19 minute read
AROUND TOWN
AROUND TOWN SEASONS OF FUN
FALL
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Admire the Blooms at the Arnold Arboretum Feeling botanical? Feeling like “botanical” isn’t a state of being? Plan a visit to the Arnold Arboretum and test your knowledge of all things flora, or take it one step further and make a Mother’s Day trip on Lilac Sunday in May when the fields of lilacs bloom. Biking on the Somerville Community Path Start at Davis Square and pick up a bike at the Bluebikes station. Then make your way along the Community Path, enjoying the weather and scenery, maybe even stopping for a Pinterest-worthy picnic! Boston Harborwalk Walk part (or all?!) of this 43-mile public walkway wending along piers and wharfs, and witness nature come to life along the coast. The colors are amazing in May. Apple Picking Gala, Fuji, Grannysmith, or Pink Lady? Head to an orchard for some applepicking, and maybe a hay ride! Grab some butter and flour on your way home to make a delicious apple crisp.
The Fells Just a few miles from campus sits the Middlesex Fells Reservation, the site of 100+ mixed-use trails for hiking or biking. Unleash your inner Reese Witherspoon (but just in that one movie) and set off into the wild. Walk the Greenway Walk the Greenway, one of Boston’s green oases in the heart of the city, and explore the vendors, public art spaces, and fountains. If you download the app beforehand, you can even participate in a new virtual reality treasure hunt exploring the Greenway’s past, present, and future.
Explore the Emerald Necklace Searching for spectacular fall foliage, or just wanting to soak up as much time outside as possible before winter comes barrelling in? Look no further than the Emerald Necklace, a chain of parks right in Boston with 1,100
SPRING
acres’ worth of outdoor activity.
One way to mark change and the passing of time in New England is simply to get outside and look around. Amber and golden hues of foliage give way to barren trees and frosty mornings, which in turn transform with new life in green buds and pink petals, and then close out the annual cycle with blue and purple hydrangeas.
Let us take you on an annual tour of the best of Boston’s natural beauty so you can take advantage of “America’s College Town’s” seasonal change.
WINTER
Picnic on the Esplanade Take a break from Boston’s sticky heat and catch the breeze coming off the Charles on the Esplanade, a 17-mile stretch of land along the river bank. Pack a basket full of snacks and a blanket to make a day of it! Beach Day? Southie, Revere, Quincy Head south of the city to one of the beaches in South Boston (Southie) or make it out the other side of the city entirely to a suburb like Revere or Quincy to find public beaches perfect for sunbathing, swimming, and sandcastles. Take the Ferry to Coastal Towns If you’ve exhausted all the activities offered to you through dry land transportation, it’s time to look to the sea! Take a ferry to Provincetown and see what “The Cape” is all about, or take another up to Salem! Concerts/Outdoor Movies at the Hatch Memorial Shell One of the coolest places you can see live music is the Hatch Memorial Shell, an outdoor concert venue adored by Boston locals. During the summer months, there’ll be events there almost every night, with screenings of movies in addition to music. Sledding Grab your sled and bundle up! The hill of Tufts gives you great calf muscles— and an opportunity for some awesome sledding! With your friends by your side, enjoy the slopes in and around the Tufts campus. Our very own President’s Lawn is a great spot! President Anthony Monaco may just have to join in on the sledding fun—he has before! Ice Skating at Frog Pond One of the perks of a darn cold winter is that water freezes, like, super easily here. If you’re ever in the mood for taking advantage of that basic molecular property, rent some skates down at Boston Common and go out on its Frog Pond—admission is just six bucks! (or free if you’re under 58 inches tall).
Ice Sculpture Stroll & First Night Celebration New year, new me, am I right, people? If you’re looking for a fun (and free!) way to ring in the New Year, you can participate in one of Boston’s best traditions, First Night. In Copley Square and Back Bay, you’ll find ice sculptures, live music, fireworks, and,
SUMMER
of course, a countdown.
