Four �ֲ���ý seniors are hoping to get the chance to spend the next year seeking answers to some big questions. Finalists for the Watson Fellowship, these students are exploring differing approaches to work across cultures, persistent traditions amid changing political boundaries, how meaning can be made from movement, and community-driven approaches to power grids.

The Watson Fellowship offers college graduates support to travel for a full year exploring a complex topic. Fellows receive $40,000 along with health insurance and a year’s worth of student loan payments (if needed). In exchange, they must remain outside of the United States for a full year, beginning in the August following their college graduation.

“This is some version of heaven,” said Robert Strong, director of national fellowships. “The Watson allows �ֲ���ýies to spend a year traveling the earth constrained only by the limits of their curiosities, which Watson believes should be limitless.” �ֲ���ý is one of 41 colleges and universities that can nominate students. Each institution is allowed to nominate up to four students from within their own highly competitive pool. The last time �ֲ���ý students were awarded a Watson was in 2023, when two �ֲ���ý seniors, and , received the prestigious fellowships.

This year �ֲ���ý has four nominees: Poppy Marsh ’26 of San Francisco, Calif., John Harun-DeLong ’26 of Fairbanks, Alaska; Brett Karpf ’26 of Ridgewood, N.J., and Linh Hoang ’26 of Hanoi, Vietnam. And if awarded, their travels could span 19 countries — from Nepal to Norway to New Zealand.

We caught up with these four finalists, to learn more about what they hope to accomplish if they receive a Watson. Poppy Marsh, a double major in English and politics, has proposed a project to explore identity and community among those impacted by political borders in five countries. Marsh was an Otis Fellow in 2024 and spent eight weeks in the Italian Dolomites, hiking and talking to people about climate change and environmental degradation. Marsh sees the Watson as “the grandparent of the Otis,” with a longer time frame, larger scope, and increased independence on the part of the fellow. For the Watson, she explains, “I’m curious about individual and communal conceptions of identity as it relates to the invention of the modern state through, around, and between communities whose presence on this land predates the state’s modern borders. So my project is thinking about this through distinct methods of cultural, linguistic, and social preservations of these communal identities as they relate to the land that they’ve remained on.”

Marsh’s interdisciplinarity shows up in her work at �ֲ���ý. Her politics thesis, which is “a comparative study of the refugee accommodation regimes in Greece and Kenya,” focuses on policy differences in shifting communities. Her year-long poetry thesis allows another way to explore questions of place. “For that, I’m interested in ideas of homeland, ideas of what it means to come from a place and no longer be with it or what it means to come from a place and remain with it.” 

Marsh’s idea for the Watson builds on questions of belonging, but never aims to find answers or offer solutions. “I’m not really after a specific political or social definition. I’m not interested in proving a rightful belonging to land or affirming a rightful belonging to land. That’s so far from my place. What I want is structured around open-ended curiosity. I want it to be stretchy. I want it to be bent and folded and contradicted. I want it to be able to hold water and leak as well, depending on where I am.” 

Marsh credits her first-year seminar professor and advisor, Senem Aslan, professor of politics, for her growing enthusiasm and curiosity about these questions. Aslan has been Marsh’s advisor all four years and has encouraged Marsh to move toward these goals. 

John Harun-DeLong ’26 of Fairbanks, Alaska, could have selected any number of big questions to follow for his proposed year abroad. He is a cellist, on the debate team, and majoring in biochemistry with minors in philosophy and Hispanic Studies. But within those varied interests is a throughline:  “Climate change is what really drives me. I need to think of it. For me, my life isn’t just my own body. It’s like my entire community of Alaska and my hometown. And so the destruction of that is fundamental. Everything that shaped you, if those are being destroyed, that’s the most complete destruction of the self that can exist, really.”

Though he aims to work toward a MD/PhD in the future, Harun-DeLong first wants to spend time understanding, and comparing, power grids around the world to work toward more sustainable and safer solutions for the U.S.. 

His plan is to travel to countries with a decentralized power grid or microgrids that are more resilient than the aging – and vulnerable – grid in the U.S. It isn’t only the science that interests Harun-DeLong. These microgrids also “allow [citizens] to have truly democratic control over the grid because the people in the village are supposed to maintain and decide what the best grid policy is.” 

