Study
Opening the Classroom Door
Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Rashida Braggs has a new tool in her teaching kit. Someday soon, she plans to ask her students a single question—and she knows it has to be a doozy—and structure an entire class discussion around it. It’s an idea inspired by a visit last semester to an introductory level comparative
Liza Johnson’s Hateship, Loveship to Premiere in U.S.
Professor of Art Liza Johnson ’92 has spent the last several years directing, writing and producing films while teaching courses in moving image production. Her latest work, Hateship Loveship, was picked up by IFC films after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. It will be released in the U.S. on April 11.
Visual Activism
Zanele Muholi’s work confronts discrimination and broadens the representation of black queer life in South Africa. And for Williams Associate Professor of History Gretchen Long, the artist’s photos, now on display at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), complement the issues she’s exploring with students in her course “Black Women in the U.S.” Long
The Pursuit of Dao
George T. (Sam) Crane is an empirical social scientist. But when his son Aidan was born profoundly disabled, Crane found that empiricist rationality fell short of helping him to understand the meaning of Aidan’s life. Crane’s scholarship and teaching focused on contemporary East Asian politics, so ancient Chinese philosophy “had long been on the edges
Other Books
Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches and Rats. By Dawn Day Biehler ’97. University of Washington Press, 2013. Despite modernity and sustainability in U.S. cities, urban pests remain a problem at the intersection of public health, politics and environmental justice. Art, Vision and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeing. By Amy Holzapfel, Williams associate
Researching Rocks (at the billion-pixel level)
Gigapans are panoramic photos made up of billions of pixels. The technology, developed by scientists at Carnegie Mellon and NASA’s Ames Research Center for use in Mars Rover expeditions, involves a robotic camera mounted on a tripod. As the mount slowly swivels, hundreds or even thousands of individual images are captured. Software stitches the images
On Being a Third-Culture Kid
Other Faculty Lectures This Spring Jeannie Albrecht, associate professor of computer science: “Detecting and Predicting Occupancy in a Smart Home” Lisa Gilbert, associate professor of geosciences and marine sciences: “Adventures in the Deep Sea: Rocks Younger than You” Amy Holzapfel, associate professor of theater: “Acts of Seeing: Art, Vision and Realist Theater” Jason Ananda Josephson,
The Mathematics of Legos
Associate Professor of Mathematics Steven Miller wants his students to see math in action, outside of textbooks and outside of the classroom. So he organized a Winter Study course with the ultimate aim of building a Lego Super Star Destroyer—a 50-inch vessel made up of 3,152 pieces that’s part of the “Star Wars” Imperial fleet—in
