Drawing a big and energetic crowd to a small Pettengill classroom, two majors in Chinese studies took the occasion of the 2019 Mount David Summit to share senior thesis research into China’s uneasy adoption of two pop-culture prime movers: video games and hip-hop music.

From left, Nathan Faries, assistant professor of Asian studies, introduces Mount David Summit presenters Chelsea Anglin ’19 and George Fiske ’19. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Chelsea Anglin of Dayton, N.J., looked at video games and esports — competitive video gaming — in China and how they relate to that nation’s image among its Asian peers. George Fiske of West Hartford, Conn., examined hip-hop in China, focusing on a Voice-style reality show and two of its winners.

Though domestically oriented and, because of language and other factors, quite inaccessible to Westerners, China’s video game industry was the world’s largest in 2017, with 583 million participants. But, as Anglin explained, China arrived late to the party. Its first rudimentary games appeared only in the 1990s and various government interventions, including a 15-year ban on console games that ended in 2015, interrupted industry progress.

“I grounded my Chinese studies in something I’m passionate about,” Anglin said. A dedicated gamer herself, she spent many hours of her year abroad in internet cafes exploring the genre called wuxia (woo-shia) — “martial heroes.”

Senior Chinese studies major Chelsea Anglin presents research on video gaming in China during the 2019 Mount David Summit. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

A historically based genre widespread in opera, literature, and movies as well as games, wuxia depicts an ancient era in China populated with honorable, chivalrous men and women who wield swords in the defense of what’s good and right. (A clip of game play that Anglin showed also demonstrated how the games can mirror Chinese culture more broadly, as the “weapons” included acupuncture needles and a stringed musical instrument.)

If what Anglin called the “ancient Chinese feeling” of wuxia can exist happily embedded in game technology, the booming field of esports generates sharp tensions between moral and financial interests in China.

A lucrative industry based on multi-player gaming, “it’s very much something the Chinese government is trying to capitalize on,” Anglin said, and courses in esports are offered at the high school and college levels. Esports, she argued, “create a positive correlation between the Chinese and video game prowess,” an emerging cultural characteristic analogous to the pairings of Japan and animé art or Korea and K-Pop music.

But despite that prestige and the economic benefits of video gaming, Anglin pointed out, Chinese perspectives on the games remain in conflict. In China as elsewhere, they are seen as a distraction from studies and other more “wholesome” activities. Some compare the games to “spiritual opium,” a deeply pejorative label given opium’s role in the British exploitation of China.

An image from the character-design function of the game Jian Wang San.

Both personal gaming and esports, Anglin concluded, have the potential to extend China’s “soft power,” its cultural and social influence. She’s convinced, she said, that the wuxia aesthetic has the potential to “disrupt the current medieval European trope” that exists in today’s open-world video games, “if they can localize it well.”

Anglin’s presentation was rooted in a �ֲ���ý-funded summer research grant that took her to Japan for research into pop culture and especially video games, a focus that she expanded while spending junior year in China. Her adviser was China specialist Nathan Faries, assistant professor of Asian studies, who also hosted the summit session.

Fiske traced the growth of hip-hop in China from its introduction through so-called saw-gash CDs, discs remaindered out of Western markets and sold underground in China. Today, he explained, hip-hop is thriving but polarized: On the one hand, artists like Jay Chou represent a safe, mainstream approach to the music. “He integrates just enough Western style to make the music unique and interesting on the Chinese market, without really challenging or threatening any social taboo.”

George Fiske offers a look into the world of hip-hop music in China. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

On the other hand, there’s a much more feisty, vernacular, and authentic hip-hop scene that until 2017 was exclusively an underground phenomenon. And what happened that year to bring hip-hop into daylight was the debut of The Rap of China, a thoroughly commercial television competition credited with establishing hip-hop as a mainstream force in mainland China.

“I’m here today to argue that this wasn’t selling out on the part of the rappers, and it wasn’t just exploitation on the part of advertisers,” Fiske said. Despite the heavy doses of vitamin-water advertising, the show nevertheless represented “an alternative pathway into mainstream venues” for rap — a breakthrough Fiske later described as “monumental.”

