. No math required.

Cover illustration by Andrei Cojocaru

A life-changing scholarship

Make your gift today to inspire other Clark students like Jennifer Krulisz-Hossain at alumni.clarku/magazine. Or use the envelope inside this issue of Clark magazine.

To Jennifer Krulisz-Hossain ’25, going to college has meant being the first in her family to pursue higher education, an opportunity to study what most interests her, and a chance to elevate—through her achievements—the image of the Bronx, where she grew up.

Throughout the years, Clark has expanded Jennifer’s perspective on her areas of study (marketing, history, genocide, and human rights), and her views on philanthropy. When she learned she was a recipient of the Joan Goldstein Endowed Scholarship, a fund specifically awarded to students from the Bronx, she felt tremendous gratitude.

Howard Goldstein ’80 and his wife, Neva, created the scholarship to honor his late mother, Joan Goldstein, who taught in the Bronx. Supporting students from his mother’s beloved borough and tying her work to educating future generations was part of the intention behind creating the scholarship.

“I know I’m the first in my family to receive an education, and this is a big milestone not only for myself but also for my family,” Jennifer says. “And so I take that with a lot of pride because I’m able to push boundaries and have the same opportunities that other students might have.”

Jennifer has flourished at Clark, enjoying her studies and working as a student assistant for the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and as a programming assistant for the Office of Identity, Student Engagement, and Access. This past summer she interned at Pfizer, and last semester studied abroad in Dublin, Ireland, thanks to the Goldstein Scholarship.

Jennifer knows many more deserving students could be part of the Clark community if awarded scholarships. For donors considering gifts to the University, she has one piece of advice:

“ Just do it. One small act of kindness can have such a big impact on another person’s life.”

Campus

“It’s Like a Family”

Heroes

STEVEN KING

EMMANUEL PAITOO

is there anyone more heroic on a college campus than the maker of pizza? Especially when that person is very, very good at what they do?

Consider the affection-bordering-on-reverence that Clark students have for EMMANUEL PAITOO, a 19-year employee in Dining Services who operates the Table at Higgins pizza oven the way Jackson Pollock reimagined blank canvases. What Paitoo slides into the oven are circles of dough blanketed with cheeses, meats, and vegetables. What emerges is edible art.

“When I’m working, the kids tell me they’re so happy to see me,” Paitoo says with a grin. “And when they go home for vacation, they tell me, ‘I’m going to miss your pizza! You make the best pizza in the world.’ ”

A native of Ghana and the father of four, Paitoo lived and worked in many countries before immigrating to the United States “to make a better life.” When he came to work at Clark, he noticed that the pizza, while tasty, was, well, flat. To amp up the pies, he began braiding the edges of the crust, which nicely framed the cheesy surface and gave his pizzas added crunch. A small distinction, perhaps, but one meaningful enough to earn Paitoo the praise of his bosses, who described the twisted dough as “beautiful.”

“I always wondered why pizza had to be flat,” he says. “I twist it the way you’d twist a pastry, and it works. I’ve taught others how to do it, but it’s never quite like my own.”

He makes 30 to 35 pizzas a day, and as many as 40 when demand gets high. Plenty of those pizzas are classics like cheese and pepperoni, as well as a revolving choice of other favorites, from Buffalo chicken (just the right amount saucy bite) to Greek style (generous with the feta). Paitoo also enjoys experimenting, which explains his creation of the popular Mac Attack, whose ingredients blend together to form the perfect taste facsimile of a McDonald’s Big Mac.

On June 1, Harvest Table took over the operation of Clark Dining Services, succeeding longtime hospitality provider Sodexo. Paitoo continued with the new company, with his satisfied customers in mind.

“I love that the kids are happy,” he says. “It’s like a family.”

His own favorite pizza? The Margherita: fresh tomatoes, mozzarella, crushed basil. With, of course, a braided crust.

Media

Mall of Fame

The New Yorker trained its sophisticated eye on the work of Photography Professor STEPHEN DIRADO to recall the halcyon days of shopping malls in all their parachute-panted, Cinnabon-scented, Orange Julius-tanged glory. In “A Begrudgingly Affectionate Portrait of the American Mall,” author Margaret Talbot gave deep consideration to the series of black-andwhite photographs that DiRado shot from 1984 to 1986 inside the late, great Worcester Center Galleria.

Through his lens, DiRado lovingly chronicled the human communities that formed in the shadow of Filene’s and Jordan Marsh—bored teens, diffident security guards, harried parents, seen-it-all seniors. Talbot managed to track down one of DiRado’s teenage subjects, Cara, now a school psychologist in Worcester, who fondly remembered the joys of preening in the mall on a Friday night. As Talbot wrote, “The mall had been her stage, as it had been for so many others, and DiRado had memorialized her turn upon it.”

3 VIEW A GALLERY OF DIRADO’S VINTAGE MALL PHOTOS AT CLARKU.EDU/DIRADO-MALL.

HE IS LEGEND : SAJED ZIADE QUESTS FOR GAMING PERFECTION

“let Me tell you about my typical day.”

SAJED ZIADE ’26 suggests this as the best approach to understanding just what it takes to be a video gamer at an elite level.

Here is how his typical day unfolds:

After awakening at about 11 a.m., the computer science major attends class and heads to the gym for a workout. He then settles at his computer to play the globally renowned game League of Legends for about an hour and a half as a tune-up for a practice session with fellow members of FlyQuest, his League of Legends team. That session will consume seven hours.

And he isn’t done. Once his FlyQuest teammates scatter for the night, and after a quick break, Ziade will continue playing for another three to four hours to polish the skills he’ll employ in the high-stakes competitions pitting him against some of the best players from around the country. He’ll finally get to bed in the early morning hours. The cycle resumes at 11 a.m.

For Ziade, 12 to 14 hours immersed in the League of Legends universe is not only common—it’s a necessity. The best players can climb through the ranks, and the truly elite can shape lucrative

careers from the game, but the work required to get there can be grueling, and the competition fearsome.

“I’ve been playing League of Legends for seven years, but not seriously until COVID hit,” he says. “After COVID, there was a big influx of talented 15and 16-year-old players who had been playing for 10 to 14 hours a day during the shutdown.”

League of Legends is a highly competitive, multiplayer online battle-arena video game that attracts millions of players and fans worldwide. The game matches two teams of five players, known as “champions,” who face off to overtake the other’s base.

“You work together against AI monsters, and you fight other players,” he says. “The key is to outsmart and get stronger than your opponents.” The game requires tremendous reflexes along with a heightened ability to anticipate your enemy’s maneuvers, hence Ziade’s many hours of practice.

FlyQuest competes in the highly prestigious North American Champions League, which is closely affiliated with, and is regarded as the feeder league into, the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), the top-tier professional league for the North American region.

FlyQuest is considered the strongest Tier 2 team within the game’s organization. Ziade’s quick hands and high scores on a Tier 3 team earned him an invitation to try out for the team; he was flown out to Los Angeles for the tryout and earned his spot on the FlyQuest roster.

The Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, native recognizes that immersion in League of Legends and other competitive games can put one’s life out of balance, which is why he values his breaks and makes sure he exercises daily. “I can’t keep the schedule I have without being healthy,” he says.

His dream is to make League of Legends a career, which will require him to eventually advance to Tier 1 and even more supercharged competitions. He insists he can continue to meet the rigorous challenges of his Clark studies and keep his commitments to League of Legends training and events for the immediate future.

Competing with FlyQuest is challenging and exhausting, Ziade notes, because “everyone is insanely good.” He plans to be just as good by adhering to the life pattern he describes as “gaming, eating, sleeping, gaming.” And repeat.

JIM KEOGH

“The key is to outsmart and get stronger than your opponents.”

“When you say that you’re a Clark student, it’s something that’s recognized in the community.”

STEVEN KING

Amanda Dye ’24 Finds Common Ground with Main South

t he feel in the air is pure April-in-New England, the kind where you follow the sun to fight off the chill. Summer is coming … but it’s not here yet.

Dressed in a flannel shirt, jeans, and leather gardening gloves, AMANDA DYE ’24 ignores the cold as she shovels and scrapes the ground around the Jaques Avenue Community Bioshelter, a greenhouse that operates as an indoor ecosystem for year-round mushroom cultivation. She’s preparing the space for the growing season.

The bioshelter, located a short drive from Clark, is surrounded by raised vegetable beds and a small fruit orchard where Main South families cultivate and harvest their own fresh produce. Each gardener typically tends two or three raised beds to put food on their tables and sell to local farmers markets in areas where healthy foods can be difficult to obtain.

For the past three years, Dye has worked with Worcester Common Ground (WCG), a nonprofit organization that pursues sustainable neighborhood improvements through affordable housing initiatives, economic development, educational opportunities, and the cultivation of green spaces to promote access to locally sourced healthy food.

The particular swath of green that Dye tended this past April, set amid the sprawl of brick and concrete, is referred to as “the oasis” by Worcester Common Ground workers. With good reason. During the warmer months, the beds erupt with fresh vegetables and the trees are weighted with ripe plums, peaches, pears, apples, and sour cherries.

“It’s an awesome cycle that we have,” she says. “We aim to get people directly connected with good food.”

The bioshelter and raised beds are located near the Chandler Elementary and Jacob Hiatt schools, supplying multiple opportunities to introduce area students to the good work being done there. It’s one of

seven greenspaces WCG operates throughout the city, including community gardens, a playground, and hydroponic greenhouse.

Growing up in Sherborn, Massachusetts, Dye would attend an annual event in which local farmers invited the public to tour their farms and engage in conversations about their operations. Those visits exposed her to the “origin stories” of how food is sourced and taught her the value of community.

The lessons have persisted. Dye is a yearround habitué of the bioshelter, assuming any number of roles to keep things running smoothly—from the planting of seedlings to maintaining the composting and rainwater collection systems to scheduling events and instructional sessions. When the gardens experience an overflow of fruits and vegetables, Dye brings the surplus produce to community refrigerators—known collectively as Woo Fridge—that have been placed in socalled food deserts throughout Worcester.

“When you say that you’re a Clark student, it’s something that’s recognized in the community,” Dye notes. “Worcester Common Ground has had a lot of Clark students work there over the years.”

The global environmental studies major, who is now pursuing a master’s degree in public administration at Clark, is eyeing a future in community development, perhaps by starting her own nonprofit organization. Her twin goals are to empower and connect.

“Hopefully this would be somewhere in New England with a farming component that would address food insecurity,” she says. “I would want to create a nonprofit where there wouldn’t be any barriers for people to access the space, learn something new, and enjoy being together as a community.”

3 WATCH A SHORT FILM ABOUT AMANDA DYE’S WORK: CLARKU.EDU/DYE

JIM KEOGH

GRAND ENTRANCE

Members of the Class of 2024 entered the DCU Center as Clark University students and departed as Clark alumni after receiving their diplomas during the University’s 120th Commencement on May 20. The ceremony was relocated to the downtown venue to accommodate more Clark families and guests, including those with accessibility challenges. “My greatest hope for you is that you seize the opportunities to learn even more about the world, yourself, and what fulfills you,” President DAVID B. FITHIAN ’87 told the graduates.

The Big Picture

STEVEN KING

MAXIMUM

Three-sport coach retires after 39 years

bringing an end to a storied career, LINDA WAGE, who coached in the women’s athletics program for 39 years—36 of those as head softball coach—announced her retirement this spring.

In addition to her leadership on the softball sidelines, Wage guided the field hockey team for 31 years and served as assistant women’s basketball coach for 12 years. Across the three sports, she coached a staggering 79 combined sports seasons at Clark.

Wage’s softball teams earned a remarkable 491 wins. She coached 10 All-Americans, three academic All-Americans, four NEWMAC Rookie of the Year players, and 20 All-Conference honorees. The Clark players who hold school records in major statistical categories including career hits, batting average, RBIs, and pitching wins all played for Wage.

As field hockey coach, Wage led the program to 303 victories over 18 winning seasons, including an undefeated season in 1989. In 1991, she was selected as Northeast Regional Coach of the Year and in 2002 was named NFHCA New England East Region Coach of the Year.

The Cougars reached the postseason 14 times, including an NCAA Tournament appearance in the 1991 season.

Wage was a two-time NEWMAC Coach of the Year for softball and twice garnered New England Division 3 Coach of the Year accolades for field hockey.

“Linda will be truly missed,” says Trish Cronin, director of athletics and recreation. “For many she has been a colleague and mentor, but to everyone she has been a friend. Linda’s steadfast work ethic and calming sense of

order will never be replaced.”

As an assistant basketball coach, Wage helped guide the program to four NCAA Tournament appearances. During that period, Clark recorded 239 victories, including seven 20-win seasons.

Wage came to Clark with a deep sports pedigree as a four-year letter winner in field hockey, softball, and basketball at Providence College. She remains the Friars’ all-time leading scorer in field hockey and is a member of the PC Hall of Fame.

In a Worcester Telegram & Gazette profile marking her retirement, Wage was lauded by former players for her enduring influence as a coach and mentor.

“Coach Wage was the best,” Jenny (Scavone) Collins, an All-American

“FOR MANY SHE HAS BEEN A COLLEAGUE AND MENTOR, BUT TO EVERYONE SHE HAS BEEN A FRIEND.”

softball player at Clark, told the newspaper. “She always had a positive impact on me, on and off the field. She wasn’t just a coach; she was a huge role model for me at Clark and beyond.”

Wage told the T&G that she looks back at her full career with satisfac tion. But it’s not the hundreds of wins or many earned awards that persist in her memory.

“I supported and valued and cared about all the women that I coached through the years,” she said. “It’s about the people; it always has been.”

A Net Win WAGE

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i n the spring se M ester, lacrosse player LUCAS CUDA ’26 found himself not just in the classroom, but at the head of it.

Partway through his Community-Based Entrepreneurship course, Professor John Dobson introduced a series of four workshops for Haitian immigrants and refugees living in Worcester who are eager to start their own businesses, and he required the students to be the workshop leaders. Through a Creole-speaking interpreter, teams of students taught a range of topics, like finance and marketing.

“I loved every second of it,” Cuda says. “We got to talk to them one-on-one and hear real-world business problems. It’s one thing to understand business and finance yourself, but it’s another to actually teach it.”

The experience also deepened Cuda’s appreciation for the local community. “It was nice to see these families who want to become entrepreneurs and make their own businesses in America. They wanted to be in that classroom—their passion was obvious.”

