Film Theory from Paris to New Haven 5

Diapers and Dissertations 6

E V E N T S

These funds support advanced graduate students of exceptional

merit as they complete their disser-tations. At Yale, a faculty commit-tee appointed by the Dean selects

the very best students from among those who have been nominated by

their departments to be Whiting Fellows. This year’s Whiting Fellows are Irina Dumitrescu (English), Tara Golba (French), Andrew Goldstone (English), Faith Hillis (History), John Muse (English), Laura Rob-son (History), and Rocco Rubini (Com-parative Literature). Fellows received prize scholarships and were honored at a dinner hosted by the Dean in November. They will meet several times during the spring semester to explore intellectual and profes-sional topics that go beyond their fields of specialization. John Mack Faragher, the Arthur Unobskey Professor of American History, director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders and profes-sor of American Stud-ies, will serve as faculty mentor for the Whiting Fellows group this year.

“I’m eagerly looking forward to meet-ing and getting to know these talented young people,” Faragher says. “I’ve invited the Whiting Fellows to join me in a series of lunchtime conversations about the role of humanists in American colleges and uni-versities. Over the semester we’ll be hearing from several guest speakers, including a rare books curator, a university press editor, and an English professor at a regional university.” “The mentoring aspect of

the program has been an extremely valuable experience for the Fellows in the past, and we anticipate a

lively exchange of ideas this semes-

Every year, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation provides

grants to Yale and six other universities recognized for

their distinguished graduate programs in the Humanities.

S aT u r D ay, F E b r ua r y 77 pm Grad Night at Yale Rep. Lydia.1120 Chapel Street. $15. www.yalerep.org9 pm—2 am Ninth Annual Winter Ball. Tickets/registration at www.yale.edu/mcdougal/studentlife, 432-BLUE or mcdougal.center@yale.edu

M o N D ay, F E b r ua r y 9, 4 P MDean’s Lecture. Anna Pyle, Professor of MB&B.“Catalytic RNA Molecules & the Origins of Biological Diversity.”119 HGS .

T u E S D ay, F E b r ua r y 1 0, 4 P MPoynter Lecture. Ira Flatow, host of Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. Location TBA

F r i D ay, F E b r ua r y 1 3“Levers for Change.” 3rd annual leadership conference, Yale School of Management. http://community.som.yale.edu/education

F r i D ay – S u N D ay, F E b r ua r y 13 /1 4 Friday and Saturday, 7:30 pm; Sunday, 2 pm. Yale Opera presents Mozart’s The Magic Flute. www.shubert.com. 203-562-5666

F r i D ay, M a r c H 6, 5 : 3 0 P MSpring Recess begins. Recess ends 3/23.

F r i D ay & S aT u r D ay, M a r c H 2 7 – 2 8Sixth Annual Yale Bouchet Conference on Diversity. HGS. www.yale.edu/graduate-school/diversity or 432-0763

S aT u r D ay, M a r c H 2 8, 7 P MGrad Night at the Yale Rep. Notes from Underground. 1120 Chapel Street. $15. www.yalerep.org

Full information on events above: http://research.yale.edu/cgi-bin/ mcdougal/publish2.72/webevent.cgi

yaLE GraDuaTE ScHooLNEWS�

www.yale.edu/graduateschoolVolume 11, Number 4

f e b r u a r y / m a r c h

best of the best

09Physics reunion conference 4

Grants and Fellowships online: http://studentgrants.yale.edu/

ter,” says Edward Barnaby, assistant dean and coordinator of the Whiting Fellowship program at Yale. “It is often noted that human-ists are vulnerable to a feeling of isolation that comes with the solitary nature of their research,” says Barnaby. “The Whiting Foundation’s program counters this ten-dency by encouraging discussions among graduate students that move well beyond a polite exchange of research interests. The Whiting Fellows are provided with a rare and invigorating opportunity to reflect on the variety of paths through which their peers have come to the study of the humani-ties, to distinguish and articulate what has shaped their own intellectual motivations as humanists, and to consider as a group the professional responsibilities and challenges that humanists share, regardless of the spe-

cific disciplines in which they operate. There is no better

time for these students to become conversant in

such issues than now,

continued page 2

Paris photo ©iStockphoto.com/fotoVoyager

as they complete their dissertations and prepare to present themselves for positions in the academy and beyond.” Each Whiting Fellow is deeply engaged in an intriguing research topic, and each has an individual story explaining what led them to Yale, to academia, and to their field of study.

