Brenda
Wineapple, Doris Zemurray
Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, won the Ambassador Award for Best Biography of 2003 from the
English-Speaking Union of the United States for her book, Hawthorne: A Life. The book was chosen by the Books-Across the Sea Committee
for its “outstanding contribution to interpreting the life and culture of the U.S. to other English-speaking people.” Copies of the book will
be sent to ESU libraries throughout the world. Other winners were David
Maraniss (They Marched into Sunlight)
in American studies; Richard Powers (The
Time of our Singing) for fiction, and Collected
Poems of Robert Lowell, ed. Frank Bidart, for poetry. The chair of the
Committee is novelist Maureen Howard, taking over for George Plimpton. The
first chair was T. S. Eliot. Other members of committee include Eric Foner,
Vartan Gregorian, and Rick Moody. The awards ceremony is Oct. 7 at the New York
Public Library.
Faculty receive $1M NIH grant
Martin
Strosberg, research professor of political science,
is principal investigator for a $1 million National Institutes of Health training
grant titled “E-Education in Research Ethics: Central and Eastern
Europe.” Robert Baker,
professor of philosophy, will serve as faculty member and associate program
director along with Prof. Wayne Shelton of Albany
Medical College. Co-principal investigator is Eugenijus Gefenas of the University
of Vilnius, a former Fulbright Fellow to Union College. The purpose of the grant
is to improve the protection of human subjects in clinical drug trials in Eastern Europe
by training faculty from Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Russia, and Hungary to use the e-education techniques to educate researchers
about their ethical responsibilities to research subjects.
Five students are lone undergrads at semiconductor conference
Five Union students were the only
undergraduates presenting research at the 2004 Semiconductor Research
Corporation's (SRC) Graduate Fellowship Conference this week in San Francisco.
Presenting were senior Mayrita
Arrandale of North Blenheim, N.Y., who is majoring in biology and chemistry;
junior Michael Boyer of Portland, Ore., computer engineering; senior Jennifer
Eliseo of Burnt Hills, chemistry; junior Robert Katuska of Southborough, Mass.,
math and physics; and senior Evan Leibner of Bellmore, N.Y., chemistry and
physics. Michael Hagerman, associate professor of chemistry, an advisor for two
of the projects, traveled with the group.
SRC, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., is a research
management consortium of technology companies including IBM, Intel, National
Semiconductor Corp. and Texas Instruments.
Two faculty named MacArthur professors
Jennifer Matsue, assistant professor of performing arts and East Asian
Studies, and Andrew Morris, assistant professor of history, have been named John D.
and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professors, a fellowship that supports new
and promising faculty members.
Matsue is an ethnomusicologist who
specializes in Japanese popular and traditional music. She teaches courses on
Japanese popular music and culture, East Asian traditional music, world music,
gender and sexuality in music, and global popular music. She has held teaching
posts at the University of Chicago,
Sophia University
in Tokyo and Dartmouth
College. She earned her Ph.D. from
the University of Chicago
with a dissertation on underground bands in Tokyo.
She is working on a book titled Mamonaku Tokyo Desu! (Next Stop Tokyo!):
Underground Music-Making in Contemporary Tokyo.
Morris
specializes in 20th-century American political history, public policy,
welfare state and philanthropy. He earned his Ph.D.
from the University of Virginia with a dissertation titled “Charity, Therapy and Poverty:
Private Social Service in the Era of Public Welfare.” He is working on a
manuscript titled “The Limits of Voluntarism: Private Social Service and the
Expansion of the Welfare State.” Last fall, he made a presentation at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University
of Virginia titled “World War Two and the Revival of
Voluntarism.” He has authored an article, “The Voluntary Sectors' War on
Poverty,” to be published in the Journal
of Policy History.
The College
has recognized a total of 28 MacArthur Assistant Professors since 1982,
after it received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation. Last year's recipients were Anupama Jain of English, and
Erica Ball of history.
Senior surveys Chinese perceptions on labor
Annette Stock '05 has a modest
goal: “I want people to look at the tags when they put their clothes on in the
morning.”
Stock is just back from China,
where she used a mini-term at Tianjin University School of Traditional Medicine
to lay the groundwork for an extensive study about Chinese perceptions of their
labor economy.
The work will become the basis for
her senior thesis, about which she says, “I want it to be amazing. I want to
put as much time into this as I can.”
Stock said she wants to raise the
consciousness of American consumers, especially her fellow college students, to
make them aware that their purchases have a direct impact on people halfway
around the globe.
About five years ago, college
students across the country learned from various labor organizations that their
colleges and universities were investing and contracting with companies who
used so-called sweatshop labor. These students wanted a stricter code, designed to ensure that factories producing clothing and other goods
bearing school names respect the basic rights of workers. Over 100
colleges, including Union, withdrew from the Fair Labor
Association (FLA) and joined the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC). These campus boycotts helped call attention
to the plight of workers in China
and other countries.
Now, Stock wants to take what she
calls a “second step,” raising awareness so that consumers will push for
humanitarian support to those workers.
Stock, a native of St.
Johnsbury, Vt., is a senior
political science major with a minor in philosophy. She is a president of both Pi
Sigma Alpha (political science honor society), and the College's chapter of
Amnesty International.
Her idea to study Chinese views on
labor began to take shape during a class called Politics of China with Prof. Ted
Gilman, and came into sharper focus during an American Higher Education seminar
with Prof. Terry Weiner. She has also been aided
by Prof. Richard Fox, her political science advisor, and Prof. Jianping Feng, the leader of the China
mini-term. “So many Union faculty came together to make my project possible,”
she said. “Without their help I would have never left Schenectady!”
Her visit to China
was supported by a grant from the East Asian Studies Department, with funding
from the Freeman Foundation.
By interviewing Chinese citizens,
Stock hopes to gain a deeper understanding of their perception of sweatshops.
“It's such an important issue,” she said. “College students are painfully
unaware of the international labor economy, especially about the complex nature
of sweatshops.”
Stock, a member of the executive
committee for the Minerva Houses, said she plans to return to China with the
contacts she has developed at Tianjian University, where one dean circulated
her questionnaires to the students in his classes.
“We don't even know what the
Chinese think,” she said. “Having more information may allow consumers to look
at other alternatives.”
Stock credits faculty support and
her experience in Minerva's Green House, where she lived last year, for helping
develop her leadership skills. “If you have a good goal and want to make a
difference,” she said, “Union can give you the support
to reach it.”
Stock said she is considering law
school, but plans to take a year to do humanitarian work, most likely in China.