The Salinas, California, native became interested in coming to Clark because of the lacrosse program, and he enjoys playing on a team with people from different backgrounds. “I pride myself on being able to work with and communicate effectively with everybody. That’s something I’ve learned on the field—and it’s something I can bring into the classroom.”

It seems to be working—in the spring semester, Cuda was one of 15 men’s lacrosse players named to the NEWMAC Men’s Lacrosse All-Academic Team, which required a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.5 after the 2023 fall semester.

“IT’S ONE THING TO UNDERSTAND BUSINESS AND FINANCE YOURSELF, BUT IT’S ANOTHER TO ACTUALLY TEACH IT.”

Bookshelf

Selections from Our Scholars

CLARK UNIVERSITY SCHOLARS’ RECENT PUBLICATIONS PROVIDE A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE ATLANTIC, EXPLORE THE MORAL DILEMMAS PRODUCED BY CITIES, EXAMINE VIENNA’S PRE- AND POST-WORLD WAR II CULTURE, AND RECALL HOW THE INTRODUCTION OF THE DIRECT PRIMARY ELECTION CAUSED MORE PROBLEMS THAN IT SOLVED.

3 ENGLISH

Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760–1830

LISA KASMER

Kasmer argues that British women’s history and historical fiction in the late 18th and early 19th centuries changed not only the shape but also the political significance of women’s writing. At a time when women writers were both celebrated and reviled, these authors pushed the limits of narrated history to respond to contemporary national politics.

3 GEOGRAPHY

Justice and Cities: Metro Morals

MARK DAVIDSON

Since philosophers like Socrates debated in the ancient public square, cities have prompted arguments about the best ways to live together. Cities have also produced some of the most vexing moral problems, including what obligations we have to people we neither know nor affiliate with. Davidson explores different theories of justice and explains how these inform our understanding of urban problems.

3 HISTORY The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

EDITED BY WIM KLOOSTER

This three-volume series delves into the Age of Revolutions, from colonial actions in America, Haiti, Spanish America, and the French Caribbean to the violence and terror wrought by the French Revolution. It addresses the traditional argument on whether the Enlightenment caused revolutions, concluding that revolutions actually helped create the Enlightenment as a body of thought.

3 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Reform and Retrenchment: A Century of Efforts to Fix Primary Elections

ROBERT BOATRIGHT

The direct primary, in which voters rather than party leaders or convention delegates select party nominees for state and federal offices, was a widely adopted political reform in the early 20th century. Boatright argues that this “reform” created far more election chaos than most scholars realize—and that those seeking to repair American politics are best off exploring changes to other areas of elections and governance.

3 HISTORY

Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City

FRANCES TANZER

Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s, revealing continuity in Vienna’s cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence.

3 PSYCHOLOGY Motivation Myth Busters: Science-Based Strategies to Boost Motivation in Yourself and Others

CO-AUTHORED BY WENDY GROLNICK

In this book, readers will learn to identify and debunk 10 persistent myths about motivation and replace those myths with accurate knowledge that will help them take positive steps toward their goals. Each chapter uses cuttingedge psychological research and theory to offer scientifically supported strategies for boosting motivation in a variety of contexts.

$10M GIFT ENERGIZES CLIMATE SCHOOL PLANS

in MarCh, president David Fithian announced that Clark University will receive a $10 million gift from University Trustee and philanthropist Vickie Riccardo and her two daughters, Jocelyn Spencer and Alyssa Spencer ’17, to begin the process of establishing the School of Climate, Environment, and Society.

The school, with an anticipated opening in fall 2025, will synergize a number of Clark’s historic strengths in geography, geographic information science, environmental economics, and community development, along with faculty expertise in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

“We are tremendously grateful to Vickie and her daughters for this transformative gift,” said President Fithian. “It will make an immeasurable difference for our University and, even more importantly, the world as we are better enabled to bring forward new solutions and have even greater impact.”

In recognition of this foundational gift, Clark will name the deanship of the school as the D.J.A. Spencer Dean of the School of Climate, Environment, and Society, honoring the late Donald Spencer, as well as his and Vickie’s daughters, Jocelyn and Alyssa.

“Clark’s School of Climate, Environment, and Society will offer a truly interdisciplinary approach to addressing one of the world’s most intractable challenges, drawing from nearly every University department,” Riccardo said.

The Riccardo and Spencer family also have given their time, resources, and leadership to empower Clark to pursue other key strategic initiatives, including the renovation of the Little Center and Michelson Theater on the Clark campus, now home to the Riccardo & Spencer Lobby. Riccardo served Clark with distinction as a member of the Board of Trustees for the past decade before completing her term this spring.

THE DAY THAT CLARK STOOD STILL

Like the rest of North America, on April 8 the Clark community put their day on “pause” to peer into the sky and marvel at the solar eclipse.

CELEBRATION COUNTDOWN

ON MARCH 16, 1926, Clark alumnus and Physics Professor ROBERT H. GODDARD earned the title of “Father of Modern Rocketry” when he successfully completed the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket launch on his aunt’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. And the countdown to that momentous event’s centennial has begun.

The Wonder Mission, a nonprofit founded by Charles Slatkin ’74, is developing the “First Launch Centennial” initiative in partnership with Worcester and Auburn officials. A steering committee has been formed to guide the celebrations.

“I think Worcester has a great opportunity to get on the world stage,” Slatkin said at a press conference announcing the initiative, held at the Robert and Esther Goddard House (Goddard’s birthplace), which Slatkin purchased in 2021. He added that centennial plans could include city and national proclamations, bringing national figures to Worcester for the celebration, establishing a permanent Goddard visitors site, creating a special postage stamp, and introducing Goddard into the school system curriculum.

Slatkin believes many people in Worcester County don’t know who Robert Goddard is. “We really haven’t done enough to own the Goddard legacy. The centennial is a great opportunity to own that message.”

Clarkies Make a Splash at WooTank

The setting was Worcester’s venerable BrickBox Theater, but the Clark University student entrepreneurs who pitched their businesses in the April 2 WooTank intercollegiate competition took every opportunity to step outside the box. Their efforts paid off—literally—when they came away with the night’s top honors and largest cash awards against competitors from Holy Cross, WPI, and Nichols College. The judges awarded the largest individual prize of the night, $4,000, to SOPHIE LEE ’26 (right), owner of Sophremacy, which sells gothic and punk-inspired jewelry and accessories.

OWEN CHASE ’26, owner of Just for Fun Farms, which specializes in growing nutrient-dense microgreens for direct sale to students, was awarded $3,000 by the judges. The Clark students’ combined total of $7,000 surpassed that of any other college in the competition.

WooTank involved students pitching their business ideas to a panel of industry leaders in technology, sales, and marketing in a format modeled on the popular show “Shark Tank.”

“They were incredibly complimentary to Sophie and Owen,” says Teresa Quinn, who managed Clark’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program. “They both just blew it out of the water.”

ART ON FIRE

During the spring semester, a group of 20 Clark art history and studio art majors were inducted as founding members of the Clark University chapter of Kappa Pi, an international art honor society with at least 300 chapters. The event was held in the Schiltkamp Gallery with the student art exhibition “Convergence” as the backdrop. Pictured, Professor TOBY SISSON hands out electric tea lights during the ceremony.

The Write Stuff

Clark may be the only university in existence with two books that have traveled through space.

Well, sort of.

Both books are miniature-sized autobiographies of Clark rocketry pioneer Robert H. Goddard. One was brought on board the Apollo 11 mission by Buzz Aldrin—son of Edwin Aldrin, Clark class of 1915—and became the first book ever carried onto the moon. The other is an almost identical copy, except that it is bound in thin slices of meteorite.

ROSS HELLER ’63, an author, publisher, and collector of rare books, presented the meteorite-bound book to Goddard Library’s Archives and Special Collections. In an interview with The Scarlet, he explained that he purchased the book after seeing an advertisement for it in a specialty magazine, and decided to give it to the University now rather than bequeath it.

“I’m 80 years old and in wonderful health— but nobody lives forever,” Heller told The Scarlet. “I thought, ‘Better to make sure it gets to the right place at the right time.’ And so that’s what I did.”

JUST MY TYPE

Diabetics of Clark, a student organization founded in 2021 by BECCA BURNETT ’22 and MAIRE O’DONNELL ’23, celebrated the installation of emergency low stations in four campus locations. The stations contain single-serve sources of glucose that club members can access in case of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). The 2023–24 co-presidents (left to right) GRACE DOWLING ’24, and AINE SHEEHAN ’24 display the technology they use to manage their Type 1 diabetes: Dowling wears a Dexcom G7 continuous glucose monitor, and Sheehan wears the OmniPod 5 insulin pump.

STEVEN KING

CLARK MEANS BUSINESS

Clark’s School of Management has been renamed the Clark University School of Business.

Dean David Jordan said the new name is an important step in larger efforts to ensure that the Clark education strongly aligns with students’ interests, ambitions, and career paths while also creating business leaders who are forces for positive change in their companies and in a world struggling with myriad social issues, including climate change, poverty, and equitable access to technologies.

The former School of Management “for 42 years responded to the interests and needs of students,” Jordan told The Worcester Business Journal, “but students who are coming in this fall are asking a lot more questions about the relevance of business and the importance of business.”

In the spring, The Princeton Review included Clark’s School of Business among its Best Business Schools of 2024.

‘YOUR PASSION IS GIVEN TO YOU AS A GIFT’ Short Stories

ROSALIE ODUOR, M.S. ’24, has been building a career in the music industry for the past decade. A native of Nairobi, Kenya, she is a well-known singer in her home country, with over 40,000 followers on Instagram and 9,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, where her videos have earned more than 200,000 views. She recently signed with Platoon Africa, a subsidiary of Apple Music, to extend her reach in the entertainment industry.

While still a teenager, Oduor was invited to perform Kenya’s national anthem at an upcoming concert. The moment was extra special because the festival featured Burna Boy, a popular Nigerian singer, songwriter, and music producer.

“When I got on the stage to sing the national anthem, a music label representative was there. When I got off that stage, I was immediately signed,” she recalls.

Oduor, who sings in five languages, including Mandarin, describes her music as Afropop, which is high tempo and danceable. She’s steadfast about managing her own career—writing her own music, designing her own costumes, and choregraphing her shows. Her career aspirations led her to study marketing analytics at Clark, where she’s learned how to effectively reach a wider audience not only as a performer but as a brand influencer.

“Your passion is given to you as a gift,” she says, “and you need to remind yourself that there’s a reason you have it.”

MICHAEL ADDIS

Syllabus

“Let go of the idea that men are supposed to behave and feel and think a certain way.”

COURSE

Psychology of Men

TEACHER

Michael Addis

“Be a man.”

It’s an admonition that historically has meant one thing: Toughen up. And men have heard it all the way back to boyhood. In his Psychology of Men course, Professor Michael Addis notes the widening recognition that being a man is a far more complex and nuanced construct. As the author of Invisible Men: Men’s Inner Lives and the Consequences of Silence, and in his research, Addis investigates how the understanding of, and expectations for, men are evolving alongside shifting cultural and societal norms.

Who enrolls in your course?

It’s a capstone course for psychology majors. Not surprisingly, more femalethan male-identifying people are in the class for three reasons: Slightly more women than men are going to college, there are more female psychology majors than male psych majors, and it’s still unsettling for

some men to talk about the psychology of men. That said, I’ve seen the reluctance to engage with the topic decrease over the years at Clark. I have more men taking the class now than I used to.

There’s a school of thought that men are losing ground in the modern world. Do you find this to be true?

I think that’s a very broad statement that partly comes out of fear of change and resistance to change. Traditional gender roles for men, in this country and around the world, are shifting. Some might call that a crisis if they feel like it’s a bad change; some might call it an opportunity—it depends on where you’re coming from. I see young men, especially at Clark, really engaging in all new ways of being in the world.

How do you approach the widespread notion of toxic masculinity?

Toxic masculinity is a term that evolved in popular culture but has not proven useful in scientific research. One of the problems is that the term itself assumes that there’s a toxic ver-

sion of masculinity and a nontoxic version—and that all we’ve got to do is get rid of the toxic version and the so-called positive side of masculinity will be allowed to thrive.

That may come from a place of wanting to highlight some of the good things men can do, not only the problematic things. But how about we just let go of the idea of masculinity per se; the idea that says men are supposed to perform and behave and feel and think a certain way because of their gender? There’s a whole range of positive experiences for men related to emotional awareness, intimacy, and connections with other people. All these things are helped by letting go of the pressure to be a certain way because of your gender.

You’re a musician, so it seems appropriate that you teach a class called Psychology of Music. How does music connect with the topics addressed in Psychology of Men?

My particular research interest for a long time has been about the way men experience and express emotional vulnerability. I’ve noticed that it’s very

difficult to get a conversation going with the men in my Psychology of Men class when I ask them what they may be facing in their lives. But with Psychology of Music, men are talking about how music makes them feel, what they listen to based on how they’re feeling, and specific songs that were crucial for them at critical moments in their lives. Music is one of the few social contexts in this country where men are allowed to express raw vulnerability.

I thought this would be a one-off class when I first started teaching it, but a decade later there’s a waiting list to take it.

3 LISTEN TO MICHAEL ADDIS DISCUSS HIS RESEARCH AT

Humanities Humanity Human Hope

Does the world need poets?

Or historians? Philosophers, linguists, or painters?

Can we afford the time or expend the energy to pursue deeper meaning and elevated expression when the world is buffeted by environmental disruption, warfare, social inequity, political unrest, and technologies that are behaving more and more, well, human?

These are questions that get asked during cynical times.

They’re getting asked now.

In the following pages, our scholars consider the modern state of humanities—their urgency and relevancy; how they help us to respond and adapt, embrace and transform, resist falsity and seek truth.

Our faculty address how Clark humanities are evolving to meet the modern challenges of artificial intelligence and climate change, while also taking fresh approaches to traditional literature, language, and the arts, with new regard for some of their most renowned practitioners.

Here’s

looking at you, William Shakespeare.

The humanities reveal the complexities of humanity.

They unlock the art of being human. They offer hope.

We have a story to tell here at Clark. Let’s get to it.

The Humanities in 2024

I. Humanity’s Parable

BY MEREDITH WOODWARD KING

3 In choosing a book for the Class of 2026 to read and discuss collectively during their first semester as Clark University students, Clark scholars selected Octavia Butler’s 1993 dystopian science fiction novel Parable of the Sower

Set in the year 2024, the book envisions a world beset by all manner of unrest generated by climate change, disease, racism, violence, and widespread homelessness. It follows the story of an African American teenager, Lauren, and her community, who fight for survival amid the social and environmental turmoil.

