HSA Department Updates, Aug. 2024

Sabbaticals Beginning and Ending

The department welcomes Isabel Balseiro (Professor of Comparative Literature and Alexander and Adelaide Hixon Professor of Humanities), Salvador Plascencia (Associate Professor of Creative Writing), and Paul Steinberg (Professor of Political Science and Environmental Policy and Malcolm Lewis Chair of Sustainability and Society) back from their recent sabbaticals. Professor of the History of Science Vivien Hamilton is taking a one-semester sabbatical this fall. The department wishes her a productive and reinvigorating time away!

Promotion News

Vivien Hamilton was promoted to the rank of Professor effective July 1, 2024. Professor Hamilton, who joined the HSA department in 2011, is an historian of science whose scholarship explores the social contexts of medical technologies and the divergent values informing the collaboration of physicians and scientists in the development of these technologies, and also the social history of radiation and other forms of environmental toxicity. The department congratulates Professor Hamilton on her promotion!

De Laet Named Director of Major Dutch Research Institute

Professor of Anthropology Marianne de Laet has been named Director of the Meertens Institute in The Netherlands. The Institute is a part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. After twenty-three years as a Harvey Mudd faculty member, de Laet is taking a leave of absence this academic year to begin pursuing this new opportunity.

At Harvey Mudd, de Laet has offered staple courses within the 5C STS major and a wide variety of sought-after courses dealing with the anthropology of science and technology. She also served for three years as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs; as Director of the Hixon Riggs Program for Responsive Science and Technology for ten years; and for two terms as Coordinator of the Intercollegiate Program in the Study of Science and Technology. She collaborated with faculty of various departments in teaching and research and received several grants to do so. At Meertens, she will coordinate the work of some fifty researchers, staff members, and visitors. The institute “studies and documents language and culture in the Netherlands as well as Dutch language and culture throughout the world,” according to its website. With its “focus

is on the phenomena that shape everyday life in society,” the Meertens institute will offer a lovely home for de Laet’s research.

Though we’re sorry to lose her contributions to the department and the college, all of us in HSA congratulate Professor de Laet on this accomplishment and wish her the very best in her new role.

Long Receives Major Grant

Assistant Professor of Economics Dede Long and an interdisciplinary group of researchers in economics and other fields have received a $799,000 grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA) to develop a methodology for valuing natural capital stocks such as forests. Approximately thirty percent of the grant will go to funding Long’s own portion of the work over the next few years.

Seitz Interview

As we announced last fall, David Seitz’s A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine was published by the University of Nebraska Press in July 2023. The book has been very well received, and Seitz recently did an interview about it with the alumni magazine of his undergraduate alma mater, Macalester College. The interview can be found at Books: Winter 2024.

New Appointment in Architectural Design

After an extensive search, Jia Yi Gu has been appointed Assistant Professor of Architecture, filling a new tenure-track position for the department. She is completing a Ph.D. in Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA and holds an M.A. earned within the same program. Prior to her appointment at Harvey Mudd, she was Director and Curator at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. She has taught courses at the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, and other institutions, and she is an accomplished curator and architectural historian, as well as a practicing architect. Her dissertation is entitled “When is a Model a Method? Architectural Expertise in Eero Saarinen & Associates.” The dissertation “asks how physical models in architecture shifted from a craft-based activity premised on final representation to a research- oriented enterprise subject to structural calculation, operational analysis, and experiential simulation,” she writes. “This interdisciplinary research draws on media studies, the history of science and technology, and material cultures to investigate how practices of constructing, testing, and imaging physical models became a primary mode by which architects practiced.”

New Appointment in Music

In addition to the new tenure-track faculty appointed as a result of our recent searches in sociology and architecture (see above), this year the department also welcomes a new tenure- track faculty member in music. David Wilson was hired in July of 2022, with the start of his appointment deferred for two years. He holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. “My current research,” he says, “focuses on the ways in which the music of Cultural Revolution-era China interacted with political ideologies, discursive practices, and the construction of contemporary notions of gender. Other research interests include the ways in which political structures of totalitarian regimes shape creative practices, as well as issues of vocality and vocalism in song and concert repertories of 19th-century Europe.” Besides being a researcher, Dr. Wilson is a performing tenor.

New Hixon-Riggs Postdoctoral Fellow Appointed

The department has selected artist Isabel Beavers as its next Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow. During her two-year appointment, she will teach, engage the community through her art practice, and organize both a reading group and a conference on campus. Beavers and her work are described at Isabel Beavers.