Two
Union faculty members – one a chemist,
and the other a poet – received national notice this fall:
Professor
Tom Werner, an enthusiastic supporter of undergraduate research since his
arrival at the College in 1971, received the American Chemical Society's Award
for Research at an Undergraduate Institution.
Ed
Pavlic, an assistant professor of English whose poetry writings are about music
and the memories it evokes, won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book
Prize for Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue.
The
award to Werner is funded by the Research Corporation, a private foundation for
the advancement of science. It honors a chemistry faculty member whose research
in an undergraduate setting has achieved wide recognition and contributed
significantly to chemistry and to the professional development of undergraduate
students. The award consists of $5,000 and a certificate; Research Corporation
also is providing a $5,000 grant directly to the College.
Werner,
the Florence B. Sherwood Professor of Physical Sciences, has directed about
fifty senior theses, which have produced publications with more than thirty
student co-authors, and more than thirty-five presentations at regional and
national conferences. Last year, one of his students, Tania Magoon, received a
National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship; she now is pursuing her Ph.D.
in chemistry at Harvard University.
A
longtime member and former chair of the board of governors of the National
Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), Werner twice co-chaired Union's
hosting of NCUR, the largest national conference of its kind. He also is a
co-author of a history of NCUR, which is to appear in The Journal of Chemical
Education. In 1991, he helped establish the Steinmetz Symposium at Union, now a
two-day celebration of undergraduate scholarly activity in which more than 300
students participate. He also helps direct the College's NSF-AIRE award, a
$500,000 grant awarded in part for the College's promotion of undergraduate
research, and is director of the NCUR/Lancy Initiative, which provides
institutions with support for faculty-mentored research.
He
remembers that he became fascinated with research while an undergraduate at
Juniata College in Pennsylvania. “I guess it's a story that's a fairly common
one,” he says. “The influence of the teachers that you have really has a big
impact on the way you end up,” recalling that it was an eccentric chemistry
teacher from high school who first sparked his interest in chemistry and that
professors in college opened up their worlds to him through research.
The award to Pavlic includes publication of
his book, a $3,000 cash award, and distribution through Copper Canyon Press, a
leading publisher of poetry books.
Pavlic,
a Union faculty member since 1997, says his book draws heavily on his own
musicality, in particular his penchant for the blues and the improvised art
form known as jazz. Many of his lines resemble musical riffs, and there are
frequent references to musicians such as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and
Miles Davis. Poet Adrienne Rich, who wrote the book's foreward, says that
Pavlic has “listened closely to our most profound American art, the blues and
jazz, and that music has not only helped him achieve poetic art form but
allowed him to explore a mesh of experience extraneous to literary theories.”
For the
title of the book, “paraph” (a flourish at the end of one's signature) and “bone”
combine to convey a sort of exuberance at the core of who we are, Pavlic says.
The rest of the title, borrowed from Davis's exploration in modal jazz that
featured prolonged invention within a single scale, refers to the wide spectrum
of human experience.
“The
title is a provocation that says, 'You're not going to get all of this,'”
Pavlic says. “There's a kind of mystery to it, and I liked the way it sounded.
A lot of times I start poems with sounds, not even a word, and the words kind
of branch out from there. There's a whole musicality to poetry.”
Pavlic
received his degrees from the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University.
His critical and creative work has appeared in African American Review, Black
Warrior Review, Colorado Review, DoubleTake, and other journals, and his book,
Crossroads Modernism, will be published this year by the University of
Minnesota Press.