The book—which shot to the top of bestseller lists during the pandemic—is not a lesson in bleakness, insists English Professor BETSY HUANG, who has long studied the post-apocalyptic story and taught it in her classes. Indeed, she sees Parable as a cautiously hopeful tale that holds out the possibility for a meaningful life springing from a

BETSY HUANG

troubled world.

If you ask Huang about the future of humanity and the humanities, which face disruption from seemingly unmitigable forces such as climate change and artificial intelligence, she will direct you to pragmatic visions of hope and eye-opening messages of caution offered by contemporary speculative fiction writers. She says speculative fiction, like Butler’s Parable series, helps to make meaning of it all “by forcing us to take stock of what we find valuable in our everyday life.”

Likewise, studying the humanities brings people face to face with questions about “the pursuit of the good life, and what that good life means,” she says.

“Is the good life about consumer power, where your degree will translate into a job that allows you to function as the kind of consumer that our capitalistic economy encourages?” Huang asks. “Or is it about another way of being in this world, attuned to the life and longevity of not only the human race but every other species on this planet?”

In this age of AI and other emerging technologies, speculative fiction also raises questions about what it means to be human and to be alive, she says.

“For over a century, speculative fiction has been in this conversation about how technology has been folded into the human condition and even physically into the human body, changing the way that we function intellectually, biologically, and relationally,” Huang says. She notes the influences in literature and pop culture of human-technology interfaces, from Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein in the 1800s, to Philip K. Dick’s androids in the 1960s, to Spike Jonze’s Her and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun in recent decades.

To better understand those who embrace “technology as the

solution to everything,” Huang took a class on AI through MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

What was missing from classroom discussions, she says, was something that she believes Clark can introduce into its liberal arts curriculum: “The overarching philosophical and existential questions about what AI is really going to mean for the human race.”

For the near future, she says, “It’s still very much a human-AI partnership. Humans need to learn how to coexist with AI and consistently understand AI as a tool to help them think about what would improve conditions of humanity. Even though AI does mean the end of many ways of doing things, it doesn’t have to mean the end of times. How we use or abuse AI as a shortcut for doing the kind of work that gives human life its sense of meaning is the most critical question we can ask every time we are presented with a tool this powerful. Unfortunately, not enough of the creators of these tools are asking these questions responsibly.”

Huang reminds us that powerful technologies have not replaced artistic creativity and work. Despite having access to digital music and books, she points out, people still flock to live performances of music and theater where they appreciate the labor and love that goes into producing the art.

And therein, Huang insists, lies the value of the humanities.

“The humanities provide a person with the vocabularies they need to make sense of their experience in the world in all its dimensions, to be able to articulate it, and to feel that they are creating their own experience and value rather than simply receiving it,” she says. “It is very important to study all things that make us human, but it’s also in the act and in the performance of our humanity that truly reminds us of who we are in this world.”

Yak and Hack

3 EDUARD ARRIAGA-ARANGO arrived at Clark just as his peers faced new challenges and opportunities posed by emerging technologies.

The time was right. Arriaga studies how language, literature, culture, and technology collide and intersect.

“IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO STUDY ALL THINGS THAT MAKE US HUMAN.”

“Within digital humanities, we use computers and digital technology to explore questions in the humanities, and we also question technology,” says the associate professor and chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Culture. “We ask, ‘How is technology improving humanity, and how is it possibly decreasing the importance of humanity?’ ”

Within the Higgins School of Humanities (recently renamed the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities), Arriaga helped launch the Digital Humanities Research Collaborative. Last spring, he taught a workshop, with colleagues from the Computer Science Department and music and data science programs, on using technology for textual analysis, data mining, and visualization in arts and humanities research.

Arriaga first discovered “the power of computation” to quickly compile information almost two decades ago when he was a Ph.D. student in Hispanic studies and migration studies at the University of Western Ontario. He conducted research in the university’s newly launched CulturePlex laboratory. “We started to use those tools

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower was named one of “9 Banned Books We Just Can’t Live Without” by Oprah Daily.

“ WE WANT PEOPLE NOT ONLY TO SPEAK BUT ALSO TO CREATE THINGS.”

EDUARD ARRIAGA-ARANGO

not to replace what we do in the humanities but to look at humanities questions from other perspectives,” he says.

Arriaga characterizes the differences between traditional and digital humanities as “yak and hack.”

“The yak is the theoretical approach that we in the humanities usually take, discussing everything and being philosophical,” he explains. “But in the digital humanities, we bring out the hack. We want people not only to speak but also to create things, to use those creations to think and then speak.” Those “things” might include a visualization (a graphical representation of data and information), model, web page, or database.

When studying a novel, for instance, a researcher could use data mining to quickly evaluate historical and literary contexts and “patterns” by analyzing other works published at the same time.

“You definitely can do similar research with a pen and paper, but how long would it take for you to get to these conclusions?” Arriaga asks.

In his research, he uses both a “yak” and “hack” approach. Through a grant from the Higgins Institute, he is applying digital humanities methods to investigate the connections between data mining—a process through which corporations and governments appropriate humans’ intellectual and creative work—and the extraction of minerals from the earth.

“Mining, the physical activity of extracting value from the earth, is connected, metaphorically and concretely, with data mining, which is extracting value from data,” Arriaga says.

Meanwhile, his research on Afro-Latinx and Afro-Latin American cultures and identities explores other social, political, and ethical questions surrounding technology. He is interested in how marginalized communities “apply technology but also use data to challenge how technology has been used to marginalize them and to use that power to give a message to the world that they exist and that they are human beings.”

M.W.K.

Fingerprints on the Keyboard

3 Amid technological advances like ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools, Clark’s faculty are examining how to prepare students for a fast-changing world while empowering them to move about in that same world with confidence, with empathy, and as critical thinkers. As humanists.

“It’s an exciting time. As someone who is interested in technology and sci-fi, I think, ‘Well, here comes the future.’ And it’s coming at us really quick,” says JOHN MAGEE, dean of the college and professor of computer science.

Yet some remain anxious, he acknowledges. “The concerns are, are we going to delegate some of what it means to be human over to AI and to computers? And if we do that, are we going to lose out both individually and societally?”

The world has faced technolog-

ical disruptions before that have reshaped society, Magee points out, from the printing press to the personal computer to the internet.

Around 2012, Magee’s area of research—computer vision, AI, and machine learning—began to dominate the computer science field.

It then took more than a decade—and the release of ChatGPT to the public—for most educational institutions to wake up and realize the potential impacts of large language learning models on the curriculum. The notion of artificial intelligence “writing” fully formed books, articles, and, yes, college papers, has sent a chill through academia.

“What I find interesting is that this moment gives us the opportunity to question” how we teach students at Clark, Magee says. “We need to look at where we can have meaningful impacts. What should we be doing that still allows us to contribute to society in meaningful ways?”

In 1949, Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa launched a 30-year project with IBM to computerize an index of the works of Thomas Aquinas. JOHN MAGEE

As a longtime consumer of post-apocalyptic fiction, Magee sees parallels in how higher education might approach the use of AI.

“The potential dystopian future in higher education is this: Students write AI-generated essays and turn them in, and then professors use AI grading to grade them,” he says. “If we get to that point, we’re too late. We cannot turn over human cognition to the machines.”

To integrate AI and any other technological advances, Clark could reconsider student learning outcomes, Magee says. “What can students do that can be possibly augmented by those tools, not replaced by the tools? How do we ensure that students can still analyze a piece of literature or create art or describe what art is?

“You can still pose an intellectual problem as a human, and if you figure out how to use a particular tool, it might allow you to be more effective in solving that problem,” he notes. “Computer scientists recognize that the most interesting problems are not computational but societal. Understanding the world’s problems from a humanities perspective is vitally important.”

“ WE CANNOT TURN OVER HUMAN COGNITION TO THE MACHINES.”

ULM

M.W.K.

TERRASA

IV. Tell Me How It Begins, and Ends

3 Storytelling lies at the heart of what makes us human, from primitive etchings on cave walls to tales of astronauts leaving footprints on the moon. It’s the thread running through the arts and humanities, according to Professor TERRASA ULM, director of the undergraduate program in interactive media in Clark’s Becker School of Design & Technology.

“People are constantly engaged in storytelling. We’re picking up stories from everyone else, and then those become part of the stories we’re telling,” Ulm says. “We’re passing on genetics, and we’re also

Ulm’s interactive play, Waiting for Obols, debuted at Clark on December 15, 2022.

passing on stories from a millennia ago. It’s beautiful to me. Storytelling is everything that is the human experience.”

Interactive media, too, “is all about storytelling,” she says. Students develop stories by programming games, writing narratives, developing characters, and creating art and music. They integrate what they’ve learned in liberal arts classes at Clark to build engaging digital experiences.

“Students go to a university to become a whole person, to engage with their passions on a deeper level of understanding, and to be part of society and humanity,” Ulm says.

For that reason, in the Becker School, “we’re not just about teaching tools. We use them and explore them because we’re curious people, but ultimately, we create dynamic experiences and approach our passions through the humanities.”

Ulm integrates the arts and humanities, along with an interactive storytelling approach, into her classes and research.

For the past two years, she has taught a class, Interactive Theater, with professors Ezra Cove and Amanda Theinert of the Becker School and Jessie Darrell-Jarbadan of Visual and Performing Arts. The plays have no scripts or pre-scripted dialogue—just “worlds” written by Ulm. Students develop charac-

ters, sets, props, and costumes. Darrell-Jarbadan offers costume design expertise, Cove creates 3D models that bring costumes to life, and Theinert oversees set and lighting design.

Students apply methods used in game character design, “writing just enough backstories about their characters so they can embody them,” Ulm says. “There is no audience—there are only participants who walk in and engage with everybody to figure out what the story is, to follow the story, to discover the story. We have no idea what they’re going to say or do.”

Through another class, Embodying Virtual Avatars, Ulm covers the history of objects and images that humans have used to represent themselves in imagined worlds and spaces, from dolls in childhood play to digital personas in games and social media. Students create visual designs and 3D models of their avatars, develop backstories, and livestream final performances on the Twitch platform.

“By getting into these characters, you understand the power of representing yourself and being able to tell your story in your own way—not being confined by stereotypes and how people see you,” Ulm says.

As part of a three-year research project led by Professor Timothy Downs of the Department of Sustainability and Social Justice, Ulm is working with students and faculty to design an extended reality (XR) project that uses interactive storytelling to help communities understand how climate change will impact water resources in Mexico.

“STORYTELLING IS EVERYTHING THAT IS THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE.”

Outside of Clark, Ulm tells stories through her interactive media art, including avatars, alternate reality games—known as ARGs— and other digital experiences that connect “the reality of your lived experience and the reality of a fictional story.”

“Storytelling is a collaborative experience,” Ulm says. “The story I’m telling isn’t told until someone else is involved in hearing it and putting their own imagination into it. We’re all engaged in storytelling together.”

M.W.K.

V. Narratives of Nature

3 When STEPHEN LEVIN, associate professor of English, first offered Ecofictions: Literature and the Environment in fall 2023, the undergraduate course filled up quickly with highly engaged students.

“It was one of the most exciting teaching experiences I’ve had in my career,” he says.

As the world witnessed the damaging effects of climate change that year, from wildfires to flooding, students confronted fundamental questions about what it means to be human and “how we understand the human entanglement with the non-human world.”

Through readings in “ecocriticism” and environmental literature by authors in the U.S. and Global South, Levin’s students dove deeply into “examining colonialism, processes of domination, and the politics of power and identity,” he says.

Yet their core assignment was to undertake “an everyday life project,” inspired by literary critic and scholar Andrew Epstein’s book, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture.

“The absolutely overwhelming nature of the environmental crisis makes it important to think in smaller contexts of what you can do, and how you can reflect on what you can control in your day-to-day

personal decisions,” he explains, “and not to be completely destabilized or rendered passive.”

For almost a decade Levin has been involved in research in the environmental humanities, a field that took off after the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in 1992.

“The realization of planetary crisis, and a shared sense of precarity, is what has made the current version of environmental humanities exceedingly important,” Levin says. “Environmental issues are more than a technocratic problem merely to be managed. If we rely solely on metrics, then something crucial is being missed.”

Increasingly, Clark—whose social and natural sciences faculty have long been celebrated for their research in climate change, sustainability, and conservation—is paying attention to the environmental humanities.

This year, the Higgins Institute for the Arts and Humanities and A New Earth Conversation, a university-wide climate initiative, announced four faculty fellows in the environmental humanities who are developing courses for next spring. They include Levin and Geography Professor Max Ritts, who have proposed a course on Ecologies and Energies; Francophone

and Language, Literature, and Culture Professor ODILE FERLY, who will offer a class on Decolonial Ecologies in the Caribbean; and History Professor Nana Kesse, who will teach African Environmental History.

Ferly has been interested in environmental issues since her childhood in Guadeloupe. Due to rising ocean temperatures and water levels, the Caribbean islands face climate impacts including bleached coral reefs, receding mangrove forests that make communities more vulnerable to increased hurricanes, and beaches infested with jellyfish.

“I will focus my class on the human response to environmental changes, whether it’s an artistic response, cultural response, social response, or political response,” Ferly says.

“Literature and film have much more potential to make people react to what is happening and make a change, instead of simply hearing about those issues from scientists and politicians,” she insists. “The humanities engage with the imagination, which is important for thinking about the future.”

M.W.K.

Studies

ODILE FERLY

“THE PLANETARY CRISIS HAS MADE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES EXCEEDINGLY IMPORTANT.”

STEPHEN LEVIN

3 As a philosophy major studying the ethical issues surrounding emerging technologies, TETRAH CLARK ’24 grew to appreciate the role that the humanities could play in helping people become better digital citizens.

“I think the humanities are more important than ever,” creating an academic rigor through which people can “think critically about the information and technologies they encounter,” says Clark, who is pursuing a master of library science degree from Indiana University and hopes to work for a “cyber library” or internet archive. “I think the humanities need people from all different backgrounds contributing to conversations going on within them.”

As a home-schooled student growing up in Massachusetts, Clark developed a passion for libraries, where she spent hours reading, studying, and writing.

Later at Clark, she took Philosophy Professor Arden Ali’s course, Technology, Ethics, and Public Policy, where she conducted research and submitted public comments solicited by governmental organizations like the Federal Communications Commission and the United Nations.

