Before she joined the U.S. Foreign Service, Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz, professor of politics, was certain that she would never make a career out of studying Latin America.

Her family is from Mexico — she was born in Monterrey before moving to the U.S. at age 2 — and she felt that studying the region would give in to people’s stereotypes about what was expected of her.

But, when she was assigned to Mexico for her first post as a Foreign Service officer, everything changed.

“I was really upset,” Pérez-Armendáriz says. “But then, it turned out it’s the most incredible thing that happened in my life.”

Her experience in Mexico inspired much of her thesis work for her PhD in politics and continues to impact her research and teaching. In recognition of the latter, Pérez-Armendáriz is this year’s recipient of the Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, �ֲ���ý’ highest honor for teaching.

“I really like teaching, and it felt really exciting for people to recognize something that I care about a lot,” Pérez-Armendáriz says.

“Hearing from them and taking seriously their observations, I like that a lot. That’s what makes me come up with a new idea for a course.”

Professor of Politics Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz

She helped establish the college’s Program in Latin American and Latinx Studies, and her courses frequently cover comparative politics, Latin American and Latinx politics, and international migration. This semester, she’s teaching a first-year seminar, “How Democracy Dies,” and a 300-level course, “Political Challenges in Latin America.”

For politics major and “Political Challenges in Latin America” student Elizabeth Holcombe ’26 of Takoma Park. Md., what makes Pérez-Armendáriz stand out as a teacher is her ability to develop close, honest relationships with her students.

“Clarisa makes everyone feel capable and smart in their own way,” Holcombe says. “Everyone has something to share and contribute.” 

Both Holcombe and Leslie Jimenez ’26 of Chicago, Ill., a politics and Latin American and Latinx studies double major also in “Political Challenges in Latin America,” took their first courses with Pérez-Armendáriz their sophomore year. They jump at any opportunity to enroll in a course with her, they say, and are constantly recommending her courses to their peers.

“Clarisa is this light that guides a lot of people in this world,” Jimenez says.

Another strength of Pérez-Armendáriz’s teaching is the way that she uses her experience as a Foreign Service officer to make her lessons come alive, Holcombe says.

“It’s pretty clear in her teaching that a lot of her life before �ֲ���ý is informing what we’re learning about in a powerful way,” Holcombe says. 

As a Foreign Service officer, Pérez-Armendáriz was responsible for issuing visas for entry into the U.S. and helping people with dual citizenship in Mexico and America resolve various administrative problems. She began to notice interesting patterns among her clients with dual citizenship or who had emigrated out of Mexico and were returning or visiting. 

Her experience inspired her to begin thinking about how Mexican emigrants influence the political state of their home country from abroad or through their families, a topic that would go on to influence her doctoral thesis and later research. Pérez-Armendáriz is currently working on several research projects, including investigating election participation of Mexican citizens who vote from abroad.

Pérez-Armendáriz’s courses touch on complicated, contested political concepts, such as, for her first-year seminar students, the often-debated definition of populism. As a teacher, one of her priorities is ensuring that her students both understand and can explain these intricate topics. She wants them to be able to share what they’ve learned, whether while educating family members or discussing their work in a job interview.

“We complicate things a lot,” Pérez-Armendáriz says. “You don’t want to lose your audience.”

Pérez-Armendáriz helps students grasp ideas by teaching them how to create and analyze visual tools such as graphs. She’s laid back and approachable when she’s at the front of the classroom, using humor to help students relax and feel comfortable approaching difficult topics, and quick to remind them that there is often more than one way to view an idea.

In her classroom, “you’re allowed to have a very nuanced opinion,” Jimenez says.

Pérez-Armendáriz seeks feedback from students on what they want to learn and provides opportunities for students with unique global perspectives, such as international students or those returning from study abroad, to share their insights with their classmates. 

“Hearing from them and taking seriously their observations, I like that a lot,” Pérez-Armendáriz says. “That’s what makes me come up with a new idea for a course.”

Her changing, topical ideas for her courses are part of what makes students return to her repeatedly.

“Clarisa has her finger on the pulse,” Holcombe says. “She knows what people want to learn.”

Though her courses are all taught in English, Pérez-Armendáriz encourages her students to engage with source materials in other languages, whether they access them because they speak another language or through using AI translation services. She discussed the importance of accessing sources in different languages during the Kroepsch Pedagogy Panel in September, which Pérez-Armendáriz organized and moderated around the theme of “preparing our students to be global citizens.”

In the same vein of having students who have spent time abroad share their experiences, engaging with scholarly work in different languages offers a glimpse into ideas beyond what is available in the English scholastic catalog.

“It’s not just ‘same stuff, different language,’” Pérez-Armendáriz says. “It’s ‘different stuff.’”

