Anthony Fauci

Fauci recalls his visit to Maine 27 years ago — WMTW-TV

A Maine affiliate of ABC, television station WMTW covered a �ֲ���ý News story that recalled how, in 1993, Dr. Anthony Fauci received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from �ֲ���ý. Fauci, whose guidance through the coronavirus pandemic has caught national attention, received the �ֲ���ý honor for his work fighting a different virus: HIV.

Then as now, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was trying to use scientific principles to stop a virus that was devastating communities — the work was like being in a “pressure cooker,” he said in a �ֲ���ý News interview. 

The �ֲ���ý visit, in contrast, was “food for the soul,” Fauci said. Talking “with really smart and curious students reminded me of the great privilege of having a liberal arts education.” 

Read the story: 

• “,” WMTW-TV, May 7, 2020 

Francesco Duina

Free market ideology won’t help us during the COVID-19 crisis. Here’s what would — Los Angeles Times

In an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina argued that government action, not the free market or private industry, is providing the strongest leadership during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Duina pointed to the fact that large industries like airlines and small businesses alike are benefiting from emergency loans and tax cuts, while federal and state governments are coordinating public health responses. He said governments should partner with the private sector to respond to crises, and government offices themselves — like those handling unemployment claims — should expand their capacities. 

“We must all assume, even in good times, the fragility of markets,” Duina wrote. “This means that we must invest, ahead of time, in government structures, programs, and funding for challenges that will inevitably arise. And we must commit to them for the long term.” 

Read the story: 

• “,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2020

Myron Beasley and Imti Hassan ’23

PMA Magazine, Portland Museum of Art 

PMA Magazine, a publication of the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, asked Mainers to write about pieces in the museum’s collection that resonated with them. �ֲ���ý was prominent as the respondents included Associate Professor of American Studies Myron Beasley and Imti Hassan ’23 of Portland. 

Beasley introduced Daniel Minter’s Malaga, a series of works that explore the story of a Maine island that was home to an interracial community before the state evicted its residents in 1912. 

Beasley has himself looked hard at the Malaga story: In 2018, he created “re:past,” a packed with history and symbolism. 

“Malaga is not unique in that it is a story of injustice, racism, and forced dislocation peculiar to African Americans,” Beasley wrote. “The particularities of the Malaga story, however, reveal a distinctive horror which Minter acknowledges and addresses.” 

Hassan wrote about “Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp,” an 1895 oil painting by Frederic Edwin Church that shows Maine’s highest peak in the brilliance of sunrise. Hassan worked at the museum as a Homer Fellow, a summer program for Maine high school students. 

“Church’s art is a reminder that nature and humans are constantly evolving,” Hassan wrote. “This work of art reminds me to live life to the fullest and remember that time is always going forward.”

Read the reflections: 

• “,” PMA Magazine
• “,” PMA Magazine

Allison Beaulieu ’13

Teamwork comes full circle for doctor from Swampscott — The Daily Item 

Steve Krause of the Lynn, Mass., Daily Item profiled Allison Beaulieu ’13, a local basketball champion who went on to become an award-winning emergency physician on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. 

After graduating from �ֲ���ý and then New York Medical College, Beaulieu became an emergency room resident at the UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester. This year, she won the Massachusetts American College of Emergency Physicians Resident of the Year award.

What’s hard during the COVID-19 crisis, Beaulieu said, is that her patients “are all alone. There’s no family allowed back in to see them. So what you have is family members on the other end of the telephone, and that’s how you communicate. It’s not being able to have personal interactions.”

Read the story: 

• “,” The Daily Item, May 6, 2020 

Erica Long ’12

Cony High School graduate, now chaplain at Boston hospital, offers comfort, hope to coronavirus, COVID-19 patients, families — News Center Maine 

Erica Long ’12, a Maine native now working as a chaplain at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told the Portland affiliate of NBC how her work — offering comfort and love to patients, staff, and families — has changed and intensified during the COVID-19 crisis. 

Long, a �ֲ���ý English major who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, has had to learn to minister to the hospital community, often at a distance, during a time of intense fear and suffering. She’s guided coronavirus patients and their families over the phone and developed new rituals of offering “Zen Dens” to staff and celebrating patients who come off ventilators. 

“My training has prepared me to draw on my faith, my beliefs, especially my belief in the transformative power of love,” Long told reporter Beth Brogan. “Then I get to see that love, both in how families care for patients, how nurses and doctors and the entire team care for our patients, and in the way that patients learn to care for themselves and love themselves.”