The assignments allowed her to tap into her love of libraries and further explore the role they can

Navigating the New Library

play in educating the public.

“Libraries are more important than ever because they provide access to learning and access to how to navigate learning,” Clark says. “But I don’t think the future of libraries is a return to physical assets like books and a card catalog.” Instead, she adds, “libraries are becoming a space to educate people on how to navigate the information presented to them, especially online and with technologies like generative AI.”

For her capstone research project, Clark further investigated the intersections between philosophy and technology by studying how people use memes to communicate. She presented her project, “What Do You Meme? The Philosophy of Language and Memes,” at ClarkFEST, the semiannual undergraduate research event.

When the printing press emerged during the 15th century, she explains, “our language changed, and we began to create new symbols to save space and to attribute new meaning to symbols and pictures.”

Today’s technology integrates not just text but more images, videos, and other visual assets. “Memes,” she says, “are the next way we’re communicating.”

Much like her research projects, the field of library science and information sciences “perfectly encapsulates the interdisciplinary nature of the humanities,” Clark says, and will allow her to continue to explore deep philosophical questions.

“I consider myself a philosopher first and foremost,” she says, “and within that, I think about the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of information.”

M.W.K.

Quenching the Inner Thirst for Knowledge

to our humanities faculty discuss their work on the Challenge. Change. podcast.

“ MEMES ARE THE NEXT WAY WE’RE COMMUNICATING.”

3 Professor OUSMANE POWER-GREENE doesn’t believe that the teaching and learning of college-level history should be contained only to a select few who can afford the privilege. This conviction leads him into neighborhoods in Springfield and Holyoke, where he engages students who are eager to access his expertise, but who, without a vital initiative supporting them, might otherwise be unable to do so.

Power-Greene is an instructor in The Clemente Course in the Humanities, a nationwide program providing free accredited college humanities courses to adults facing economic hardship and other adverse circumstances that impede them from pursuing higher education opportunities. The goal is to empower the participants not only to expand their knowledge and boost their careers, but also to “engage actively in the cultural and civic lives of their communities.”

Power-Greene, who has been teaching Clemente courses since 2014, said the thirst for humanities education is intense and egalitarian—participants can range in age from the late teens to 70s (or older) and represent a wealth of ethnic, cultural, and national identities. Some have long been living in the U.S.; others are pursuing citizenship. But when they walk into a Clemente classroom, they are united in one important way: They want to be there. Heartily.

“These people are incredibly eager to engage, and there’s joy in that,” Power-Greene says. “Everyone brings with them an inner thirst for knowledge and their own understanding of the world, which really drives deep conversation, debate, and questions. Sometimes they’ll tell me, ‘We didn’t talk about this stuff in our high school history class.’ ” To date, 10,000 people have taken part in Clemente seminars.

Launched in New York City in 1996, The Clemente Course was established in Holyoke in 1999 by DAVID TEBALDI ’69, then executive director, CEO, and president of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and was expanded into other low-income communities

VII.

TETRAH CLARK

Listen

in urban centers across the state, including Worcester. Tebaldi, who majored in philosophy at Clark, recruited humanities scholars from colleges around the commonwealth, with Power-Greene and fellow history professor AMY RICHTER among Clark’s most enthusiastic practitioners. Last year, Richter earned Clark’s John W. Lund Community Achievement Award for her Clemente work in Worcester, including as the local program’s academic director.

“The animating belief of The Clemente Course is that the study of the humanities provides us with knowledge and skills that enable us to take fuller control of our lives, to think and act deliberatively, and to be more active and informed citizens,” Tebaldi says. “Here was an opportunity to demonstrate that the humanities are not just for college-educated elites. They are for everyone.

“Working with a diverse community of avid adult learners who

bring an astonishing array of often heart-wrenching life experiences to the interpretation of texts, the relevancy of history, and the nuances of moral reasoning, presents new ways of approaching the essential questions that are the unique purview of the humanities.”

Power-Greene notes that the simple act of handing a person a book and saying, “You’ve got to read this,” or urging someone to visit an art gallery, can filter into a community in a powerful way. It is how the recipients of that guidance interpret the materials and immerse themselves in essential dialogues about history, literature, art, and ethics that have become the hallmarks of Clemente courses.

“Always, we’re trying to get at not just what we do, but why we do it,” Power-Greene says. “People have questions and opinions about the ‘why,’ which they’re eager to express. That’s a great thing.”

JIM KEOGH

“HUMANITIES ARE NOT JUST FOR COLLEGE-EDUCATED ELITES. THEY ARE FOR EVERYONE.”

The Humanities in 2024

As of August 2024, IMDB gives Shakespeare writing credit on 1,852 films, including 47 upcoming projects.

Why do the Bard’s works resonate in our modern age? Maybe because people still seek love. Go to war. Hunger for power. Have midsummer nights’ dreams …

BY MELISSA LYNCH ’95, M.S. ’15

3 Growing up in Southeast Texas, Justin Shaw never saw a Shakespeare play performed. As much as he hoped to be inspired, the Bard simply didn’t feel relevant.

“As a young Black guy in Texas, reading about some despondent white prince whining about stuff and never doing anything about it wasn’t a good entry point,” he laughs.

During his junior year at Morehouse College, Shaw studied in London, where he took two classes in Shakespeare and watched live performances. Here, he discovered his missing inspiration.

“As far as I tried to run away from him, I kept running back to Shakespeare,” he recalls. “And I kept finding myself in Shakespeare.”

Illustration by Helena Pallarés

Shaw is still running back to the playwright, still finding himself in the verses, still discovering prescient lessons about contemporary political tumult, social struggles, and class conflicts embedded in stage pieces written 400 years ago.

As Clark’s resident Shakespeare scholar in the English Department, he works not only to help his students perceive why Shakespeare continues to move audiences to tears, to laughter, to deeper understandings of human motivation— but also why his words still matter, since he last put quill pen to paper in 1610.

Can a playwright who died four centuries ago truly shed light on who we are in 2024? Should his work still be an essential part of our literature studies?

Yes to both, Shaw says.

• “Like madness is the glory of this life.”

TIMON OF ATHENS

When Shaw joined the Clark University English faculty in 2020, his first class, an advanced Shakespeare seminar, was titled Kings, Queens, and Tyrants. It was a presidential election year, the U.S. was extraordinarily divided, and the coronavirus was killing thousands of people every week.

“People are putting their lives on the line, and we’re reading a play?” Shaw recalls thinking. “I was curious: What’s the purpose of a Shakespeare class in a world like this?”

In his classes, Shaw invites his students not just to read Shakespeare, but “to do Shakespeare” and to see themselves in the plays. “There are so many characters, so many scenarios we can find ourselves in, with plots that represent very real situations. That’s when it stops being about a dead white guy they have to study, who everyone says is so important. I want them to see and feel the importance.”

He notes that English departments have long required students to take Shakespeare courses to earn their degree, and many classes are taught in such a way “that reinforces the old vanguard of ‘Shakespeare is the best writer ever.’

“You have professors thinking that their job is to teach you the genius of Shakespeare, and if you can’t get it, that’s your problem,” he says. “I’m not one of those people.”

•

“Life’s but a walking shadow.”

MACBETH

“Shakespeare has been an essential vehicle for the most important debates about humanity, culture, and society for the last 300 years,” says Virginia Mason Vaughan, professor emerita of English, who was Clark’s resident Shakespeare scholar for 37 years.

The author put his pen to race, gender, class, and ableism in his comedies, tragedies, and history plays. The comedies include marriage games, with “men and women figuring it out,” Vaughan says, although at the time women were legally subordinate—and when the plays were performed, women weren’t allowed to act, so the female characters were portrayed by men.

“The issue of women’s place in society is still relevant today,” Vaughan notes, as is the concept of masculinity, which takes center stage in numerous plays.

Vaughan also believes Shakespeare’s contribution to language cannot be discounted. “He was writing at a time when language was changing. The vernacular was developing, the printing press had been invented, and more people were learning to read.

“So many of his phrases have become second nature to us,” she adds, like “household words,” “good riddance,” “love is blind,” “a foregone conclusion,” and about 1,700 words the playwright is credited with inventing.

In 2002, to give students an opportunity to engage with Shakespeare beyond the classroom, Vaughan launched the annual Undergraduate Shakespeare Conference, which allows students to present papers that examine the many facets of the playwright and his works. Student researchers from across the country attended the 2024 “Shakespeare and Play” conference at Clark, where they heard the keynote address

“ WE USE SHAKESPEARE TO READ CULTURE—TO READ LIFE.”

delivered by David Sterling Brown, author of Shakespeare’s White Others.

April Chronowski ’25, whose paper, “Shakespeare and Theater as Our Green World,” earned the conference’s third place prize, examined the idea of theater as “a tool for social change and individual exploration.”

In plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, characters escape the order of the city by fleeing to a nearby forested and wild setting. In this natural environment, they resolve issues around romantic relationships, social order, and intergenerational struggles, which exist in the real world.

“The plays are timeless and show the vast array of human experiences—the underlying themes still speak to modern audiences” because they are filled with relatable human emotion, Chronowski said. The texts offer a way for audiences, like Shakespeare’s characters, to “step aside from society” and explore their own motivations and personalities.

“Externalizing our differences makes it easier to deal with them.”

• “If you prick us, do we not bleed? ” THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

Shaw’s own research interests lie in how Early Modern/Renaissance dramatists and poets use “the language of melancholy” in areas of

The Hillsborough County school district in Florida has banned the full text of Romeo and Juliet due to the play’s sexual content.

JUSTIN SHAW

race or otherness.

“It’s not just feeling down or anxious,” he explains. “It’s power versus powerlessness. It’s the feeling of living in the world as a person who is queer, or who is ‘othered’ in some way, or, in different points in history, as a woman. It’s the feeling of living in the U.S. right now, especially in certain states, where there is anxiety about moving through life. It’s being Black in a world where you don’t know how a police encounter will end for you.”

Some characters in Shakespeare are trying to exist and thrive in an oppressive world. “Othello is a respectable Black man who just wants a seat at the table,” Shaw says, “while Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus wants to destroy the table.” In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is “the other” because he is a Jew.

“I see real-life people’s situations reflected in Shakespeare,” Shaw says. “But I don’t think Shakespeare is the only place we can find them. You have to kind of get a bigger picture of what’s going on; Shakespeare was also watching other plays. Sometimes, to understand Shakespeare, you have to get away from Shakespeare.”

In some states—including Shaw’s native Texas—students are getting away from Shakespeare because the plays are being banned from the classroom. “There are important issues in Shakespeare, as there are in a lot of texts, that we should be dealing with head-on,” Shaw says. “I remind my own students often that we have an incredible privilege here at Clark to be able to openly discuss ideas about race and racism, about gender and sexual orientation, about class and religion, and to use these texts to be honest with ourselves about these issues in our own lives.”

In his most recent advanced Shakespeare course, Shakespeare in Black and White, Shaw stressed the importance of Shakespeare by “decentering” the plays. He started by exploring race in two tragedies, Othello and Hamlet, which helps students develop a method for seeing obvious—“and not so obvious”—racism in the texts. He then moved on to modern plays, all by writers of color, that are adaptations of Shakespeare.

The Humanities in 2024

“We use Shakespeare to read culture, to read life, and then use these other modern dramas to bridge the gap.”

• “A rarer spirit never did steer humanity.”

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

As an assignment, Shaw asks his students to write sonnets about topics that interest, challenge, or move them. “I love seeing them work through very personal and important issues through Shakespearean form and content. That’s what Shakespeare did.”

Shakespeare is not the be-all and end-all (a Macbeth phrase) of literature studies, but “he provides a helpful lens through which we can read the world,” Shaw says.

When his students graduate from Clark, they may never read another Shakespeare play, “but they’re going to encounter texts. They’re going to encounter politics. They’re going to encounter difference. I want them to be able to encounter anything in the world and say, ‘I know how to read this situation.

“ ‘I’ve seen this somewhere before.’ ” n

AinLegacy Bloom

Donald Lee ’95, a bilateral amputee, performed a stirring dance in Higgins’ 2020 “Bodies” program.

The Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities boasts a rich history and prepares for a robust future

BY JIM KEOGH

3 Most people who walked by the silver-haired woman planting tulips and geraniums around campus did not know her, if they noticed her at all.

Given Alice Higgins’ innate humility, her anonymity came as no surprise. Kneeling in the soil with a trowel in hand was simply her quiet expression of a love as sturdy as a fieldstone foundation and as delicate as a tulip petal. The object of her devotion: Clark University. Higgins is a consequential figure in Clark’s history, a longtime leader and benefactor known for a dynamism that matched her generosity. In 1962, she became the first woman elected to the Board of Trustees, and from 1967 to 1974 served as the first female chair of a board of trustees at an American research university. She was instrumental in planning and fundraising for signature University structures, like the Goddard Library and Kneller Athletic Center, and looked fabulous in a hardhat at groundbreaking ceremonies. She had presence.

In 1986, seizing upon an idea proposed by then-Provost Leonard Berry, Higgins made a $1 million gift to establish the Higgins School of Humanities—a channel for

Illustration by Nate Williams

developing innovative programs, supporting compelling faculty research, and generating the kinds of conversations that bridge disciplines and give space for disparate, sometimes conflicting, ideas.

“Alice said to me several times that there wasn’t any problem that couldn’t be solved if people would just sit down and talk to each other,” says Virginia Mason Vaughan, professor emerita of English and the school’s first director.

The conversations and explorations persist, albeit under a new banner. Thirty-eight years after its founding, the Higgins School for Humanities has been renamed the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities. The essence of the Higgins mission is to promote “humanistic inquiries and practices that are crucial to our development as intellectually curious, socially engaged, and ethically oriented beings.” Those inquiries and practices continue, with added attention to how modern technologies and environmental changes shape our awareness of social complexities and challenges as they evolve and accelerate over time.

“The Higgins Institute can be described as bringing the world to Clark, with empathy,” says Director Matt Malsky. “Everything is done with humanity at the forefront. Not just humanities, but humanity.”

The initial iteration of the Higgins School focused on internal audiences, Vaughan recalls. Grants were distributed to support faculty research and enrichment activities for students. The school also hosted faculty-led seminars, often pairing professors from different departments who were interested in a common area of inquiry. The school launched the African American Intellectual Series, the brainchild of English Professor Winston Napier, and fostered faculty dialogues inside the Carriage House on Woodland Street, where the school was then based (it would later be relocated to Dana Commons).