There’s a precedent for Harun-DeLong to figure it out as he goes, and find opportunities along the way. Last summer, when Harun-DeLong knew that he wanted to work with some of the top cancer researchers in the world, he cold-called them. He showed up in Spain and ended up working as a research assistant for Maria Blasco, director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center. 

Linh Hoang ’26 of Hanoi, Vietnam was traveling in Svalbard, Norway, when she met a stranger who changed her life. In a shared kitchen, over instant ramen, Hoang struck up a conversation with a man who explained his own big questions. He had spent the past two decades in constant motion, always striving through work to reach the next rung on the ladder. He suddenly stopped and asked himself: “What do I actually want?” That reflection struck Hoang as she was busy working toward her own future. Why wait for a mid-life break to ask this question? Talking to friends across the globe who are building lives in a time of uncertainty, Hoang believes that it is worth pausing to notice how various cultures respond to and help shape relationships to work. 

Hoang’s Watson project emphasizes existential questions and places her generation in a broader context of work culture. “From my Watson, I will learn how people across cultures navigate the same tensions I’ve felt: between ambition and meaning, belonging and freedom, expectation and reality. I will return with a deeper understanding of how systems and emotions intertwine, and with the humility to know that both matter.” 

Those who know Hoang as a double major in math and economics might be surprised that she is focusing on philosophical questions. Hoang’s understanding of economics will certainly impact the questions that she asks, but she really is interested in a more personal approach in her travels. Hoang’s proposal lays out a plan to visit nine countries in the coming year. 

Hoang is already making plans to pursue graduate work that bridges math and finance. She isn’t on the fence about her next steps, and she does not see the Watson as “opting out.” Instead, she is remembering the stranger in Norway reflecting on his life and his choices. And in framing these questions comparatively in cultures both known for their high-pressure or their laid-back approaches to work, Hoang is certain to move toward her next phase with more understanding. “What I’ve found,” Hoang says, ”is that when I talk to more people, I learn more about myself.“ 

Brett Karpf ’26 of Ridgewood, N.J. spends a lot of time walking. Whether covering hundreds of miles along trails in Italy on his Otis Fellowship, wandering through urban Morocco during study abroad or simply moving from place to place in Maine, walking gives meaning to his life. As he has grown and reflected more on the role of motion in his own life, he has begun asking more questions about walking and movement, such as “Why is it that moving, walking especially, can enable us to gain a better sense of faith or understanding or contentedness?” 

An English major, Karpf is deeply engaged in analyzing words; his two-semester thesis project explores sublimity in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! But Karpf has also served as an assistant to �ֲ���ý horticulturalist Jeremy Lavertu and worked as a gardener for Sanford Freedman, associate professor of English. His proposal for the Watson allows him to combine his love of the natural world with his analytical skills as he works to understand what happens for people who spend time walking outside. 

Though Karpf’s experiences walking have been selective and intentional, he is drawn to nomadic cultures whose very existence is tied to movement. “I’m looking for similarities and oppositions between different groups. You can find so much cultural similarity between places that are thousands of miles apart, if not tens of thousands of miles apart, and who are using motion to sort of reach similar ends.”

Karpf will explore people who walk for various reasons, including religious pilgrims. He hopes to learn “by interacting with people who are walking as a means of religious observance or as a way to become closer with what they deem to be divine.” The project will also explore “cultures where motion and movement are prioritized — herders, semi-nomadic peoples, including people that used to be nomadic and no longer are,” in order to understand the drive to hold to traditions that are increasingly threatened.

Karpf hopes to find meaningful answers — and at minimum, answers that help him understand himself more. “I am seeking how others experience purpose and understanding when it feels deeply entangled with movement: Can their experience help me understand my own?”

Devanshi Trivedi ’22 of Rajkot, India, has wanted to study the brain ever since third grade, when a friend told her that our eyes see the world upside down, but our brains flip everything right side up. 

Trivedi never lost sight of her interest in learning how the brain works. At �ֲ���ý, she deepened that interest, delving into studies that seek to understand “what makes us who we are,” earning a major in neuroscience and a minor in philosophy.