The show found a way to guard both the underground rappers’ own aesthetic and the moral concerns of government and society, Fiske explained. That way was solidarity: As long as everyone on stage respected both hip-hop culture and prevailing Chinese culture, they were all one big happy family.

Fiske used the co-winners of the first season of The Rap of China, GAI and PG One, to show what happened to Chinese hip-hop in the wake of the show’s tremendous success. Among the underground vanguard when they arrived on the show, both artists challenged traditional taboos and norms with their music, style, and image.

Proud of his local dialect and adopting a roaming gangster-cum-ascetic monk persona — “a poetic bandit, almost,” Fiske said — GAI used traditional poetic and historic archetypes to tweak the assumed hegemony of “Chinese-ness.” Meanwhile, PG One’s provocative, nimble, and dynamic music was rooted in an unparalleled expressive command of the Chinese language.

All told, Fiske’s presentation amounted to action, reaction, and ultimately a synthesis emerging from the two. Winning 1.3 billion online views in the summer of 2017, The Rap of China was “a rocket ship aimed at the heart of Chinese popular consciousness.“

Presentations of senior thesis research into pop culture in China filled a Pettengill Hall classroom. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It put rap on the map — but it may have been too much too soon for the powers that be, especially given a scandal, involving PG One lyrics about cocaine use, that emerged in the wake of the series’ first season.

In January 2018, the Chinese government “banned” hip-hop — an action that was actually more a “filtration” of the more egregious performers and not outright suppression. “China doesn’t necessarily have any problems with hip-hop style of music, so long as it promotes the right values,” Fiske explained.

“This is very much indicative of the obstacles that hip-hop has faced in the past [in China] and will continue to face in the future,” he concluded, noting that PG One has dropped out of sight, while GAI is still in the game but has become much more mainstream.

And the rocket ship is now more of a Roman candle: Renamed China’s New Rap, Fiske said, the show returned in 2018 with the stated mission of promoting “positive energy and socialist values.”

Fiske’s thesis adviser was Professor of Chinese Yang Shuhui.

“The history of Chinese emperors and generals has been written,” says Assistant Professor of History Wes Chaney. “I’m interested in telling the stories of everyday life.”

He’s doing that with historical contracts related to land, household division, and marriage that he has collected from antique marketplaces near farming communities in Gansu and Qinghai provinces.

This household division contract allows two brothers who want to live separately to divide their family inheritance (dated from 1914). (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Dating from 1800 to the mid-1900s, these records feature mostly boilerplate language, where thumbprints represent the only likely written record of the individuals whose lives they document. Chaney can’t actually reproduce their voices à la Studs Terkel, yet he’s always looking for those places where individual experience bubbles up. His collection represents this effort — “the voice of the subaltern” is muffled, he says, but trying to hear these peasants’ stories is “what I like about it.”

Each contract has its own distinctive texture, color, and calligraphy. There’s also a distinction between red and white contracts. The former display the government office seal. The latter — comprising most of Chaney’s collection — were never registered with the county office, making them technically illegal, since they mimic the red ones but without a tax payment.

Assistant Professor of History Wes Chaney looks through his collection of Chinese land, household distribution, and marriage contracts in his Pettengill Hall office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In Chaney’s Pettengill office, he pulls out a household division contract from January 1914 that represents the realities of Chinese peasant life. According to Confucian ideology, he says, brothers remain in the same household for life. In reality, that often fails to work out. In this particular case, where two brothers didn’t get along, the contract stipulates how each brother will receive exactly half of their deceased father’s inheritance.

Chaney reads aloud from a list that, in addition to a few parcels of land, includes “one shoehorn, a broken wok, seven sheep, and a leather strap.”

This contract also provides their widowed mother with assets to support both her life and the cost of her eventual funeral.

A land exchange contract dated from 1938 in Huzhu County, Qinghai Province. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It’s typical of the hundreds of contracts he has collected, and together, they tell the story of an illiterate peasantry who left no written record other than the kinds of municipal and private contracts he has in his possession. “You can construct the history of a family over time and the kind of changes in the land that they owned and why,” he says.