“I made it a stipulation that if you got a substantial grant, you had to give a lecture about your research,” Vaughan recalls. “My first goal as director was to try and make the work of humanities scholars and students at Clark more visible.”

MATT MALSKY

TIMELY TALKS

The Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities has a long history of bringing to campus luminaries from a variety of fields to speak on matters shaping our world. A brief selection:

Author, activist, and a member of the famed Chicago Seven arrested for their part in the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention, Tom Hayden transfixed the audience in Dana Commons as he recounted his role in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. “It was a time of pure beauty and uprisings,” Hayden recalled. “We thought we could change the country and the world.”

Former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Tretheway read from her works, delving into matters of race, family, history, and the moving target that is our evolving perception of all three. Her selections combined personal experience and the intimacy of memoir with national history and the grand sweep of social and cultural change to “find out something deeply ingrained.”

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, revealed how our online existence is rewiring our minds, replacing deep thought with information overload, and overruling attentiveness with a steady stream of interruptions and distractions. In stark terms, he warned we are losing our capacity for deep, sustained thought and are becoming “suckers for irrelevancy.”

Author and historian Annette Gordon-Reed, whose investigation into the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved Sally Hemings earned her the Pulitzer Prize, spoke at Clark about the controversy surrounding the findings. “This story is of incredible importance to us in thinking about the history of race in this country, and the way history itself is written.”

“I did not grow up in a world where I ever felt safe,” transgender rights activist Janet Mock told an audience packed into Jefferson 320. In a dialogue with Amy Richter, director of the then-Higgins School, Mock recounted the challenges of growing up multiracial, poor, and transgender in America and the need to make room for oneself in the world. “Listen to yourself,” she advised students.

Stanley Pierre-Louis ’92, the CEO and president of the Entertainment Software Association, returned to campus as part of the Higgins “Fair Game(s)” symposium to discuss the societal impact of video games and the robust career outlook for students enrolled in game design programs at Clark. “They are literally always hiring in our industry,” he said.

“ EVERYTHING IS DONE WITH HUMANITY AT THE FOREFRONT. NOT JUST HUMANITIES, BUT HUMANITY.”

ALICE HIGGINS

Sarah Buie, professor of design in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, took over as director of the Higgins School in 2004 and amplified the conversation.

In 2005, Buie and William Fisher, then director of the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment (now the Department of Sustainability and Social Justice), led a group of 16 faculty and staff in navigating the application process when the Ford Foundation made a call for their new and timely program, Difficult Dialogues. Out of 720 applicants, Clark was among the 27 colleges and universities nationwide to be funded in December 2005. The Clark community embarked on a distinctive version of Difficult Dialogues in November 2006, making it the signature endeavor of the Higgins School for more than a decade.

Difficult Dialogues encouraged participants to address some of the thorniest issues of the day in ways where the ability to listen deeply was as highly valued as the expression of one’s own thoughts. The symposia, lectures, workshops, concerts, and exhibitions—many of them held in Dana Commons’ Higgins Lounge (known affectionately as “the Fishbowl”), which Buie designed and furnished—inspired participants to communicate thoughtfully and civilly across differences, no simple task in a polarized age.

Participants explored a host of topics, examining issues of race, gender, the state of our democracy, religion, our changing Earth, and the use and misuse of power, while the precepts of respectful, fruitful

dialogue were further incorporated into dozens of Clark courses. The fall 2010 theme of “Slowing in a Wired World” gave such fresh focus to modern society’s reliance on instant communication that The Boston Globe dispatched a reporter to campus to write about it.

During Buie’s transformative tenure, exploration and reflection on the human-environment relationship and the climate crises became a focus of many Difficult Dialogue symposia—bringing together almost 30 faculty with related research and teaching expertise.

As her term came to an end in 2012, Buie’s work at Higgins laid the groundwork for the creation of the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, initially funded by the Mellon Foundation through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. The early faculty councils led two campuswide climate teach-ins in 2015 and 2016 that brought together hundreds of students, faculty, staff, and visiting speakers from across the disciplines, among them writer and visionary Naomi Klein, for day-long considerations of the evolving environmental and social challenges facing us.

The council’s work has expanded to include hundreds of members representing prominent institutions across the U.S. and in several countries and served as the impetus among faculty for A New Earth Conversation (2017-23) at Clark, a campuswide curriculum initiative that brought a fresh approach to climate education.

“What does it mean to educate, to create a space of learning and nurture in these turbulent, revelatory times?” Buie has asked. “Might we meet our students in the realities of where we are, and what it means? Might we help seed a life-supporting society?”

It was standing room only in the Fishbowl when filmmaker Jennifer Potts held the Worcester premiere of her original documentary chronicling Afghan refugees who were making new lives for themselves in the city. Family members, friends, Worcester officials, and students from local schools gathered to

watch the film—which was translated into four different languages in real time—and then engaged in a wide-ranging discussion about what they’d just seen and their hopes and plans for the future.

The screening, held under the auspices of the now-Higgins Institute in partnership with the Worcester Arts Council, underscored the Institute’s emphasis on “public humanities,” which, as Matt Malsky puts it, “we’re bringing to the masses.”

“We find the fault lines where interesting conversations, discussions, and arguments happen,” Malsky continues. “Higgins has been the conduit through which Clark participates in these broader conversations happening off campus.”

The public humanities component joins the digital humanities and environmental humanities as the three pillars on which the Institute is shaping its endeavors today and in the near future.

The Higgins research collaboratives, beginning with the African American Intellectual Series and finding momentum with Early Modernists Unite, are exploring how traditional humanities can mesh with technologies to enhance research capabilities and bring fresh academic approaches to a generation of students who are native to the digital universe.

Partners from Computer Science and the Becker School of Design & Technology have been working with humanities faculty on ways that databases, imaging tools, and augmented reality (AR) and extended reality (XR) technologies can enhance the appreciation of the humanities. The Higgins Institute recently received a $500,000 Sherman Fairchild Foundation grant to create an Interactive Arts Faculty Collaborative to support this work.

“We are a liberal arts school, but part of the liberal arts will have to be about embracing technology that is in service to the liberal arts and reflects the multiple ways that people experience humanistic subjects,” Malsky says.

Environmental humanities, a mainstay in the Higgins Institute, have taken on even greater urgency as Clark prepares to open its School of Climate,

Higgins guests jazz bassist Ron Carter (above) and author-historian

Annette Gordondon-Reed earned honorary Clark degrees.

Environment, and Society in fall 2025. Last semester, Higgins and A New Earth Conversation announced four faculty fellows in English, geography, history, and languages who will develop courses that will explore climate challenges from a humanistic perspective.

“We’re looking to build communities of practice,” Malsky says. “And to do that, we need many different voices.”

Amy Richter, professor of history and a former director of the Higgins School, says one of the greatest joys of the Higgins directorship is saying “yes”—to faculty research grants, to distinctive programming, to bringing compelling speakers to campus.

“When Sarah was stepping down, she told me, ‘Being the director of the Higgins School is the best job on campus.’ She was right. I don’t think there are many places here where your job is fundamentally to say yes.”

The original “yes” was delivered by Alice Higgins in 1986 when she was asked to consider supporting a new humanities initiative. With the renaming to the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities, Clark has thrown its arms around the legacy of its benefactor.

“We’re at the tail end of a moment when people who actually knew Alice are still on campus, and I think it’s important that we keep her front and center,” Malsky says.

Higgins, who passed away in 2000, surely would have reveled in the growth and direction of the institute that bears her name. In 2011, to observe the then-Higgins School’s 25th anniversary, a celebration was held to honor her for making possible the innumerable innovative seminars and public programs, conferences, faculty research projects, exhibitions, and community conversations.

The title of the event was succinct, composed of three words feting a special woman for her vision and philanthropy to build an institution-within-the-institution, a hub for the frank exchange of ideas and a vessel to reimagine how we engage with the world.

“Thanks to Alice.” n

The Humanities in 2024

“Seven Nation Army,” a 2003 song by the White Stripes, includes a riff inspired by Bruckner’s 5th Symphony.

The Fourth Is with Him

BY MEREDITH WOODWARD KING

3 It was spring 1987 at Clark University, and music was in the air.

Lambsbread, a Vermont-based reggae band, played at Spree Day. Top hits like The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” and U2’s “With or Without You” wafted from the radio. And Benjamin Korstvedt, a onetime blues-loving, guitar-playing Deadhead who had expanded his purview to include the piano and canonical classical composers like Bach and Beethoven, graduated from Clark, summa cum laude, with a B.A. in music. With no immediate plan, he took a nondescript nine-to-five job.

One day while flipping through albums in the 99-cent bin at a local record store, Korstvedt uncovered the symphonies of 19th-century Austrian composer Anton Bruckner. Intrigued by a composer he had hardly encountered during his undergraduate years, Korstvedt bought the albums, took them home, and listened.

“I was captivated,” he recalls. “It struck me immediately as fascinating music, with so many innovative aspects, but also intensely expressive and dramatic.”

Little did he know his chance encounter would ignite such an enduring passion for the music that Korstvedt would someday become one of the world’s foremost authorities on Bruckner—a modern-day muse for the composer’s long-overlooked genius and impact.

A Bruckner Year

Nearly four decades since his discovery in that dusty record store bin—after researching Bruckner’s complex works and complicated history while studying for his X.

Musicologist Benjamin Korstvedt ’87 has recovered the legacy of composer Anton Bruckner by helping reclaim his “lost” symphony

Illustration by Chad Hagen

Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and after joining Clark’s faculty in 2002—Korstvedt is having his most extraordinary Bruckner experience yet. The Jeppson Professor of Music has been called upon to share his expertise during Austria’s “Bruckner Year,” which celebrates the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth on September 8, 1824, in a village near the city of Linz.

Korstvedt, president of the Bruckner Society of America since 2011, has been on sabbatical to conduct research and participate in various events throughout Austria.

In the spring, he delivered the keynote address for an international conference in Vienna sponsored by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and curated an exhibition and presented lectures as part of Austria’s Steinbach Mahler Festival. He spoke in Linz at the Bruckner University for Music and the Performing Arts about the composer’s Fourth Symphony and chaired the organizing committee for an international conference held at the “Bruckner Days” festival in St. Florian, Austria, where Brucker was a choir boy and later organist at St. Florian Abbey. In Britain, he presented the keynote address for the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research’s Fourth International Conference.

This fall in Vienna, New York, and Washington, Korstvedt is delving into the archives to research the musical and personal relationship between Bruckner and his younger composer friend Gustav Mahler for a future publication.

Changing Images of Bruckner

Over the years, depictions of Bruckner have been marked by dissonance, much like a discordant symphony. The composer has been seen as a misunderstood genius, a Catholic mystic, even a dangerous musical radical, according to Korstvedt. Austria’s 19th-century cultured elite generally regarded him as a “bumbling, rustic character from out in the provinces who was not very sophisticated.”

Throughout his life, Bruckner struggled to secure performances of his symphonies. But by the 1920s Jazz Age, during a period of rapid

social and cultural change—and just two decades after his death in 1896—Bruckner had become embraced as one of the most avant-garde composers of the symphony, Korstvedt notes.

“Every characterization of Bruckner emerges in a specific time and place—and is always shaped by the cultural tendencies and sociopolitical pressure of the moment,” he explains.

Egregiously, Bruckner’s image also was molded, exploited, and tarnished in the 1930s with the rise of Adolf Hitler, who also had been born in Linz near the German border. Hitler claimed the composer as a fellow German, symbolically annexing him just as he would soon politically and militarily annex the nation of Austria.

“Bruckner was heavily appropriated as a symbol not only of German art and music but also of the supposed unity of Germany and Austria,” Korstvedt says. “Hitler took a great interest in Bruckner’s music, and Bruckner became used as a symbol of German nationalism.” In a 1937 ceremony at the Walhalla temple, Germany’s “hall of fame” in the Bavarian city of Regensburg, Hitler celebrated the installation of his commissioned sculpture of the composer.

Critical fallout against Bruckner lasted until the 1950s and ’60s, according to Korstvedt, when the popularity of high-fidelity audio and LP recordings brought new appreciation for the intense symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler.

“Their music was, and is, a favor-

ite of people who are audiophiles. It’s good music to enjoy in stereo,” says Korstvedt, whose authoritative notes accompany Bruckner from the Archives, a six-doubleCD-volume series celebrating the 200th anniversary of Bruckner’s birth.

‘The Bruckner Problem’

In October, Oxford University will publish Korstvedt’s third book, Bruckner’s Fourth: The Biography of a Symphony. It’s the culmination of his research into a musical work that perhaps best defines what scholars call “the Bruckner Problem.”

For years, musicologists have disputed the authenticity of various versions of Bruckner’s works, especially his Fourth Symphony. During his lifetime, most of his symphonies were published with his approval, but in the 1930s scholars advanced the argument that these publications had been heavily edited by Bruckner’s friends and students supposedly without the composer’s approval or even awareness, according to Korstvedt. As a result, modern editors decided to publish only the “original” versions of his symphonies, even though many of these had not been published during the composer’s lifetime. Deep into his doctoral research, Korstvedt became aware of “striking contradictions” in the historical evidence pertaining to Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. The version of the Fourth published during Bruckner’s lifetime, Korstvedt says, “was

“BRUCKNER TAKES THE LISTENER ON A GREAT JOURNEY THROUGH ALL SORTS OF DIFFERENT EMOTIONS AND CONFLICTS.”

commonly believed to have been ‘mutilated’ by editors and possibly even produced without his awareness or agreement.”

This interpretation first emerged within Nazi Germany, which added to Korstvedt’s suspicions. “The more I delved into it, the clearer it became to me that a lot of the scholarly work was strongly shaped by the ideological context” of Nazi Germany, and he began to see that “the facts told a much different story.”

Immersed in unraveling the mysteries surrounding the Fourth, Korstvedt traveled to Austria in 1993 to examine photographs of a crucial but long-overlooked document from the symphony’s compositional process: a copy of the score prepared by Ferdinand Löwe, a former student of Bruckner’s who later became a leading conductor.

That score has a fraught history. It was made available to a sympa-

thetic scholar in 1940. But because Löwe and his family were identified by the Nazis as half-Jewish, the issue quickly became a cause célèbre that threatened to disrupt the official narrative of Bruckner as victim of unscrupulous editors. Given the great political investment in Bruckner’s music at that time and place, the scholarly debate was quickly silenced. After the war, the manuscript was returned to the Löwe family, but today its whereabouts remain unknown.

