Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.

• If you missed the Narrative Journalism Showcase on Tuesday, you still have a chance to listen to the amazing stories in the “How Did You Get Here?” series on middmag.com. Check out the trailer to get a taste of what’s in store!

• Not only is Sue Halpern the director of the Narrative Journalism Fellowships, she is also the author of A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home: Lessons in the Good Life from an Unlikely Teacher.
  She talked to the folks at the Dish about what surprised her most as she visited nursing homes with her therapy dog, Pransky.

• The Solar Decathlon team is hard at work on its entry for the competition next fall, Insite. Recently the Burlington Free Press highlighted the students as they worked to deconstruct a historic barn so they can repurpose the wood to use as siding for their house. Check their website to stay up to date on their progress!
• The school year is winding down, but some athletic teams are still going strong. Both men’s and women’s tennis won their respective NCAA Regionals and are headed to the NCAA Quarterfinals. The women’s lacrosse team is making its 16th trip to the NCAA Final Four this weekend, and the women’s golf team is competing in the NCAA Championship in Destin, Fla.

• Senior Andrew Ackerman has been working hard on this thesis project and as part of his research, he’s been training in extreme mixed martial arts. Recently he took part in an amateur fight night in Plattsburgh, N.Y., in his first competitive fight ever. And he won!

• Finals begin on Wednesday, so it’s quiet on campus and things to do other than studying are scarce. Downtown, at 51 Main, good music is available as usual with a Blues Jam Wednesday night and Mint Julep on Friday night, performing an ecletic mix of swing and Latin rhythms.

• Artist and photographer Edward Burtynsky is receiving an honorary Doctor of Arts from the College at Commencement on May 26. His exhibit, Nature Transformed, will be on display at the Museum of Art until June 9. If you haven’t seen it yet, you still have a few weeks to check it out!

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.

• Midd alum Andrew Forsthoefel ’11 walked from Philadelphia to California, and his story was featured on NPR’s This American Life.
• Laurie Essig shared her latest take on beauty-product advertising in her blog “Love, Inc.” at PsychologyToday.com, and it ain’t pretty…
• Harvard professor and tour de force political theorist Eric Nelson made an incredibly complex historical concept both graspable and engaging for a packed house during last Thursday’s Fulton Lecture in Dana. You can read about it and see the entire hour-plus talk here.
• President Liebowitz sent a message to the College community this week reaffirming the College’s support for the construction of the natural gas pipeline project that will come through Addison County.
• On Wednesday at 5 p.m., the women’s lacrosse team will host Castleton in a first-round NCAA game for its 19th tournament appearance in 20 years. Tickets are $3 for adults, $2 for students.
• Make time on Friday at 8 p.m. to catch Alexander Twilight Artist in Residence Francois Clemmons for his final solo concert before he retires this month. The beloved tenor will take center stage at the Concert Hall in the Mahaney Center for the Arts, and it’s free!
• Tuesday, May 14, is Arbor Day, and campus horticulturist Tim Parsons and student volunteers have plenty of activities planned–live music, tree tours, tree planting, food, a kids’ race–spelled out at go/arborday. Can’t make it? Enjoy our ligneous, leafy friends by virtually touring the trees here on campus.
• Stop by Axinn 229 on Tuesday from 5–7 p.m. and check out this year’s “How Did You Get Here?” audio slideshows from the Narrative Journalism Fellows.

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.

• The fossil fuel divestment issue continues to heat up. This week we heard different views from a student panel, and the Socially Responsible Investment Club released a new video featuring interviews about divestment with several Middlebury faculty members.

• Middlebury lost a friend near and dear to our hearts last week. Read about the remarkable life of 106-year-old philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis.

• Major League Baseball may be in full swing, but Middlebury senior Ryan Moores is thinking NFL. The 6-6, 315-lb. Panther offensive lineman was invited to the Atlanta Falcons rookie camp this weekend, where he’ll vie for a coveted spot on the preseason roster.

• If you missed the Middlebury TEDx talks this year, you missed some incredible speakers — like Natalie Randolph, the first female varsity football coach in Washington, D.C., or Derek Amato, who had a major concussion, then suddenly discovered a virtuosic ability to play piano. The good news is that all those Middlebury TEDx talks are viewable online!