These records feature mostly boilerplate language, where thumbprints represent the only likely written record of the individuals whose lives they document. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In preserving these stories of everyday village life, Chaney imagines the different ways in which he can use these papers in his research on Chinese law and land disputes. “These are not seen as important documents, they’re not seen as important to the writing of history, but I think these voices are important to history. And so I think there’s a moral argument for why I’m collecting them,” he says.

Eventually, he would like to return to China — when it’s politically feasible — and donate the documents to local libraries in their counties of origin so they can be accessible to everyone.

This Short Term, Chaney will work with a �ֲ���ý student to catalog more of these documents that he often shares in the classroom. In an increasingly digital world, Chaney says it’s essential for his students to experience what the document would have felt like.

“There’s an importance to the materiality here,” he says, “and we lose that when we read it on Lyceum or downloaded onto our phones or computers. It’s actually important to touch things.”

During a contract negotiating session between Argosy International and a Chinese aircraft manufacturer, a senior vice president representing the Chinese left the room for a smoke break.

A large material-supply contract was at stake. Sessions lasted up to five grueling days, each word in the bilingual contract under scrutiny.

Argosy’s CEO, Paul Marks ’83, followed the vice president. Marks told the man his head was spinning, using a saying by the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi.

“He looked at me and said, ‘How do you know about Zhuangzi?’” Marks said. “He was really into Taoism. So we discussed Taoism for 10 minutes, walked back into the room, he turned to his team, and said, ‘Sign the contract.’”

In March 2017, Paul Marks ’83, CEO of Argosy International, speaks during the opening of the company’s manufacturing facility in Taichung City, Taiwan. (Photo courtesy Argosy International)

Marks, a �ֲ���ý trustee who was on campus for meetings last month, told the story during his Oct. 26 talk in Roger Williams Hall, the center for language study at �ֲ���ý.

Marks explained that he’d learned about Zhuangzi through a �ֲ���ý history course on Chinese intellectual history, taught by now-Professor Emeritus Dennis Grafflin. By engaging with professors like Grafflin and following his interests, plus a bit of “the �ֲ���ý serendipity,” Marks says he developed the ability to navigate the cultures, politics, and business climates of two interconnected but very different worlds.

All that was apparent throughout his time as a student. He went on a pioneering Short Term trip to China with a “maverick” sociology professor, George Fetter. After their tour guide bet him $5 that he couldn’t learn Mandarin, Marks became �ֲ���ý’ first student of Chinese, taking daily Mandarin lessons back on campus with a �ֲ���ý-hired Taiwanese language instructor, Barbara Leong.

Marks says that engaging with his �ֲ���ý professors, following his interests — plus a bit of “the �ֲ���ý serendipity” — have been the key to his life and career. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

After graduation, with a growing interest in all things China, Marks headed to Taiwan to study language at National Taiwan Normal University and history at National Chengchi University.

It was the mid-1980s, not long after the U.S. reestablished diplomatic relations with China, and Taiwan was still under martial law. So Marks wasn’t allowed to study the Communist Party and Cultural Revolution (instead, he was told to study the Yuan Dynasty).

Once, he was hauled in for questioning by the Taiwanese police after some classmates asked him about protests on U.S. college campuses and then held their own protest. “They showed me this propaganda film of how bad ‘Red China’ was, and they started screaming, ‘You want Taiwan to turn into this?’” Marks told his audience. “And I wasn’t scared anymore because it was so ridiculous. Then they drove me back to campus.”

Mathematics major Xuchong Shao ’20 of Shanghai and Chinese major Chelsea Anglin ’19 of Dayton, N.J., talk with Marks after his presentation. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

At the time, Taiwan was building its own fighter jet. Some of Marks’ classmates were working on the project and had been sent to the university to earn MBAs. They complained that they couldn’t acquire the aerospace materials they needed to build their plane.

“I listened to this for five months, and I said, ‘I’m going to set up a business and sell you the materials you need,’” Marks said.

Marks’ father advised him to “go work for someone and learn on their time,” so if he screwed things up he wouldn’t be left holding the bill. Instead, Marks created Argosy, which consisted of himself and one client.