FROM CLASSROOM TO CONVERSATION
Cassi Cancemi ’21, a chemistry major and a Goldwater Scholarship recipient, has been a part of the Kritzer Laboratory since she was a sophomore at Tufts. Here, she sits with Professor Joshua Kritzer, as they reflect on their longtime mentorship and Cassi’s journey from being a
first-time researcher to a distinguished scholar. BY VALERIA VELASQUEZ ’23
How did you first meet? Cassi Cancemi: I started looking for research opportunities at the beginning of my sophomore year. The summer before I took organic chemistry with Dr. Kritzer, I emailed him and asked if he had any openings for undergrads. Around October, I started training with a grad student in the lab while I was in his organic chemistry class. I stayed working with him even after that class was over. Joshua Kritzer: Cassi stood out...because of the questions she would ask. Cassi was clearly interested in the science for the science’s sake—she wasn’t there for a grade or because she was being forced to. I was very excited to bring someone like her into my lab. CC: That was my first ever research experience, so I was nervous.
JK: I like to bring on first-years and sophomores into my lab. That’s something that everyone in chemistry likes to do—professors all over campus, really. Those [students] that started early have two or three full years to develop into a completely independent scientist. Have there been any specific highlights or moments together that stand out to you? JK: I asked my students to bring progress reports to our one-on-one meetings, and she would bring in these very detailed reports that went over everything she’d learned and questions she still had. Her questions ranged from technical to the big picture. She’d ask a really sophisticated line of questioning for someone who was just getting into research. She impressed me right off the bat, and I wasn’t surprised that it was only six months until she had her own independent project. CC: Even when the pandemic started, we crafted a whole new project that I could do remotely. I had a wet project pre-COVID, but I’ve switched to something I can do with software on my computer. It was so nice to have somebody who valued me having an experience as much as I valued having one myself. I appreciate that he put in the work to help me not lose that.
JK: This type of computational work is something that she was not trained on. When I offered an option to do work from home over the summer, she jumped on the opportunity to teach herself. I also must mention that Cassi competed successfully for a Goldwater Scholarship, which is very, very rare and very difficult to get. I can’t remember the last time a Tufts undergrad has received that honor. CC: Doing the application for the Goldwater Scholarship was a really good learning experience. I thought, “Well, I’ll just try super hard, and I’ll get something out of the application process.” It paid off. What impact has your relationship with Professor Kritzer had on your time at Tufts? CC: I didn’t know this whole research world existed until I started working with him, and I’ve completely altered my life plan to go down the path of research. It’s something that I don’t think I would’ve ever been exposed to if he didn’t take the chance on me and let me work with him. I’ve gained a lot of confidence in myself and my abilities, which is something I’ve kind of always struggled with. I have a lot of excitement for my future. I’m excited about grad school. All of this started when I joined his lab. JK: She has the ability, the hard work, the talent, and the grit to achieve whatever career path she chooses to explore. There are very few question marks in my mind about Cassi’s future—I’m just really excited to be a part of it.
HOW DO YOU ASK A QUESTION?
Building on the Legacies of Black Jumbos by Finding Personal and Institutional Truths in the Archives
BY HARRISON CLARK ’22
I
"Why do I feel the way I feel right now?" —The Gerald Gill Papers
I have trouble processing how different Tufts used to be. Perhaps this is because I keep looking for differences where I should be looking for similarities. Or maybe it’s because I never asked anyone how to ask a good question. I wish I had the courage to ask that question now. To ask would be to admit that I haven’t really known what I’ve been doing for a good while—that I’ve been wandering around merely stumbling upon answers every now and then. I would also have to admit that I’ve been internally passing my wanderings and stumblings off as masterful time management and mystifying displays of intensely nonchalant commitment.
My desire to understand why I feel the way I feel in certain spaces has always drawn me to archival research. Imagine being able to piece together the current state of your surroundings like a jigsaw puzzle. The major caveat is that you’ll never be able to find all the pieces. If I were to walk someone through it I’d say:
“Look, you can really only hope to find enough of those pieces that you can come up with some new questions for yourself. The questions are what lead you to the next section of the puzzle, the next round of documents. And even though it will never really be ‘over,’ there comes a point when you’ve extracted enough that you can start to mentally form the rest of the image.”
Before I had even touched the Gill Papers in the Digital Collections and Archives, in the fall of 2019, I knew that late Tufts history professor Gerald Gill had been through hundreds of cycles of his own version of this process. At Tufts in 2020, if I wanted to conduct research with the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, I would apply for the Gill Fellowship. If I wanted a quiet study space to focus and get some work done for the day, I would head over to the Gill Reading Room. The Professor of the Year wins the Gerald Gill Award. So, I decided if I wanted to know how things used to be, I would start with the man whose legacy dictates the way things are now.
