Union’s writer-in-residence, Binyavanga Wainaina, wrote an op-ed about tribal violence in Kenya that appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, Jan. 6. In it, Wainaina wrote, “This thing called Kenya is a strange animal. In the 1960s, the bright young nationalists who took over the country when we got independence from the British believed that their first job was to eradicate ‘tribalism.’ What they really meant, in a way, was that they wanted to eradicate the nations that made up Kenya. It was assumed that the process would end with the birth of a brand-new being: the Kenyan. Compared with other African nations, Kenya has had significant success with this experiment. But it has not been without its contradictions, though they had never really turned lethal until now.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution named Wainaina to its list of people worth watching in 2008, along with U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, Spanish actor Javier Bardem, and Fidel and Raul Castro. Associate Professor Frank E. Wicks was elected a fellow in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the highest elected grade of the society. The College honored Wicks during a ceremony on Oct. 5. Less than 3 percent of the 120,000 members of the society are elected by the board of directors as fellows. Selection is based on significant engineering achievements and contributions to the mechanical engineering profession. Wicks was nominated by Nancy Deloye Fitzroy, a former president of the engineers society who has served as an advisor to Union’s student chapter.
Ann Andersen, the Agnes S. MacDonald Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Mary Carroll, professor of chemistry and director of undergraduate research, recently presented four papers at the XIVth International Sol-Gel Conference in Montpellier, France. Union students and recent alumni co-authored the papers. Anderson was the only faculty member from an undergraduate institution to give an oral presentation at the conference. She spoke on “Understanding and Modeling the Relationship Between Pressure and Temperature in the Rapid Supercritical Extraction Aerogel Fabrication Process.” Co-authors are Carroll and former mechanical engineering students Tim Roth ’06 and Matthew Ernst ’07, now engineering graduate students at, respectively, UCLA and the University of Vermont. Anderson and Carroll, directors of Union’s Aerogel Lab, co-presented three poster papers at the conference. Their student co-authors included Shazia Baig ’09, Amanda Barrow ’08, John Ferrarone ’07, Sadie Gorman ’08, Emily Green ’08, Jason Melville ’07, Aaron Philips ’06, Adam Reeve ’07 and Caleb Wattley ’08.
Laurie Tyler, assistant professor of Chemistry, has been awarded a prestigious Jerome A. Schiff Charitable Trust grant of $30,000 for the academic year 2007-08 in support of her project, “Structure Determination and Dynamics of Transition Metal Complexes Using Isotopically Labeled Ligands: Through Metal Coupling of NMR Active Nuclei.” Tyler will use her award to purchase chemicals and equipment, and to provide stipends for students who will be conducting research. She is interested in developing new, innovative methods for determining chemical structure using NMR spectroscopy. Her initial NMR studies have yielded promising and exciting findings that have not been reported previously. Tyler holds a doctorate in inorganic chemistry from the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Schiff grant is designed to assist a faculty member whose research has been difficult to fund because it is too interdisciplinary or esoteric for traditional funding agencies.
Linda E. Patrik, professor of philosophy, has been awarded a Contemplative Practice Fellowship to develop a new philosophy course, “Contemplative Social Ethics,” from the American Council of Learned Societies in its 2006-2007 fellowships competition. The course will be offered in spring 2008 and the grant will support three class field trips to non-profit organizations in New York state that base their social work on contemplation. Students will learn and practice the contemplative methods used by the social workers, who administer these non-profit organizations related to job opportunities in urban areas, prison reform and anti-violence strategies for teenagers.
Brenda Wineapple, the Doris Samurai Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, has won this year’s SCMLA Kirby Prize for Best Article, “The Politics of Politics; or, How the Atomic Bomb Didn’t Interest Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson,” published in the South Central Review, Vol. 23, No. 3, Fall 2006.