Jack Sapoch ’18

Croatian police accused of spray-painting heads of asylum seekers — The Guardian 

Jack Sapoch ’18, who works with an organization that distributes non-food items like clothes to migrants and monitors violence at the border between Bosnia and Croatia, spoke with The Guardian about an uptick in mistreatment by Croatian police.  

Croatia is in the European Union while Bosnia is not, so many migrants try to seek asylum in Croatia, only to be (illegally) returned to Bosnia. Lately, Sapoch’s organization has reported that Croatian police are spray-painting migrants’ heads as well as robbing and otherwise trying to humiliate them.

“Hearing reports of increased brutality during pushbacks is worrying due to the increased autonomy that state authorities have gained during these times of the [coronavirus] pandemic,” said Sapoch, who studied abroad in Bosnia and Serbia as a �ֲ���ý student and returned to Bosnia after graduation to work on human rights issues. 

“Now, more than ever, it is important for us to keep these forces accountable for their own actions.” 

Read the story: 

• “,” The Guardian, May 12, 2020 

See also:

• “,” Newsweek, May 13, 2020

Tad Baker ’80

On This Day in Maine’s History — Maine Public 

Maine Public’s May 18  On This Day in Maine’s History segment featured Emerson “Tad” Baker, an archaeologist and historian at Salem State University who is known for his work on Colonial witchcraft and excavation of historic sites in New England. May 18 is his birthday. 

“A recognized specialist in the history of 17th-century Maine, Baker has been featured as an expert consultant on the PBS miniseries Colonial House,” presenter Gale Parmelee said. 

Listen to the segment: 

• “,” Maine Public, May 18, 2020 

Peter Steenstra 

Into the Wild — Rowing News 

Jen Whiting of Rowing News profiled Peter Steenstra, who in his 12 years as head rowing coach has led �ֲ���ý to the top of its division, with four NCAA championships in the past five years and 13 All-American rowers. 

Steenstra credited his success to his rowers and staff, as well as his ability to create an atmosphere in which the rowers can develop a successful culture. “It’s moving. It’s organic. And it changes every year.” 

He said, “What I’ve learned is that you have to give them as much as you can, so you can then stand aside, in the shadows. You have to give them the ownership so they can go as far as possible. From that ownership, they get control. The athletes themselves are in control of the program.”

Read the story: 

• “,” Rowing News, May 6, 2020 

�ֲ���ý professor tells story of Malaga Island, including its dark chapter of forced exodus — Portland Press Herald

The Portland Press Herald covered an unusual gathering on Malaga Island, off the coast of Maine, envisioned and organized by �ֲ���ý professor Myron Beasley.

The event to create a memorial to a dark chapter in Maine history: the forced eviction of an interracial community from Malaga in July 1912.

Beasley, a professor of American studies, invited 47 participants — one for each evicted Malaga resident — to the island for the “performative dinner in the form of memorial,” prepared from ingredients and recipes the Malaga residents might have used.

With stunning art direction by Michael Reidy, managing director of theater and dance, the public installation told the story of Malaga and its people, who were evicted by the state for reasons related to racism and eugenics.

During the performative dinner, each guest "was charged with calling out a name of a former islander as the dinner was served, standing in for the people of Malaga. It was a memorial and a celebration of not forgetting," wrote Portland Press Herald reporter Mary Pols. (Jop Blom)

Reidy based the cutout representations on archival photographs of the islanders. (Jop Blom)

Held on Malaga Island off the Maine coast on July 12, the performative dinner "re:past" was created by Myron Beasley, professor of African American and American cultural studies. (Jop Blom)

During a performative dinner, “the food becomes both the object and subject, to make known the cultural politics surrounding the object — in this case, the food,” says Myron Beasley professor of African American and American cultural studies. (Jop Blom)

Forty seven participants — one for each evicted Malaga resident — attended the performative dinner. (Jop Blom)

During the meal, each guest “was charged with calling out a name of a former islander as the dinner was served, standing in for the people of Malaga. It was a memorial and a celebration of not forgetting,” wrote reporter Mary Pols.

Reidy, whose production team included recent �ֲ���ý grad Saleha Belgaumi ’18 and others, created physical representations of the structures Malaga residents used and of the residents themselves.

The meal was the culmination of years of learning and preparation by Beasley, who first heard the story of this dark chapter in Maine’s history on the day he moved to the state.  “This is a moment that I could finally really do something with it,” Beasley tells Pols.

