The lecture concludes the series City, Neighborhood and Society: Social Science Approaches to Urban Issues. This series has been sponsored by the Department of Sociology with support from the Program in Environmental Studies, the Division of the Social Sciences, the Office of Intercultural Education and the Office of the Special Assistant to the President for Diversity and Inclusion.

Additional support for specific speakers in the series has been provided by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the departments of politics, anthropology and history, the Program in Women and Gender Studies, and OUTFront.

For more information, please call 207-786-8296.

Dominguez is an associate professor in the department of sociology and human services at Northeastern University. She is also a faculty fellow at the Urban Health Research Institute, the Gender and Sexuality Program and the Brudnick Center for the Study of Conflict and Violence at Northeastern.

A forensically trained psychotherapist, Dominguez is affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital’s Division on Global Psychiatry. She helped developed the 2009 National Mental Health Policy for the Republic of Liberia.

A Ford Foundation and Woodrow Wilson fellow, she chairs the Latino Section of the American Sociological Association and has been recognized by the United States Census Bureau as an ethnography expert on low-income populations. She holds degrees in sociology, psychology, forensic social work and social welfare policy.

Interviewer Hannah Albertine ’16 of Philadelphia is a writer for the Bates Communications Office.

Like all impending (and intimidating) tasks, senior thesis sits in my mind as a project that will never actually be mine to take on.

But when I met with Taryn O’Connell ’13 in the Bobcat Den, I found myself staring directly at the very thing that had appeared so theoretical and scary to me: a big, black three-ring binder.

Once I was able to catch my breath again after the initial shock, Taryn and I bonded over our mutual love of basketball. Taryn was a driving force on the Bates women’s basketball team all four years.

She recalled for me how strange it was to complete her final game as a college basketball player, and how the ending of her athletic career oddly paralleled her thesis experience.

For her senior thesis in environmental studies, Taryn O’Connell ’13 investigated a debate about Androscoggin River pollution that took place in Lewiston in the 1950s. Photograph by Hank Schless ’13.

She researched a debate about Androscoggin River pollution that took place in Lewiston in the 1950s. Her thesis is titled “Place, Class and Culture: A Case Study of Pollution Debates in Lewiston, Maine, 1953-1955.”

I hear that seniors are told to practice their thesis elevator speech. What’s yours?

My thesis is about the pollution debate between a group called the Associated Industries of Maine, which was made up of the industry heads of the paper and textile companies, and a group called the Citizens for Conservation and Pollution Control.

I got statements from newspaper articles and used primary sources like interviews and pamphlets. I’m trying to see how these groups tried to expand their collective identity in Lewiston using place and class to reach different social classes in Lewiston.

What was the inspiration for your idea?

My junior year I took a class called “U.S. Environmental History” with Professor Joe Hall that really shaped my thesis.

I realized that everything is right here.

We did a project in the Muskie Archives and learned about Walter Lawrance, who was a Bates chemistry professor and the court-appointed “river master” for the Androscoggin.

There was a lot of information about the samples and testing they used to do, and I sat there and thought about how the river used to smell like rotten eggs. I realized that everything is right here. I wanted to learn about our community, and the thesis really pulled in my history buff side with my interest in social movements.

Along with foam and scum in the Androscoggin River, seen in this aerial photo of the Great Falls, circa 1930, was a strong smell. Photograph courtesy of the Androscoggin Historical Society.

Your go-to work space?

I like to do my work in the computer lab of Hedge.

Study-snack of choice?

Hmmm. Well, I don’t know if coffee counts as a snack because I drink that like it’s my job. But I’ll go with trail mix from Commons.

Any moments where you went “a-ha!”?

There were definitely moments where I understood exactly the arguments that the different groups were making. I was looking at the history of Lewiston in the early 1900s when the Catholic church didn’t let its members get involved in labor unions.

Click here to open a PDF file of O’Connell’s thesis.