Lexie Jamieson ’20, a double major in politics and Spanish, embraced Pérez-Armendáriz’s enthusiasm for using multiple languages while writing her thesis analyzing perceptions of foreigners in Argentina. With Pérez-Armendáriz encouraging her as her advisor, Jamieson conducted surveys and interviews in Spanish. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Jamieson worried that it wasn’t possible to complete her thesis virtually. But Pérez-Armendáriz assured her that she could do it. They met online nearly every day until she was finished.

“She’s the definition of what an amazing professor is like, and she really truly cares about her students and their lives,” Jamieson says.

Pérez-Armendáriz enjoys supporting students who are interested in research and encourages them to pursue their interests, even when their ideas are unusual. When she herself was a PhD student, her advisors cautioned her against studying her primary interest of immigration, claiming that it was not a topical part of politics.

Years later, immigration is one of the most relevant and examined topics in political science.

“I have a really strong reaction to when people are like, ‘You don’t want to do that.’ It’s really negative,” Pérez-Armendáriz says. “It keeps us from knowing and learning stuff we don’t know. Maybe a student is from a place that hasn’t been represented in academia.”

Jimenez spent a summer as Pérez-Armendáriz’s research assistant through an internship funded by the Center for Purposeful Work. Even though Jimenez began the summer without the research skills needed for the work, such as coding data, Pérez-Armendáriz was confident that she could learn — and she did.

“Clarisa is just meeting you where you’re at and really wanting to make sure you like what you’re doing,” Jimenez says.

But Pérez-Armendáriz has high expectations for her students. Her courses taught Jamieson that her brain and work ethic were capable of more than she previously thought possible. Today, as a bilingual English-Spanish kindergarten teacher in Washington D.C., Jamieson views her students’ potential the same way that Pérez-Armendáriz viewed hers.

“It really influences the way I also hold those high standards and expectations of my students,” Jamieson says. “Even as five-year-olds, I’ve been very amazed at their abilities to have critical conversations about the world around them and understand.” 

Pérez-Armendáriz knows personally that the path to purposeful work is often winding and full of surprises. With her unfailing belief in her students’ ability to succeed, she is equipping them for the journey.

“One thing will lead to another, and you can’t predict it,” Pérez-Armendáriz said. “Just be ready and be open and listen to your instincts.”

“Follow the money,” the FBI source Deep Throat told the reporters unraveling the Watergate burglary in the film All the President’s Men.

A corollary for our time might be “name the evil.” If you want to understand what’s driving a particular conspiracy theory, advises rhetoric professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano, then try to characterize the perceived evil that motivates the theorists’ stories.

For instance, why did then–political aspirant Donald Trump boost the “birther” conspiracy, the lie that Barack Obama’s presidency was illegitimate because Obama hadn’t actually been born in the U.S.? What was the perceived evil behind that particular rhetoric?

“It’s pretty plain,” Kelley-Romano told a �ֲ���ý audience on Sept. 19. “It’s fear of a black president, right? It’s just blatant white supremacy and racism. And so, when we see that for what it is, it becomes a lot easier to understand the subsequent rhetoric.”

Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano poses in her Pettigrew Hall Office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Kelley-Romano, associate professor and chair of rhetoric, film, and screen studies, was honored last winter with �ֲ���ý’ Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching. Giving her Kroepsch Lecture in Pettengill Hall last week, she treated a packed Keck Classroom to a quick tour of her ongoing conspiracy rhetoric research.

The talk, a sort of field guide to conspiracy rhetoric, was another in a welcome and timely series of �ֲ���ý examinations of truth and untruths. In fact, earlier in the day and also under the Kroepsch aegis, four faculty members described how the concept of truth figured in their teaching, a topic suggested by Kelley-Romano.

During that event, in recounting how he and Alex Dauge-Roth designed their First-Year Seminar scrutinizing the nature of truth, economist Michael Murray neatly summarized how the context has changed around the concept.

“The motivation was really our shared dismay and outrage at a climate in which alternative facts become something that people think of as real, and the dismissal of what one might learn through science,” Murray said. “We wanted somehow to provide students with a venue in which they could deal with that environment more richly and deeply.”

Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty (right), talks with Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics Michael Murray and Professor of Psychology Amy Douglass, presenters at the panel discussion “Truth and How One Teaches It,” a prelude to Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s Kroepsch lecture later in the day. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Kelley-Romano’s late-afternoon lecture, distinguished by clarity, urgency, and humor, was another such venue. She focused on four subjects of her research: people who say they have been abducted by space aliens; the television blockbuster The X-Files; Trump’s conspiracy rhetoric; and the Fox News treatment of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

“A conspiracy is a group of people who are doing something in secret for harmful or evil reasons,” Kelley-Romano explained. “And so a conspiracy theory is the belief that there is a group of people who are doing something in secret for harmful or illicit reasons.

Further, she asked, “What are the defining characteristics of it? Thematically, what are the things that unite it? Formally, what are the common argumentative strategies?” And in the case of television’s X-Files and the Kavanaugh hearings, “what are the visual trappings?”