I r I n a D u m I t r e s c uIrina is writing her dissertation on “The Instructional Moment in Anglo-Saxon

Literature,” a study of the complex role of corporal punishment and imagined pain in teacher-student encounters. Roberta Frank is her advisor. “Anglo-Saxon writers revered educa-tion as a vehicle for Christian salvation, but they also recognized that the process of learning, whether for infant or adult students, involved painful desires and strenuous negotiations for power. A variety of Anglo-Latin and Old English texts reveal imagined pain to be a constructive, but also potentially disruptive, component of the teaching moment. I explore this aspect of the teacher-student relationship in text-books, histories, esoteric wisdom literature, and saints’ lives in poetry and prose.” Irina was born in Bucharest, Roma-nia, grew up in Canada, and has lived in Israel and Germany. She earned a b.a. from the University of Toronto and came to Yale because “it seemed like a great chance to do what I loved most—reading, writing, and talking to people about literature and ideas.” Her research topic grew out of a fas-cination with what she calls “a very obscure text, the Old English poem, Solomon and Saturn. … Eventually, I realized that what most fascinated me about it was the fact that the two speakers in the poem, the wise King Solomon and Saturn, a pagan prince, are actually in a teacher-student encounter, but a very dark and dangerous one. My dissertation is about the role of mistrust, danger, and illicit attraction in teaching relationships.” Her article, The Grammar of Pain in Ælfric Bata’s Colloquies,” was recently accepted for publication at the Forum for Modern Language Studies. At Yale, in addition to academics, Irina was the graduate affiliate coordina-tor at Berkeley College for four years. She worked in the darkroom of the Art School for several years and taught Romanian through the World Language Center. She is a member of the Elizabethan Club, has published in Palimpsest, and co-organized two conferences: the New England Gradu-ate Medieval Conference in 2005, and in 2008, a conference on “Pleasure in Anglo-Saxon England”—both partially supported by the Dean’s Symposium Fund.

t a r a G o l b aTara is working on “French and Franco-phone Novels of Investigation: Dissecting the Post/colonial Epistemological Terrain,” with Christopher Miller as her advisor. In the dissertation, she analyzes European and African novels “in which scientific, histori-cal, criminal, and administrative investiga-tions provide the narrative framework. The investigations in question contain elements

best of the best, continued tigates the development of mass politics in a multi-lingual, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic city. It describes how Kiev, which was renowned for the diversity and inclusive ethos of its commercial elite in the 1860s, by the turn of the twentieth century became one of Russia’s most violent cities and the center of a mass-oriented, anti-Semitic right-wing movement. “Challeng-ing the tendency to write the political his-tory of late tsarist Russia as a narrative of decline, this work shows that local political culture was sophisticated and consequential and explores how Kiev residents used local politics to intervene in larger questions of pan-imperial importance,” she says. A native of Virginia, Faith graduated from Princeton University in 2002. Follow-ing a brief stint in the policy world in Wash-ington, d.c., she came to Yale to continue working with Laura Engelstein, who was her college thesis advisor. “My most positive memories of graduate school will always be connected to my travels,” Faith says. “I’ve had the good fortune to complete language courses in Berlin, Krakow, and Kyiv [Kiev] and to make several research trips to Europe, including a year-long odyssey that took me to archives and libraries in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and Finland.” J o h n m u s e John’s dissertation is titled “‘Time She Stops’: Modernist Theatrical Shorts Since 1880,” and is advised by Marc Robinson and Joseph Roach. “My topic came together as I did mountains of reading to prepare for my oral exams,” he reports. “In reviewing the plays and histories of modernist drama over the last 120 years, I kept coming across remark-ably short plays, but found that when these

little gems made it into the critical litera-ture at all (which they did only rarely), they were often dismissed or downplayed. It seemed to me that these tiny plays had a lot to say, both on their own and as part of a larger modernist impulse toward com-pression. “My project traces the origins and the impact of experimental short plays—I call them ‘modernist shorts’—since the late nineteenth century. I argue that we should recognize an understudied theatrical mini-genre that is parallel to the lyric poem in poetry, to the very short story in fiction, and to the short film, but that operates dif-ferently from these due to the shared expe-rience of time in the theater,” he says. “The authors of modernist shorts reacted against the well-made play and the gigantism of Wagnerian epic, and responded to a newly industrialized urban world in which new technologies were accelerating the pace of life and communication.” After growing up in Fulton, Missouri, John came to Yale College as an English major and was an active member of the the-atre scene. After earning his b.a. in 2000, he worked in New York for two years at an Internet company and then taught English

LENA CHIN Lena Chin (Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology) was first author on a paper published in an American Association for Cancer Research journal this past fall. The

paper describes groundbreaking lung cancer research and received major national and local media attention. Chin, with colleagues in Frank Slack’s lab, identified a biological marker that can be used to assess the risk of lung cancer in moderate smokers. The marker will also help with early diag-nosis and potentially with developing a cure for lung cancer. Lena earned her undergraduate degree at Rutgers University. Slack is the advisor of her dissertation, which is titled, “Muta-tions in the 3’ UTRs of lung cancer associated genes.”