Everything he needed to learn came in due time: how to run a company, the ins and outs of importing and exporting, the aerospace materials industry, and Chinese and American law and politics, the last of which Marks discussed at length with �ֲ���ý students and professors during his talk.

Paul Marks ’83 talks with Professor Emeritus of History Dennis Grafflin after his talk on Oct. 26. Marks considers Grafflin’s course on Chinese intellectual history to be instrumental to his work and life in China. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Argosy International grew to supply major aerospace companies with a range of composite materials and now has offices in the U.S., China, Taiwan, Malaysia, India, Singapore, Korea, France, and Australia.

When people ask Marks which �ֲ���ý course had the biggest impact on his business career, his answer is always the same: Grafflin’s course in Chinese intellectual history. He’s still in touch with his former history professor, who was at his talk.

“�ֲ���ý gave me the wherewithal to start a business, to believe in myself, and also the intellectual capability to analyze things and think about them logically,” Marks said.

Clay Baldo ’13 explains a Chinese political poster during the Mount David Summit. Photograph by Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College College.

It’s common knowledge here in the U.S. that the Chinese government’s involvement in arts and entertainment is, shall we say, much more hands-on than Americans are used to.

Presented during the Mount David Summit by their adviser, Assistant Professor of Chinese Xing Fan, three seniors described thesis projects that illustrated intriguing examples of such state involvement.

Clay Baldo of Santa Fe, N.M., talked about mid-20th century propaganda posters and the communist Chinese government’s shifting intentions for them. Baldo’s focus was the contrast between agitative and integrative propaganda — in musical terms, “Power to the People” vs. “Get Together.”

Of equal concern in mid-century China was the time-honored propaganda technique of holding up scapegoats, such as the Gang of Four, as a way of putting a face on politically odorous tendencies. The “Smash the Gang of Four” campaign in the 1970s, said Baldo, “is my favorite, because I hate the Gang of Four.”

Moving from Mao’s rise to dominance through the Cultural Revolution and beyond, Baldo’s poster gallery segued from scenarios of sanctioned worker violence against class enemies to pictures of harmonious collaboration in attractive landscapes. (Writers in attendance at the presentation were especially gratified by depictions of the pen as a weapon just as efficacious as a spear or shovel.) He noted that while the Chinese government still uses something like propaganda posters, nowadays they are more likely to caution against littering.

Eleanor Anaclerio of Winnetka, Ill., a double major in art and Chinese, talked about the high-profile dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Anaclerio’s own artwork seemed to have some oblique bearing on her presentation: She is also a photographer whose camera obscura images explore notions of public and private space as they seem to bring �ֲ���ý campus scenes into student bedrooms.

Anaclerio argued that in a more liberal social-political context, Ai Weiwei could be doing what he does now and yet would not be seen as a dissident. Instead, the political climate in China has made him a dissident, she said, “but he hasn’t shied away from it at all.”

What impressed her particularly about this intrepid conceptual artist, she said, is his ability to create a community around him wherever he is, whether it was New York in the go-go 1980s or on the Internet today — where Ai Weiwei has pitched his big tent because the Chinese authorities won’t let him leave the country.

Anaclerio pointed to Ai’s 2010-11 Sunflower Seeds exhibition at the Tate Modern, comprising 100 million handmade porcelain “seeds” spread on the gallery floor. “Those seeds individually can’t do much,” she said. “But when there are so many of them together, even when you walk on them, you hardly displace any.”

Maura Maloney of Ellicott City, Md., chose the toughest row to hoe, subjecting herself to hours of dating shows from Chinese television, sans subtitles, to learn about female roles in Chinese society. Maloney studied episodes of the reality shows If You Are the One and Take Me Out, both based on a British show.

The shows are elaborate affairs in which male contestants use videos to make their case to a platoon of women, who can accept or reject the prospects by showing indicator lights. The shows, she said, “reflect the collective anxieties of Chinese singles” — a fraught arena in particular for women, who under Mao Zedong gained a kind of nominal gender equality that, Maloney explained, was more about making political points than advancing women’s real interests.