I had a moment where I thought, “Oh it makes sense that if they’re not able to join labor unions, then they’re not going to fight for labor rights. And why would they be forthright in fighting against pollution if they feel it is going to compromise their jobs?” There were all of these traditions that the community kept with them over time.

How has your thesis experience changed your perception of our Bates community and our Lewiston community?

I think it has been huge to get off campus and do things like this. The more you take a step outside of our little box, the more you get to experience how rich in culture Lewiston really is. It has such an interesting past.

What is your relationship with your adviser like?

Sonja Pieck is great. She’s an assistant professor in environmental studies and also teaches in the Latin American studies program. She’s so helpful and always points me in the right direction. She’s definitely a professor that I respect a lot, and I’m really interested in the work she does with social movements.

What advice would you give me or to your freshman self?

I think I would say make sure to take advantage of what Lewiston has to offer. I wish freshman year I had done something right away to expose myself to that sooner. But I’m really lucky that I’ve been able to see so many different sides of the community through this experience.

What has been the most enjoyable part of working on your senior thesis?

I think my favorite part right now is just looking at it! Just getting it all on paper and putting the information together.

I’m looking at that book and thinking there’s no way I can pull it off.

You think, “I can’t do a thesis.” But everyone does. You just do it.

I’ll get back to you on that, Taryn.

Chester Higgins Jr. Photograph by Sanviki Chapman.

Chester Higgins Jr., a photographer for The New York Times whose images have appeared in exhibitions all over the world, visits Bates to give a talk titled Dancing with My Spirit at 6 p.m. Wednesday, May 1, in Room G65 of Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

The event is sponsored by the Learning Associates Program and the programs in African American and American cultural studies. For more information, please call 207-786-8296.

“With the camera I embrace the spirit that is the essence of all existence,” Higgins has said. His mission is to embrace, to reaffirm and to challenge. Higgins’ images resonate with a spiritual echo that maintains the image and frees it from the constraints of time.

Much of Higgins’ imagery is inspired by issues of identity. Over the past five decades, he has produced a visual collection of compelling imagery reflecting a sensitive and in-depth diary of his explorations of the human Diaspora and his concern with his own humanity.

Higgins has worked as a New York Times photographer since 1975 and has exhibited in museums throughout the world. His one-man exhibitions have appeared at the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of African Art, the Schomburg Center, the New-York Historical Society and Musée Dapper, a museum of African art in Paris.

Higgins has published several photo collections including Black Woman, Drums of Life: A Photographic Essay on the Black Man in America, Some Time Ago: A Historical Portrait of Black America (1850-1950), Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa, and Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging, as well as a memoir, 2004′s Echo of the Spirit: A Photographer’s Journey.

His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has been published in numerous compilations and publications such as Newsweek, Fortune, Look, Essence and Life.

Greg Anderson, an assistant in instruction in biology, works with a student doing field work on a Brunswick mudflat of the kind that’s occasionally closed to clam harvesters for conservation reasons. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Historic friction between two marine fisheries groups is playing out once again in Maine, where proposed legislation would give coastal towns the power to prohibit bloodworm digging in areas closed to clam harvesting.

Occasionally, a Maine town will close a flat to allow younger seed clams to mature. Currently, such closures doen’t apply to worm diggers.

The proposed legislation assumes that seeded flats need to be protected from both clam and worm digging, an assumption that riles worm diggers.

“Somebody is always trying to get us kicked out of their town,” said worm dealer Phil Harrington during a recent meeting in Brunswick to discuss the legislation.

Bates marine biologist Will Ambrose tends to side with the worm diggers, telling Bangor Daily News reporter Beth Brogan that the “impact worm digging has on clams has probably been overstated.”

Ambrose tells the BDN that according to his and his students’ research, not a lot of clams are “impacted to the point of death by worm digging.”

He also points to research by colleague and collaborator Brian Beal, a marine ecologist at the University of Maine, that specifically looks at how worm digging affects young clams. Beal concludes that “blood wormers should continue to harvest commercially from areas closed to shellfishing without reprisal or fear that they are causing damage to populations of juvenile soft-shell clams.”

