People News, September 2018

The Smith College Museum of Art has been awarded a $37,822 National Park Service Preservation of Japanese American Confinement Sites grant for Graphic Language: The Art of Munio Makuuchi, an illustrated book that will accompany a 2019 SCMA exhibition of works by the artist, who was incarcerated with his family during WWII at the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho. The exhibition provides insight into the long-term effects of incarceration and how trauma can be expressed through creative forms. Hard copies of the book will be donated to libraries in more than 100 public universities in the U.S.

(Re)Creations and MathStudio, an exhibition of work by Pau Atela, professor of mathematics and statistics, is on view through December 9 at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The exhibition focuses on the dialogue between mathematics and art and features Atela’s own creations, as well as samples from his MathStudio at Smith.

Jennifer Guglielmo, associate professor of history, and Michelle Joffroy, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese, have been awarded a $1.06 million grant from an anonymous donor for a two-year collaboration with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to raise the visibility of the domestic work sector. The project—which started three years ago at Smith—includes creation of a multilingual, smartphone-accessible digital timeline on the history of domestic worker organizing, as well as a paired political education curriculum on the histories and cultures of domestic work and domestic worker organizing in the U.S. and beyond.

Colin Hoag, assistant professor of anthropology, has been awarded a $10,000 grant from the Thomas Jefferson Fund of the Embassy of France in the United States for “Livestock Production, Environmental Change, and Climate Adaptation in the Global South: Comparative Interdisciplinary Research in Mountain Rangelands of Chile and Lesotho.”

Niveen Ismail, assistant professor of engineering, has been awarded a $322,976 grant from the National Science Foundation for “RUI:WRF:Zooplankton Mediated Removal of Microbial Pollutants in Natural Systems.”

Karen Kukil, associate curator of special collections, is co-editor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956-1963, featuring correspondence from the early years of Plath’s marriage to the days leading up to Plath’s suicide in 1963. Kukil is also a panelist for “Triple-Threat Woman: The Letters of Sylvia Plath,” to be held in October at the British Library in London.

At the 76^th World Science Fiction Awards in California in August, Suzanne Palmer, a Linux systems and database administrator for Smith’s Clark Science Center, received the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for her 2017 story, The Secret Life of Bots.

Linefork, a film co-directed by Vic Rawlings, a performance instructor in Smith’s music department, was screened at Amherst Cinema in September. The feature-length documentary offers a rare glimpse into the lives of unheralded banjo legend Lee Sexton and his wife, Opal, who live in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky.

Seven Smith alumnae were recognized in the most recent round of National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Awards: Katherine Blackford ’17 (chemistry), Sarah Iverson ’14 (sociology) and Jenna Wurster ’14 (biological sciences), received graduate research fellowship awards. Kalani Williams ’18 (biological sciences), Miari Taina Stephens ’16 (Africana studies), Ellen Bryer ’15 (sociology) and Christina Nelson ’14(sociology and Spanish) received honorable mentions.

Breanna Parker ’18 has won a national Campus Sustainability Research Award from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education for her honors thesis, “Designing a Proxy Carbon Strategy for Smith College.” Parker’s research successfully identified and analyzed strategies to incorporate the proxy carbon price into financial decisions at the college, the judges said. Parker majored in environmental science and policy at Smith.

Katherine Wilkinson ’85 has been elected board president of the Delaware College Scholars Program, a statewide college preparation and persistence program. Wilkinson, who is senior vice president and market executive at Fulton Bank, majored in economics at Smith and earned an M.B.A. in finance from Drexel University.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman ’71 is the new director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, succeeding founding director David Gergen. A former U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, Sherman is senior counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group global business strategy firm.