In producing the event, Beasley worked in cooperation with the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, the conservation group that owns the island.

Beasley’s performative meals have included one at nearby Nezinscot Farm, in 2014, and in 2008, in the �ֲ���ý Mill Complex, as a memorial to mill workers, in which students interviewed local citizens to gather stories, histories, and recipes to learn about hunger, poverty, and food insecurity in Androscoggin County.

The public installations are akin to performance art. Rather than the artist as focus, it is “the food [that] becomes both the object and subject,” Beasley explains, “to make known cultural politics.”

In New Hampshire, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist pulls into a long-forgotten station — The National

In an Amtrak’s onboard magazine, Elizabeth Strout ’77 recalls the wave of nostalgia as the train she was riding, the Downeaster, pulled into the station in Durham, N.H., her childhood home and where her father taught biology in Nesmith Hall at the University of New Hampshire, visible from the station.

That summer feeling of sitting on the lawn of Nesmith Hall is what assaulted me the most that first day I sat on the train, now so many years later, and saw it from this point of view. I had been so happy on that lawn! Turning cartwheels and lying in the grass, I had felt safe, waiting for my father to be done in his office, to call to me through the window, and then I would run inside and sit in his swivel chair and chatter to him while he strolled about gathering his things to take home. It was a happiness that I would not have remembered had I not seen it from the train.

Elizabeth Strout ’77 speaks during a Q&A with President Clayton Spencer at Reunion in 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

With comedy, movement, and music, ‘The Lectern’ explores all the rules that govern us — MaineToday

Bob Keyes of MaineToday “The Lectern: rule by rule by rule,” which was performed in July at the . The piece, created by Sara Juli and Claire Porter, “takes viewers on a funny spin around the rules and laws that govern our every existence and also what happens when we choose to bend them,” Keyes writes.

The piece took the form of a series of vignettes about rules surrounding “graduation ceremonies, eulogies and sporting events,” as well as “rules about tattoos, rules about fashion, rules about eating at the table.”

“Rules are everywhere,” Juli told Keyes. “Pay attention. Be careful. Some rules should not be negotiated, like stopping at red lights. And there are a whole bunch of rules coming our way that we need to take a look at. Claire and I both use comedy as a way to look underneath some things.”

Pediatrician’s legacy lives on at Mercy — Portland Press Herald

In an for the Portland Press Herald, Dr. Robert McAfee ’56 P’83 recalled one of his role models, a Portland pediatrician who kept an office at the bottom of Munjoy Hill from the early 1920s until his death in 1963.

Dr. Harry Davis showed deep dedication to the community by looking after its health, wrote McAfee, a vascular surgeon and former president of the American Medical Association.

“During the Depression, he spent his own money to ensure that every child in Portland was vaccinated, a practice he continued long after the economy rebounded. He served as the Portland city physician as well as the team doctor to many high school sports teams.”

McAfee wrote his essay as Portland’s Mercy Hospital, where Davis practiced, celebrates the centennial of its founding.

As president of the AMA, McAfee successfully led efforts to frame domestic violence as a medical issue. He received an honorary degree from �ֲ���ý in 1995.

What Can Lunar Eclipses Do For Science? — Sky & Telescope

Ahead of a July 27 lunar eclipse, Graham Jones of the magazine Sky & Telescope , the project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, about what we can learn from lunar eclipses.

Noah Petro ’01 represented NASA at a minor league baseball game that took place during the solar eclipse in August 2017. This July, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the spacecraft for which he is a project scientist, collected data during a lunar eclipse. (Photograph by W. Hrybyk / NASA)

The LRO has had a spacecraft orbiting the Moon for nearly nine years. During the eclipse but before it reaches totality, on-board instruments can measure temperatures, helping scientists “infer the properties of the regolith of the Moon — the surface of the Moon — based on how quickly or slowly it cools,” Petro said.

Why the Moon at all? “The Moon itself records the processes that have affected the entire solar system: impact craters, volcanism, tectonism, interactions with the space environment,” Petro said. “They’re all recorded on the lunar surface.”