Trivedi recalls taking her first neuroscience course and thinking, “I have a favorite professor at �ֲ���ý.” Then she took another neuroscience course — and discovered another new favorite professor. It happened enough, she laughs, that her friends would say, “Not again!”

“Every professor in neuroscience has just approached the work in so many different ways,” she says. “That’s been one of the best parts of my experience.”

Trivedi got to know her senior thesis adviser, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene, as a summer research assistant in Greene’s lab after her first year. Being advised by Greene for her thesis is a nice bookend to her �ֲ���ý career. “Hers was the first lab I ever worked in.”

As Trivedi moved from first year to senior year, she went from being a learner of neuroscience knowledge and research methods to a more active collaborator with Greene through her thesis research.

“I started to have a say in the design elements of my experiments,” she says. “We think together about how we want to analyze the results or what kinds of further work we could do.”

Her neuroscience thesis explores the capacity limits of visual memory, and the curious psychological phenomena of “boundary extension” and “boundary contraction.” The former describes how, after we observe an image and then recall it from memory, we tend to zoom out, recalling details that weren’t actually in the image.

Boundary contraction is where our memories crop an image, recalling fewer details as we remember it. It’s a more recently studied phenomenon. “We believe it is related to the amount of information within an image,” Trivedi says. “Our visual memory may be capacity-limited by the amount of information in images.”

While Trevedi arrived at �ֲ���ý with a keen interest in studying the science of the brain, only later did she discover an interest in an humanistic approach, through her minor, philosophy.

“I’ve always loved thinking about the mind and the brain and how those two sort of coexist,” she says. “How does the brain really create a person? That was something that I’ve been able to explore more through the philosophy side of things: How can an organ — that is just matter — create something that is conscious or that is human?”

Whether it’s neuroscience and philosophy, or any other juxtaposition of academic interests, the effect is to “broaden the scope of whatever you thought your field was. And that just gives you so much perspective.”

At a small liberal arts institution like �ֲ���ý, says biochemist Lori Banks, “you get to interact with students differently than you would at a larger kind of school. There’s a different kind of connection, a different vested interest in the success of the students.”

That connection “seemed to be especially strong here,” a factor that attracted the new assistant professor of biology to �ֲ���ý.

The same is true of philosopher Paul Schofield. At a different kind of school, he says, there might not be the same opportunities to get to know students. “But because of the size of �ֲ���ý and the kinds of things that the students are looking for, you’re able to build intellectual community.”

Assistant professors Banks and Schofield are among the faculty appointed to tenure-track positions this year. Others are Stephanie Pridgeon, in Spanish; Ian Khara Ellasante, gender and sexuality studies; and Asha Tamirisa, music. Those five have found that their values, interests, and goals as teacher-scholars are reflected in the �ֲ���ý community.

Tamirisa was drawn to �ֲ���ý’ aspirations and initiatives toward equity and inclusion. “�ֲ���ý seemed to be a step ahead of a lot of other institutions in terms of not thinking the remedy would simply be changing the demographics, but also changing the way the college itself works. �ֲ���ý is willing to say, ‘This is what we could be doing better,’ and then take action.”

Ellasante agrees. In particular, the gender and sexuality studies mission statement spoke to them — “its commitments to anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and trans work and histories,” they say, “and its focus on action and practice and reciprocal engagement.”

For Pridgeon, who like Schofield has been at �ֲ���ý for a few years as a visiting professor, an enduring appeal of �ֲ���ý is the campus community’s commitment to take on — and see through — the tough and complex kinds of discussion without which, often, nothing really meaningful gets done.

“We’re thinking about difficult, sometimes uncomfortable, problems and challenges on topics that I want to be challenged on, that I want to be forced to reckon with,” she says. “We’re having conversations I want to be having.”

That determination to challenge our understanding of the world while attending to community life is central to the value of the �ֲ���ý education, says Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

“Our latest tenure-track appointees bring expertise and a creative spirit to our talented academic community. We look forward to benefiting from their contributions in the years to come.”

Let’s meet Banks, Ellasante, Pridgeon, Schofield, and Tamirisa.