II
“Uh, hi. Can I please see the Gill Papers?”
Well, maybe I said it a bit more confidently than that, but I was scared. Not because I felt like I shouldn’t see the collection, but because I knew that I was about to receive information that would irreversibly alter the way I operate at Tufts. I read through files for hours, retrieved from the archives on the Ground Level of Tisch Library, and only barely scratched the surface of Professor Gill’s work. I scribbled down pages and pages of notes on the history of Black student life, the Tufts Africana Center, multiculturalism in the academy, affirmative action, and so much more. And when I finally left the Reading Room that afternoon, I felt like I had a better understanding of myself.
I felt as if I inherited some sort of cultural responsibility when I read Professor Gill’s work. I had developed a deep appreciation for the Black Tufts students who came through campus before me. But more alarmingly, I had developed such a disarming
awareness of my own personal cultural identity (or lack thereof), that I felt uncomfortable almost everywhere I went. Spaces that used to feel like home suddenly started feeling like they weren’t meant for me anymore. The music I played felt shallow and inadequate. The lyrics I sang were weak and weightless. The relationships I had built were melting away, and all I could do was melt with them.
My truth, in being a self-declared Black artist, is that I still do not have a working definition for what I believe to be “Black Art.” Even so, I constantly fear that my work won’t be “Black enough.” I sweat over trivial details such as slang and dialect in my lyrics. I insert over-played rhythmic references in my compositions to communicate that I have a subscription to Black popular culture, even if I never use it. I quote famous Black melodies in string and vocal arrangements to catch ears when I’m afraid that my own true sound won’t quite accomplish that. I often get so caught up in sounding “Black,” that I forget to sound like myself.
III
“If a Black artist decides to create art that doesn’t fit our definition of ‘Black Art,’ do we still call it Black Art?” –Jester Hairston ’29 & Professor T.J. Anderson
I saw the name “Jester Hairston” for the first time when I flipped through my high school’s hymn book during my junior year. His world-famous choral arrangement of “Amen” from the 1963 film Lilies of the Field was on the 117th and 118th pages of the book. Through reading Professor Gill’s work, I found out that Hairston was a 1929 Tufts graduate. Jester Hairston is widely credited in many circles to be one of the artists responsible for reviving and documenting the melodies that we know today as Negro Spirituals. Hairston himself was born on a plantation in 1901 and dedicated his entire career to the performance, preservation, and celebration of Black American Music.
While I explored the Jester Hairston collections in the Digital Collections and Archives, I started to draw parallels between his Tufts experience and my own. Though our student tenures were separated by almost a century, I couldn’t help but think that we shared some sort of common thread as Black Jumbos and Black artists. I came across photos of Hairston as a student starring
in a show and singing with his Black men’s vocal group and compared them to my own versions. Just as with the Gill collections, every new folder in the Jester Hairston collection was a new puzzle piece giving me a better picture of the legacy of Black American music and performance at Tufts.
When Pam Hopkins, Outreach Archivist in the Digital Collections and Archives, introduced me to the work of T.J. Anderson, I almost couldn’t believe it. As a prolific pianist, composer, and playwright, T.J. Anderson is a creative giant. With his sweeping, eclectic compositions that challenged my perceptions of rhythm and harmony, I had never felt so internally validated by someone else’s work. He didn’t bend to anyone’s sound or standards. There was nothing in his sound or writings that suggested he was trying to sound like anyone other than himself.
I spoke with my current academic advisor, Dr. Pearl Robinson, about her memories of T.J. Anderson’s tenure at Tufts as Music Department Chair. She mentioned a show that he put on in 1983 called Thomas Jefferson’s Minstrels and suggested that I attempt to recreate it. The show, which took place at Tufts and featured Tufts musicians and vocalists in the ensemble, was a satire on minstrel Blackface performance. I took that news back to Pam Hopkins in the archives, who directed me towards Professor John McDonald in the Music Department. Professor McDonald, who was a mentee of T.J. Anderson, gave me some incredible insight as to the inspiration behind Anderson’s work and the experiences which fueled it. Yet at the end of the conversation, rather than suggesting that I replicate Thomas Jefferson’s Minstrels, Professor McDonald recommended that I take the inspiration I gathered from T.J. Anderson’s work and start writing my own musical.