• Harvard professor of government Eric Nelson will give this year’s Fulton Lecture, “The Lord Alone Shall be King of America: Hebraism and the Republican Turn of 1776,” on Thursday, May 2, at 4:30 p.m. in Dana Auditorium. It’s free and all are welcome.

• The theatre program opens its spring production of Howard Barker’s The Castle, on Thursday, May 2. Set in the 13th century, the historic drama also reflects contemporary themes.

• Looks like it will be a beautiful weekend to watch some lacrosse, and the Midd men’s team will host the NESCAC championships starting Saturday, May 4, at noon.

Last week President Obama announced an ambitious plan called The Brain Initiative—a $100-million project to study brain function. The goal is for scientists working in the field of brain research to further their understanding and continue to develop resources that will lead to breakthroughs in treating conditions such as Alzheimer’s, autism, and stroke.

That announcement got the attention of some neuroscience faculty and student researchers here on campus. Middmag caught up with Professor Tom Root and Stephen Lammers ’13, Ben Wagner ’13, and Deirdre Sackett ’13 during a break from their studies. Here’s what they had to say about Obama’s plan—and what it might mean for the future.

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at 

• Assistant Professor of Biology Catherine Combelles has received the Perkins Award for Excellence in Teaching. Combelles, who specializes in reproductive biology, will be honored at a ceremony and reception open to the College community on Thursday, April 4, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 104 of McCardell Bicentennial Hall.
• Last week Middlebury announced it had offered admission to 1,750 students, who will make up the class of 2017, out of an applicant pool of 9,112 — a 19% acceptance rate. The new admits come from 44 states and 73 countries.
• Forbes online raised Middlebury up as an example of how colleges can promote the idea of a “bridge year” between high school and college to help students avoid burnout and further prepare for their academic road ahead.
• The Solar Decathlon ’13 team kicks off their spring construction season this Thursday, April 4, at 4:30 with a ceremonial celebration at their building site in the Ridgeline parking lot, just west of campus on Route 125. All are welcome.
• Davis Projects for Peace recipient Jihad Hajjouji ’14 started an “entrepreneurship boot camp” in Morocco. On Friday, April 5, at 12:30 p.m., she’ll give a public talk about her project at the Axinn Center, Room 219.
• Middlebury College Affiliate Artist Mary Rowell will perform music for violin, viola, and electronics in a free concert on Friday, April 5, at the Mahaney Center for the Arts. Rowell has earned international acclaim as a performer and proponent of new music.
• Cellist Sophie Shao, a perennial favorite in the Middlebury College Performing Arts Series, returns with her piano quartet on Saturday, April 6, at 8 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts.
• Finally, if you’re planning to attend the New Play Festival, “Undressing Cinderella,” next week, you’ll get some interesting insight at a Behind the Scenes lunch and discussion on Monday, April 9, at 12:30.

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/04/03/things-that-happened-things-to-do-week-of-april-1/feed/ 0 http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/03/07/small-paintings-tell-a-big-story/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2013/03/07/small-paintings-tell-a-big-story/#comments Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:11:40 +0000 Robert Keren http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=11471 Historian Paul Monod unraveled some of the mysteries surrounding the College’s two 15th-century Flemish panel paintings for an admiring audience of art aficionados on Feb. 28 in the Mahaney Center for the Arts. The works, which are in the permanent collection of the Middlebury College Museum of Art, are currently on display in the museum.

The exquisite paintings on wooden panels are attributed to the “Master of the St. Ursula Legend,” an unnamed artist working in Bruges between 1475 and 1500. The panels are the outside wings of a triptych – a popular format for religious art – and the whereabouts of the third or center panel is also unknown.

And yet Monod, the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of History at Middlebury, has determined almost to a certainty the identities of most of the major figures depicted on the panels. He has also determined when the works were painted, and has informed opinions about who the Master of St. Ursula was, why the paintings were commissioned, and what might constitute the subject of the missing middle panel.