“I’m surprised somebody hasn’t been shot over this.”

The hostility between the two digging groups, Ambrose adds, “goes back to at least 1979…because these groups do not mix, for a whole variety of reasons: socioeconomic, geopolitical — they just don’t get along. I’m surprised somebody hasn’t been shot over this.”

In 2005, environmental studies major Eben Sypitkowski ’05 spent time with worm diggers while doing his honors thesis on bloodworm digging.

He described for Bates Magazine the offbeat culture of the hardy yet disenfranchised worm diggers, and how there’s enviable talent in being able to “keep your butt to the wind and your hoe in the mud when your back is killing you.”

• View story from the Bangor Daily News, April 9, 2013

Ingrid Olivia Norrmén-Smith ’13. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

A 2013 Watson Fellowship will make it possible for a Bates alumna to spend a year in Africa and Asia researching cultural perceptions of one of humankind’s leading causes of death and disability.

A double major in neuroscience and French who graduates in May, Ingrid Norrmén-Smith of Upper Montclair, N.J., has received the Watson to support research that will explore how people in Morocco, Madagascar and Cambodia regard strokes and stroke victims.

“Stroke is a leading cause of death and disability around the world, but there isn’t a lot of literature regarding how different cultures perceive it” — even though a better understanding of such cultural perceptions could mitigate the global impact of strokes, says Norrmén-Smith, who goes by her middle name, Olivia.

“Your brain is an incredible organ that defines you, and when you have an affront to that organ, so much is changed. The effects are so personal — how people deal with disability, trauma and concepts of self, all of these different things.”

She adds, “I believe that as a Westerner, I stand to learn something valuable about how stroke victims are treated elsewhere. It may be that victims in other cultures are respected and revered, not stigmatized, and that life post-stroke is more fruitful because the support system that exists is more robust.

“I am just so happy that the Watson Foundation recognized this project.”

Awarded only to graduates of 40 highly selective liberal arts colleges, the Watson is one of the nation’s most prestigious graduate fellowships. The $25,000 fellowship is designed to identify potential leaders and challenge them in ways that foster independence, a global perspective and adaptability to new cultures. It funds research on a topic deeply important to the recipient and is conducted outside academe and the recipient’s home culture. Learn more.

“My project has two components,” says Norrmén-Smith. “One is to discern on a grand scale how stroke is perceived, and that will be accomplished via a questionnaire” completed by ordinary citizens in the destination country.

“But then I will also have personal interviews with stroke patients or people close to them.”

Norrmén-Smith has reached out to leading researchers in each country for assistance in finding stroke patients to interview and in administering the questionnaires. The questionnaires will combine basic demographic questions with scenarios depicting people afflicted in different ways by a stroke — physical, emotional and mental.

“It will be fascinating to see if disparate deficits evoke different responses,” she says. In addition, she will ask how participants would feel if a family member was experiencing stroke symptoms and what interventions the participant would take.

“Those could include options such as seeking medical help or religious advice, or whether the participant would intervene socially, pursue an exorcism, not seek help, etc.”

Although the cultures of Morocco, Madagascar and Cambodia differ in many ways, Norrmén-Smith suspects that religion will be a prime factor in shaping perceptions of stroke. She takes her lead from research into cross-cultural perceptions of mental illness that points to religion as a major determinant.

Morocco is predominantly Muslim, Cambodia primarily Buddhist and Madagascar is roughly divided between Christianity and faith practices indigenous to the island. But despite her expectations about religion’s role, “who knows what I will find?” Norrmén-Smith says. “That’s what’s intriguing.”

Norrmén-Smith first became interested in stroke while working as a volunteer and intern in New Jersey hospitals during the past several years. At the Overlook Medical Center in Summit, she conducted surveys of stroke patients and attended stroke-support group sessions.

She parlayed this experience into a project for the trauma hospital at University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, in Newark, where she created a stroke awareness brochure that has been adopted by the neurology department and disseminated through the city’s medical establishment.