Lori Banks, Assistant Professor of Biology

An early inspiration for professor Lori Banks was the “Magic School Bus” television series. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

Name: Lori Banks

Position: Assistant Professor of Biology

Degrees from: Baylor College of Medicine, Ph.D., Molecular Virology and Microbiology; Prairie View A&M University, B.S., Biology

Before �ֲ���ý: Postdoctoral researcher in molecular virology and microbiology, Baylor College of Medicine

Her work: A protein biochemist engaged in preclinical drug development, Banks studies ways that microbial pathogens sense their host environments. She has studied gene expression in the anthrax bacterium and is currently exploring approaches to more effectively treat rotavirus.

Tell us more: “A horrible downstream effect of rotavirus, especially in small kids, is that repeat infections can be associated with cognitive delays,” Banks explains.

A rotavirus vaccine exists, “but in the parts of the world where it’s most endemic, the vaccine doesn’t work very well. So we have to attack the public health problem from a different perspective, that of treating people once they’re infected.” Banks calls her search for an off-switch for the virus “very low-tech” — but notes that it could eventually “inform drug discovery work that affects millions.”

A sense of purpose: Banks was headed to an anatomy class at Prairie View when she saw a newscast of the second World Trade Center tower going down. The Sept. 11 attacks and subsequent anthrax mailings galvanized her interest in biology research. It was a feeling she likens to the call that her grandparents’ generation felt to mobilize for World War II. “I remember thinking that I had this skill set or gift for thinking about biological and chemical questions,” she says. “For me it was just like, ‘We’re the people that are going to be out there saving lives, designing medicine.’”

Sample lesson: “One of my favorite things to discuss with students is being aware of what your own personality is telling you, what skill sets you’re developing, what things you’re drawn to — and how you might be able to best serve the world, the community, your school, whatever, just by being you.”

Ian Khara Ellasante, Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies

Ian Khara Ellasante, new to the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, is a poet as well as a scholar and teacher. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

Name: Ian Khara Ellasante

Position: Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies

Degrees from: University of Arizona, Ph.D. and M.A., American Indian Studies; University of Memphis, B.A., Sociology and English.

Before �ֲ���ý: Visiting scholar in residence, Washington & Jefferson College

Their work: “There are global similarities in the ways that indigenousness, embodied blackness, and marginalized gender identities are targeted and defined,” says Ellasante, a cultural studies scholar. “I am trans, nonbinary, queer, and a person of color. I work to translate the lived experiences at that type of nexus into scholarship that is broadly and compellingly legible.”

Ellasante’s recent work has involved the “peoplehood matrix,” a theoretical construct developed by Indigenous scholars. In this concept, an Indigenous people’s relationship to four elements — land, language, ceremonial cycle, and sacred history — can help delineate their cultural identity. “I argue that when a people align around these four elements, they’re able to persist despite settler colonialism and enforced assimilation.”

Finding their path: Ellasante is a longtime advocate for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults, focusing on housing instability and bullying in schools. As a researcher at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Institute for Research on Women, “I got a lot of experience in community-based participatory research.

“In that work, I saw a pathway: I could merge being an advocate, working within communities, with being a researcher and scholar. I have pursued it, and �ֲ���ý feels like a good place for me to continue that path,” thanks to the robust community-engaged programming of the college’s Harward Center.

A sample lesson: “Early in the semester, I like to have students simultaneously write brief definitions of gender on the board. Then we can see that even in a small classroom, there can be many definitions of gender. Students can better understand its nuances, and the idea that gender is a social construct becomes very clear.”

Stephanie Pridgeon, Assistant Professor of Spanish

Stories are central to the work of Spanish professor Stephanie Pridgeon. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

Name: Stephanie Pridgeon

Position: Assistant Professor of Spanish

Degrees from: Emory University, Ph.D., Spanish; University of Virginia, M.A., Spanish Language and Literature; College of Charleston, Honors College, B.A., Hispanic Studies and Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Before �ֲ���ý: Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, The Catholic University of America. Pridgeon joined �ֲ���ý as a visiting professor in 2016.

Her work: Pridgeon studies intersections of ethnicity, gender, religion, and politics as depicted in Latin American film and literature. She’s drawn to characters “who don’t do what they’d necessarily be expected to do based on a category with which they identify,” she says.