CECILE LAGESSECecile Lagesse (Film Studies and East Asian Languages and Literature) had an essay in the December issue of the French film magazine, Cahiers

du Cinema. Published in French with an electronic English edition, the article is titled “Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life: Realism in the Age of the Digital.” Jia Zhang-ke is a prominent contemporary Chinese film director whose 2006 Still Life won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Interna-tional Film Festival. In her essay, Cecile argues that the use of digital techniques in Still Life enables the director to perpetuate an approach to cinematographic realism based on film critic André Bazin’s “ethic of the real.” Her scholarly interest is Chinese film and literature. Cecile earned her undergraduate degree at Paris I, Sorbonne University in France.

K u D o s

“the strength of the humanities in the colleges and universities of tomor-

row will depend on scholars and teachers like these.” J o h n m a c K Fa r a G h e r

of objective inquiry—conclusions might, for example, be verified by physical evidence—but the novels that I examine are especially notable for their challenging of assumptions about objectivity and subjectivity…. In my analysis of these novels, I hope to arrive at the very heart of how French and Francophone authors interpret the post/colonial subject’s knowledge of him/herself and the world.” A native of Toledo, Ohio, Tara received a b.s. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University, then worked as an au pair in France before joining the u.s. Patent and Trademark Office as a patent examiner. At the

Graduate School, she “decided to specialize in Francophone literature after taking courses at Yale on postcolonial

theory, the slave trade, and the literature of sub-Saharan Africa, and after carrying out research on African women writers in prepa-ration for my qualifying exams.” Tara’s research addresses “issues such as the relationship between anthropology and colonial-era racism, the role of memory and testimony in investigation, the subversion of official discourse, and perceptions of race in France today.” She has served as the French depart-ment’s representative to the Graduate Student Assembly for three years and has done volun-teer work with aids Project New Haven, help-ing to train and supervise high school students participating in a peer education program.

a n D r e w G o l D s t o n eAndrew reports that he was “raised by two academics. For a long time I thought I would go into my father’s field—physics. I concen-trated in physics and math at Harvard, where I got my bachelor’s in 2004. But by that time I had already chosen graduate school in English, thus end-ing up closer to my mother’s path; she got her master’s in French at Yale. My science background has never left me, though. The standards of rigor I learned in physics and math have continued to shape my approach to the study of literature.” Andrew’s dissertation, titled “The Dominance of Form: Modernist Poetic and Narrative Fictions of Aesthetic Autonomy,” is advised by Langdon Hammer. In it, He “addresses very fundamental questions about how we study a literary text: is it a self-con-tained, autonomous object? Is it a reflection of the social conditions that produced it?” He focuses on the early twentieth century and shows that “even the most extravagant claims to autonomy nonetheless reveal the relations between literature and its historical contexts. I argue for a sociologically specific concept of relative aesthetic autonomy. I study modernist literature’s vexed relationship to such contexts as the changing nature of domestic service, the myths of the aging artist, the world of expats in Paris, and the dream of a purely self-referential literature. Of course, choosing such a broad theoretical framework was also a sneaky way to work on a large selection of my favorite authors: Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Henry James, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Wal-lace Stevens, and others!”

F a I t h h I l l I sFaith’s dissertation, “Between Empire and Nation: Urban Politics and Community in Late Imperial Kiev, 1863–1907,” inves-

“It is often noted that humanists are vulnerable to a feeling of

isolation that comes with the solitary nature of their research.

the whiting Foundation’s program counters this tendency by

encouraging discussions among graduate students that move well

beyond a polite exchange of research interests.” e D wa r D b a r n a b y

as a second language in Chiang Mai, Thailand, for two years. He recalls, “That teaching experience convinced me that I wanted to be a teacher, and I could think of no better way to do that than teaching at a university. Looking for a graduate pro-gram where I could connect my interests in literature and performance, I chose to come back to Yale in 2004 because of the strong relationship here between the humanities and the performing arts.” L a u r a r o b S o N Laura is writing a dissertation on “The Making of Sectarianism: Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine, 1917–1948,” advised by Paul Kennedy. She came to Yale in 2003 and has “benefited hugely from the many opportunities I’ve had to travel. During my time here, I have traveled to Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria for archival research and lan-guage training.”

