Posted on Jan 1, 2004

Martha K. Huggins, the Roger Thayer Stone Professor of Sociology, retired from Union in December and assumed a position in Tulane University's Sociology Department, where she has been appointed the Charles A. and Leo M. Favrot Professor of Human Relations.

A graduate of California State University at Long Beach, she received her M.A from the University of Arizona and her Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. She joined the College's Sociology Department in 1979, where the courses she taught ranged from “Introduction to Sociology” to “Women, Technology, and Economic Development in Brazil.” She also chaired the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and was the first director of the College's Women's Studies program.

She first visited Brazil more than twenty-five years ago as a Fellow of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Although she intended to study labor unions, she soon focused on vigilantism and the death squads (the country then was under a military dictatorship).

One of the resulting books, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Duke University Press, 1998) won the American Society of Criminology and New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) “best book” prizes. A more recent work,
Violence Workers:
Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities (University of California Press, 2002, with co-authors, Mika Haritos Fatouros and Philip Zimbardo), was awarded the “Best Book for 2002”
prize by both NECLAS and the American Society of Criminology's Division of International Criminology (DIC). The book was also a finalist for the 2003 C.
Wright Mills Award.

An article, “Women Studying Violent Male Institutions: Cross-Gendered Dynamics in Police Research on Secrecy and Danger,” was published in the
Journal of Theoretical Criminology (August, 2003) with Marie-Louise Glebbeek, an anthropology colleague at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. This article is the basis for Huggins's edited book in progress:
Women Researching in Male Spaces: Danger, Secrecy, and Ethics.

Posted on Jan 1, 2004

William B. Bristol, professor of history emeritus, died on Oct. 24.

A native of Philadelphia, he graduated in 1936 from Gettysburg College and earned both his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a visiting professor
at the University of Puerto Rico and taught at Princeton
University before joining the Union faculty in 1948. He retired in 1985.

As a pacifist during World War II, he was a conscientious objector, working with the U.S Forest Service, first
in New York and then in
Oregon and Washington, where he was a smokejumper, parachuting into remote
locations to fight forest fires.

A specialist in Latin
American history, Prof.
Bristol taught such courses as “The Spanish and Portuguese Empires in America,” “Latin America and the United States,” and “The Mexican Revolution.” He traveled extensively in Central and South America, making several trips to pursue research on Protestant missionary activities in Colombia, to investigate fruit companies in Honduras and Costa Rica, and to lead Union student groups to Bogota. He wrote a monograph on Cuba for the American Friends Service Committee, reviewed more than forty-five books for Choice magazine, and was a frequent speaker on non-violence and on Latin American topics.

He was active with foreign student groups art the College and was an advisor to the International Relations Club and Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. His memberships included the American Historical Association, the Latin American Studies Association, the Conference on Latin American History, and Phi Beta Kappa.

Survivors include his wife, Naomi; his daughter, Joan Cameron Bristol; his son-in-law, Randolph F. Scully; and his granddaughter, Naomi Scully-Bristol.

(A letter about Prof. Bristol appears in the “Letters” section.)

Posted on Jan 1, 2004

Erica Ball, assistant professor of history, and Anupama Jain, assistant professor of English, have been named John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professors, a fellowship that supports new and promising faculty members.

Ball, who joined the College in 2001, earned her bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School and University Center of City University of New York. Her research and teaching interests include early American social and cultural history, African American history, and U.S. women's history.

Jain, who joined Union in 2002, holds a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College and a master's and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory, and Asian American literature and studies. She recently presented her research about the growing Indo-Guyanese community in Schenectady.

The College has recognized a total of twenty-six MacArthur Assistant Professors since 1982, after it received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Posted on Jan 1, 2004

The annual Report of Gifts,
sent by the Office of College Relations to those who contributed to the Union Fund, contained some errors:

-The Class of 1935 in
memoriam should have been Robert L. Slobod.

-In the Class of 1989,
Lauren and William Leahy should have been listed in
the Frank Bailey League.

-In the Class of 1992, Erin Reams Vialardi and Robert
V. Vialardi should have
been listed in the Richmond Associates

Audubon's Birds of America, as printed by Robert Havell, Jr., is intaglio using mostly etching with aquatint and some engraving. It
is not lithograph, as erroneously attributed to Prof. Carl George in our article about “The Illustrated Organism” in the fall issue.

Posted on Jan 1, 2004

Peering over the shoulder of President Bush is Ross Feinstein '05, who was an intern at the United Nations last
summer. Working for the Press and Public Affairs section of the U.S. Mission, Feinstein says he attended lots of meetings and met many heads of state. Working into September meant that he missed the first weeks of his Term Abroad in England, but it also meant that
he was able to work with the White House to help coordinate the president's visit to the United Nations. “The experience I received
was second to none. I can't rave enough about it-it was so great even before I met the president, secretary of state, and others.”