For instance, in Revolting Jews on Screen, a book manuscript under publisher review, she uses a variety of films to explore the contradictory effects of Jewish political involvement in Latin America. “I became fascinated with all these retrospective stories about how fraught it was to identify simultaneously as Jewish and revolutionary.”

Why teach? “I love hearing other people’s stories,” says Pridgeon, “and I love sharing stories with students and giving them an appreciation for the stories about, effectively, what it means to be human — the messiness of it, the nuances, and the challenges of everyday life.”

Pridgeon values interactions with students that spark different directions for a course. Ditto for current events that change her teaching: for instance, the #MeToo movement gave her a new perspective on Argentinian novelist Claudia Piñeiro’s Tuya, about a woman who finds out her husband is cheating on her. “Those moments where our students can see that I’m learning with them and thinking about things in new ways with them are really productive.”

Why the liberal arts? For Pridgeon, “the core of a liberal arts education has to do with understanding what it means to be human in a variety of cases and contexts. I’m teaching the ability to gain knowledge and critical language skills in order to relate to somebody else’s story, to relate to something that’s a part of human experience.”

Paul Schofield, Assistant Professor of Philosophy

A teaching objective of Paul Schofield is introducing students to overlooked philosophical works by women. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

Name: Paul Schofield

Position: Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Degrees from: Harvard University, Ph.D., Philosophy; University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, M.A., Philosophy; University of Notre Dame, B.A., Liberal Studies

Before �ֲ���ý: After completing doctoral studies, Schofield came to �ֲ���ý in 2013 as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and has since served as a lecturer and visiting assistant professor.

His work: Two themes stand out among Schofield’s research. One, he says, is the question of “whether you can owe moral duties to yourself.” He explains that where contemporary moral philosophy tends to examine our interactions with others, “I argue that the relationship that you have to yourself is morally inflected — that you owe certain actions or behaviors to your own self.” His book on the topic is scheduled for publication in 2020 from Oxford University Press.

Schofield also studies philosophy and film, focusing on the medium’s strengths and weaknesses as a form of philosophical text. For example, he has written about the ballet film The Red Shoes as a distinctively deep representation of agency over one’s movement of one’s body.

Why teach? “I’ve always been intellectually curious,” says Schofield, who was reading philosophy and competing in debate in his teens. “I’ve always liked sharing that with others. Even when I did high school debate as a junior or a senior, I liked to teach the first-years what I knew, which was a lot less back then.”

The liberal arts: “There are philosophers interested in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and psychology, political philosophy, aesthetics and the arts.” And because such philosophers are “attempting to answer the fundamental questions about other disciplines,” Schofield situates philosophy at the very center of the liberal arts education.

�ֲ���ý students: “They’re willing to challenge themselves to take on difficult projects, to be told that there’s more work to do. I find the �ֲ���ý students to be the most intellectually curious group of young people I’ve ever been around.”

Asha Tamirisa, Assistant Professor of Music

Asha Tamirisa has taught sound and video production to middle- and high-school students. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

Name: Asha Tamirisa

Position: Assistant Professor of Music

Degrees from: Brown University: Ph.D., Computer Music and Multimedia; M.A., Modern Culture and Media; M.A., Computer Music and Multimedia; Oberlin College, B.A., Musical Studies

Before �ֲ���ý: While doing her postgraduate work, Tamirisa taught courses on multimedia art and electronic music at Brown and in community workshops in Rhode Island.

Her work: Harnessing a variety of technologies in performance and installations, Tamirisa describes herself as a sound and media artist. “The research that I do really informs the creative work that I make,” she says.

“I’m interested in fields like feminist science and technology studies and media archeology, which look critically at the stories behind our machines and can inform technological use and design.” For instance, motivated by the interrelated histories of textiles and digital technologies, Tamirisa is currently working on converting a small loom into an interface for audiovisual performance.

Tell us more: “I see teaching as an opportunity to rethink epistemologies of technology, music, and sound,” Tamirisa says. “How do gender and race fit into the histories of the technologies that we’re dealing with now? How does that shift our engagement or our understanding with them now?