“I have been in love with these two panels ever since we acquired them and they have fascinated me since I first set eyes upon them,” said Professor Monod, who acknowledged that he is not an art historian by training. Rather, he is an expert in 17th- and 18th-century European history, particularly the history of the British Isles, and he was motivated to delve deeply into the origins and symbolism of the panels because “they are very, very rare and very, very fascinating.”

Monod sees a direct British connection in the right-hand panel of the Middlebury triptych, particularly in the “protecting saint” shown carrying a scepter, wearing an open crown, and dressed in a gown bearing the coat of arms of England. Monod concludes that the figure in the painting is King Henry VI, although Henry VI was never canonized. The painter depicted the king to appear much as British royalty did on the coinage of the day: “a generic portrait of a king…with long flowing hair and a youngish look.”

Monod is certain that the man shown kneeling before the king commissioned the making of the triptych, the outside panels of which measure just over 20 inches in height and eight inches in width. “It is quite clear that he wanted something small and quite possibly portable, but he also wanted it packed with saints…for every possibility and every occasion.”

So who commissioned the work? “The man in the right-hand panel is well dressed, but not well dressed enough to be a nobleman, nor is he carrying a nobleman’s sword,” which leads Monod to believe that the patron of the triptych was “a wealthy merchant, an alderman of a town, or someone high-ranking within a city,” presumably in England.

Paul Monod says the “d” in his surname is silent and the accent goes on the first syllable

The author of five books and an assiduous researcher, Paul Monod examined the iconography associated with the eight saints in the left wing of the triptych and used those “clues” to determine who they are and how they might hold meaning to the patron.

According to Monod, the saints in the background of the left panel are: St. Anthony Abbot, shown with fire coming from his feet; St. Barbara, who is about to be decapitated; St. Sebastian, who is naked and shot with arrows; and St. Giles, who is carrying a crosier in front of a hermit’s cell. The saints shown as bishops in the foreground of the left panel are: St. Nicholas, who has at his feet two little boys in a barrel; St. Omer, with a thick pair of eyeglasses; St. Eligius, who is holding a goldsmith’s hammer; and St. Blaise, with a wool-combers carding tool.

Each of the eight saints must have held significance to the patron who paid for the creation of the triptych, Monod explained. For example, it was believed that St. Barbara guarded against thunder and lightning, St. Blaise protected those in the wool trade, and St. Anthony was appealed to for infectious diseases.

Before Paul Monod concluded his research, the identities of St. Giles and St. Omer in the triptych were not known, and the identity of King Henry VI had never been confirmed.

The Middlebury historian and others have deduced that the triptych was painted in the studio of Pieter Cassinbroodt, a free master of the Bruges Guild of St. Luke. Based on his research, Monod believes that the Middlebury panels were most likely painted in 1495 by one or more of Cassinbroodt’s apprentices. (Cassinbroodt was known to take on as many as seven apprentices.)

The final piece of the puzzle is the center panel: where did it go, what did it depict, and why did it get separated from its wings? We may never know the answers to those questions, Monod remarked, but it’s likely that the missing center panel showed a powerful religious image such as the body of Christ being brought down from the cross.

The one certainty, though, is why the triptych was commissioned. It was intended to be  “a declaration of a kind of political loyalty and it’s meant to show that the patron has accepted the political transition and change of power” from King Henry VI to Henry VII.

He concluded: “This is a very rare piece that has a big, important story to tell, if not by me then by others in the years to come. These two panels – these two tiny, little panels – will reveal more and more about the history of the times, about the person who commissioned them, and about these charming little saints who are posed so mysteriously against this fascinating landscape.”

Middlebury College acquired the two painted panels in 2011 through the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Fund. The Museum of Art is open to the public without charge Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. 

Montana State? In Middlebury?

It’s not every day you hear skiers from the western schools announced over the loudspeaker at Middlebury’s Snow Bowl. But today is not every day.

Wednesday morning marked the start of the 2013 NCAA Championship for both alpine and Nordic skiing, hosted this year by Middlebury.

“It’s been a long time in the works,” said an appropriately bundled Director of Athletics Erin Quinn, who stood among a crowd of other fans at the finish line, watching the first of the women’s giant slalom runs. “We’ve been prepping for this for more than a year, and it’s just a great feeling to have the day finally be here—and the weather cooperating!”

