Category: Academics
May 15, 2012|Academics
Long before well-muscled movie stars began exchanging gunfire in Hollywood action flicks and Xbox assassins started blowing up buildings in computer games, similar displays of high-testosterone aggression were common in the epics of the ancient world. Audiences, it seems, have always liked their heroes quick-fisted and armed to the teeth.
But, as Tina-Marie Ranalli will tell you, there are exceptions. Ranalli, an assistant professor of French and German, has spent years poring over a little-known 700-year-old manuscript housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. What she has found there, she says, turns traditional depictions of the heroic warrior upside-down. For some classical heroes, as the title of one of Ranalli’s recent papers puts it, it paid “to be a lover, not a fighter.”
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April 20, 2012|Academics
Ricky Dingraudo, crime-scene investigator, was creeping through a bed of ankle-high pachysandra outside Schaible Science Center one afternoon last week when he found what he was looking for. There, partially hidden by the early spring foliage, was a bright white bone: A human femur, Dingraudo guessed.
It would have been an alarming discovery, if the bone hadn’t been plastic and if Dingraudo didn’t have good reason to believe it had been planted there by a couple of his professors.
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April 11, 2012|Academics
The students who come to see Earl Thompson have big plans. They want to go to Paris and spend a year studying French. They want to join a research team in a biology lab at one of Germany’s top universities. They want to teach English as a Second Language in Ecuador.
So they talk to Thompson, Elmhurst’s major scholarships coordinator. He makes it his mission to help them win one of the big-money, high-prestige scholarships—maybe a Fulbright, maybe a Gilman—that can make their plans a reality.
“So many of the students that come to me are so impressive. They have that special spark,” Thompson said in a meeting room at the Center for Professional Excellence where he often meets with students. This is where he makes his pitch for them to apply for one of the twenty or so scholarships that are considered higher education’s biggest prizes. “I tell them, ‘There’s a time to be humble, and this ain’t it.’”
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March 23, 2012|Academics
The newest addition to Rich Schultz’s Daniels Hall office is a wall map of the United States that occupies a place of honor above Schultz’s desk.
“Look at the attention to detail,” Schultz, an associate professor in the department of geography and geosciences, proudly told a visitor who asked about the map last week. “Look at the shading. It’s the kind of work you don’t see anymore.”
The map, created by cartographer David Imus, is a throwback to an artisanal tradition of painstakingly plotted maps that treat the smallest details—elevations, forestation, the density of urban areas—with great care. Schultz is not the only one who has taken note. One reviewer called Imus’ map “masterful … the greatest paper map of the United States you’ll ever see,” and it won last year’s “Best of Show” award at the competition of the Cartography and Geographic Society.
There is just one problem with the map. Fewer and fewer people have any idea how to read it, or any map.
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February 21, 2012|Academics
For most science majors, the presentation that Pat Brambert is set to deliver at the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research in Utah next month would be the highlight of a semester. For Brambert, it’s just a warm-up.
Brambert, a junior from Bloomingdale, has spent much of the last year working with Assistant Professor Stacey Raimondi on investigations into the genetic triggers that make cancer cells grow more aggressively. He was selected to present his findings at the annual NCUR meeting in late March, a showcase for the nation’s top undergraduate researchers.
But that’s just the first of two high-profile appointments Brambert has on his calendar for that week. After finishing his presentation in Utah, he will hustle back across country to offer his work at the prestigious American Association of Cancer Research conference in Chicago, a stage even more impressive than the NCUR conference.
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October 17, 2011|Academics
Gene Losey’s new chemistry lab is in an unlikely location. Every so often, especially after a heavy rain, or what Losey likes to call “a real gully-whumper,” you might find him at work in the parking lot just west of West Hall. In an unremarkable-looking white utility box there, tucked among the prairie plantings that border the student parking spaces, Losey, a professor and chair of the chemistry department, collects samples of stormwater runoff. For the last two years, he has been analyzing the water he collects there, looking for insights into the workings of the innovative stormwater-control system the College installed around West Hall before the state-of-the-art “green” residence hall opened in 2008.
“This is a natural laboratory,” Losey said one afternoon last week as he was crossing the parking lot. “It gives us a chance to collect stormwater and see what we can learn from it.”
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September 30, 2011|Academics
When Abby Heider traveled to Costa Rica for a January Term Spanish class last year, she was determined, as she put it, “to live and breathe Spanish.”
So Heider kept her journal in Spanish, wrote her shopping lists in Spanish, and chatted with her friends in Spanish. At the mountaintop language institute near the scenic Central Valley town of Santa Ana where she studied, she took classroom notes in Spanish. One day when she and her classmates took a harrowing whitewater rafting trip down the Rio Pacuare, she even found herself screaming in Spanish.
“It was total immersion in the language,” she said.
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May 11, 2011|Academics
In this 150th year since the start of the American Civil War, it is time to reconsider one of the most vexing questions to emerge from that conflict: Did Mary Todd Lincoln really need 300 pairs of gloves?
This is the sort of question that has been bothering Nicole Boylan for much of the past year. Boylan, a senior, is part of a team of student costumers who recreated 19th-century fashions for the Mill Theatre’s May production of the historical drama Abraham Lincoln. In all, the team produced 40 sets of costumes—soldier’s uniforms, ladies’ dresses, even corsets and pantaloons–aiming for historical accuracy and attention to detail. Researching their work took the costumers to archives and museums from Madison, Wisconsin to Washington, D.C. But the project began last summer with a trip to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. It was there that Boylan began to understand Mrs. Lincoln’s extraordinary fashion sense.
“She thought it was her patriotic duty to wear the very best clothes and to spend money on the very best silks,” Boylan said last week in Buik Recital Hall, where she and her fellow students were presenting their work as part of Elmhurst’s ninth annual Research and Performance Showcase. But when it came to Mrs. Lincoln’s attempts at high style, everyone was a critic. “People said her dresses made her look like a piece of furniture. They said she appeared to be wearing a flower pot on her head.”
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April 20, 2011|Academics
In a Hammerschmidt Chapel classroom last week, Katrina Sifferd was leading the seven students in her “Philosophy of Law” class through a discussion of Roper v. Simmons, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that it was unconstitutional to impose capital punishment for crimes committed while under the age of 18. Sifferd, an assistant professor of philosophy, called her students’ attention to one particular kind of evidence considered by the court: neuroscientific studies about the development of the adolescent brain that account for the juvenile tendency to act recklessly and on dangerous impulse.
“There’s science in there again, isn’t there?” Sifferd asked from the front of the room, as her students worked through the court’s ruling.
The intersection of law and neuroscience is becoming a busy place. Armed with new brain-scanning and visualization technologies that seem lifted from science fiction, scientists are peering into the working brain and unraveling our very decision-making processes. What they learn from those scans is heavy with implications for courts and for scholars like Sifferd. For better or worse, brain science promises to alter legal notions about whether defendants are culpable for the things they do and how they should be punished or treated.
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March 16, 2011|Academics
Russell Ford greeted the five students in his medical humanities senior seminar late Tuesday afternoon with a bit of fictitious good news.
“Congratulations, you’ve all just won the lottery,” he told the class. “You get one million dollars in cash. There are no strings attached, it’ s tax-free, and you have no outstanding debts. “
Ford’s students, arrayed in a semi-circle around their professor in a tiny classroom in Daniels Hall, didn’t bother celebrating. They seemed to be waiting for some inevitable bit of bad news to follow. Ford, an assistant professor of philosophy, didn’t disappoint them.
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