Her dissertation investigates “why and how sectarianism emerged as a major feature of the modern Palestinian Arab political landscape. My manuscript follows the declining political fortunes of Palestin-ian Arab Christians during the mandate period, from a prominent and influential position within a broad secular nationalist movement in the early years of the mandate to a position of almost total exclusion from Muslim-dominated national politics by the late 1930s. … This study historicizes the movement of Palestinian Arab politics away from secular nationalism and towards sec-tarianism. It demonstrates that both Muslim and Christian sectarian identifications, far from representing an entrenched mode of Palestinian Arab political action, constituted a considered response to the new conditions of the mandate state.” After growing up in New York and Michigan, Laura studied at Tulane, where she earned a joint b.a./b.f.a. degree in his-tory and music in 2000. She won a Mar-shall Scholarship to study in England and continued to pursue both areas, completing

a Master of Music degree in piano perfor-mance from the Royal Academy of Music in London and a second Master’s in ancient history from Queen’s College, Oxford. At Yale, she has been active on the music scene, singing in the Yale Camerata for the past four years. r o c c o r u b i N i In his dissertation, “Renaissance Humanism and Postmodernism: A Rhetorical History,” Rocco “explores the intellectual history and philosophical concepts that inform the twen-tieth century understanding of Renaissance humanism,” and “shows how the current understanding of the Renaissance evolved together with and informed the emergence of our postmodern historical consciousness.” His goal is “to advance the study of the Renaissance and its philosophy in the twenty-first century by showing in what way solid archeological and philological research on manuscripts can coexist with

insights derived from past and present developments in

philosophical herme-neutics, and thus

make the Renaissance once again a central epoch for the West and the beginning of its ‘modernity.’” Born and raised in Rome, Italy, Rocco moved to New York at the age of 17 with his mother. “We believed it would be only for one year, but then we ended up staying much longer, as we fell in love with the city. My home and neighborhood in New York is the Upper West side, where I went to high school for an International Baccalaure-ate diploma.” He earned his undergraduate degree from nyu in 2002 and came to Yale to study with two of his college mentor’s former students, David Quint and Giuseppe Mazzotta, who are now his advisors. “The strength of the humanities in the colleges and universities of tomorrow will depend on scholars and teachers like these,” says Faragher. The Graduate School is deeply proud of these outstanding stu-dents.

Top row, left to right: Andrew Gold-stone, Irina Dumitrescu, Faith Hillis, and John Muse. Second row: Laura Robson, Rocco Rubini, and Tara Golba. Whiting Fellows and advisors are pictured below. Seated, left to right: Professor Roberta Frank, Irina Dumi-trescu, John Muse, and Professor Marc Robinson. Standing, Professor Joseph Roach, Tara Golba, Professor Amy Hungerford, Andrew Goldstone, Rocco Rubini, and Dean Jon Butler

PhOTOS

About 85 alumni of the Physics and Applied Physics

departments returned to campus to join current faculty

and graduate students for a three-day conference titled

“Today’s Physics for Tomorrow’s World” in November.

The weekend began with welcoming remarks from Dean Butler and Physics Department Chair Meg Urry. Events included a depart-mental open house with lab tours, panels with alumni speakers, a reception and dinner at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, a gala evening in Silliman College, and a special tour of campus highlighting new construction and renovation. On Friday, graduate students presented their research at a poster session as part of the open house. Conference panels addressed “Alumni at the Frontiers of Physics Research, “Science Policy and Its Implications for Research at Universities and Laboratories,” “From Yale Physics to the World of Business, Finance and Industry,” and “Modern Trends in Physics Education.” Steven Girvin, deputy provost for science and technology, spoke on the future

of the sciences at Yale, and Urry gave a

presentation on the current directions of the Physics Department. Participating speakers hailed from a wide range of universities, including Texas a&m, Cornell, cuny, Notre Dame, and Vassar; from the world of business (Hewlett-Packard, hsbc, ibm, and CreditSights); and from labs such as the u.s. Department of Energy and lgs-Bell Labs Innovations. Yale faculty speakers and moderators, in addition to Urry and Girvin, were Francesco Iachello, Michael Zeller, Charles Baltay, Thomas Appelquist, Peter Parker, and Daniel Prober. The reunion and conference were organized by the Association of Yale Alumni. Iachello was faculty coordinator.

Physics reunion conference

At far left Lab partners, left to right, Steven Korotky ‘80 PH.D., Munter Hin-di ‘80 PH.D., Steve Willett ‘81 PH.D., and Mark Cunningham ‘82 PH.D. Left At the poster session, graduate student Christine Nattrass presents her research to alumnus Baha Balantekin ‘82 PH.D., University of Wisconsin. Below Alumnus Ping Zhao ‘86 PH.D. and research scientist David Rabinowitz talk shop.

PhySicS reuNiON cONfereNce

Titled “Ouvrir Bazin/Opening Bazin,” the conferences focused on the work of influ-ential French film critic and theorist André Bazin (1918–1958). Founding editor of the journal, Cahier du Cinéma, Bazin wrote extensively about the significance of “objec-tive reality” in film. His essays, champion-ing the “invisible” director and the power of documentary filmmaking, continue to be widely read by film scholars.