The seed that the Gerald Gill Papers planted in my head a year ago, with the help of many others along the way, is now about nine months into becoming a full-length musical on the evolution of minstrel Blackface performance and the commercial theft of Black American music. Inspired by three incredible Black performers and thinkers who came before me at Tufts, my ultimate goal is to create art that centers the truth that their work has helped me to understand: that my only responsibility as a Black artist is to create art that is true to my Black experience.
IV
How do you ask a question when there’s no real answer?
At the root of my fear of engagement is my fear that I’ll never find the cultural agency and gratifying creative release that I’m after. Even as my ability to ask questions has grown stronger and I’ve placated my fears of displeasing cultural gatekeepers, I’m still a little bit on edge, just waiting for a signal that it’s safe to engage.
Orbiting engagement has its pros and cons. On the plus side, my orbit status allows me to see engagement pretty clearly. My view gets blocked from time to time, but for the most part, I know what I’m missing out on. I can see it from all angles and perspectives. I understand its structure about as well as I understand what "orbit" means.
The downside of my orbit around engagement is that I can really only see the raw structure from up here. And it looks pretty dangerous to land on most of the time. So, I stay in orbit. It’s comfortable up here. Although one day, I thought I might have seen Opportunity sunbathing on one of engagement’s beaches.
“What’s the deal with opportunity?” I pointed down and asked my neighbor, Complacency.
They responded, “That’s not Opportunity, that’s Agency.”
For as long as she can remember, Dr. Zarin Machanda wanted to work with animals. “From the time I was a child, I really wanted to be an astronaut veterinarian, which is not a job,” she laughs, “but I had watched a documentary about sending chimpanzees to space. And when I was five years old, I just assumed that there were chimps in space, and I thought I’d go and take care of them.” It’s a funny anecdote—although any job involving space travel sounds awesome—but Machanda explains that her early desire to be a veterinarian shaped her academic studies and field work, while also creating some fascinating projects for her to explore.
Machanda is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, with a research focus on the social relationships of wild chimpanzees and how they’ve evolved over time. We trace through her education history, which includes a PhD from Harvard University on the evolution of male and female relationships in wild chimpanzees. “No one knew a lot about it before I started,” Machanda says, “which I thought was puzzling because male and female bonds are interesting and important in so many human cultures, and chimpanzees are our closest living relatives.”
Her research spanned almost 18 months in the field in Uganda, specifically including work at the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, at which she is now the director of long-term research. “I worked with Richard Wrangham, who is one of the world’s leading primatologists and has a field site in southwestern Uganda that he started in 1987. It was about the time that I graduated and finished my PhD that he approached some of his former students about running the site.”
Machanda notes how inheriting this field site from Wrangham has shaped her research at Tufts. “I archive and maintain all of this data from the project,” she explains, “and do various research initiatives. Right now, one set is focused on aging and another is focused on leadership.” The research put both Machanda—and Tufts students who are interested in the research—in contact with the Project’s full-time Ugandan staff, who collect the data every day. It’s all very impressive; I admit that my only knowledge of chimps comes from Jane Goodall. But for other Tufts students, this is a direct connection to really exciting research. “Because of the nature of the data and that we have years and years of it in my laboratory, it’s a great way to get undergraduate students involved,” Machanda says. She also explains that plenty of Tufts undergraduate students have traveled to Uganda to work on the field site.
Beyond this work, Machanda is very passionate about the conservation of chimpanzees. “The work that I’m involved in is through the Kasiisi Project, which is over 20 years old and works with 16 public elementary or primary schools near Uganda’s Kibale National Park,” she tells me. She’s a board member for the project, which focuses on providing these schools with educational support and opportunities while also teaching students about caring for the country’s natural resources. “It is a conservation project, but it manifests itself into various educational programming,” Machanda says. She talks about one of her favorite projects, which involves teaching girls how to make reusable sanitary pads for their periods. The goal is to keep girls in school while also demonstrating environmental responsibility. “My favorite part about this project is that now we teach the boys how to make them,” she says.
It’s easy to acknowledge how diverse Machanda’s commitments are, but all of her work connects her to some of the most interdisciplinary and passionate Tufts students. “For me, a lot of my focus with advising and teaching is science and biology, but my research also brings me closer to students who are interested in community health and public policy. It’s a great way of introducing them to some science and show[ing] them how it impacts them.” —CHRIS PANELLA ’21
DR. ZARIN MACHANDA