“Understanding how gender and race have been imbricated in the histories and practices of these fields have shifted my engagement with these fields as an instructor as much as they have as a practitioner.”

Sample lesson: In the music theory course that she’s teaching this semester, Tamirisa’s students will select a piece of music and, throughout the semester, “apply the techniques that we’re learning in class to that piece. This is a way for me to get to know the students and their musical tastes and to demonstrate how the course material connects to music across genres and styles.”

She says, “I love the push and pull of starting a class with an idea of where it’s going to go, and then hearing from the students about where they want to go and where that takes us collectively.”

A striking black-and-white photographic portrait of Associate Professor of Philosophy Susan Stark’s great-grandmother Flora Perrotta occupies a place of honor in her Hedge Hall office.

Stark takes great pride in her ancestor, who in 1905 was a 16-year-old motherless girl when she emigrated from near Naples, Italy, to join her father and siblings in New York City, where the teenager worked as a skilled seamstress to help support her family.

Stark considers herself lucky to be Flora’s great-granddaughter, but not in the way you might think of “lucky.”

Susan Stark takes great pride in her great-grandmother. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Stark works in moral psychology and social philosophy. This semester she’s teaching a course on “moral luck,” the idea that individuals are morally good by virtue of the lucky or unlucky things that have happened to them.

“Our identity is largely a matter of luck: who our parents are, what time period we live in, which country, what our race or gender is, what our sexual identity or sexual orientation are,” she says.

Many of these factors are not really determined by us but rather by our genes. True, environment plays a part, at times, in some aspects of our identity. “But we don’t get to pick the culture that we live in and how it regards our gender or race. A lot of it is not up to us.”

And simple luck plays a part in Stark’s very existence, she says. In her early 20s, Flora had a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which infamously burned to the ground on March 25, 1911. One hundred forty-six garment workers — mostly recent Italian and Jewish female immigrants — died from fire, smoke inhalation, and jumping to their deaths in one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history.

For some unknown reason, Stark’s great-grandmother stayed home from work that day, perhaps escaping death. “Luck not only affects these fine-grained aspects of our lives but my very own existence, the existence of my whole family. I’ve often thought about how, if she had gone to work that day, my grandmother wouldn’t have been born, my mother wouldn’t have been born, and I wouldn’t have been born.”

The shelves in Stark’s Roger Williams office feature family photographs and artwork by her children. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Stark’s great-grandmother lived to be 100, and Stark got to know her as she grew up. She notes that Flora married and raised children during a time when Italian immigrants encountered significant discrimination in the United States. “It’s interesting to think about the challenges they faced,” she says. Her great-grandmother passed her immigrant’s fortitude to Stark’s grandmother, today a progressive 100-year-old, who raised Stark’s mother to be a strong woman. “And my mother raised me to be a strong woman,” says Stark. She keeps pictures of all of them on her office shelf display.

Stark believes that it can be really uncomfortable for people to acknowledge the contingency and uncertainty in their lives. “But,” she says, “I think our lives are much more contingent than we are typically willing to admit.”

When philosophy major Emilio Valadez ’18 of San Antonio, Texas, eats lunch at Commons, he likes to start out on a window ledge and “consider the constellation of humans” spread out before him.

“And what I really enjoy about being here,” he says, “is that anyone you sit with, you’re going to learn something from eating with them.”

Whether the conversation touches on happiness, anxiety, the profound, or the mundane, “you learn so much about yourself and who you want to be. And I love it.”

Lauren Ashwell is an associate professor of philosophy at �ֲ���ý. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

When Lauren Ashwell, associate professor of philosophy, uses the word “disposition,” she often means:

“An object’s potential, in a metaphysical sense. For example, a glass vase may have a disposition to break under stress, and in some sense, this is about what would happen in certain potential circumstances.

“This raises a puzzle about how we can ascribe a quality to the vase while seeming to say nothing about the way the world actually is; the glass might never be stressed, and never break.

“Thinking about dispositions might help us to understand a whole host of different phenomena, such as laws of nature, metaphysical chance, mental states — and perhaps even what it is to have freewill.”

Lauren Ashwell, who chairs the Program in Digital and Computational Studies, is one of 21 scholars to receive a for 2016-17.