“Bazin is important today because several of his texts were foundational for the discipline of film studies, posing key questions that we keep debating as the nature of cinema technology changes,” says Grant Wiedenfeld (Film Studies). Bazin’s ideas are especially open to re-examination in light of the digital revolution. He argued that “an image doesn’t just represent (as an icon), but proves and preserves (as an index) the real existence of an object or event,” says Seung-hoon Jeong (Film Studies). “Digitization can create and compose an image even without its real source, so it de-ontologizes the traditional notion of cinema based on celluloid film. The more the cinema is threatened by new media, the more Bazin needs to be read-dressed.” “In film studies, people have been re-reading Bazin recently to see howhis ideas about photographic realism in cinema hold up in the era of digital (argu-ably ‘post-photographic’) imaging. This conference demonstrated that there is far more to Bazin than the ideas about pho-

tography and realism with which he is often most readily associated,” Ryan Cook (Film Studies) adds. Panels in Paris were conducted in French. Language was a bit of a problem for some of the Yale students. Ryan, for example, had studied abroad in Paris as an undergraduate and can read and converse in French “fairly well,” he says, “but I was out of practice and often found myself confusing

everyone by unintentionally sub-stituting French with Japanese, the foreign language I’ve been immersed in most recently. Speaking publicly in French at the conference was intimi-dating, but I felt that my piece went surprisingly well.” Grant, on the other hand, had lived in Paris and speaks fluent French.

Furthermore, he adds, “I love visiting Paris because it’s the capital of world cinema: a Disneyland for the cinephile.” Pluses of the Paris venue were excur-sions to restaurants and “getting inside a

French university and seeing the way that academic meetings are conducted in France,” Ryan says. “We also had a set of screenings and talks at the Cinematheque Fran-caise, a very symbolic location for film studies and for Bazin. And there were plenty of occasions to talk to people over food and drinks, including a very nice dinner on Thanksgiving at a cozy Parisian restaurant.” Participants in addition to Grant, Seung-hoon, and Ryan included Diana Lem-berg (History) and Film Studies students Michael Cramer, Alice Lovejoy, and Jeremi Szaniawski. Jennifer Stob attended the Yale

Film Theory from Paris to New Haven

Eight graduate students participated in a pair of bilingual,

bi-national conferences held at the University of Paris-

Diderot in November and at Yale in December.

conference. Students presented papers and held a roundtable discussion (in French in Paris, in English at Yale) and interacted with invited scholars from universities that included Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Uni-versity of Iowa, University of Chicago, and nyu. In addition, each student prepared and presented a dossier based on research in the Bazin archive at Yale. The archive at Yale includes “a copy of almost everything Bazin published in his career, from very short movie reviews writ-ten for popular newspapers and magazines to substantial, carefully crafted essays, many long overlooked, that originally appeared in more specialized publications,” Ryan explains. “There are over 2,000 items in the collection. It will be significant not only to scholars interested specifically in Bazin, but also to those researching film in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s, as Bazin was writing prolifically and insightfully throughout the period on what he was seeing around him.” “I personally learned most by delv-ing into the fantastic archive put together by professors Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin (from Paris),” Jeremi says. “When you know that less than 10% of Bazin’s works had been anthologized hitherto, you can gauge the importance of this undertaking and its value for future generations of scholars. The conferences were the jewels in the crown of this research process.” “To me, the wonderful thing about the Paris conference was to be immersed in a totally different academic tradition than the Ivy League one. The room in which we held our talks was less lavish than the Whitney Humanities Center’s auditorium, no doubt, but in spite of the cold of the bare walls and concrete columns (evocative of nothing more than a parking lot), there was a wonderful intellectual warmth and energy about the event,” Jeremi says. Actress Jeanne Moreau attended the Paris conference and read from Bazin as well as from Francois Truffaut’s writings on Bazin. “It was a highpoint of the confer-ence,” says Andrew, the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Litera-ture and dgs of the Film Studies Program. Andrew helped organize the conferences. Speaking of the New Haven confer-ence, Jennifer says, “I deeply appreciated the scholarly diversity of the speakers invited and their significant contributions to the field of film studies. It was a pleasure and an honor to be able to discuss with them and present my work to them on the graduate student panel.” Sponsoring Yale offices included the Film Studies Program, the departments of French and Comparative Literature, the European Studies Council, the Whitney Humanities Center, the Peter Woodward Fund, and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, and beyond Yale, the French Cultural Services.

Pictured on right in film strip: photo #5 from top, Seung-hoon Jeong and Grant Wiedenfeld; photo #7 Michael Cramer and Alice Lovejoy; photo #9 Jeanne Moreau and Jeremi Szaniawski.