Korstvedt’s research convinced him that this version of the Fourth was not a corruption of Bruckner’s wishes but rather a clear expression of his final intentions. It reveals that “Bruckner had worked over the score closely and made many of the most important changes. He was totally involved in the process.”

Korstvedt’s revelation made waves among other Bruckner scholars. “There was quite a bit of

resistance to it,” he recalls, “and this persists in some circles.”

Editing an Award-Winning Fourth Symphony

Korstvedt’s argument did win over a key player: the managing editor of the Bruckner Collected Works, the late Herbert Vogg. He asked Korstvedt to prepare a new critical edition of this version of the Fourth Symphony. Korstvedt’s new edition of the Fourth, which has been performed across the world, fostered fresh insights into the composer’s musical thinking and creative process.

In a nod to Korstvedt’s contributions, The New York Times described Bruckner’s Fourth as “something of a work in progress” because of edits and tweaks by “followers, publishers and scholars. … The burden is on musicologists and conductors to decide which iteration is the most authentic, or just the best.”

More recently, Korstvedt collaborated on a major recording project with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and its conductor Jakub Hrůša that won the 2022 International Classical Music Awards’ Best Symphonic Recording category. The four-disc recording features three versions of Bruckner’s Fourth, all in new editions edited by Korstvedt, who also wrote the accompanying essay.

The Fourth’s complicated history may most intrigue Korstvedt, but for him Bruckner’s greatest symphony is the Eighth, the subject of his first book, Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 8, published by Cambridge University Press in 2000. “The Eighth plunges into some very great emotional depths,” he observes, “and the overall sweep of that symphony takes the listener on a great journey through all sorts of different emotions and conflicts to a very compelling resolution.”

In similar fashion, Korstvedt’s great journey through Austria for Bruckner Year is winding down. Much like Bruckner’s Eighth— which ends, Korstvedt says, with a “remarkably calming coda after the intense turbulence that preceded it”—the music professor will take a much-needed pause before returning to campus in January. n

Austria’s “Bruckner Year” included a 24hour birthday party in multiple cities on September 4.

BEN KORSTVEDT

Planned gifts that endure

To Emilee Cocuzzo ’18, MBA ’19, Clark University is more than just a place she went to college. It is a place that perpetually transforms her life.

As a student, Clark meant a robust educational experience that helped Emilee gain confidence in her field. As a young professional, she is connected to a company founded by fellow Clarkies, with whom she is now actively building her career. As an engaged alumna, Emilee continues to foster lifelong Clark friendships, and as a part-time professor in the School of Business she supports a new generation of students coming into their own understanding of themselves and the world.

With everything the University has given her, Emilee chose to add Clark as a beneficiary to her retirement account to give back to the place that has given her so much.

“If my gift can help create an opportunity for another Clarkie to impact the world in some way, have life-changing experiences or meet lifelong friends, that to me is just so meaningful,” Emilee says.

Her advice to fellow young alumni? Acknowledge the importance of early financial and life planning, and include Clark in your financial plans now.

“We should want to give back to our students because we were once in their shoes,” she says.

Clark University is a prominent fixture and enduring influence in Emilee Cocuzzo’s life. Now, with her planned gift, Emilee is hoping her contribution will help others reap the benefits of the Clark experience.

She remains as grateful as ever for that experience with each passing year.

To learn more about using your retirement account to make a tax-savvy gift now or via your estate, visit clarku.edu/planned-giving or contact Kate Rafey, interim director of planning giving, at 508-793-7719 or plannedgiving@clarku.edu.

Alma Mater

“At Clark, I began thinking about working in international news.”

Celebrating Clark’s Alumni Community

Vocation

Japan’s U.S. Muse

As news producer for Fuji TV, HUNTER HOYSRADT ’16 tells America’s story

By Doreen Manning

When HUNTER HOYSRADT ’16 arrived on the Clark campus in 2012, the only clear vision for his future involved a love of Japan—but he was fuzzy on the details.

One thing about which he was certain was his inexhaustible love of Asian culture, dating back to 2006 when he watch an episode of the Anthony Bourdain show No Reservations that was shot in Japan. Spending his junior year of high school in Aichi, Japan—with daily language instruction and embedded with a host family—convinced him he would one day work internationally. “I figured I’d go into Asian studies and political science with a focus on international relations. Other than that, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” he recalls.

He figured it out.

For the past three years, Hoysradt has been based in New York City as a news producer for the Japanese broadcasting company Fuji Television, traveling throughout the country to report on a wide range of subjects. He’s covered high-level deliberations at the United Nations, devastating tornadoes in Kentucky, the plight of Florida’s manatees, celebrity arrivals at the Met Gala, and multiple games featuring Major League Baseball sensation Shohei Ohtani. His research, interviews, and project management inform the broadcasts that allow his on-camera counterparts to seamlessly deliver their reports to the viewers back in Japan.

Sometimes he has a week to pull together a story, and sometimes only hours. But he feeds off of the deadline pressures, knowing that the day’s stories are reaching an eager audience. “I’m doing work that is being seen by people in Japan every day,” he marvels. It was during a film class in his first year at Clark that Hoysradt learned how to write a detailed movie analysis with a deep understanding of atmosphere, direction, and plot. The

a bit, so I taught English as a second language,” he says. “Even though I loved teaching, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do long term.” After almost four years of on-and-off teaching, Hoysradt felt a change was in order. It came in the form of a global pandemic, and he found himself back on American soil, buckling down with the rest of the world to ride out COVID-19.

Hoysradt moved in with two Clarkies he’d kept ties with during his time abroad, joining them in Washington, D.C., where he went to work reviewing applications at JET’s U.S. office in the Embassy of Japan. Toward the end of that temporary gig, he learned on a JET Facebook alumni page about an opening for a news producer at Fuji Television’s New York City office. “I thought, ‘Wait, I know international relations. And I know Japan, and what Japanese people are interested in. I’ve taken classes in media and journalism. Maybe I could do this!’ ”

experience inspired in him an interest in media and journalism in a way he never expected. “I always had a little interest in media, and I knew I was interested in Asia and in going to Japan, so it was here that I began thinking about working in international news.”

After graduating, Hoysradt enrolled in Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET), a program that brings university graduates to Japan as assistant language teachers. “I wanted to live in Japan for

by Mackenzie Stroh

It turned out that his time at Clark and immersion in Japanese culture had prepared him more than he had anticipated. Hoysradt seized the professional opportunity he’d been seeking.

“I hear people advise you to find a job that you love because that’s where you put all of your time. And I have that job,” he says. “I love being and working in the U.S. but still having a strong tie to Japan.”

In short, he has no reservations.

Photograph

HUNTER HOYSRADT IN BOSTON WITH SOME OF HIS NEWS CREW TO COVER BASEBALL SUPERSTAR SHOHEI OHTANI.

The Arts

The Lives of Brian Silverman

Filmmaker’s latest work is an award-winner

By Doreen Manning

Writer, actor, director, and producer BRIAN SILVERMAN ’90 learned something during his undergrad years that still resonates with him: Sometimes you need to hear other points of view to dislodge you from the comfortable and familiar.

“Clark really did a great job of teaching the ability to think with a counterpoint. Not to deny or negate or disregard other points of view, because those need to be heard as well,” Silverman recalls.

These ideals are entwined in Two Lives in Pittsburgh, Silverman’s directorial debut featuring his original script. Shot in his hometown of Pittsburgh, the film centers on Bernie, the father of a middle school-aged child who is questioning their gender identity, and chronicles this blue-collar family’s journey of denial, change, and acceptance.

Two Lives in Pittsburgh has won a host of awards including the prestigious Audience Award at Dances With Films, The People’s Choice Award at the Beloit International Film Festival, and multiple Best Narrative Feature Awards at Indie Spirit, OutSouth, and ScreenCritix, among other accolades. Two Lives was screened at Clark in April as part of the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival.

The road to becoming a filmmaker wasn’t a direct one for Silverman—more like a slow burn. Graduating with a degree in government and education, the filmmaker was always interested in acting, but felt pressure—most of it

“IT TOOK ME INTO MY THIRTIES TO TURN MY DREAM INTO A REALITY.”

self-imposed—to pursue a more “reasonable” career.

With his true passion stifled, Silverman left Clark feeling too young to launch directly into a teaching career, so he entered the Peace Corps to explore the world and discern his own path. For three years he worked in agroforestry and hillside agriculture in Haiti and Guatemala, yet continued to feel the tug between the actor’s dream and the stable career he felt was expected of him.

“I remember a conversation with one of my good Peace Corps friends. Inevitably the conversation went, ‘What are you going to do after we finish?’ ” Silverman’s response? That he would work

Photograph by Steven King

up the nerve to go out to Hollywood and become an actor. “And even when I came back, I pushed against that dream,” he remembers. “It took me into my thirties to really turn that dream into a reality.”

The road to filmmaker was one that his Clark degree supported in a circuitous way. “I eventually got a job substitute teaching at a school in California that was great about letting me head to auditions,” he says. He calls it his “survival job,” which allowed him to hone his craft while pulling in a steady paycheck. Over the years, he studied acting, performed in Los Angeles theater productions, and landed parts on shows like Ray Donovan. In 2019, Silverman produced and starred in the independent feature After We Leave Silverman’s time as an educator helped inspire Two Lives in Pittsburgh, as many of his students grappled with identity and saw their family ties either strengthened or strained by the struggle.

“This relates a bit back to Clark, in offering a view that’s just a little bit counter to what you know—in this case, that of a cis white guy without any other reference outside of the students I came in contact with, with no real tie to the transgender community,” Silverman shares. He found himself wondering how someone from Pittsburgh, someone like himself, would handle this experience. It was out of these ruminations that his character Bernie was born.

3

WATCH THE TRAILER FOR TWO LIVES IN PITTSBURGH AT CLARKU.EDU/ SILVERMAN.

Come Back to Clark

Clark’s new Alumni Council president, TOM HICKS ’93, has a simple question for all Clarkies: What would bring you back to Clark?

This and many other questions have been top of mind for Hicks since he succeeded GARRETT ABRAHAMSON ’07, MBA ’08, who had held the role of council president since 2022.

We spoke with Hicks over the summer to learn more about his vision for the Council. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU TO BECOME CLARK’S ALUMNI COUNCIL PRESIDENT?

I don’t think the title of president really matters. I view it more so in the way that Clark is in general: You’re an individual but you work as a collective, and in that way of one pea in a pod. I think of it as: How do we get folks more involved? That’s a challenge.

WHAT EXCITES YOU ABOUT THIS ROLE?

It’s exciting to see the change with the University in terms of where it will be going. For instance, the purchase of the land on Park Avenue or how the new building is being used for the

WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO?

Becker School—those things are huge.

IS THERE ANYTHING UNIQUE ABOUT REENGAGING CLARK ALUMNI?

It’s unique in that Clark is not a large school. I was on a plane a couple of weeks ago, and I had a Clark hat on, and a couple approached me and asked if I went to Clark University in Worcester. When you see someone with some sort of Clark gear on and you say to them, “Hey, I went there,” you have this bond.

HOW WAS YOUR CLARK EXPERIENCE?

I had a great experience because I made friends from all walks of life, from first-generation college kids like myself to folks who were legacies at the University. One of my best experiences was going overseas for a year as part of the Clark program in London. I made friends I will have for the rest of my life.

WHAT DO YOU WANT ALUMNI TO KNOW AS YOU START THE NEW ROLE?

Alumni should think about coming back to their reunion, seeing folks they haven’t seen in years for just a

weekend, and build upon that as they move forward. There is still nothing like seeing someone face-to-face, which is one reason why I came to my class reunion a couple of years ago and plan to make the next one.

HOW DO YOU HOPE TO ENGAGE ALUMNI ACROSS GENERATIONS?

Even though you get that parchment at the end of the day saying that you’re a graduate, your journey with Clark doesn’t end there. My hope is to get people more engaged in the University as much as possible as a collective.

WHY SHOULD ALUMNI STAY ENGAGED?

When we were bright-eyed 18- or 19-year-olds about to come to school, we had the world in front of us. Now, as a Clark alum, what is your expectation? What do you want to accomplish, or be a part of? It’s easy to complain about what the University is not doing, but if you don’t have that interaction with the University, how can you make change? It’s not for me to bring you in, but rather what you would tell your 18or 19-year-old self to get you to come back to the University today.

Did you get a promotion? Get married? Write a book? Meet up with fellow Clarkies for a mini-reunion? We want to hear all about it, and your classmates do, too. Send your class note to: classnotes@clarku.edu Want to send a photo? Please be sure it’s as high resolution as possible (preferably 300 dpi) and send it as an attachment to your email. Or, if you prefer snail mail: Melissa Lynch, Associate Editor, Marketing and Communications, 138 Woodland St., Worcester, MA 01610

Tom Hicks

Alumni Notes

Class Notes

Steve Siegel finished third in the Male 80+ division of the 2023 Philadelphia Half Marathon. In 46 years of running, he has completed 590 road races—including 30 marathons and 143 half marathons.

1958

1961

Chuck Altman has published Oops, I Forgot to Salute!, a memoir of his days in the U.S. Army in the 1960s. “The business and journalistic skills I acquired as a student at Clark were instrumental in the positions I held while serving,” he writes. He was an editor of the Fort Devens Dispatch (Fort Devens, Massachusetts) and, upon being transferred to Germany, became editor of the Southern Area Command newspaper, which served the military in southern Germany. Chuck’s book is available on Amazon.

1971

Marc Eichen ’71, Ph.D. ’76, has published Wind,

Maryland. He served as the University’s ambassador at the installation ceremony for Towson University’s 15th president in April 2023.

1976

Sand, Sky | Upepo, Mchanga, Anga, a collection of short stories in both English and Swahili. Set in Zanzibar, these stories invite the reader to accompany characters navigating personal challenges within a rapidly changing terrain. From 2015 to 2019, Marc was a visiting faculty member at the State University of Zanzibar. He is the winner of the Richard Cortez Day Prize in fiction and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Best of Small Fictions, 2023.