A characteristic of conspiracy rhetoric, and a recurring device in the show The X-Files, is the mixing of fact with fiction as a means of lending credibility to the latter, says Kroepsch Award honoree Stephanie Kelley-Romano. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas in the mid-1990s, Kelley-Romano found rhetoric around human-alien encounters becoming something of a theme in her life. She was an obsessive fan of The X-Files, whose main characters, FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, were bent on exposing a federal plot to conceal the earthly activities of extraterrestrials.

“I didn’t know if I wanted to be Mulder and Scully or if I wanted to date them, but I knew I wanted more of them,” Kelley-Romano told the �ֲ���ý audience. “And so, since I was in graduate school, I had to write about it, because I couldn’t [otherwise] justify watching it.”

Meanwhile, defying her Ph.D. adviser (“You’ll never get a job,” he warned), Kelley-Romano interviewed 100 professed abductees to form the basis of her dissertation, on the rhetoric of alien abduction.

A characteristic of conspiracy rhetoric is the mixing of fact with fiction as a means of lending credibility to the latter. An X-Files motif was the use of actual or carefully replicated news footage, often with text superimposed on it that serves the fictional plot. (One episode references the famous Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in revealing that it was actually a key X-Files character, the Cigarette-Smoking Man, who killed the president.)

In 2012, Arizona conspiracy theorist Mike Zullo announces at a press conference that Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery. The birther conspiracy that dogged President Obama was fueled by “a fear of a black president,” explains Stephanie Kelley-Romano, associate professor of rhetoric, film, and screen studies. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Fact vs. fiction gets complicated in a hall-of-mirrors way. Kelley-Romano noted that some professed abductees believe that programs like The X-Files are actually part of a real federal disinformation campaign. If it’s just science fiction, the logic goes, who would believe it? So a drama about a government conspiracy to hide the truth about extraterrestrial activities is, in reality, itself part of such a conspiracy.

Some kind of perceived evil is an organizing principle or orbital center for a given conspiracy theory.

“The blurring, and the inability to make these distinctions, is part of the problem with the perpetuation and proliferation of conspiracy belief,” Kelley-Romano said.

Conspiracy theories exploit the human need for coherence in stories, something that communications theorist Walter Fisher called narrative fidelity. “We like it when things seem to hang together,” Kelley-Romano explained. Yet “narrative fidelity or narrative rationality and rational argument are not always in sync.”

Which brought us to the role of evil in conspiracy rhetoric, a concept Kelley-Romano attributed to Earl Creps of Northwest University.  For Creps, some kind of perceived evil is an organizing principle or orbital center for a given conspiracy theory. In order to bust that theory, we need to identify the evil that the conspiracy believers are perceiving and responding to.

Kelley-Romano’s witty, energetic style captivated her listeners. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“And how can we get at combating that, right? Because we all know that we are not going to argue…any type of new mindset [into] most conspiracy believers.”

Playing on the desire for narrative fidelity, The X-Files rendered as art another tactic near and dear to conspiracy theorists: the kind of associative “logic,” Kelley-Romano explained, “whereby things that come in concurrent succession are somehow argumentatively or rationally related, which is not necessarily the truth.”

She admitted, “That was part of why I loved watching the show. I loved the intellectual calisthenics and the illogic of it.”

But what’s fun and lovable over pizza on a Friday night becomes something different and much less fun when it’s a factor in mainstream political discourse, including conspiracy rhetoric à la Trump (whom she dubbed “the conspiracy president”), and Fox News coverage of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

Borrowing a phrase from Wabash College’s Jeffrey Mehltretter Drury, Kelley-Romano held up Trump as a great example of the “rogue ethos”: the “notion that your credibility as a politician comes from the fact that you’re outside the system. You’re willing to shake things up. You’re willing to go rogue.”

However, as Drury made clear, the rogue has to profess populist solidarity. “You can’t do it for your own personal gain,” Kelley-Romano said. “It has to be for the people.”

President Trump is an example of the “rogue ethos” at work, says Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Trump positions himself as a latter-day Rick Blaine, the Casablanca protagonist who wants to stay out of the fray but finally has to step up and do the right thing. “I don’t want to talk about this,” Trump might say, “but when I walk down the street, they’re saying, ‘Don’t give up. Don’t give up.’

“And so he has to talk about it, right?”

Trump is also a master of rhetorical questioning, which has the desired effect of spreading doubt and suspicion without leveling actual charges that would require evidence. “He’s just wondering. He’s just asking,” Kelley-Romano said. “And he manages to absolve himself of any type of responsibility.”

With a shout-out to advisee and collaborator Claire Sullivan ’19, whose senior thesis examined the role of conspiracy rhetoric in Fox News’ Kavanaugh coverage, Kelley-Romano used the 2018 hearings as an example of “tactical framing.” (The concept comes from Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.)