“bazin is important today because several of his texts

were foundational for the discipline of film studies,

posing key questions that we keep debating as the

nature of cinema technology changes.” G r a N T W i E D E N F E L D

“This conference demonstrated that there is far more

to bazin than the ideas about photography and realism

with which he is often most readily associated.” r ya N c o o K

“To me, the wonderful thing about the Paris conference

was to be immersed in a totally different academic

tradition than the ivy League one.” J E r E M i S z a N i aW S K i

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Having a baby complicates life, and the Graduate School is prepared to help. At a panel last semester, administrators, current students, and faculty members provided useful information to those contemplating parenthood. The program was organized by McDougal Family Fellow Susan Caplan (Nursing), mother of Liam and grand-mother of five—all of whom will accom-pany her onto the Woolsey Hall stage).

“This is the second year we’ve pre-sented the ‘Grad Students Contemplating Becoming Parents’ program, because we feel that parenting is one of the most important decisions a person can make,” Susan says. “We wanted to provide current students with an opportunity to hear what went into the decision for people who were graduate students, post docs or faculty members when they had their babies.” Assistant Dean Robert Harper-Mangels (father of Ramey, 6) assured the audience that the Graduate School was committed to assisting students with families, and highlighted the Parental Relief policy that was insti-tuted in 2007. He urged students to contact their associate dean well in advance of the arrival of a new baby, “to tailor the Parental Relief Policy to your individual needs. We want you to be able to have your family and still complete your degree in a reasonable time. Whether your personal and academic situation is simple or complex, we’ll work with you.” Information about the policy is available at www.yale.edu/graduateschool/policies/parental.html Yale’s Parental Relief Policy is unusual, Lisa Brandes, director of Student Life (and mother of 4-year-old Charles) pointed out. “Only three or four other universities have a similar policy. This is still new to us and to everybody else, but the Graduate School feels this is an important step in becoming more family-friendly.” In essence, the policy provides ph.d. students with up to 16 weeks of relief from academic, research, and teaching duties following the birth or adoption of a child. Financial support continues, uninterrupted, and the time-to-degree is extended. Mas-ter’s degree students may also modify their academic responsibilities because of the arrival of a child. In addition, the Graduate School helps ph.d. student parents by paying the full cost for family basic and hospitalization health coverage through the Yale Health Plan.

MICHAEL PEPPARD An essay by Michael Peppard (Religious Studies) was featured as the cover story in December’s issue of Commonweal: A Review of Religion, Politics and Culture. His article, titled “The Secret

Weapon: Religious Abuse in the ‘War on Terror,’” surveys, analyzes, and interprets the significance of allegations of religious abuse, especially desecra-tion of the Qur’an, in the Guantánamo detention facility. Using accounts of former detainees and U.S. government reports, he argues that many Muslims consider these abuses to be the worst form of torture. Michael is working on a dissertation on a very different topic, titled “The Christian ‘Son of God’ in the Roman World,” which shows how the social and political concepts of “sonship” in the Roman Empire can be used to illu-minate early Christian concepts. Harold Attridge, dean of Yale Divinity School, is his advisor. Michael earned an M.A.R. at Yale Divinity School and a B.A. at the University of Notre Dame.

EMILY GOBLEEmily Goble (Anthropology) has won the Bryan Patterson Memorial Award, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The prize is awarded for “field work that is innovative rather than routine, venturesome rather than predictable, unusual rather than run-of-the-mill.” Emily studies how significant climate fluctuations in the Kenya Rift Valley around 2.5 million years ago affected mammal communities, including the earliest known representatives of the human genus, Homo. Another genus of humans, Paranthropus, evolved at about this same time. Stone tools also make their first appearance in the archaeological record. For the past three years, Emily has collected fossils in the Tugen Hills west of Lake Baringo and studied them as well as other collections in the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi. She is also developing paleo-environmental models using satellite remote sensing to pursue her inter-ests in biogeography, faunal change, and climatic forcing. Emily did her undergraduate studies at Arizona State University. Her advisor is Andrew Hill and her dissertation, “Faunal Shifts and Precessional Climatic Forcing in the Chemeron Formation, Tugen Hills, Kenya,” combines the use of remotely-sensed images, modern ecology, faunal analysis, and fieldwork.

The University has several affiliated childcare centers and maintains a compre-hensive database of center and family-based care in Greater New Haven www.yale.edu/worklife. The many services of the Worklife Program Office include regular workshops, resources, consultation, and subsidized back-up care when regular arrangements fall through, such as when a child is sick or when parents travel to academic conferences and

bring their children, since Yale backup care is part of a national network. Yale also has an online babysitting service, where Yale-affiliated parents can

advertise for student sitters, and student-babysitters can advertise their availability www.yale.edu/babysitting. Other resources include advice and advocacy provided by Brandes and the two McDougal Family Fellows, monthly family activities (www.yale.edu/mcdougal/studentlife),

and monthly lunches for graduate student parents. McDougal Family Notes, http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/mcdougal-family, are sent monthly to subscribers to keep them informed of programs and policies of interest to student-parents. On a very practical level, there are baby-changing tables in the hgs first-floor restrooms and booster seats and highchairs in the Dining Hall and Blue Dog Café. After general information was given out, members of the panel took the floor. They were Stewart Moore (Religious Studies), father of 2-year-old Lizzie; Nurit Shna-bel (Psychology post-doctoral associate), mother of 3-year-old Lior; Monica Ordway (Nursing), mother of 3-year-old Ryan and