Indeed, an overcast day with slight flurries and temps in the 20s made for the perfect race day. According to one finisher from New Mexico, “It was a little windy at the top, but most of us really like these conditions.” Another skier, from the University of Denver and a native of New Hampshire, was excited to be back East skiing among old friends. “This is awesome,” she gushed, fresh over the line. “Middlebury’s a great hill. And such a fun town! We’ve tried a different sandwich shop every day—so far we like Noonie’s the best.”

Waiting for their daughter Anne to race, Rocky and Betsy Rockwell from Moosehead Lake, Maine, were well prepared for the day in warm Bates hats and scarves—including the one on their dog. “This is a trip,” said Rocky. “It’s a dream for these college kids to make it to this day. It’s Anne’s first time here. She might’ve been a little nervous.”

At the foot of the chairlift, a giant flat screen TV captured each skier as she sped through the gates. Once she was visible in person on the lower half of the mountain, the cheers and clanging cowbells were deafening.

Inside the lodge, the temperature was warmer but the atmosphere just as frantic. Skiers stretched, changed uniforms, inhaled egg sandwiches, and prepped for their second runs on the GS course. Snow Bowl staff were busy answering questions and generally enjoying the excitement of the day—and days to come. “It’s wonderful to see so many faces from so far away,” said Susie Davis, director of the Snow School. Ticket master Don Swenor, with his characteristic smile, said the best part of the day was “everything happening outside on the mountain,” and added, “It ought to happen every five years instead of ten.”

Upstairs, tucked in a corner room with a clear view of the course, Doug Lewis, a former Olympian alpine skier and local Vermonter, announced each skier’s progress from start to finish with the flair and ease of a seasoned commentator. A sign hastily taped to the half-open door requested “Silence please, no cells or electronic devices.”

With only a few skiers left to go, he finally announced Anne Rockwell from Bates, whose parents waited so patiently at the finish. “And she’s looking smooth at the start…bing bang she’s through the midway gates…a little thin at the bottom…and that’s 1:05.89 at the line.”

She was 26th after that first run, 29th overall—not bad for a first outing among some of her most talented peers. Her parents were beaming.

For more details on the NCAA Championships, please use these links:

http://www.ncaa.com/content/2013-ncaa-skiing-results

http://www.middlebury.edu/athletics/about/sportsnotes/201213sn/2013sn/march13/031113/node/448304

http://www.middlebury.edu/newsroom/node/447735

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu. 

• A provocative question posted on Middblog last week asked, “When’s the last time you took a risk?” In the post, blogger Cody Gohl ’13 decried the propensity of the Middlebury community to play it safe. He posited that we have created a culture that awards “risklessness.” An interesting discussion has ensued.

• Professor Jessica Holmes and her creative work with MiddCore, which teaches skills and perspectives that foster the development of leaders, were the subject of the Visionary Leader Radio Show, on February 25.  The show focuses on people shaping our future.

• Middlebury alumna Dena Simmons ’05 was among the many influential women featured in The Makers: Women Who Make America, screened at Dana Auditorium on February 26. The film documents the sweeping social revolution underway as women have gained in personal and political power over the last 50 years.

• The last day of the shortest month is jam packed with things to do. Among them, two lunchtime offerings:  Robert Orsi, historian and scholar of Catholic studies, discusses the practice of confession and how it has contributed to the ongoing crisis of sexual abuse of children by priests in his lecture, “Bless Me, Father, For I Have Sinned.”  And the Woodin ES Colloquium hosts cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram, who will talk about the ecology of sensory experience, and how language influences our perception of the “more-than-human” natural world.

• The late afternoon of February 28 brings a panel discussion about how emerging technology can be used to further Middlebury’s mission to foster qualities essential for leadership in our rapidly changing global community. And, Professor of History Paul Monod discusses the mysterious identity of one of the figures in the museum’s early Renaissance panel painting The Bearded Monk in the Middlebury Triptych by the Master of the St. Ursula Legend.