�ֲ���ý economics professor Maggie Maurer-Fazio, a China specialist, asked Maloney about state censorship on the shows, in view of another Chinese program that drew official ire because viewer voting, à la American Idol, was deemed too participatory. Censorship exists, Maloney replied, but is less political than moral, responding to women portraying themselves as sexual beings and expressing untoward interest in money.

Agency, Maloney found, is the key to contentment. The women she observed didn’t want to have traditional qualities of character like gentleness and domesticity imposed on them — but were willing to assume those qualities if it was their choice. “I hear the same thing from my students,” said a member of the audience, a professor of women’s studies from Clark University.

Another listener asked if Maloney’s project had inspired her to watch American dating shows. No, said Maloney, who spent much of February watching 16 hours of the Chinese shows. “I think that would kill me.”

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art Library (Dürer),” a 2006 oil painting by Xiaoze Xie.

Xiaoze Xie, an artist whose work is featured in a �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art retrospective, formally opens the museum’s two winter exhibitions with a lecture about his work at 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. A reception follows in the museum, also located in the arts center.

The museum is open to the public at no cost from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. For more information, please contact museum@bates.edu or 207-786-6158.

Learn more about the winter exhibitions:

Xiaoze Xie: Amplified Moments (1993-2008)

James Ensor: ‘Scènes de la vie du Christ’ and other works

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art Library (Dürer),” a 2006 oil painting by Xiaoze Xie.

The �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art continues its leadership in bringing contemporary Chinese and Chinese American art to Maine and beyond with the exhibition Xiaoze Xie: Amplified Moments (1993-2008), opening Monday, Jan. 23.

A native of China and , Xie is a nationally known artist whose work explores cultural memory, time, and social and political manipulations of history.

“This exhibition is unique in that it is the first to look at 15 years of Xiaoze’s work, in all media, and important works from all of the major painting series,” says �ֲ���ý museum director Dan Mills, who curated the exhibition while director of the Samek Gallery at Bucknell University.

Xie, who will be a learning associate at �ֲ���ý this winter, discusses his work at 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. The museum, also located in Olin, is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

All museum activities are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6158 or museum@bates.edu.

Showing at the museum through the same period is James Ensor: ‘Scènes de la vie du Christ’ and Other Works, including a portfolio of 32 lithographs by the influential Belgian artist.

Amplified Moments

“Xiaoze Xie wants to have it all in his art: He wants meaning as well as beauty, politics as well as humor, and realism as well as abstraction,” wrote Bob Keefer, a reviewer for the Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore., where Amplified Moments appears through December at the .

Xiaoze Xie at work.

A U.S. resident since 1992, Xie was born in 1966, the year that began China’s devastating Cultural Revolution, and attended university in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square protests. If his work is informed by Chinese history, though, this exquisitely skilled artist is more concerned with factors that transcend ideology and nationality.

“What ties all [my] works together is the interest in time, in memory and in history,” Xie told an interviewer at the University of Oregon in November. “There’s always this sense of contemplating time, the passage of time and how changes in history and politics are documented.”

The documentary medium of photography, in particular, is central to Xie’s work — in both his adaptations, in paint or ink, of images from the news media, and his sumptuous renderings in paint of his own photographs of books and newspapers.

In fact, Xie is known particularly for paintings that show stacks of those publications stored in libraries and archives. Those paintings, art scholar Britta Erickson writes in the Amplified Moments catalog, capture a strange duality in human nature: We take the trouble to preserve these representations of the past, yet having preserved them, then largely neglect them.

For the viewer, Keefer wrote, “photographic devices such as narrow depth of field and motion blur, familiar to us from about a billion contemporary journalistic and advertising photographs, are translated into creamy brush strokes. The combination is extraordinary.”

Amplified Moments is also distinguished by Xie’s work in other media, such as ink drawings, videos and installations.

The 1999 installation “Order (The Red Guards)” refers explicitly to the Cultural Revolution. A painted scroll, reaching into the viewer’s floor space, depicts a library whose books have been mutilated and thrown around. A grid of metal squares, painted black and red — a combination frequently seen in Xie’s work — stands between the viewer and the scene of vandalism.

Like a hall of mirrors, Xie’s work invites a complex contemplation of the nature of history and memory, and how media representations both reflect and distort a past that we have in common yet experience alone.