The series “What I Mean When I Say” explains terms and phrases used by �ֲ���ý professors in their teaching and research.

“A teacher is always trying to start something,” says Thomas Tracy.

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

Tracy, the college’s Phillips Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, doesn’t mean a fight necessarily, but rather the philosophical sense of argument that involves an exchange of views backed up by reasons.

He describes himself as an agent provocateur in the classroom.

When Tracy does “start something,” he does it with humor and respect for how difficult it can be for students to analyze religious texts.

“They find themselves challenged in fairly deep ways,” he says. “I try to encourage students to recognize that their relationships to their own faith traditions can be deepened and enriched through this process of reflection.”

NOTE TO READERS: Thomas Tracy’s Kroepsch Lecture, Creation, Evolution and The Problem of Suffering, takes place at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, April 2, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Tracy’s deft skill at this task has been acknowledged with the college’s 2014 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, established in 1985 by a gift from Robert Kroepsch ’33. Nominated by students and alumni, recipients are selected by a committee of previous years’ winners.

Tracy will give his Kroepsch Lecture on the public debate between the Christian teachings of creationism and the scientific theory of evolution.

The lecture, Creation, Evolution and The Problem of Suffering, takes place at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, April 2, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. For more information, please call 207-786-6066.

His lecture reflects the idea that “something about our particular culture keeps this endless controversy between evolution and creation going,” says Tracy, who studies the relationship between religion and science. This 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.

John Smedley, professor of physics, teams with Tracy to teach “Caring for Creation,” an interdisciplinary course that looks at both science and religious thought to understand how people conceptualize the natural world and the origins of our universe.

For their students, they model the idea that it’s OK not to know something.

“Something could come up that Tom brings in from his expertise that I don’t really know about, and then we can have a conversation about it,” says Smedley.

“That’s the thing that we demonstrate for students — conversations about interesting ideas and topics from different perspectives. Not being afraid to just say, ‘Wow, I didn’t think of that before.’”

It’s the intrinsic value of what we do that makes for a richer and more interesting life.

Alex Hamilton ’14 of Truckee, Calif., conducted an independent study on environmental ethics with Tracy.

“He asks his students big questions, and he encourages them to respond with bigger ones,” Hamilton says.

While the obvious results of studying philosophy are improved skills in critical thinking and communication, “it’s the intrinsic value of what we do,” says Tracy, “that makes for a richer and more interesting life.”

The classroom, says Tom Tracy, is where students’ worlds get “bigger, richer, more complex, more interesting.”

The philosophy classroom, he says, “complicates the world and allows you to live a life that is in conversation with a more diverse range of human beings, across intellectual and cultural differences — and also in time, across historical differences.”

Olivia Boueri ’16, an environmental studies major from Dubai, took Tracy’s course on the history of Christian Thought last semester.

“He taught me how to make course material relevant to my life — to see the big picture and make it matter.”

Tracy began teaching at �ֲ���ý in 1976. He holds a bachelor’s degree from St. Olaf College and a doctorate from Yale. He is a scholar of Christian thought and environmental ethics and is the author of The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological Explorations (Penn State University Press, 1994).

Just as you wouldn’t reference an Eighties Party in a story set at �ֲ���ý in the ’70s, Kathryn Allison Mann ’08 doesn’t let Mad Men make anachronistic or other historical flubs in her job as head researcher for the AMC series.

In its recent profile of Mann, the Los Angeles Times notes that she’s responsible for “upholding the period drama’s well-earned reputation for authenticity and for mining the tumultuous history of the 1960s for potential fodder for series creator Matthew Weiner and his writing team.”

Mann tells writer Meredith Blake that her work is “relentlessly interesting.”

Mann has been research head for three seasons of the show, which concluded its sixth year on June 23.

Mann, whose major contribution to the creative team is a timeline of noteworthy events in news, politics and culture, goes about her work this ways, says Blake:

“Assisted by a handful of interns, Mann begins by methodically combing the front page of The New York Times each day of the year being depicted. Back issues of Life, The New Yorker, New York Magazine and smaller regional newspapers are other rich fonts of material.”

The books that Mann consults have included Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America; The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York; and The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators.

