Summer 2019

Illustration of someone looking at a phone and all the information leaving the phone and sweeping around his face in cords.

Privacy in the Digital Age

Our smart devices are listening, our faces and bodies routinely scanned and our preferences tracked. But four alumni are leading efforts to make sure new technologies don’t infringe on our civil and constitutional rights. It feels like a harmless trade-off: give up a little privacy, gain a little happiness—or at least a little efficiency. We…

Read More...
The predominantly black residents of the Rust Belt town Braddock, Pa., struggle with pollution, toxic health issues and unemployment.

Justice For All?

A grassroots movement for environmental justice is taking root at Williams. We see it in new courses being taught across the curriculum, in scholarship and research, in discussions and in activism—both local and global—among students, faculty and staff. To get an understanding of the scope and scale of campus involvement, Williams Magazine convened a conversation…

Read More...
Three students hanging out together along with a small dog.

Life in the Details

Log lunches. Labs. Block parties. Band rehearsals. Rallies. Radio shows. Study sessions. Swim meets. Sunrise. Shadows. Candlepin bowling.Chamber Choir. Coffee. Classes. More coffee. First snow. Final exams… See how the year unfolded at Williams—day by day—in this video: Video by Jay Corey

Read More...
Illustration depicting two eyes in the sky, crying. The silhouettes of a mother and two children stand on the top of a tree and flower petals of blue, yellow, red and pink fill the bottom of the frame.

The Unwinding of the Miracle

“This story begins at the ending. Which means that if you are here, then I am not. But it’s OK. … Dying has taught me a great deal about living—about facing hard truths consciously, about embracing the suffering as well as the joy. Wrapping my arms around the hard parts was perhaps the great liberating…

Read More...
A photo of liverwort.

Tiny Plants, Big Answers

Marchantia polymorpha, a species of liverwort, was one of the first plants to colonize land roughly 470 million years ago. At the time, the tiny plants lowered carbon dioxide levels enough to trigger a mini ice age. Today liverwort grows all over the world—and all over Williams’ campus. The biomechanics of how it spreads is…

Read More...
An interpretation of a scene from Angels in America, for the course Worldbuilding.

Building Worlds

An interpretation of a scene from Angels in America, for the course Worldbuilding. Model by Tobias Delgado ’21. When David Gürçay-Morris ’96 was a theater and studio art major at Williams, he enrolled in Introduction to Staging and Design, a course that influenced the rest of his career. When he returned to the college 11…

Read More...
Portrait of Betty Zimmerberg, the Howard B. Schow ’50 and Nan W. Schow Professor of Neuroscience,

Nature Via Nurture

What determines behavior: genes or the environment? Neuroscientist Betty Zimmerberg and her students have worked to answer that question in the tutorial Nature Via Nurture. The course explores topics such as child neglect, antisocial behavior, addiction, anxiety, risk-taking, empathy and depression in animal models. It’s a traditional tutorial—with pairs of students under Zimmerberg’s guidance alternately…

Read More...

Mundo, Recognized

Art professor C. Ondine Chavoya’s groundbreaking scholarship is the basis for a fall WCMA exhibition on queer Chicanx creative networks. Despite his nickname, “Mundo,” which means world in Spanish, Edmundo Meza, a queer Chicanx artist, wasn’t well known in the mainstream art world. His work all but disappeared from view after his death in 1985….

Read More...

Fresh Fellows

Spring is national fellowships and scholarships season, and Williams students and alumni earned more than their fair share this year. With Rhodes, Mitchell and Schwarzman scholarships already announced in the spring issue of Williams Magazine, we reached out to several of the newest winners to learn more about their scholarly and career interests and how…

Read More...

Vértiz Wins Pen Award

In late 2018, Vickie Vértiz ’98 was awarded a PEN America Literary Award-Los Angeles for her poetry collection Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press, 2017). The collection is a series of portraits of cities—including Los Angeles, Mexico City and Paris—and of rivers, freeways and people. The Los Angeles Review of Books…

Read More...

Recently Published

The work of top scholars to understand how state structures—rather than moments of crisis or partisan realignment—shape political history informs the collection Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), edited by Mason B. Williams, leadership studies and political science professor, et. al. Religion…

Read More...

Learned Faculty

Two Williams professors have received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies. Gregory Mitchell, associate professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies, was named a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow. The fellowship provides a $95,000 stipend and a $7,500 research budget and will allow Mitchell to spend the upcoming academic year at Princeton University to…

Read More...

Music Makers

At the Williams College Department of Music’s I/O fest in January, the student group Axxea String Quartet performed a suite by Sato Matsui ’14 as well as a new piece by composer and visual artist Tristan Perich. Violinist Jeffrey Pearson ’20 says it was “a rare and exciting experience to work with living composers and…

Read More...

Trustee Update

On July 1, Williams welcomed Michele Y. Johnson Rogers ’79 and Nathan K. Sleeper ’95 to its Board of Trustees. Rogers, who was elected by the Society of Alumni and appointed by the trustees, is director of partnerships with Chicago organizations and a clinical assistant professor with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University….

Read More...

WCMA’s Summer Home

The Williams College Museum of Art (WCM) is taking it to the streets while Lawrence Hall closes temporarily for renovations. The Summer Space at 76 Spring St., open daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Sept. 2, features the WCMA shop and an exhibition from the WALLS Collection. The weekly summer Ologies series continues…

Read More...

Science, Supported

Microscopic fossils, artificial intelligence and solar eclipses are the research areas of three professors who received more than $481,000 combined in National Science Foundation grants. Geosciences professor Phoebe Cohen and her research partners are measuring organic carbon isotopes of microscopic fossils, a window into the evolution of life before the rise of animals. Computer science…

Read More...

In Memoriam

William “Bill” T. Fox ’54, the Edward Brust Professor of Geology and Minerology, died on Feb. 12. He was 86. Fox spent 35 years at Williams, serving as chair of the geology department and helping to plan and develop Bronfman Science Center, one of the most innovative scientific facilities of any college when it opened…

Read More...

Drag Culture

LaWhore Vagistan, alter ego of Tufts professor (and former Williams queer life coordinator) Kareem Khubchandani, discussed the dangers of performing in drag, pop culture influence—and why he keeps his body hair—during “Drag Me! Ethics, Performance and the Politics of Drag,” part of a yearlong series on performative ethics, presented by the Program in Women’s, Gender…

Read More...

On Campus Activism

It’s summer in Williamstown: a wonderful time to step out onto campus and feel the embrace of mountains on all sides. And yet this summer also feels like the quiet eye of a far-reaching storm, swirling with debate of many issues. Williams is hardly alone in this experience. From Maine to California, my fellow college…

Read More...

Comment

Other Missions? I read “Mission Possible” (spring 2019) with amazement at the hard work and creativity of Williams scientists. However, I couldn’t help but think how much money is being spent on U.S. space programs (as well as on educating space scientists) while countless people are suffering from cancer, Alzheimer’s and many other modern diseases….

Read More...

Lessons from Wrestling

Coaching students inside the classroom and on the mat. I’m standing on the sidelines of a middle school wrestling match, watching one of my students get beat. He’s a little guy—just like I was at his age—and I’ve coached him for a couple of years. To the best of my ability, I’ve shown him what…

Read More...