SAS Journal

Rethinking King

The Reverend Jesse Jackson strolled onto the stage of Irvine Auditorium to conduct a public conversation with Michael Eric Dyson, the Avalon Professor in the Humanities, on the life and legacy of Martin Luther King. Each year, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Lecture in Social Justice brings to campus a scholar of African descent committed to a just society. Jackson, head of the Rainbow/ PUSH Coalition, was one of King’s lieutenants during the 1960s civil rights struggle. Tukufu Zuberi, sociology professor and director of the Center for Africana Studies, which sponsored the event, moderated the exchange of ideas and asked about the meaning of King’s legacy. Dyson, author of I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr., remarked that many had “frozen King’s legacy into a single moment”—the I Have a Dream speech—without understanding how radical the leader’s views are. “The focus,” said Jackson, “must be on the promise and not a dream because the dream doesn’t have a budget attached to it.”

Guggenheim Gold

Six members of the SAS faculty received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the School’s largest number in one year since 1995. The 2004 fellows were selected from over 3,200 applicants and went to 185 individuals from 87 institutions. Only five institutions, including SAS, had six or more fellows. “These are extremely prestigious awards for which there is intense competition,” noted Dean Preston. “That six of them went to SAS faculty is another very gratifying indicator of the caliber of scholarship in the School.” The SAS Guggenheim Fellows are:

• Professor of English Joan Dayan for a legal, cultural, and religious history of incarceration and slavery and their impact on identity;
• Associate professor of religious studies Talya Fishman to study the inscription of Oral Torah and the formation of Jewish culture in the Middle Ages;
• Professor of history and sociology of science M. Susan Lindee to examine the convergence of war, science, and medicine in 20th-century America;
• Professor of English Peter Stallybrass, the Walter H. and Lenore C. Annenberg Professor of Humanities, to explore technologies of reading and writing in early modern England and America;
• David Stern, the Ruth Meltzer Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature, to study how the physical forms of four classic Jewish books have shaped their meaning and significance;
• Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History Margo Todd for an urban history of the royal burgh of Perth in 16th- and 17th-century Scotland.

Two Best Books

Two members of the English department were cited for the excellence of their newest books—one nonfiction, the other poetry—at the National Book Critics Circle’s 30th annual award ceremony. Susan Stewart, Gr’78, won for poetry with her collection of verse in Columbarium, and Paul Hendrickson received the award for general nonfiction for Sons of Mississippi. “These two people are working at the highest levels of writing,” said Al Filries, the Kelly Family Professor of English. “It is just an extraordinary affirmation of what they have done.” The National Book Critics Circle consists of book reviewers and editors interested in singling out fine writing and advancing the intelligent discussion of books. Stewart, the Donald T. Regan Professor of English, is a poet and critic who teaches courses on the history of lyric poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature. Hendrickson, a prize-winning feature writer for the Washington Post for more than 20 years, teaches advanced
non-fiction writing. “I had been a little afraid it was my life’s pattern to be always a bridesmaid, never a bride,” he said, referring to three previous nominations of his books for literary awards (twice for the Critics Circle and once for the National Book Award). “It gives me immense feelings of pride and pleasure too, that my colleague, Susan Stewart, should have won in poetry—a great evening it was for Penn and for the liberal arts here.”

Dean’s Forum

Historian and best-selling biographer David McCullough was the keynote speaker at this year’s Dean’s Forum. The acclaimed storyteller spoke to a crowd at Irvine Auditorium on the qualities of leadership. McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies on John Adams and Truman as well as books on Theodore Roosevelt and events in American history make him an authority on the subject. “Popularity and leadership have never gone hand in hand,” he said.

Pulitzer Professor

Steven Hahn, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his book A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Hahn is a specialist on the social and political history of 19th century America and the history of the South. His prize-winning book tells the story of how former slaves transformed themselves into a political people. History department chair, Jonathan Steinberg, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History, points out that “Steven’s remarkable book rests on a very bright idea—that slaves must have had networks of kinship and information that constituted a politics of the oppressed and that once freed, they organized to take what had been submerged into the light.” A Nation under Our Feet had already garnered the Bancroft Prize for the best book on American history and the Merle Curti Award for the best social history. Hahn’s grassroots account “has done something which, once it’s done, is obvious,” notes Steinberg, “but nobody had thought of it before. That’s true of a lot of great ideas.”

Classroom Fieldwork

If anything is sure to give undergraduates the willies, it’s finding out that the dean
is seated in their classroom, spying from the back row. It conjures an image of Vernon Wormer, disciplinarian out to catch slackers in the film Animal House. But Rebecca Bushnell is no Dean Wormer.

Bushnell, dean of the College, explains that she has been sitting in on science classes “in order to experience science education from a student’s point of view.” And, she adds, “to educate myself better about how science is taught.”

A scholar of Shakespeare and the Renaissance, Bushnell admits that she’s long fostered an allergy to the world of DNA and neutrinos. “I’m one of those humanities students who avoided science classes at all costs.” But with the urging of her daughter, an aspiring physicist, she decided it was time to face her fears. To date, Bushnell has audited everything from organic chemistry to the Big Bang and Beyond, not to mention an advanced course on molecular biology and genetics.
Besides the “fascinating” lectures, she was surprised by some of the teaching methods. Almost all of the science lessons were taught with a barrage of images, she observes. “I had no idea that science was so visually oriented.” Whether used to illustrate anatomy, diagram a molecule, or just infuse some cartoon humor, the visual cues helped carry through the “act of translation/ interpretation,” which Bushnell says is the heart of the educational experience. The humanities, she believes, could benefit from this sort of pedagogical lesson.

With David Balamuth, the associate dean for natural and social sciences in SAS, she is working to convene department chairs to discuss which approaches to teaching science are effective. Though it’s uncertain what proposals the academic congress will make, Bushnell’s classroom fieldwork has convinced her of one thing: “You can’t sit down and talk to professors about their teaching unless you truly understand what it is they teach.”

— Ted Mann