Mann, who earned honors in English and philosophy, wrote her �ֲ���ý honors thesis on film theory, specifically disputing the notion that a single and unified theory of film is possible.

Rather, she argued (looking at the films of Ingmar Bergman), each and every film is capable of answering philosophical questions about film in different ways.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the final days of the renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls.

On Monday, June 27, faculty in philosophy, religious studies and environmental studies will receive key-card access to the renovated Hedge Hall and be able to start settling into their spiffy new offices. ES will occupy the first floor, religious studies the second and philosophy the third.

Students head toward New Commons in this photograph taken from the fourth floor of Roger Williams Hall on May 23, 2011.

Garcelon Field and New Commons photographed from the fourth floor of Roger Williams Hall on May 23, 2011.

A power shovel leaves tracks in the mud outside Roger Williams Hall in this image taken May 23, 2011.

The Hedge Hall entrance plaza photographed from Roger Williams Hall on May 23, 2011.

Alumni Walk and Hedge and Pettengill halls, photographed from the fourth floor of Roger Williams Hall on May 23, 2011.

Four weeks later, July 25 is moving day for staff of the Language Resource Center and Off-Campus Study office and the faculty of the foreign-language programs that will occupy Roger Williams Hall.

In both cases, explains project manager Paul Farnsworth, the buildings will remain off-limits to the remainder of the campus community for some time yet. “The spaces still won’t be schedulable” through the online R25 room-reservation system, he explains, and general contractor Wright-Ryan Construction will still be around. “It makes life difficult for the contractor if there are people in the building while he’s trying to finish things.”

Still, installing �ֲ���ý inhabitants has to be one of the final milestones. The timetable is especially tight for the Roger Bill’s occupants, Farnsworth adds, because their former digs in Hathorn Hall are scheduled for
sprucing up, too.

At Hedge, the punch-list process rolls on, as the general contractor and then the architect inspect what’s been finished and flag things that fall short. As for new construction, there’s precious little left: expansion joints on the roof and between the new and old sections of the building and some flooring here and there — notably on the ground floor, where dampness in the floor slab has forced a change in plan.

�ֲ���ý is committed to using construction products that don’t emit toxic vapors, which means that the flooring adhesive is a benign water-based product. But it needs a dry surface to stay stuck, so a water barrier needs to be laid over the ground floor concrete
to keep the moisture at bay.

Meanwhile, moving day looms ever larger. “I just took the classroom committee through the building,” Farnsworth says. “These are people who deal with room scheduling, and we walked them through so they can get a visual on the spaces.”

Previously, we had asked Farnsworth what Commencement visitors could expect to see on the construction site. This time around, unable to let go of a good premise for a question, we wondered what would greet alums and families returning for Reunion, just days away.

One thing that will greet them is the opportunity to tour both buildings, at 11 a.m. Friday, and 1:30 and 4 p.m. Saturday. Tour groups will meet up outside the main entrance of Hedge on Alumni Walk.

For passers-by, meanwhile, there won’t be anything as dramatic as the instant lawn that materialized around Hedge Hall during Senior Week. In fact, Farnsworth says, the construction fence will stay up around the Bill and no grounds work will take place till after Reunion. The continuing need for cherry pickers on the site necessitates both those conditions.

Aside from landscaping, though, the Bill will show marked progress since just late May. On the outside, the roofing slates will likely all be in place, and workers should be nearly done installing the dark-gray ContinentalBronze sheet metal on the walls of dormers and other non-brick faces.

Inside, drywall is virtually finished, with the stairwell inside the new addition being the last stand for the wallboard hangers. Plenty of primer paint has been splashed around, too, and the first color coats have been applied through much of the building. Ceiling grids are going up and ceiling systems being installed — lights, sprinkler heads, etc.

“The pace of work has greatly accelerated” at the Bill because of experience gained at Hedge, Farnsworth says. “A lot of the questions that were unique to the installation here at �ֲ���ý, we’ve answered in doing Hedge. So people don’t need additional instruction, they just march on.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions, reminiscences and comments about campus improvements. Please e-mail staff writer Doug Hubley at dhubley@bates.edu, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

Note: Campus Construction Update returns the first week of July.