A Donald Trump tweet from Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s presentation shows the president’s skill with rhetorical questions.

That’s when news organizations turn their attention away from actual news content and instead, report “on the coverage or the positioning of something,” she explained.

“So rather than focus on what was actually being said during the testimony, there was this meta-narrative that unified the Fox News coverage — which was, this is actually a conspiracy by the Democrats to thwart the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, and, in particular, out of revenge for the Clintons.”

She added, “When we think about that problem of rhetorical evil, what is this conspiracy responding to? I would argue, that this conspiracy is hell-bent on defending a particular way of American life — of privilege and white, heteronormative men. And specifically, Brett Kavanaugh.”

Stephanie Kelley-Romano as seen through her Kroepsch Award. (Photograph by Jonathan Cavallero)

The real-world power of economist Michael Murray’s teaching is on display everywhere his former students go.

Take, for example, Analysis Group in Boston, which has had an active alumni connection since its co-founding by trustee emeritus Bruce Stangle ’70 in 1981.

Jim Hughes, one of Murray’s �ֲ���ý colleagues, does consulting at Analysis Group. More than once, a former Murray student now working at Analysis has given Hughes “a lecture on the econometric techniques needed for a project that I’m working on. It blows me away.”

“Michael just makes econometrics click for them in a way that other people don’t.”

Making things click for generations of �ֲ���ý students is why Murray, the Phillips Professor of Economics and a member of the faculty since 1986, has won the 2017 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, the college’s top teaching honor carrying a $5,000 prize.

As Hughes’ anecdote indicates, one of Murray’s courses (he’s taught 16 different ones at �ֲ���ý) is econometrics, a notoriously difficult course at any college because it asks students to use math and statistics to grasp the workings of economic systems.

Students don’t just rave about Murray’s ability to communicate econometrics. They say he even makes it fun. “He made complex concepts enjoyable and interesting to learn,” says Sarah Centanni ’17 of Hingham, Mass.

To his students, Michael Murray is “passionate, intelligent, funny, caring, and personable,” says a former student. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Murray has written the book on understanding econometrics, literally. His textbook, Econometrics: A Modern Introduction, was published in 2005. “It’s quite different from other textbooks,” he says. “In that sense, I teach the subject in a very different manner.”

It’s a manner that studiously avoids what he calls “black boxes,” which symbolize memorizing. In his book and in his classroom, Murray instead tries to give his students an understanding of econometric theory, rather than simple proficiency in using the various tools of the field, including econometric software.

With that approach, he’s passing on a maxim from his own school days.

An amateur actor who’s been in many �ֲ���ý theater productions, Murray adopts the character of a beloved high school math teacher who spoke with a nasal twang and would draw out certain words. Time and again, the teacher would tell Murray and his classmates, “Don’t memorize. Understaaaannnd.”

And his students do. “Professor Murray lays out the base of the material in class and he pushes you, the student, to find the answers on your own,” says Dan Willsey ’18 of Glastonbury, Conn. “He holds his students to an incredibly high standard.”

“When I did not understand some material during the course, he talked with me for over an hour until I got it,” recalls Shelby Rader ’17 of Duxbury, Mass.

Here are some scenes of Murray in the classroom as he talks about teaching �ֲ���ý students:

In courses like econometrics or statistics, an array of software — STATA, Eviews, R, or SPSS — can crunch right through problems that Murray is trying to get his students to understand.

Leaning on those tools, “it’s easy to decide that you want to get your students to learn the mechanics of an analysis,” says Murray. “I figure our students are bright enough to figure out the mechanics. They’ll benefit most from the stuff they couldn’t learn for themselves. And that’s understanding.”

Hughes, the college’s Sowell Professor of Economics and Murray’s colleague since 1992, says the stakes are high when it comes to teaching topics like econometrics or statistics, which he teaches.

It’s a “dangerous thing,” he says, for teachers to succumb to the “temptation to teach econometrics and stats by saying, ‘Let the computer do it.’ Or just teaching students that ‘when faced with this, do that,’ figuring, ‘Who cares? You’re just going to be a research assistant.’”

Students can get by on that kind of teaching, he says, “but Michael’s talent is to get his students to want to go deeper.”

Understanding doesn’t come cheaply, in terms of Murray’s time investment. Students repeatedly mention long office hours, three-hour study sessions before exams, and the time he drove to �ֲ���ý from Portland after returning on an evening flight in order to hold a 10:30 p.m. study session.

Students and his colleagues also routinely praise Murray’s enthusiasm in the classroom. Actor that he is, he nevertheless disagrees that he’s playing a part — an econ version of Dead Poets Society — as he enthuses about this or that econometric model in a Pettengill Hall classroom.

Economics professor Michael Murray works with students in his econometrics course on April 3 during the final week of classes. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Murray recalls teaching at the University of Virginia in the 1970s, where he had two sections of an economics course, each with 600 students. There, “the skills I use in theater are very valuable. I can project my voice. I can project my presence. I can move in ways that will hold people’s attention.” In those settings, “there’s a point at which teaching has become performance,” he says.