6-year-old Justin; and Mayur Desai, assis-tant professor in the School of Public Health and father of three daughters. Desai, whose wife is on the faculty of Yale Medical School, said, “We decided to have our kids as junior faculty. There’s no good or bad time to have a baby, but keep in mind that you’ll never become less busy than you are now. In fact, life only gets busier, but somehow your life fits around your children.” Once the baby arrives, parents need to locate childcare, so they can get back to

work. Several panelists raised the problem of finding good, affordable care, especially for infants and toddlers under the age of three. Brandes noted that there are options for low-cost or highly subsidized care, such as daycares and pre-schools run by the New Haven Public School system (www.nhps.net) and the State of ct Care 4 Kids program (www.ctcare4kids.com). Monica recommended Au Pair in America or Cultural Care, both of which provide live-in nannies. Nurit, pictured above with her son, advised prospective parents to sign up for daycare as early as possible—before the birth of the child. She also spoke of the frustration of trying to excel professionally, while trying to be on hand for the children. “I don’t want to miss things at work, but when I come home after the kid is asleep, I feel guilty.” Stewart noted that having a child changes a person’s perspective and cau-tioned, “You can’t be a perfect parent and a perfect student at the same time. You prob-

ably can’t be a perfect parent at all!” But it was clear that

despite the complica-tions involved, all four

panelists were happy they had children.

“We want you to be able to have your family and still

complete your degree in a reasonable time. Whether

your personal and academic situation is simple or

complex, we’ll work with you.” D E a N r o b E r T H a r P E r - M a N G E L S

“There’s no good or bad time to have a baby, but keep in mind that

you’ll never become less busy than you are now. in fact, life only gets

busier, but somehow your life fits around your children.” M ay u r D E S a i

K u D o SQuite a few graduate students start their families while still

at Yale. At the Commencement diploma ceremony in May, a

crowd of strollers always lines the back of Woolsey Hall,

and a fair number of babies and toddlers accompany their

parents onto the platform to be congratulated by the Dean.

Diapers and Dissertations online: www.yale.edu/graduate-school/policies/parental.html

Yale Graduate School’s students come from every state in the U.S. and about

100 different countries around the world. Their diversity is one of the great

strengths of the school. The faces on this page, selected at random from pho-

tos taken at recent Graduate School social events, reflect some of the energy,

warmth, humor, and intelligence of the student population. If you are pictured

here, please contact the Graduate School News editor, gila.reinstein@yale.edu,

so we will know who you are!

The Many Faces

V o L u M E 1 1, N u M b E r 4, F E b / M a r 2 0 0 9

Yale Graduate School News is a publication of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Jon Butler, dean; Gila Reinstein, editor; Bjorn Akselsen, design/production; Yale RIS, production supervision; Michael Marsland, Harold Shapiro, photography.

Send us news and notification of upcoming events. Email: gila.reinstein@yale.edu; by fax: 432–1323, or stop by the Office of Public Affairs, 265 Church Street, suite 901.

In an effort to highlight the impor-tance of good mentoring in successful graduate education and to celebrate great mentors here at Yale, the Graduate Student Assembly and the Graduate School will host Mentor-ing Week 2009, a week of seminars and events focused on graduate mentoring. After the success of last year’s Mentoring Week, participat-ing students and faculty members compiled a handbook to help students and faculty maintain good mentoring relationship. Here are a few helpful suggestions from that document:

Students should be aware that every mentor will have a different mentoring style. Some will want to involve themselves more directly in their students’ work, and others will take a more hands-off approach. Some will prefer a more formal rela-tionship, and others a more casual one. This will depend a great deal on the individual personality of the mentor.

Students should be aware that if their mentors are mentoring multiple students, the mentor may tailor his/her mentoring style to the perceived needs of each individual. Giving extra attention to certain students at a particular time or for a particular reason does not necessarily signal favoritism or neglect.

The mentee should be honest about his or her needs. The student should explain whether or not he or she prefers a hands-on or hands-off approach; how often he or she hopes to meet; whether or not he or she needs regular positive reinforcement. On both sides, the expectations should be clear and explicit.