1975

Dr. Jonathan Weinman recently donned regalia to represent Clark University in Towson,

Steve Greenbaum, CUNY Distinguished Professor of Physics at Hunter College, received a fiveyear, $5 million award from NASA for advanced research on storing energy for use in space. The project involves close collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a significant portion of the funding will support student research internships there. The NASA award seeks to strengthen minority-serving institutions in areas of strategic importance to NASA. “As with many technologies pioneered by NASA, innovations often find their way back to Earth and improve our standard of living,” Steve writes.

1977

Ira Miller, who writes under the name I.J. Miller, has published Surviving the Storm, his eighth book and seventh work of literary fiction. The novel thriller is about three dysfunctional couples working at a Caribbean resort who are trying to navigate their emotional lives while being suspects in the

murder of a co-worker. Ira credits 17 summers of working on the Caribbean islands of Antigua, St. Kitts, and St. Lucia with providing inspiration for the book. In 2022, Ira co-authored Promise Fulfilled, the memoir of a famous plastic surgeon. Learn more about his work at ijmiller.com. Ira has retired from fulltime tennis coaching and is devoting more time to writing, including a novelette, Escape Your Life, published in Confetti Magazine. Ira, who majored in English at Clark, earned an MFA as a screenwriting fellow at the American Film Institute.

John S. Winkleman, who served as executive assistant to former Clark University presidents Mortimer Appley and Richard Traina, received the Judson Wolfe Excellence in Teaching Award at the 2024 Commencement exercises of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. John is a member of

the faculty of Mailman’s Department of Health Policy and Management, where he teaches marketing and directs the Thomas P. Ference Health System Simulation and the Consulting Practice. He is also a trustee emeritus of the Mount Sinai Health System and continues to participate in key committees. In addition, John—whose many drawings of Clark buildings are housed in the University’s Archives and Special Collections— continues to illustrate in his spare time.

1978

Steven Levine was the home plate umpire at the 2023 Annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity played at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. Over $1.8 million was raised for various charities, including the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Washington, the Washington Literacy Center, the Washington Nationals Philanthropies, and the United States Capitol Police Memo-

Fred Covan, Ph.D. ’66, celebrated his 80th birthday on April 30, 2024—and on the same day, he married Kalamkas Akhmetova, who is originally from Kazakhstan. The wedding took place in Key West, Florida, where Fred and Kalamkas live.

1966

1976

Former Clark soccer coach Massood Abolfazli ’76 stays in touch with the team he coached in 1983 and 1984. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the team’s undefeated regular season—the only one in Clark soccer history—along with the 1984 team’s soccer championship, last summer he hosted the players at his home in Rhode Island. Back row, from left: Massood Abolfazli, Joe Wallace ’87, Michael Dalhausser ’88, Matt Maranz ’87, Tim Walsh ’86, Alex Von Cramm ’87, Jack Thorton ’86, Steve Lavoie ’86, Tim Welch ’83, and Walter Belding ’76. Front row, from left: Brian Meehan ’86, Steve Silver ’86, Todd Typowicz ’88, Ken Stuart ’85, Al Berkowitz ’86, Doug O’Brien ’86, Bob Kuhar ’84, and Chris Darling ’89. Not pictured: Pete Kashian ’85.

rial Fund. Steven has been umpiring for the Mid-Atlantic Collegiate (MAC) Umpires Association in Virginia, D.C., and Maryland since 1999. At the end of this year, he will be retiring from his 44-year legal career at LevineCarita PLC, Alexandria, Virginia, where he has been principal owner and managing partner since 1993—but he will continue his umpire career for as long as his body allows. Steven lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife of 33 years, Patricia Petersilia. Steven and Patricia have two adult children.

1983

Katherine Buck, vice president for student development and dean of students at Wilson

College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, has been named by City & State Pennsylvania to its list of Trailblazers in Higher Education for 2024, which recognizes people who are responding to the economic, social, and technological changes impacting higher education today. The magazine recognized Katherine for prioritizing the needs of diverse campus populations, with special attention paid to first-generation and low-income students. Katherine joined Wilson College in 2022 after nearly 30 years at the College of St. Elizabeth (now St. Elizabeth University).

After graduating from Clark, Katherine earned a master’s in social work with concentrations in administration, policy, and planning from Rutgers University.

Karin Trachtenberg performed her one-woman show, My Mother Had Two Faces: Reflections on Beauty, Aging, and Acceptance, at The Edinburgh Fringe—“the world’s largest arts festival”—this past summer. She had previously performed the show in Los Angeles, Boston, and New York City. She writes that Edinburgh is “a challenge of a lifetime, as I join the thousands of performing groups presenting during the month-long festival.”

1988

Steven Margolis has been apointed president of Vitality Group, a global

David in Cali, Columbia, and published a photo essay in The Washington Post Magazine in 2021. Her work inspired Torah Tropical, a documentary that premiered at the 2023 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Heidi is an executive producer of the film, which follows a family and explores the tensions among race, religion, and class.

1989

health and well-being company specializing in behavior change. Previously, he was managing director for the Health Care Practice of Deloitte Consulting LLP, where he specialized in strategic, operational and technology transformations for both health plans and integrated delivery systems. He also served in senior leadership and exeutive roles for CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Healthways, and UnitedHealthGroup.

Heidi Paster lived in Colombia for two decades and stumbled upon an interesting phenomenon: ex-evangelical Christians converting to Orthodox Judaism. She spent several years photographing the convert community of Beit

Alicia Resnik, a writer, researcher, and small business owner, has published her first work of historical fiction, Sarys. Set against the backdrop of 1824 Bermuda, Sarys is a novel of love, lies, murder, and a 170-yearold family secret. The story examines family dynamics and the need for forgiveness, even when that forgiveness means accepting uncomfortable truths about yourself and the heritage you thought you knew. Sarys is available through Amazon, IngramSpark, Ingram, and Bookshop.org.

Susan Gordon, a core adjunct professor of psychology at National University, La Jolla, California, and research director and psychotherapist at the Southbury Clinic for Traditional Medicines in Southbury, Connecticut, has published The Mind-Brain Continuum: Psychoneurointracrinology. The book presents an autopoietic theory of the development of self and the biochemical-organismic processes at the root of the mind, challenging assumptions in present-day neuroscience and psychiatry.

1990

Sharon J. Wishnow has published her debut novel, The Pelican Tide, which tells the story of a struggling Cajun chef living in Grand Isle, Louisiana, as she fights to save her family and her community in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In addition to writing fiction with environmental themes, Sharon writes nonfiction in the science, technology, and business categories with a passion for research, seashells, birds, and the ocean. She is the former vice president of communications for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association (WFWA), the founder of Women’s Fiction Day, and the executive editor of the WFWA magazine, WriteOn! Sharon earned an MFA from George Mason University and a

publications certification from George Washington University. Learn more at sharonwishnow.com.

2000

Justin Bailey leads the Office of General Counsel of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools in Memphis, Tennessee. Prior to this, he was a partner with the law firm Bailey & Bailey. Justin, a member of the Clark Alumni Council, was also an assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, litigation counsel for International Paper, senior attorney—

then senior counsel—for FedEx Freight, and associate general counsel of compliance at Varsity Spirit. He serves on the boards of Meritan, a regional health and support services nonprofit in Memphis, and the Memphis Housing Authority. In 2016, the National Bar Association named Justin to its list of “Nation’s Best Advocates: 40 Lawyers Under 40,” and in 2017, he was recognized as one of Memphis’s “Top 40 Under 40 Urban Elite Professionals.”

James Gorman has been named the 2024 Massachusetts STEM Teacher of the Year, which is presented by the New England Patriots Hall of Fame Education Program. His award, which was presented to him by Governor Maura Healy, includes $5,000 from the Patriots Foundation to the Nipmuc Regional High School, where James teaches physics, engineering, and chemistry and chairs the science department. He also will be appointed to Governor Healey’s STEM Advisory Council. His passion for education innovation led him to develop the Epic Challenge program with Dr. Charles Camarda, a retired NASA astronaut, engineer, and chief of innovation. The program allows students to become researchers and then present their work to scientists at international symposia— the 2023 event was held

2010 Anders Ohman ’10 and Prapti Pokharel ’10 were married in June 2023 at the Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts. A gathering of Clarkies and their partners celebrated with the couple.

at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. James’s teaching has been recognized by Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the Blackstone Vally Superintendents’ Consortium, and the Massachusetts Association of Science Teachers. James, who is married with two sons, has also collaborated with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Boston Museum of Science.

2001

Leiran Biton was elected to the school committee

in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife, Anna, and their two children. In May 2023, he started a job as manager of field services at the U.S. EPA’s New England Regional Laboratory in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts.

2006

Daniel Bowhers is the writer and director of Blue Hour: The Disappearance of Nick Brandreth, which is now streaming on Prime Video and several other platforms. Daniel also served as producer,

NYC-ARTS on THIRTEEN PBS for a 10-minute profile on the renowned artist. As part of IHMA, Anna lectures on the impact of Meière’s art, assists with the preservation of her work, and promotes the legacy of her accomplishments in the Art Deco era.

2007

Luke Livingston ’07 represented Clark University in Lewiston, Maine, for the installation ceremony of Garry W. Jenkins as the ninth president of Bates College on May 4, 2024.

2010

along with Glenn Teel ’07. Blue Hour—which stars Michael Kowalski ’06—is a shape-shifting science fiction mystery that poses as a true crime documentary before plunging into a surreal nightmare. The film premiered at Panic Fest, where it was nominated for Best Indie Feature, Best Actress, and Best VFX (visual effects, which were done by Daniel and Glenn). Visit bluehourmovie.com.

Anna Kupik was elected president of the International Hildreth Meière Association (IHMA) in 2023 and interviewed by

of movies and shows filmed locally, including the Academy Award- and BAFTA-winning films The Holdovers and American Fiction.”

2017

Katie Luczai and her husband have started a natural winery in Acton, Massachusetts. “We are the first and only natural and low-intervention winery in Massachusetts,” she writes. “We hope to plant a vineyard in the Greater Boston area and bring more sustainable agriculture to Massachusetts.” Katie double majored in political science and environmental studies and encourages other GOLD (Graduates of the Last Decade) alumni to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams that contribute to the Greater Massachusetts sustainable economy.

2021

Sophie Crafts ’10 writes, “I was delighted to meet Larry Berk ’64 at a SAG Awards viewing party in Somerville, Massachusetts, in February. We’re both members of SAG-AFTRA and have both been in a number

Parker Freedman has earned the Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC) professional designation from The American College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) certification from the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards. Parker is a resident of Bourne, Massachusetts.

2010

Six Clarkies held a mini-reunion in February in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. “It was a joyous time reminiscing about our time at Clark,” writes Andrea López Duarte ’06. Top, left to right: Franco Chavarria ’06, Ivo Kuljis ’05, Robert Haab ’02, and Claudio Carmona ’03. Bottom, left to right: Andrea López Duarte ’06 and Moyra Handal ’03

In Memoriam

‘MY CURIOSITY DRIVES MY PURPOSE’

Seek out mentors. Find work that fulfills you. Be a resource for others. And network, network, network.

These were among the life and career lessons offered to Clark students of color by alumni of color at the Panel on Passion and Purpose held in February to highlight Black History Month.

Over the course of a 90-minute conversation, the panelists answered questions about their journeys, from their Clark student days to their successes and struggles as young professionals.

Serving on the panel were LUKE BLACKADAR ’11 , attorney for the Arts & Business Council in Boston and a lecturer at several colleges; GLORIA AGOSSOU ’22, assistant planner with the Central Massachusetts Regional Planning Commission; BRIANA “BRI” AZIER ’05, CEO and owner of Bri’s Sweet Treats; DR. STACEY LAWRENCE ’08 , director for STEM initiatives for the Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University; and BIKO GAYMAN ’21, MHS ’22, behavioral education and development specialist at Bradley Hospital (Providence, R.I.), and chief operating officer of Be Great Academy.

The panelists spoke of the passions that drive them in life and work. “My curiosity drives my purpose,” Lawrence said, adding that “being a good person and helping people along the way leads you into really interesting spaces.”

Mentorship is the “connective tissue” for Blackadar, whose work with junior professionals reminds him of the teachers in his personal and professional life who “led me to seismic shifts with what I thought I’d do with my life.”

3 READ MORE AT CLARKU.EDU/PASSION-PURPOSE.

NORMAN ZEIGLER ’50

Norman Zeigler ’50, who wrote an outdoors column in The New York Times and invented the popular Schminnow fly for fishing, passed away on April 15, 2024, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Norm grew up among the marshes, estuaries, and kettlehole ponds of Harwich, Massachusetts, on the southern side of Cape Cod. In 2023, the town of Palmer, Massachusetts, dedicated its Swift River Shorefishing Access to Norm, calling him “a passionate advocate for fish and those who chase them.”

He authored three books on fly-fishing: Snook on a Fly: Tackle, Tactics, and Tips for Catching the Great Saltwater Gamefish; Rivers of Shadow, Rivers of Sun: A Fly-Fisher’s European Journal; and Famous Fly Fishers: Profiles of Eminent and Accomplished People Who Love the Quiet Sport.

From 1979 to 1994, Norm worked as a civilian editor and reporter for the Germany-based European Stars and Stripes and was the paper’s travel/outdoors writer from 1988 to 1994. In 1994, Zeigler and his family relocated to Sanibel, Florida, so he could recover from Lyme disease, which he contracted while on assignment in the former Czechoslovakia. He developed the Schminnow fly in 1995; it is

now available at a number of online retailers.

He was a founding member of the Sanibel Fly Fishers and opened Norm Zeigler’s Fly Shop in 2009. He sold the shop in 2021 after his Parkinson’s diagnosis.

RONALD P. FORMISANO

Ronald P. Formisano, a tenured member of the Clark history faculty from 1973 to 1989, passed away on February 20, 2024, at his home in Lexington, Kentucky.

During his 16 years on campus, Ron won Clark’s Outstanding Teacher Award, supervised seven doctoral dissertations, and served on almost every major faculty committee, including a three-year stint as chair of the Committee on Personnel. In his spare time, he wrote restaurant and movie reviews for Worcester Magazine and played tennis and touch football. He was known not only for his sharp wit and fiery temper but also his unstinting devotion to his friends and colleagues.

Before his arrival in Worcester, Ron taught at the University of Rochester, and after his time at Clark he taught at the University of Florida and the University of Kentucky. He was the author of 10 scholarly books, including The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861 (1971), Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (1991), and Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor (2015). More recently, Ron tried his hand at what he called “muckraking fiction” with a series of four detective novels, culminating in Auditioning for Hell (2023).