At �ֲ���ý, classes are much, much smaller. “I can be myself,” he says. For students, Murray being Murray means experiencing someone who’s “passionate, intelligent, funny, caring, and personable,” says Cosmin Bardan ’16. That authentic love of his work resonates with his students. Murray’s “pure love of the field,” Centanni adds, made her “more invested in my work.”

Still, Murray is an entertaining figure in class, which does serve the purpose, he says, of “infusing energy into the room.”

“Economics — love it though I do — is a subject that can easily put people to sleep and make them tune out,” Hughes says. “Whether you call it performance or you call it agitation, what Michael does is convey his excitement and his belief in the importance of what he is putting across in a way that makes students sit up and say, ‘I really need to know this.’”

“The way Michael’s mind works, he’s thinking, ‘Wow, so you didn’t understand it that way? OK, I just thought of another three ways, and if you still don’t get it, I’ll come up with six more ways to teach it, until I finally see the light bulb come on over your head.”

And the bulb usually blinks bright. “I have never had a professor who cared so much about making sure students understand,” says Alexander Stekler ’17 of Avon, Conn., while Centanni talks about the feeling of “joy and satisfaction when a complex problem finally clicked.” (And yes, we’re still talking about economics.)

In the end, Murray says his classroom style is all about “establishing relationships with the individual students.”

And that, he says, “is what makes it really pleasurable to teach at �ֲ���ý.”

Alex Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies, gives the Kroepsch Lecture on March 18, 2015. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

What shapes a meaningful conversation with people whose sense of self has been fractured by witnessing the horrors of genocide? In such conversations, who controls what is meaningful and worthy of discussion, remembrance and action?

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, recipient of �ֲ���ý’ 2015 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, devoted his Kroepsch lecture on March 18 to a thorough analysis of those questions — specifically as they pertain to his decade of engaging �ֲ���ý students with survivors and their stories of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

And whether or not he ever used the words “power” and “ownership” during his late-afternoon lecture, those concepts were the floor his talk stood on.

How do power relationships play out in the dialogue between a trauma survivor and that person’s interlocutor? Who owns the survivor’s story, the space in which it’s heard and its retellings? Most important, what is the interlocutor’s ethical and civic obligation to the survivor?

Associate professor in French and francophone studies, Dauge-Roth is internationally known for his research into personal narratives from the genocide, work represented by his 2010 book, Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History (Lexington Books).

Dozens of students, colleagues and friends offered a warm welcome to this scholar and teacher who, in his 10th year at �ֲ���ý, “received many, many nominations for the Kroepsch,” as Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer said in introducing Dauge-Roth.

Recipients of the award are nominated by current students and recent graduates, and the honoree is selected by a panel of recent recipients. Auer quoted a nominator who had taken part in Dauge-Roth’s Short Term course in Rwanda. That person praised Dauge-Roth for teaching not only academic aspects of the genocide, but the “importance of being understanding, nonjudgmental and sensitive with the [Rwandans] we worked with.” (Another nominator drew laughter by calling Dauge-Roth “the thesis adviser I needed, not the thesis adviser I deserved.”)

Dauge-Roth’s talk was titled The Transformative Power of Literary and Testimonial Encounters. Revealing a mentality scrupulous in both its morality and its attention to the ramifications of an idea, the hour-long talk traced an arc from Dauge-Roth’s own studies, in his native Switzerland and at the University of Michigan, to the thinking behind signature courses that he introduced at �ֲ���ý.

Both courses, “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” and “Learning with the Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda,” were driven by interaction between Dauge-Roth’s students and genocide survivors. The latter, a Short Term unit, has twice brought students to Rwanda.

Together, Sarah Bravmann ’12 and Alexis Mutimukunda face a genocide exhibit of human skulls at the Ntarama Memorial in Rwanda during the Short Term course “Learning with Orphans of the Genocide in Rwanda” in 2009 led by Alex Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies.

As he designed these courses, he recounted, a central issue quickly emerged. “What are the informative — but more importantly the potentially transformative — places, voices and roles, that we as an academic community are willing to offer to members of another community whose history we are studying?”

“My hope was that a polyvocal and decentered mode of teaching would open up challenging spaces of dialogue, inviting students to re-evaluate the borders of academia; to reflect on their civic role when exposed to histories of pain; and to question the understanding, circulation and production of knowledge about others.”

Inspired by research conducted for his graduate degrees, notably his work at Michigan with the personal testimony of people living with AIDS in France, Dauge-Roth focused on the literature of survivors of the genocide — biographies, diaries, oral history and film.

“Interactions with survivors of genocide is not only about the past and grievance but also about sharing laughter within the present despite of it all,” says Dauge-Roth. Here, �ֲ���ý students and survivors of the genocide in Rwanda gather for music and fellowship during Short Term in 2013. The survivors live at Tubeho, a collective of houses in Kigali where orphans of the genocide live in reconstituted families.