• In the evening of February 28, the conclusion of Black History Month will be marked with a screening of Black Power Mixtape, highlighting the era of the Black Panther Party. For those who want to know what they are eating, VPIRG is sponsoring a labeling law forum to generate grassroots support for a campaign to require labeling of GMO foods.

• A lot more goes into a cup of coffee than just the beans. On Friday, March 1, Writer in Residence Julia Alvarez and Bill Eichner will talk about the lessons they have learned from establishing their sustainable coffee farm and literacy center in the Dominican Republic. The talk is part of the Center of Social Entrepreneurship Speaker Series.

• Dinaw Mengestu, MacArthur Fellow and award-winning author, will deliver the keynote address for the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity Symposium, on March 1.  He will talk about race and migration and the vocabulary of migration, which reflects our prejudices, biases, and fears.

• A fabulous weekend of sports is ahead. Among the events: the women’s hockey team hosts the NESCAC championship; men’s basketball makes its sixth consecutive NCAA tournament appearance; and men’s hockey heads to the NESCAC semifinals/finals.
  

The selection of photographs, on view at the Museum of Art through April 21, grew from a concept the artist began exploring in the granite quarries throughout Vermont and Canada in the early 1990s. Director of the Arts Pieter Broucke and Juliette Bianco, assistant director of Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art, where the exhibition originated, are co-curators and introduced the show at its opening this week.

The works are large-scale—as are, after all, the deeply cavernous subjects—but the largeness of it all can be deceiving. The artist gives little sense of perspective within the photographs, so the smallest details—the rock striations and geometric cuts, a bright green pool, a chalky white glaze—became almost otherworldly, while at the same time so clearly recognizable as our own earth. It’s a mesmerizing beauty born of industrial destruction. The exhibition also inherently serves as social commentary, but the artist himself is not documentarian; he doesn’t press his opinion but rather propose the opportunity for healthy and ongoing dialogue.

Click through a slideshow of selections below, then make a trip to the Museum to see the show in person—a must!

Danby Marble Quarry #2

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Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, born 1955), Underground Quarry, Danby, Vermont, 1995, digital chromogenic color print. Courtesy of the artist.

More on Bianca’s second film later, but we thought this would be a fitting post for Valentine’s Day.

• Earlier this week the featured presentation on the TEDx website was a talk given by Shabana Basij-Rasikh ’11, a leading spokesperson for the education of women in her native Afghanistan. Shabana, who dressed as a boy for years to elude the Taliban and get to a secret school in Kabul, is now the managing director of a nonprofit that helps young Afghan women gain access to education worldwide.

• This year’s crop of Febs enjoyed a two-day celebration to mark the completion of their undergraduate careers. Our coverage includes videos of the talks given by President Ron Liebowitz, Professor Jay Parini, and Ben Orbison ’12.5; photos from activities on campus and at the Snow Bowl; and a thrilling “Feb Cam” video shot by a “ski-down” senior descending the mountain with her class.

• Middlebury students were in the news this week for taking a stance about the role they believe economic disadvantage should play in the college admissions process. The author of the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard D. Kahlenberg, calls it a “once-taboo” topic that is emerging from the background. An attorney, Kahlenberg is also a Middlebury parent, the author of five books, and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation.

• Middlebury’s 90th Winter Carnival opens this Thursday, Feb. 14, and runs through Sunday, Feb. 17, with skiing (both intercollegiate and recreational), music, fireworks, an ice show, bonfire, comedian Adam Ferrara, and the gala carnival ball. Not just for students, many of the events are open to the college community including free hot chocolate at a number of venues.

• Abe Streep ’04, remembered by many at Midd as a musician in the bluegrass band Route 7 Ramblers, is now a senior editor at Outside Magazine. On Tuesday, Feb. 19, at 4:30 p.m. in 220 Bicentennial Hall Streep will give a Middlebury Meet The Press talk on “Building and Busting Legends: Reporting on Icons from Lance Armstrong to Greg Mortenson.”

• 51 Main at the Bridge—the College’s in-town social space—will welcome Megan Laslocky ’89 on Wednesday, Feb. 13, at 7:30 p.m. for a talk titled “Love Gone Wrong…at Middlebury.” Described as a “sure-to-be-a-hit, student-friendly, anti-Valentine event,” Megan will talk about her just-published The Little Book of Heartbreak: Love Gone Wrong Through the Ages, which she discussed in the winter issue of Middlebury Magazine.