Xiaoze Xie, “May 23, 2003. C.T.,” 2007, ink on rice paper.

Indeed, Xie himself resists simple responses to his work, as he said in a 2010 talk at Bucknell. “I don’t want to give up painting for installation or video; I don’t want to give up the figurative for the abstract; I don’t want to give up the political for the cultural; I don’t want to give up my Chinese-ness for the universal; I would never give up sincerity or beauty for irony.

“I want all of these in my work. For me, a good work of art should be able to generate complex layers of meaning.”

Mills, who is also an artist, first met Xie at Bucknell, where Xie taught before going to Stanford. The two had adjacent studios for eight years. “Dan is most knowledgeable about my working process,” Xie told the University of Oregon interviewer. “He knows about my hesitation, my worries, my struggle. So I’m so glad he put the show together for me.”

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated 92-page catalog with essays by Erickson, Mills and art scholar Karen Smith, and is supported by a Freeman Foundation Grant.

Peter Marsters ’09 has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarship for research in China. Marsters, who graduated from �ֲ���ý with a degree in modern Chinese history, has worked as a program assistant for the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

“I first became fascinated with the scale of China and believe that China is currently confronting issues that the globe as a whole will eventually have to face,” he says.

His research has focused on energy and climate issues, and he has published articles on electric cars, cooperation between the U.S. and China on clean energy and lake pollution issues in China. Marsters has studied Chinese language and culture at China Normal University in Shanghai and at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The Fulbright recipients are (follow the links to learn more):
, a 2011 graduate, and , 2010, both of whom received assistantships for teaching English as a foreign language in Germany;
, a 2010 graduate who received the equivalent grant for teaching English in Argentina;
, a 2009 graduate whose fellowship will support his research into energy use in China;
and , a 2007 graduate who will study business and management in Spain.

Fulbright is the flagship international educational exchange sponsored by the U.S. government. It is designed to increase mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and of other countries. The program is funded primarily by an annual congressional appropriation to the U.S. Department of State.

The 2010 Global Lens series of films from around the world concludes at �ֲ���ý with The Shaft by Chinese director Zhang Chi in screenings at 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 3, and Monday, Dec. 6, at The Ronj, �ֲ���ý’ student-run coffeehouse, 32 Frye St.

Admission is $5. Made in 2008, The Shaft is in Mandarin with English subtitles (98 min.). For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

In a poor mining town in western China, the stories of a father and his two children intersect and intertwine, illuminating complicated relationships hidden beneath the community’s hardened exterior. Chi’s wise and poetic feature debut delicately expresses the turmoil of emotion and expectation wrought by a calloused and difficult existence.

Chi was born in Beijing in 1977. He studied film direction at the Central Academy of Drama and served as the director of the Chinese national television company, CCTV, from 2000 to 2004. In 2008, he won China’s Golden Rooster Award for Best Screenplay for the film Tokyo Trial.

The Global Film Initiative produces the series in an effort to promote cross-cultural understanding through the medium of cinema by showing little-known, skillfully made independent films to American audiences. The initiative believes that “a powerful, authentic narrative can foster trust and respect between disparate cultures and mitigate the social and psychological impact of cultural prejudice.”

In this issue:

1. Dan Mills is new director of �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art
2. Comprehensive Garcelon Field renovations to be dedicated in home opener
3. After 12 years, Reich transitioning from dean of faculty to psychology professor
4. Campus Construction Update
5. �ֲ���ý listed among top 50 schools producing science Ph.D.s
6. Duncan ’10 a finalist for NCAA Woman of the Year award
7. Sharan ’11 chosen as Wall Street Journal blogger
8. Engage with new head of Alumni and Parent Programs
9. In Armenia, Shahinyan ’12 picks up where Soviets left off
10. Lambright ’12 explores African immigrant experience in China
11. �ֲ���ý in the News

1. Dan Mills is new director of �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art
Nationally esteemed as a curator and arts administrator, Dan Mills is the new director of the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art. Mills comes to Maine from Bucknell University, where for nine years he served as director of the Samek Art Gallery. He joins a museum known both for innovative, high-profile exhibitions and as a model of the academic art museum — a laboratory where students, faculty and the community interact with art that resonates across the disciplines of a liberal arts education.