It was his dissertation director at Michigan, Professor of Comparative Literature Ross Chambers, who articulated the idea that reading survivors’ literature can’t be a passive act: Listeners, Dauge-Roth learned, need to “develop a critical self-awareness regarding their own agency and inadequacy as they respond to survivors’ stories.”

As he created his Rwanda-based courses for �ֲ���ý, Dauge-Roth drew on three consequential lessons from his graduate work. First, trauma causes what he calls a “fracture within the self,” a break between one’s pre- and post-trauma selves that must be negotiated.

Second, that negotiation is not just personal and internal, but social and cultural. Traumas such as AIDS or the Rwandan genocide become, or reflect, social preoccupations. So society dictates the terms of the discourse around them — often to the detriment of the traumatized, as in the bleak early years of the AIDS crisis, when sufferers were branded as “social parasites.”

“Third, I learned that testimonial literature forces on us a political discussion about the social representation of suffering and our civic role in its unfolding and aftermath,” Dauge-Roth said. Crucially, in the words of literature professor Antoine Compagnon, “what is at stake for us as readers is our willingness to be disturbed by, and ultimately transformed by, our encounter with another’s experience.”

In the audience at Alex Dauge-Roth’s Kroepsch Lecture were, from left, departmental colleague Kirk Read; Katherine Dauge-Roth, Alex’s wife; and their son, Aymeric Dauge-Roth. (Phyllis Graber-Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As Dauge-Roth said in describing the Short Term course in Rwanda, his hope was to create “a space of encounter that would allow survivors to bear witness, on their own terms, and challenge us, their interlocutors, to explore what it means to be a listening community; and what responses we must forge as their painful histories are passed on to us.”

So what does it take to be a listening community? Dauge-Roth offered three tenets (“I’m French — everything goes by threes,” he joked). First, it requires that we move past pity and compassion, “since these are just part of the strategy for maintaining the status quo.” Second, it means incorporating into our own histories the history of pain that we encounter.

Third, it means that listeners “see themselves as indirect witnesses, whose responsibility is to develop a critical self-awareness regarding their own agency and inadequacy as they respond to survivors’ stories. Learning with the survivors” — not merely from; a key distinction for Dauge-Roth — becomes an “ethical gesture” that makes possible reciprocal relationships between survivors’ histories and our own.

“These courses have taught me and my students,” he concluded, “that listening to testimonies bearing witness to the genocide questions both our willingness to confront disconcerting human behaviors and our sense of cultural hospitality — when hospitality is understood as a transformative interruption of one’s self.”

“Facing the disturbing experience of genocide demands that we identify what role we play, and ought to play differently, in the social recognition and circulation of the histories of pain that community partners share.”

View a video of Alex Dauge-Roth’s Kroepsch Lecture:

Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies Alexandre Dauge-Roth, recipient of the 2015 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, discusses “The Transformative Power of Literary and Testimonial Encounters” at 4:30 p.m. March 18, 2015.

Thomas Tracy: “Creation, Evolution and the Problem of Suffering.”

Video from this event is no longer available.

Phillips Professor of Religious Studies and Philosophy at �ֲ���ý, Thomas Tracy received the 2014 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Tracy is the college’s Phillips Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

Previewing his lecture, Tracy says that “something about our particular culture keeps this endless controversy between evolution and creation going.” The longrunning debate tends to focus on the age and origins of the earth, but Tracy intends to show that such a framework fails to address the fundamental issues at stake.

The lecture is offered as part of Tracy’s Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Senior Lecturer in Theater Kati Vecsey.

Katalin Vecsey, an expert in theatrical uses of voice and speech, offers a talk at �ֲ���ý titled “The Different Voices of Meryl Streep” at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 12, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, the Kroepsch Lecture is open to the public at no cost. Refreshment service starts at 4:15. For more information, please call 207-786-6066.

Senior lecturer in theater at �ֲ���ý, Vecsey received the 2012 �ֲ���ý award for excellence in teaching, the Kroepsch Award. �ֲ���ý students and recent graduates nominate faculty for the Kroepsch, and a committee of previous recipients selects the honoree.

Vecsey is expert in both the anatomy and the aesthetics of speech in performance. In addition to teaching courses exploring voice, speech and gender, she works with students in every �ֲ���ý theatrical production and also directs plays.

Streep, who has won three Academy Awards and been nominated for many more, is one of the best actors of our time. Her use of voice, including her facility with diverse accents, is often cited.

“I am going to use her to explain what I do as a voice coach,” says Vecsey, “and how important voice is in establishing a character.”

For instance, in last year’s biopic “The Iron Lady,” for which Streep won her third Academy Award, the actress even captured the before-and-after speaking styles of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who took elocution lessons early in her career to learn to speak with more authority.