Netflix options ‘Friday Night Lights’-like soccer story ‘One Goal’ — The Hollywood Reporter

During a visit to Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services in Lewiston in March, Amy Bass ’92 talks to Shobow Saban, a Lewiston High School graduate and key figure in her book, One Goal.  (Daryn Slover/Sun Journal)

Baxter State Park, home of Mount Katahdin, gets new director — Portland Press Herald

Large study finds colleges that go test-optional become more diverse and maintain academic quality — Inside Higher Ed

As dean of admissions from 1978 to 2000, Bill Hiss ’66 spearheaded the college’s test-optional policy. Since then, he’s tracked the policy’s effect at �ֲ���ý and nationally. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Working: Building a brand — Sun Journal

Researchers to study history and impact of increased rain in the Arctic — The Boston Globe

Professor of Geology Mike Retelle poses with Allie Balter ’14 and Greg de Wet ’11 at a field site in Svalbard, Norway, in 2013. (Courtesy of Greg de Wet)

At �ֲ���ý College, new focus on ‘Purposeful Work’ — WGBH-FM

In 2017, Gerald Nelson ’18 interned at Sports Illustrated Kids as part of the Purposeful Work Internship Program. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Why are poor people in America so patriotic? One man went on an odyssey to find out — Salon

Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina teaches a course in political sociology. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

Can tech save the humanities? — The Boston Globe

Joshua Macht ’91 talks about entrepreneurship with Shaina Lam ’17 of Portland, Maine, in 2014. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Art review: Prints with a purpose – and power — Maine Sunday Telegram

The quest to make super-cold quantum blobs in space — Wired

In 2014, Associate Professor of Physics Nathan Lundblad works with summer student researcher Ben Lovitz ’15 of Portland, Ore., in Lundblad’s ultra-cold atomic physics lab. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

A camp for Jewish connections — The Jewish Week

Implicit Bias: Understanding our own beliefs — Maine Public

Laura Ligouri, teaches “Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society” in May. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Diet may influence the spread of a deadly type of breast cancer, study finds — ScienceDaily

Any �ֲ���ý student will tell you that gathering together in one dining hall, enjoying food prepared in kitchens nearby, creates community.

Learning why food, place and hospitality are such a great recipe for communal experience was the topic for students in the Short Term course “Food, Culture and Performance.”

Each morning, the students gathered with their professor, Myron Beasley, to “learn the theory associated with food politics, community, and the issues of hunger.” They also studied Maine farming, the area’s history and sustainable practices.

In the afternoon, they trekked to nearby to work with farm co-owner Gloria Varney, their partner for the course.

At the organic farm, theory met practice as students learned just where their food, quite literally, gets born.

And on May 21, the course culminated with a “performative dinner,” created and served by students to 50-plus guests at the Turner farm. The meal featured food raised on the farm and prepared by the students, including meat from animals slaughtered earlier in the spring.

A student clears food from the tables during the outdoor performative dinner at Nezinscot Farm on May 21. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

A performative dinner, explains Beasley, an associate professor of American cultural studies and African American studies, is akin to performance art. With the latter, “the artist is both the subject and the object of the art-making.”

During a performative dinner, “the food becomes both the object and subject, to make known the cultural politics surrounding the object — in this case, the food.”

In its May 28 edition, The Portland Press Herald took note of the distinctive course offering, publishing a major feature under the headline “�ֲ���ý students dig in to understand farming.”

Below, 12 photographs by Sarah Crosby capture what Beasley calls the “integration of food and culture and community.”

5:58 p.m.: Gather ye Bobcats

Sporting yellow “Team Nezinscot” T-shirts, Penelope Ganske ’17 of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Harrison Brown ’17 of Mount Kisco, N.Y., offer guests a tour of Nezinscot Farm before the evening’s meal.

On the quilt and T-shirts, the phrase “A Place to Gather” is the students’ interpretation of “Nezinscot,” an Abenaki word meaning “to descend upon.”

6:04 p.m.: Garden party

During a pre-dinner tour, guests walk through the farm’s herb garden, dubbed the “Medicine Garden.” Students encourage the guests to find and pick an herb that “calls to you.” Tibetan prayer flags wave in the breeze.

6:12 p.m.: Bee my honey

Wearing bee suits, Kelsey Mehegan ’15 of Duxbury, Mass., left, and Krista Prouty ’15 of Norwell, Mass., offer fresh, raw honey samples to guests.

6:26 p.m.: Cultivating the liberal arts

Ron Begin of Lewiston samples chèvre (goat cheese), kale and cilantro pesto, and chive butter. All of the food was prepared by students.

“From the natural sciences to the humanities to the social sciences, everything is right there on a farm,” Beasley says. “When I think of the liberal arts, it is about integration and interdisciplinarity, and we can see all of that functioning on the farm.”