2. Comprehensive Garcelon Field renovations to be dedicated in home opener
�ֲ���ý will dedicate comprehensive renovations to historic Garcelon Field on Saturday, Oct. 9, as part of the �ֲ���ý football team’s home opener vs. Williams College. The event, a centerpiece of Parents & Family Weekend activities at �ֲ���ý, will include a brief ceremony prior to the 1 p.m. kickoff and a halftime program recognizing supporters of the $2.6 million donor-funded project.

3. After 12 years, Reich transitioning from dean of faculty to psychology professor
After 12 years of service as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty, Jill N. Reich will step down on June 30, 2011, and, following a sabbatical, continue her service to �ֲ���ý as a tenured professor of psychology.

4. Campus Construction Update
With the Garcelon Field dedication and inaugural game just days away,  it’s a race to the goal line for the R.A.D. Sports crew renovating the facility. Meanwhile, Hedge Hall is gaining headroom while Roger Williams Hall embiggens its footprint.

5. �ֲ���ý listed among top 50 schools producing science Ph.D.s
With data from the National Science Foundation, CBS moneywatch.com has published an objective listing of colleges and universities where engineering and science Ph.D.s obtained their undergraduates degrees.  �ֲ���ý is ranked 47th in this list, and 24th among liberal arts colleges.

6. Duncan ’10 a finalist for NCAA Woman of the Year award
The field of nominees for the 2010 NCAA Woman of the Year award has been whittled from 130 conference nominees to the Top 30 honorees, and �ֲ���ý graduate Vantiel Elizabeth Duncan ’10 remains.
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7. Sharan ’11 chosen as Wall Street Journal blogger
�ֲ���ý’ own Shalini Sharan ’11 has been selected as one of this year’s “Hire Education” bloggers by The Wall Street Journal. The blogs are posted on the WSJ website by nine seniors at different colleges and universities around the United States as they finish their senior year and “look for work in a tough job market.” Sharan, of Jamshedpur, India, majors in economics and has a minor in Russian. Read Sharan online:

8. Engage with new head of Alumni and Parent Programs
Following a national search, Marianne Nolan Cowan ’92 was selected as Director of Alumni and Parent Programs, Vice President for College Advancement Kelly Kerner announced in September. Cowan has served the College in numerous roles since coming back to �ֲ���ý 10 years ago as a member of the Advancement staff, most recently as an Associate Director of Alumni and Parent Programs working with the �ֲ���ý Business and Professional Networks. “We want to hear from you,” says Cowan, “your feedback, volunteerism and new ideas are always appreciated.”

9. In Armenia, Shahinyan ’12 picks up where Soviets left off
After Armenia declared its independence from the Soviet Union on Aug. 23, 1991, everything related to Soviet rule had to go. Even the good stuff. Gohar Shahinyan ’12, Armenian born and raised in the U.S., traveled back to her homeland last summer to help bring back green space that the Reds had stewarded quite well: neighborhood commons, where townspeople and their children once gathered, socialized, and played.

10. Lambright ’12 explores the African immigrant experience in China
Lured by the chance to buy, sell and export cheap consumer goods, Africans continue to pour into the Chinese city of Guangzhou, the city’s thriving “Little Africa” is now home to 20,000 Africans, maybe many more. Into this community last summer came politics majors and budding researchers Daniel Lambright ’12 and Obi Udeh ’12.

11. �ֲ���ý in the News
The remarkable cross-country canoe trek by Outing Club alumnus Alexander Martin ’08 gets coast-to-coast coverage by The Associated Press. A Boston Globe blogger likes �ֲ���ý’ aggregation of alumni social-network sites, while much-honored chemistry major Marilla Pender-Cudlip ’10, profiled in her hometown newspaper, is praised by her �ֲ���ý mentor, Rachel Austin, for taking time off before grad school. Finally, media observers, including James Fallows at The Atlantic, pay tribute to John Strassburger ’64, president emeritus of Ursinus College, who died Sept. 22, 2010.