For her Oscar-winning performance in 1982’s “Sophia’s Choice,” in which Streep portrays a Polish immigrant, she “spent three months learning the Polish language,” says Vecsey.

“She then rehearsed her Polish accent in English in order to capture the natural rhythms of speech. She spoke all day in her new accent, so much that her own child did not recognize her voice. She also picked up some German.

“It’s a tremendous amount of work.”

But a convincing voice, of course, is only one part of constructing a character, Vecsey says. “Streep works very hard to find the character and it really shows. She is one of those actors who can do anything because she has the empathy to become the character, but doesn’t judge the character.

“That’s something I try to teach my students: It doesn’t matter who you play, you cannot judge the characters you are portraying. You have to accept them and find something that you love about them — otherwise people will not believe you on stage.”

A native of Budapest, Hungary, Vecsey was that nation’s first voice and speech teacher to be trained at the Hungarian Academy of Drama and Film (now the University of Drama and Film), completing her training in 1991. She came to �ֲ���ý in 1996 and was promoted from lecturer to senior lecturer in 2011. Vecsey lives in Lewiston with her husband, John Painter, and their son, Kelen.

Praised by students for her creativity and clarity in conveying the complex technical and moral aspects of neuroscience, Assistant Professor of Psychology Nancy Koven is one of this year’s two recipients of the �ֲ���ý College award for superior teaching.

Koven, a clinical neuropsychologist who studies connections between brain regions and cognitive and emotional functions, shares the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching with Sonja Pieck, assistant professor of environmental studies.

Pieck is on sabbatical during the winter semester and spring Short Term in 2011. �ֲ���ý students and recent alumni nominate faculty for the Kroepsch award, and a committee of previous faculty Kroepsch recipients selects the honoree.

Koven researches the anatomical roots of such cognitive functions as working memory or self-evaluation, and affective functions like attention to one’s own emotions. Her particular focus is how these regions and processes are interrelated in people suffering from mental illness, such as bipolar disorder.

Koven, who joined the �ֲ���ý faculty in 2006, teaches courses in abnormal psychology, cognitive neuroscience and affective neuroscience, among others.

“In neuroscience we have great technology, and it takes about all of your attention span just to keep up with it,” she says. “But the field lags behind on the front of translating that into the real world and dealing with real people.

“A big challenge for me in teaching is to get students to realize that that gap exists, and to know that it’s a gap they need to bridge — and also to realize that sometimes knowing the answers is not always what it takes to make someone better. You need to take the facts and situate them in the individual’s context.”

As a teacher, “I encourage my students to take what they’ve just learned, repackage it and teach it to somebody else,” Koven says. “When I walk through Pettengill at the end of the day and hear students teaching each other — saying, ‘Wait, back up, you forgot something’ — that makes me smile. They’ll tell me, ‘I knew I really knew it when I had to teach it to somebody else.’ ”

Storytelling, too, is a favored technique for imparting dense and complex concepts. “The best teachers I ever had were great storytellers,” Koven says. “I learn best when I situate myself almost as a reader trying to learn a story. And then when I teach, even though it’s science, I try to teach it like a story.”

When Scott Sinisgalli of the class of 2010, now a health policy research assistant at Mathematica Policy Research in Cambridge, Mass., took Koven’s “Cognitive Neuroscience” course, Koven explained the effects of diseases like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s by framing certain brain regions as characters trying to get messages to other regions.

“At the end of the story, she showed why each symptom occurred in the context of the chain of messages,” Sinisgalli says. “Her approach focuses on the fundamentals of what’s happening at each step, and how they affect the end result.”

For her honors thesis, a rigorous yearlong research project, senior psychology major Rachel DiStefano of Randolph Center, Vt., is investigating underlying causes of a condition in which an individual can’t identify or describe emotions. Koven is her adviser in this research into the affliction, called alexithymia.

“Her passion for research has been contagious,” says DiStefano, “and has made me appreciate the importance of psychological research on a broader level.”

Typically for �ֲ���ý, the connections between Koven and her students endure past Commencement. Allison Earon pursued a master’s degree in public health after graduating, in 2009, and will graduate this spring from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory.

“Nancy’s role as my adviser has never stopped,” she says. “Now I’m applying to medical school and she just recently updated yet another letter for my application. My ongoing communication and friendship with Nancy continues to make me feel connected to �ֲ���ý.”

Koven believes that her teaching simply mirrors what she sees around her at �ֲ���ý. “It helps to have excellent colleagues. Everyone’s priority here is just to be the best teacher they can.”

James Hughes, Thomas Sowell Professor of Economics at �ֲ���ý College, has received the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Hughes has taught at �ֲ���ý since 1992. He teaches microeconomic theory and economics as it intersects with law, labor, health, the environment and gender. His areas of research include labor, health, and law and economics.