6:40 p.m.: Farm to table

A platter of meat — roasted lamb and smoked turkey — from animals raised on the farm. “We looked at what we wanted to eat, what we had available to us as far as resources, and designed a meal around that,” says Gloria Varney. “This meal was the culmination of five weeks of experiential learning.”

6:51 p.m.: What’s on the menu

Associate Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies Lisa Maurizio passes sourdough bread down the table.

The meal featured roasted lamb, smoked turkey, scotch eggs made with maple turkey sausage, green salad with shaved aged chèvre and maple-glazed carrots. Guests drank shrub vinegars (a sweetened, flavored vinegar drink) and dandelion wine. Dessert was pets de sœurs (a pastry cake) with blueberry compote, served with fresh whipped cream.

6:55 p.m.: Dining director

Myron Beasley directs students as they serve food. Beasley has presented the course twice before, telling the Press Herald that exploring ideas about food “is a way of unraveling a lot of social and political issues.”

7:01 p.m.: Successful recipe

Gloria Varney and Myron Beasley listen to student stories during the meal. “The ultimate goal for the course,” he says, was to “integrate this notion of food and culture and community.”

7:04 p.m.: Mealtime story

Christina Felonis ’17 of Athens, Greece, rises to tell the guests about meals in her Greek family. The class built on the concept of hospitality, and both students and guests told stories to enrich the communal vibe.

7:12 p.m.: Wine and dine

A guest reaches for the dandelion wine, made from springtime dandelions on the farm.

“For students to have access to this place and to learn from it is profound because not many people will ever have this kind of experience,” Beasley says.

7:30 p.m.: ‘Go to it!’

Students serve food and clear dishes.

During the weeks leading up to the meal, Varney taught the students what they needed to know to prepare and serve a meal. That day, she told them, “OK, we’ve gotten here. Go to it!” And, she says, “They just came through.”

7:40 p.m.: When day turns to dining

The students hand-made the dinner decorations, including these felt orbs. “It’s a beautiful day and a feast on a farm,” said dinner guest Jeff Gould of Portland.

Myron Beasley (right), visiting assistant professor of American cultural studies and African American studies, consults with Rob Munro ’08 and Lilian Rossow-Greenberg ’09 prior to a “performative meal” presented in the �ֲ���ý Mill. Held in conjunction with , the event culminated Beasley’s Short Term seminar, “Food, Culture, and Performance.” Examining cultural engagement through food (here, a squash-crab bisque served in a soup-kitchen setting) students prepared for the event by interviewing local citizens to gather stories, histories, and recipes.

Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

The Harward Center for Community Partnerships has awarded three Publicly Engaged Academic Project grants to �ֲ���ý faculty members, the first of two rounds of awards for 2007-08. These “PEAP” grants are designed to offer faculty and staff significant support for publicly engaged teaching, research, cultural and other community projects. In the current round, three faculty-led projects received grants totaling $11,223.

“The diversity of the projects funded by these grants underscores the creativity with which �ֲ���ý faculty link public engagement to their teaching, research and artistic work,” noted David Scobey, director of the Harward Center. “These grants fund work in dance, cultural studies and environmental research. The range of publicly engaged academic work represented in these grants is impressive.”

The three PEAP recipients and their proposals are:

• Myron Beasley, visiting assistant professor of American cultural studies and African American studies, for “What Androscoggin County Eats,” a Short Term course that will investigate local foodways across different cultural communities and stage a “performative meal” at the �ֲ���ý Mill in partnership with Museum L-A;

• Carol Dilley, assistant professor of dance, for “FAB: Franco-American �ֲ���ý Dance Showcase,” a regional dance showcase co-produced by the �ֲ���ý dance program and the Franco-American Heritage Center, including �ֲ���ý student dancers and leading Maine choreographers and presenters;

• Mike Retelle, professor of geology, for “An Environmental Archive of Seawall Beach,” which will pair �ֲ���ý students and Midcoast conservation advocates to monitor and research the historical effects of climate and tidal changes on beach, dune and salt marsh ecosystems at the beach near �ֲ���ý-Morse Mountain Conservation Area.

“It’s exciting that these projects not only connect faculty with community partners, but also involve �ֲ���ý students in important public work,” Scobey said. “I’m proud that the PEAP grants can support such innovative parts of the �ֲ���ý education.”

The Harward Center has offered the second round of PEAP grants for this year. New proposals are due on April 18. For more information, please visit the Harward Center website, or contact David Scobey.