• Education Studies will host a four-part film series beginning with “The First Year,” a documentary about five public school teachers in Los Angeles, on Wednesday, Feb. 20, at 7 p.m. in Dana Auditorium. The series will continue every other week into April; other titles in the series are “Precious Knowledge,” “Bag It,” and “Bully.”

Middmag talked to six alumni who were back sharing their knowledge and expertise with students this past January.

To read more about the Feb celebration weekend, click here.

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.

• Two rising stars in the world of social entrepreneurship headlined the Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship’s second annual symposium last week. MiddMag was there to catch the talks by Billy Parish and Majora Carter.

• Seven Days took note of an artistic milestone at Middlebury this week, featuring a story about the Dance Company of Middlebury’s 30th anniversary celebration, and its upcoming performance tour.

• Middlebury’s Jay Parini, enjoying an increasingly rare cold snap, penned a thoughtful reflection for CNN.com about returning from balmy Key West to a frigid Vermont.

• J-Term ’13 is winding down, which can only mean one thing: It’s Feb celebration time! The annual cap & gown ski-down is coming Saturday, along with lots of other festivities.

• Audio artists from the J-Term course Sound & Story will play their works at a special gathering on Wednesday, January 30, starting at 8 p.m. Billed as a must for storytelling fans, these radio documentaries will feature “rich stories of reclusive local craftsman, portraits of bike makers, ferrymen, zombies AND humans, and campus mysteries solved.” Who could resist?

• Middlebury men’s hockey hits the ice with special meaning this weekend, donning camouflage jerseys to raise money and awareness for the Wounded Warriors Project, which serves severely injured members of the U.S. armed forces. The jerseys will be auctioned off through silent auction during the games.

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.

•  The discussion was lively and informative Tuesday night as panelists debated whether environmental and social concerns should influence the College’s endowment policy at the first of a planned series of open discussions on the topic. Several panel members asserted that divestment would come with a significant cost but Bill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury, had another angle. Read the story and watch the video.

• Poet Richard Blanco, who was a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2000 and has been back to visit several times, was invited to read an original poem at the inauguration of Barack Obama on Monday. Three out of the six poets invited to read inaugural poems over the years have had ties to Bread Loaf: Robert Frost, Miller Williams, and Blanco.
• On Friday, January 18, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave an inspiring talk to Monterey Institute students urging them to advance disarmament and nonproliferation for a more peaceful future. Speaking to a packed audience in Irvine Auditorium, he lauded the Institute for its role in educating students on these issues. If you missed the talk, you can watch it here.
• Once again, Middlebury has made the top ten. Mother Nature Network announced its “10 of the best college environmental programs in the U.S.” recently and Middlebury’s Program in Environmental Studies came in at no. 3.
• Campus will be hopping over the next three days. The Center for Social Entrepreneurship is holding its second annual symposium with the topics of social entrepreneurship and social justice. At 7:00 p.m., Thursday, January 24, after a welcome from President Liebowitz, Billy Parish, founder and president of Mosaic, will give the opening address and have a book signing. Friday night eco-entrepreneur Majora Carter, founder of the Majora Carter Group, will give the Martin Luther King Jr. address in Mead Chapel at 7:30 p.m. after a day of workshops and activities. Saturday morning Parish, Carter, and Bill McKibben will be part of a panel discussion, “Preparing Students to Lead a Life of Meaning.” Check out the entire schedule. You’re sure to find something to attend!
• If the arts are what you’re craving this week, the Middlebury College Orchestra will be performing Thursday, January 24, at 8:00 p.m. in the Concert Hall at the Center for the Arts. On Friday and Saturday nights at 8:00 p.m., the Dance Company of Middlebury will be celebrating their 30th anniversary with a premiere of “Simply Light,” their newest collaborative creation. Being held in the Dance Theatre at the Center for the Arts, the performances will be kicking off a tour of the seven-member company to San Francisco and the Monterey Institute.
• And for some lighthearted fun, check out the talent show being held in the Great Hall at Bicentennial Hall next Wednesday, January 30, from 2:00–5:00 p.m. No, you won’t be watching students sing and dance. The performers are Lego robots and their feats are the culmination of the J-term class Lego Robot Design Studio, taught by David Kauchak. To get a preview of what you might see, click here.