In connection with the award, Hughes gives a talk titled Wait a Minute — YOU Won the Teaching Award? at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 30, at the Edward S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. Sponsored by the Kroepsch Award Selection Committee, the college division chairs, Information and Library Services, and the dean of the faculty’s office, the event is open to the public at no charge.

“What just keeps me coming back to teaching is how much I learn through it,” Hughes says. “If there’s one big surprise that I’ve had in my career, it’s that, even though I might teach the same course over and over, not a semester goes by when I don’t find myself learning something new, learning how to explain something a little better, understanding what I’m teaching more deeply.”

“That’s what keeps it fresh and keeps it fun.”

Hughes, of Waterville, “is one of the brightest minds here,” says one of his students, senior economics major Daniela Jaeckel of White Plains, N.Y. “It’s not surprising that his classes are always hard to get into.”

“He has been the clearest professor I’ve had at �ֲ���ý,” adds junior Brendan O’Brien of Mont Vernon, N.H. “He creates examples of ideas that students can relate to in order to keep their interest during lectures. And he manages to be incredibly humorous while conveying important points.

“Hughes challenges students to actually understand the material rather than just robotically spit it back.”

“There are a lot of great things about teaching in a small college environment like �ֲ���ý,” says Hughes. “The best thing, I think, is that you’re teaching students who want to be there, who are highly motivated to learn, who have strong backgrounds in what you’re trying to teach.”

Hughes has conducted research on sex discrimination in labor markets in the U.S. and China. His research into fee-shifting on litigation outcomes culminated in an invitation to contribute an entry on the subject to The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law.

With his wife, Debra Barbezat, Mitchell Family Professor of Economics at Colby College, Hughes is researching the disappearance of African-American jockeys from thoroughbred racing at the turn of the 20th century.

“These jockeys were the most successful athletes in the most popular sport of the day in the late 19th century,” he says. “By 1905, African-Americans were all but gone from the sport. We want to identify these men, and learn how such a fully integrated sport was so rapidly and thoroughly segregated.”

“Teaching economics anywhere, you have to get across that this matters in people’s lives,” he says. “What I try to do with every concept, no matter how simple or obscure, is to try to make it clear that what we’re talking about comes up in the real world and that it makes a difference.

“It’s possible to use very simple economic tools to learn about very difficult problems, and if my students leave the classroom feeling that they can reflect on what’s going on in the world as an economist, even a little bit, then I think my teaching’s been quite successful.”

Hughes received his doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan in 1987, and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Boston University. Prior to coming to �ֲ���ý, Hughes was on the faculty at Amherst College and The State University of New York at Albany.

Hughes is a blues fan, and builds guitars as a hobby. “I wish that I played beautifully and made ugly guitars, but it turns out I play poorly and build beautiful guitars,” he says. “So now I spend most of my free time building guitars, and not as much time as I used to playing them.”

Each year �ֲ���ý students and recent alumni nominate Kroepsch Award recipients on the basis of their outstanding performance as teachers. Each year a committee of previous recipients selects the Kroepsch honoree from the list of nominees.

�ֲ���ý College faculty members William Ambrose, of Poland, and Rebecca Herzig, of Lewiston, have been named this year’s recipients of the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

�ֲ���ý students and recent alumni nominate Kroepsch Award recipients on the basis of their outstanding performance as teachers.

Ambrose is an associate professor of biology. Herzig is associate professor in the women and gender studies program.

Ambrose’s research interests include issues affecting food supplies for organisms living on the Arctic Ocean floor and, of particular interest to Maine residents, the environmental impacts of commercial harvesting of marine worms such as bloodworms.

“The wonderful thing about Dr. Ambrose is, he facilitates our problem-solving,” wrote one of his nominators. “He allows us to find our own answers and I believe this is where some of the most important learning takes place.”

Ambrose has an A.B. degree from Princeton and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He started at �ֲ���ý in 1994.

Herzig holds the only full-time faculty appointment in the Program in Women and Gender Studies at �ֲ���ý. She teaches a range of interdisciplinary courses on science, technology and medicine, as well as core courses in the WGS program.

She is currently completing two books: Suffering for Science: Will, Reason, and Sacrifice in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers University Press) and The Nature of Difference: Readings in the History of Science, Race, and Sex, co-edited with Evelynn Hammonds and Abigail Bass (MIT Press).

“I always left class amazed at the insightful conclusions we had reached as a group, and at the intellectual integrity of our discussions,” a former student of Herzig’s told the Kroepsch selection committee. “This kind of collective academic achievement was possible because Professor Herzig had motivated us to read, write and think at a very high level.”

Herzig earned her B.A. in American cultural and environmental studies in 1993 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998, the year she arrived at �ֲ���ý.

Kroepsch honorees are selected from the nominees by a committee of previous recipients. The annual award is funded by an endowment established in 1985 by the late Robert H. Kroepsch, a member of the �ֲ���ý class of 1933.