MARY KIRCHER ’50

Mary Kircher ’50, one of a small group of women computer programmers and coders at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950s, died on December 18, 2023, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Mary first planned to major in chemistry at Clark but switched to mathematics after one year. In a 2002 interview on the Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ethw.org/Oral-History:Mary_Kircher), Mary said she attended summer school for two years and earned her bachelor’s degree in three years.

She first learned about “big computers” during a Clark field trip, where she saw Harvard University’s Mark IV, an electronic stored-program computer built for the United States Air Force. At Los Alamos, she began working in the Calculations Group in 1952, and later became a programmer for the MANIAC I computer; its first task was to perform precise and extensive calculations of the thermonuclear process.

Mary left the Los Alamos lab to start her family in 1954, then returned to work there from 1972 to 1987. During those later years, among other things, she worked on differential equations using FORTRAN, BASIC, and other languages.

director of the Department of Administration under Colorado Governor Roy Romer, died on November 13, 2023.

Throughout his professional and volunteer work, Forrest’s focus was on improving communities across Denver and his beloved home state of Colorado. He started as a city planner for Aurora, ultimately becoming deputy city manager, where he developed plans to establish the Aurora City Center, Government Center, and Conference Center. Forrest served the city of Denver as an appointee to Mayor Federico Peña’s cabinet, then as executive director of the state Department of Administration; in that role, he planned the Colorado Convention Center, which opened in 1990. And in the early 1990s, he served on the Colorado Baseball Commission, which conducted and supported the campaign to bring a major league baseball team to Denver.

Forrest went on to become the CFO of University of Colorado Hospital, where he helped redevelop the former Fitzsimons Army Medical Center into the Anschutz Medical Campus, and then the CFO of the Mental Health Center of Denver. One of his proudest accomplishments was seeing that facility’s children and families center, the Dahlia Campus for Health and Wellbeing, open in January 2016.

Alden T. Vaughan, an affiliate professor of history at Clark from 2002 to 2015, passed away on March 19, 2024.

In 1961, Alden joined the history faculty at Columbia University—where he received his master’s and doctoral degrees— and taught there until retiring full-time to Worcester in 1994.

He continued to work on scholarly projects, many researched at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester and at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Among his many publications were two monographs and several essays written in collaboration with his wife, Virginia Mason Vaughan, professor emerita of English at Clark. Together they edited Shakespeare’s The Tempest for the Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. However, he is best known for pioneering work on the interactions between Indigenous Americans and British colonists during the 16th and 17th centuries, which paved the way for younger scholars to offer a more inclusive vision of early America.

Dianne Dyslin, MSPC ’15, a longtime employee in Clark University’s Office of University Advancement, passed away on February 20, 2024.

As associate director of stewardship, she eagerly shared with donors the enduring impact of their gifts on the students and faculty who make the academic experience at Clark special.

She herself was an avid and curious student, earning two master’s degrees—including one during her time at Clark, in professional communication—and taking courses toward a third. A gifted writer, indefatigable researcher, and relentless worker, she was the dream partner for any group project.

After her diagnosis of breast cancer and throughout her subsequent treatments, Dianne continued to work on behalf of Clark University, once telling an

interviewer, “I’m going to keep working until I can’t.”

Dianne’s story was told in the winter 2023 issue of Clark magazine; read it at clarku.edu/ dyslin.

DANIEL R. BORG

Daniel R. Borg, professor emeritus of history, died on June 13, 2024, in Worcester.

Born in Tracy, Minnesota, Dan grew up during the Great Depression in the Swedish Lutheran parishes his parents served, starting in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. His upbringing had a direct influence on his decision to study modern European history, particularly German church history.

Upon graduating in 1953 from Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota, Dan became its first student to receive a Fulbright award and was part of the first group of Fulbright scholars to study in West Germany after World War II; he studied at the University of Tübingen.

After two years in the U.S. Army, Dan enrolled at Yale University, earning his master’s in 1957 and Ph.D. in 1963; his dissertation was The Politics of the Prussian Church, 1917-1927: A Study of the Political Thought and Action of German Protestants in the Weimar Republic.

Dan joined the Clark history faculty in 1961, and stayed at the University until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2000. Over the course of his career, he consistently broke new ground in the study of German church history. During his time at Clark, he mentored innumerable students and served as the faculty advisor for Clark’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society.

FORREST M. CASON, M.A. ’78, PH.D. ’89

Forrest M. Cason, M.A. ’78, Ph.D. ’89, who served as executive

ALDEN T. VAUGHAN

DIANNE DYSLIN, MSPC ’15

Passings

1940–49

¨ Herman Kleine, M.A. ’42, Ph.D. ’51

Evelyn (Chohat) Hershatter, M.A. ’45

Blanche M. (Rawn) Norris ’46

¨ Frances (Dumas) Bratt ’47

¨ Carolyn Faille ’48

Charles V. Vilandre ’49

1950–59

Joseph O. Berthiaume ’50

¨ Lenore M. (Kelly) Hennessey, M.A. ’50

Mary J. (Hunsberger) Kircher ’50

¨ Joseph P. Mahoney ’50

Norman F. Zeigler ’50

William D. Fowler ’51

¨ Nadine (Mangan) Henderson, M.A.Ed. ’51

Dorothy L. (Simpson) Shiminski ’51

¨ David W. Barnard ’52

Paul A. Goodale ’52

Harold C. Jigarjian ’52, M.A. ’55

¨ Robert A. Kaloosdian ’52

Richard F. Bumer ’53

Oscar L. Dubé ’53

¨ Dorothy (McGrath) Fetherolf ’53

Kurt H. Stern, Ph.D. ’53

¨ Marilyn (Steeves) Torchia ’53

Diane E. Wheeler ’53

Janet C. (Rizkalla) Forzley ’54

Ruth (Rodier) Gilmartin ’54

¨ Sanford M. Kirshenbaum ’55

Wesley E. Forte ’56

Thomas F. Gilmartin, M.A.Ed. ’56

Audrey (Mishler) Jones, M.A. ’56, Ph.D. ’62

¨ Shirley (Singer) Kane ’56, M.A. ’93

Anne (Panagiotopoulos) Lias ’56

¨ Joseph I. Berman ’57

Donna (Logue) Hamblin ’57

¨ George H. Proffitt ’57

William P. Small ’57, M.A.Ed. ’60

Thomas R. Mailloux ’58

Jerald A. Rice ’58, M.A.Ed. ’60

Anthony E. Aaronson ’59

Roger J. Doiron ’59

¨ Lorraine A. (Sudol) Dufresne ’59, P ’86

1960–69

Anne R. (Murray) Dibuono ’60

Jay E. McCune ’60

Joseph E. Tancrell ’60

¨ Barbara A. (Santoian)

Tomasian ’60

Thomas A. Barry ’61

¨ Bela A. Gajary ’61

Donald F. Lundquist ’61

Francis J. DeToma ’62

¨ Maurice E. Donsky ’62

Mari Essayan, M.A.Ed. ’62

Robert Gardula, M.A. ’62, Ph.D. ’75

Mary E. Hauptmann ’62

Herbert E. Whitworth ’62

¨ Edward Benecchi ’63, P ’96

Francis J. Foley Jr. ’63

¨ Richard L. Pearlman ’63

Carl J. Antonellis ’64

Judith E. (Kerstetter) Guthrie ’64

Natalie E. Johnson ’64

Robert E. Young ’64

¨ Steven J. Adelson ’65

Douglas R. Cameron ’65

Andrew P Goldberg ’65

¨ Susan (Keene) Kern ’65

George W. Lucier ’65

George R. Minkoff ’65

¨ Richard C. Morrissey ’65

David A. Raboy, M.A. ’65

Meridith (Daniels) Wesby ’65, MBA ’77

Gordon C. Beeton ’66

Pamela (Smith) Hanson ’66

¨ Franklin D. Hodges, M.A. ’66

¨ Richard R. Hopkins ’66, P ’97, P ’89

¨ James F. Adams ’67, P ’93, P ’89

¨ John Borg ’67

Paul R. Dowgiert ’67

¨ Lynne E. (Carlson) Farsi ’67

¨ Joseph A. Federici ’67

Joseph F. Mahoney Jr., M.A. ’67

John M. Quinlan ’67

¨ David V. Smith ’67

Margaret W. Taft ’67, Ph.D. ’73

Bradford J. Ward ’67

¨ John B. Hench, M.A. ’68, Ph.D. ’78

¨ Robert K. Jordan, M.A. ’68, Ph.D. ’72

¨ Marc Kashinsky, M.A. ’68, Ph.D. ’73

Judith K. Lavender ’68

Peter G. Leach ’68

Barbar Rae Pinsker ’68

¨ Douglas L. Schmucker, M.A. ’68, Ph.D. ’72

¨ Margaret C. (Amsden) Wells ’68

¨ Margaret A. Alix ’69

Robert J. Eilerman ’69

¨ Barbara Mungeam ’69

Scott Van Batenburg ’69

¨ Robert Wolff ’69

1970–79

¨ Mitchell A. Cohen ’70

Christine M. (Baranowski) Phillips ’70

Sheila L. Rosenblatt, M.A. ’70, Ph.D. ’74

Robert J. Bird ’71

¨ Russell B. Capelle, M.A. ’71

¨ Glenn H. Carr ’71, M.A. ’95

¨ Jerome B. Jacobs, Ph.D. ’71

¨ Christie L. (Bennett) Mayo ’71

Robert A. Prior, M.A. ’71

Betty J. Singer ’71

Edward Starkus ’71

¨ Edwin T. Weiss, M.A. ’71, Ph.D. ’73

Joseph A. McConville ’72

¨ Clair R. Mosher ’72

Keith J. Phillips ’72

Manuel J. Silva ’72

¨ James A. Simoneau ’72

Jan (Crump) Graham Hunt ’73

¨ Richard G. Newton ’73

Robert B. McLeod, MBA ’73

¨ Sharon E. Tully ’73

Aduke Uddoh Bennett, M.A. ’74

¨ Paul J. Brosnahan ’74

Ina G. Goodman ’74

Jacqueline A. (Neill) Greene, M.A. ’74

Patrick S. McVeigh ’74

¨ Fred M. Shelley ’74

¨ Joel M. Androphy ’75

Jacqueline (Levine) Melick ’75

Linda A. Moody ’75

Paul M. Oliveri ‘76

¨ Sara (Howrigan) Steele ’77

Forrest M. Cason, M.A. ’78, Ph.D. ’89

¨ Richard B. Larson, D.Ed. ’78

Sharon (Feldman) Rowe ’79

1980–89

Ingrid V. Lawrence ’80

Allan Mueller ’80

¨ Betty J. Dalbeck ’82

John R. Habib ’82

¨ Suzanne (Quinn) Narkus, MHA ’82

David G. Pitney ’82

¨ Kurt R. Volk ’82

¨ Carole A. (Bucher) Buchanan ’83

¨ Raymond E. Coche ’83

¨ Diana M. Fish ’83

¨ Lisa Friedman ’85

¨ Daniel A. LeBlanc ’85

¨ Robert J. Charland ’87

¨ Lila M. (Wetherell) Weihs ’87

¨ Michelle (Burak) Langmead ’88

¨ Dorothea C. Mahoney, M.A. ’88

¨ Michael T. Taylor ’89

1990–99

David J. Loewenthal ’90

Albert L. Lara ’91

Mary L. White, M.A. ’92

Samantha A. Rudginsky-Thompson ’93

James R. Cardell, M.B.A. ’94

Brooks Bitterman, Ph.D. ’96

Carl H. Wilson, M.A. ’97

2000–

Sarah R. Thomas ’04

Jacqueline A. Russo ’05

Evelyn M. Witkin, D.Sc. ’06

Nicholas Tomten Bumbarger ’08, M.A. ’10

Alicia R. (Andrade) Groce ’10

Joseph Santucci, M.S. ’11

¨ Dianne Dyslin, MSPC ’15

“ He is a passionate advocate for fish, and those who chase them.”

SWIFT RIVER DEDICATION TO NORM ZEIGLER ’50

CLARK MEETS THE NEW BOSS

BEFORE HE WAS born to run. Before he danced in the dark, or wandered into the badlands, or had an inkling of the glory days that still lay ahead of him, Bruce Springsteen performed a memorable concert in Atwood Hall.

The date was October 6, 1974, when Clark welcomed the little-known New Jersey rocker and his E Street Band to the Atwood stage.

“Onstage, silhouetted dramatically by green light, the slight man (Springsteen) became a magician, deftly manipulating his band, his body and us, his audience,”

RUTH RACHEL POLSKY ’76 wrote in her review of the show in The Scarlet. “When he jerked his hips to the left and to the right, a double-barreled drumroll and flashes of purple and red light occurred

simultaneously, radiating to us in a wave of total sensuality. When his voice dropped to a husky, caressing whisper, we held our collective breath and rose with him to the crescendo on Clarence Clemons’ ethereal sax.”

In a story in The Worcester Telegram & Gazette commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Clark concert, several alumni who had attended that night recalled emerging with a profound appreciation for Springsteen’s star power.

“Springsteen showed up, and he started singing and I would say, within two seconds, pretty much the whole audience went crazy,” LEON ERLANGER ’75 said. “It was like the Beatles or something.”

HARRIET BASKAS ’77, in a 2014 interview with Clark magazine, recalled approaching

Springsteen and his band as they relaxed outside Goddard Library prior to the show and asking if she could record the concert for radio station WCUW.

“They said, ‘No, we’d rather you not.’ And I said, ‘Nobody knows who you are. We’ll put you on the radio and make you famous,’ ” she remembered. “At that point the station was running at about 80 watts— less than a light bulb—and I was going to make them famous! Many years later, Clarence Clemons was at a public radio conference that I attended. I went up to him and said, ‘I feel really badly— it was so presumptuous of me.’ And without missing a beat, he said, ‘Something’s been bothering The Boss all this time, and that’s probably what it is.’ ”

“ The slight man became a magician. ”

Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons perform in Trenton, New Jersey, November 1974.

Cougar Challenge

6th Annual Cougar Challenge October 16-18 #CougarChallenge Join us for a three-day giving event to support Clark Athletics.

“The Cougar Challenge is more than just a fundraising event — it’s a testament to the power of community and collective effort.”

– Coach William Cather, Baseball Get in the Game!

“As an alumna, it is incredible to see Cougar Nation come together to support one another in such a massive way.”

– Coach Brienne Smith ’01, Women’s Soccer