The field of digital scholarship is quickly emerging as one of academia’s great frontiers, with plenty of exciting, and occasionally disconcerting, questions. On Tuesday, Middlebury’s Digital Scholarship Working Group hosted a roundtable discussion tackling specific issues around the topic of “Transforming Scholarly Publishing: New Forms of Peer Review, Open Access, and Building Academic Communities.”

Speaking to a mixed audience of faculty and staff at the Axinn Center, the panel featured two Middlebury faculty members, professors Jason Mittell and Alison Byerly — both of whom have rising profiles in the digital humanities — and national experts Kathleen Fitzpatrick, director of scholarly communication for the Modern Language Association, and previously a professor of English and media studies for Pomona College, and Katherine Rowe, professor of English at Bryn Mawr College and director of the Tri-Co Digital Humanities Center.

Fitzpatrick, whose earlier research focused on the relationship between traditional forms of publishing and communication and newer media forms, began thinking about scholarly publishing as one of those “modes” in which things are moving from print to digital. She particularly thought about what this meant for peer review, and whether the traditional forms of peer review for print publishing made sense for work produced digitally. With the blessing of her publisher, she put her ideas to the test with her book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011), posting the entire manuscript to MediaCommons, an online network promoting new forms of publishing in media studies, as well as sending it to traditional reviewers through her publisher. Fitzpatrick says that the experiment generated some excellent discussion about the manuscript and provided valuable information about what works and doesn’t work in open peer review.

Rowe, a Shakespeare scholar, was also exploring what the great digital revolution meant to her field. “Like Kathleen, I’m interested in what you learn about the texts that you care about as your longstanding texts migrate across platforms,” she said.  While serving on the board of the journal Shakespeare Quarterly, she was asked to guest edit a special edition themed around Shakespeare and new media. “I said, ‘It seems to me that the most important transformation new media is going to bring to the field of Shakespeare studies is in our modes of scholarly communication.” In a radical departure from tradition, she collaborated with MediaCommons to develop a new open review process for the journal, which attracted nearly 350 comments from 41 scholars in humanities fields.

A big benefit to editors, Rowe noted, is that such highly visible commentary makes it easier for an editor to see the points of stress in an argument, the points of debate, and, of course, the points of agreement among reviewers. She says the process was highly successful for both participants and editors. “The most important takeaway, I think, from a big picture perspective of this experiment is that it gave us a process that was assessable in its own right; archivable as a process, and therefore replicable. This is not a kind of product that humanist scholars generally produce. Now we have a lot of data about what the strengths and weaknesses of this process are.”

Mittell spoke from real-time experience. He is currently in the midst of an open review — placing a pre-print draft online and soliciting comments from both expert and lay readers — of the manuscript for his new book, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. Mittell chose to serialize the release of his manuscript online by chapter rather than as a whole.  He says that one of the things scholars have learned is that comments on a full manuscript can be robust at the beginning and middle of a book, but then taper off. Release by chapter, along with plenty of outreach through online outlets and social media, has helped produce a more even distribution of comments throughout his text.

The nature of open review comments can be helpful in ways the traditional model rarely affords, says Mittell. “Generally, the conversation has been quite good. It tends to be very granular, focused on the individual paragraph. Of course, that’s the kind of commentary you don’t get when you submit a full book manuscript. You very rarely see ‘In paragraph 17 in chapter 3 your argument loses track.’ That kind of granularity has been very helpful in my own revision process.”

Byerly, who served as provost at Middlebury for several years, offered a different angle on digital scholarship. She is particularly interested in the process of how to evaluate the quality of digital work in the context of promotion and tenure, and has presented on the topic at the MLA annual conference. “It’s interesting because I don’t have anything like the level of expertise of my colleagues here, but it shows that there’s a real desire to find people who can bridge the gap between the work being done by practitioners and the institutional structures that they inevitably have to get slotted into.”