This year, mentoring week will be held from February 1–7. For a complete schedule, or to read more of the Mentoring Statement, please visit http://gsa.yale.edu. S l o a n W a r r e n ( n e u r o S c i e n c e )

G S a u P D aT Ewww.yale.edu/gsa

M i c H a E L J o H N S T o N Michael Johnston (ph.d. 1977, Political Sci-ence) has won the 2009 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Johnston, a political sci-ence professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, n.y., earned the prize for proposals he set forth in his 2005 book, Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power and Democ-racy. The book analyses the causes of corrup-tion and proposes some remedies. The Grawemeyer Foundation, based at the University of Louisville, awards $1 mil-lion each year: $200,000 each for works in music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology, education, and religion. Johnston’s book argues that the best way to end corruption is to first examine its under-lying causes and the political and economic systems in which it flourishes. Corruption takes different forms in different cultures: The practice of using wealth to seek influ-ence is common in the United States, Japan, and Germany, while forming cartels to pro-tect the elite is more typically seen in Italy, Korea, and Botswana. In Russia, Mexico, and the Philippines—countries with liberal economies and weak civil societies—fair mar-ket competition is especially risky. But the worst type of corruption—the plundering of society by those who retain absolute power—is nearly always seen in countries with growing economies and weak institutions. Understanding how corruption develops in a particular country can help stop it more effectively, says Johnston, whose work was chosen from among 50 nominations. Johnston directs Colgate University’s Division of Social Sciences and has been a Fulbright Senior Specialist since 2006. (The Fulbright Specialists Program provides short-term academic opportunities for u.s. faculty and professionals.) He has done extensive consulting in the field of public policy, assist-ing the United Nations, u.s. State Depart-ment, World Bank, World Resources Insti-

outstanding alumni For alumni news, see www.aya.yale.edu/grad

J E r u S H a b . D E T W E i L E r - b E D E L L Jerusha B. Detweiler-Bedell (ph.d. 2001, Psychology), associate professor of psychol-ogy at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, has been named the Outstanding Baccalaureate Colleges Professor of the Year. The award is one of four administered by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and sponsored by The Car-negie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to recognize professors for their influence on teaching and their commit-ment to undergraduates. According to the award announcement, “Detweiler-Bedell … challenges her students to investigate real-world puzzles, encouraging them to design and conduct experiments, par-ticipate in small group debates and engage in research projects that have resulted in changes on campus.” Detweiler-Bedell’s own research focuses on human decision-making, health psychology, and clinical psychology. She teaches introductory and advanced courses and says, “The central goal in my class is for students to think scientifically about issues related to human behavior.” Detweiler-Bedell, who joined the psychology faculty of Lewis & Clark in 2001, immerses students in interactive and challenging lessons starting in their first psychology course. Students in her Intro-duction to Psychology class, for example, handle a human brain and imagine themselves as subjects in classic psychology experiments. More advanced students in her Clinical Psychology course assume the roles of therapist and patient as they learn to solve realistic problems. This year’s u.s. Professors of the Year award winners were selected from a pool of nearly 300 nominees. tiaa-cref is the pri-mary sponsor of the awards ceremony, and Phi Beta Kappa sponsors a reception for the winners at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

tute, and the u.s. Agency for International Development. Johnston has been a visiting scholar at the University of Glasgow, Uni-versity of York, University of Durham, and Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and was an external examiner for Hong Kong University’s Graduate Program in Corruption Studies.

S T E F a N K . L a i The Institute of Electrical and Electron-ics Engineers (ieee) honored Stefan K. Lai (ph.d. 1979, Engineering and Applied Science) with the 2008 Andrew S. Grove Award, in recognition of his contributions to the development and advancement of flash memory technology, which has become an integral component in consumer electronic devices like mobile phones, digital media players, and usb flash drives. Lai is currently working on starting a company to bring phase-change memory to market. Before that, he was vice president for business development at Ovonyx, Inc. From 1982 to 2006, he worked at Intel, ris-ing to the position of vice president of the Flash Memory Group and Chief Technical Officer of Califor-nia Technology and Manufactur-ing. Lai started the flash memory development team in 1983, and man-aged almost every generation of flash memory develop-ment at Intel. Prior to his work at Intel, Lai was a member of Technical Staff at the ibm Yorktown TJ Watson Research Center. He was recognized as an ieee Fellow in 1998 for his research on the properties of silicon mos interfaces and the development of flash eprom memory. In the course of his career, he has seen stunning technical advances. “I went from building vacuum tube radios in high school to using mechanical teletype to writing my first computer program at Caltech to mak-ing 256 Mbit flash memories to be used in color cell phones with camera,” he told Yale graduate students when he visited campus several years ago.

in the company of Scholars

Next lecture in the Dean’s lecture

series: Prof. anna Pyle, “catalytic

rNa Molecules and the origins

of biological Diversity,” Monday,

February 9, 4 pm. HGS 119

Kicking back at GPScy (don’t tell my advisor)