Byerly sees potential for the faculty evaluation process to emulate the emerging open review process in publishing. She says a lot of valuable feedback is lost in the traditional process because much of the detailed discussion in a closed review committee never makes it to the faculty member who could benefit most from hearing it. “I really see an analogy between the publishing industry and the way in which a lot of evaluation that the whole academy is founded on really needs to shift in ways that publishing is starting to take account of.”

The challenges of evaluating this type of scholarship, says Byerly, often come down to format — how the work is presented.  “But also questions of what we actually look for in scholarship, in something that you call scholarship, and what constitutes a scholarly argument? Does it have to be a text-based argument, or does a database and a set of information presented visually constitute a kind of intellectual product, and argument in itself?” The frequently collaborative nature of digital work makes it especially challenging, says Byerly. If you’re reviewing someone who has worked on a digital archive with four other colleagues, for example, it can be difficult to assess that individual’s specific intellectual contribution.

One of the biggest challenges, says Byerly, is simply finding people with the right expertise to evaluate digital content. “You realize it’s a kind of shell game, where everyone is looking for some source of authority. The committees look to publishers, the publishers look to readers, readers look to other colleagues for somebody to say, ‘Is this worth looking at?’ So the idea of putting it in a space where there can be a mutual process of validation, where a variety of voices can enter into some kind of dialogue that produces some kind of judgment about whether a work is worth spending more time on seems to me a very productive way to move forward in a context where traditional sources of authority are very hard to find.”

Whether scholars find themselves on the producing end or as evaluators, it is “absolutely where the fields are headed,” said Byerly, “where most disciplines are ultimately going to end up in some way. What I think most of us, who, as scholars trained in different ways, probably have to figure out is where we ourselves fit in, either as colleagues who are in a position to be participating in these trends, or as department chairs who are sitting in judgment some day on junior colleagues who are doing work that presents itself in a way that’s different from what you’re traditionally accustomed to.”

Our regular recap of goings on at the College and a look ahead to events on the horizon. As always, we hope to call your attention to items that captured ours and alert you to events that you won’t want to miss. If you have a news item that you think we’d be interested in, drop us a line at middmag@middlebury.edu.

• Jay Parini was talking about Jesus and Robert Frost last month, though not necessarily at the same time. A New York Times article included a quote from him about Frost’s eclectic tradition for personalized Christmas cards, many now collected at Dartmouth College. And on Christmas Day, he wrote a piece for CNN.com on “Seeking the Truth About Jesus.” The prolific poet, novelist, and biographer has a new book headed our way, called Jesus: The Human Face of God.

• Congratulations to the seven faculty members awarded tenure in December: Catherine Combelles (biology), James Fitzsimmons (anthropology), Eliza Garrison (history of art and architecture), Nadia Rabesahala Horning (political science), Kareem Khalifa (philosophy), Caitlin Knowles Myers (economics), and Lynn Owens (sociology).

• There are plenty of folks who already consider Bill McKibben a great neighbor and friend—especially our planet—but it’s always good to have public affirmation. The Burlington Free Press agreed and named him the 2012 Vermonter of the Year.

• Winter sports teams are off to winning start this month so don’t miss the round of home events coming up this weekend, including men’s and women’s basketball and women’s hockey on Friday and Saturday.

• The always-entertaining and ever-talented jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut is back in town Friday at 8 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts. Part of the amazing Performing Arts Series, tickets are $20 for faculty, staff, and other ID card holders, and just $6 for students.

• To kick off his four-week residency during Winter Term, Ugandan master drummer/dancer Samuel Bakkabulindi will take the lead in “Percussion and Dance Explosion” Saturday night  from 8—10 p.m. in McCullough Social Space. Bring your bongos and dancing feet, and don’t be shy!

• If you’ve got questions, she may have answers. Catch affirmative action expert Susan Sturm on Tuesday, January 15, at 7:30 p.m. in Dana, where she’ll talk about institutional change, transformative leadership, workplace equality, legal education, and inclusion and diversity in higher education. Sturm is founding director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School and principal investigator for a Ford Foundation grant awarded to develop the architecture of inclusion in higher education.