At Bates, Norrmén-Smith may be better known for her stage presence than her neuroscience research. She has sung with a variety of campus bands, including the a cappella Crosstones, and has also acted in plays.

“It’s the nature of a Bates student to be doing things that he or she is passionate about and to be overcommitted — in a good way,” she says. “People are really involved with things. I think Bates is a very happy place and that has influenced my experiences here.”

Flash forward to later in the afternoon, when ancient languages filled a Pettengill classroom for a session featuring works by Greek and Latin students of Laurie O’Higgins, the college’s Euterpe B. Dukakis Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies, including a student video that transported the audience to ancient Thebes.

Chuck Munn ’14 (left) and Andrew Carranco ’14 perform Plautus’ comedy Captivi in the original Latin during a Mount David Summit presentation. Munn and Carranco are majoring in classical and medieval studies. Photograph by Mike Bradley/Bates College.

First up were Latin poetry students, with Michael Creedon ’15 of Medfield, Mass., giving an English introduction of the prologue to Plautus’ comedy Captivi.

Plautus was a Jon Stewart of his day.

Creedon explained how one could almost see the Roman playwright as a Jon Stewart of his day, offering ironic political commentary and incisive inquiry into familial love and loyalty among masters and slaves.

Creedon then joined fellow students to execute the prologue in costume, shackles and graceful Latin. Behind them, student-prepared subtitles appeared on a projection screen.

Performing the scene were Creedon, Emily Clark ’15 of Readfield, Maine; Andrew Carranco ’14 of Laredo, Texas; Michaela Brady ’14 of East Walpole, Mass., Chuck Munn ’14 of Norway, Maine; and Nick Steverson ’15 of Englewood, Colo.,

Following the Latinists came students of ancient Greek and their video — directed and edited by John Goodman ’15 of Larchmont, N.Y. — featuring two scenes from Euripides’ Greek tragedy Bacchae, filmed during a late winter snowstorm and featuring student-prepared subtitles.

Watch students act two scenes from Euripides’ Bacchae:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In one scene, the storm rages poetically outside an Olin Arts Center studio as Dionysus contemplates his options with Pentheus, the arrogant King of Thebes.

In the second scene, the Gomes Chapel offers a dramatic, ominous setting for an encounter between the disguised young god Dionysus and Pentheus, who ignorantly refuses to accept the whippersnapper and his mysterious Bacchic cult.

The Bacchae scenes were performed in ancient Greek by Carranco, Munn, Janée White ’13 of New York City; Andy Cannon ’15 of Greenwich, Conn; Jackson Fleming ’15 of Boston, Mass.; Henry Lee ’15 of Sag Harbor, N.Y.; and Mike Spinosa ’13 of Charlottesville, Va.

The English subtitles were prepared by Fleming and Spinosa, with assistance from O’Higgins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pieck says her undergraduate professors “changed the way I understood the world.” She strives to have similar impact with her students. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Sonja K. Pieck, a member of the Bates environmental studies faculty since 2007, addresses those questions in her courses and through research here and abroad, particularly in South America.

Her work in the classroom — which two years ago brought her a Bates Kroepsch Award for outstanding teaching — and in the field has led to her recent promotion to the position of associate professor of environmental studies, with tenure, effective Aug.1.

Growing up a citizen of the world

Daughter of a German diplomat, Pieck got to explore the world early as her family migrated between her father’s various postings. Before she entered college she had lived in Algeria, Germany, Israel, Ecuador and several U.S. locations, including Boston and Washington, D.C.

Along the way, she became interested in the question, “Why do places look so different?” She said her family’s environmental consciousness also led her to ask, for example, “how decisions made in Washington and New York translate into environmental changes at particular times, in particular places and for particular groups of people.”

Pieck majored in environmental studies at Bucknell University, then earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in geography at Clark University before taking a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago.

Today, Pieck studies transnational activism, nongovernmental organizations, indigenous movements and debates around environmental governance, with a focus on the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America.

She has taught a range of courses examining environmental problems and politics from various social science perspectives and shares teaching responsibility for “Community-Engaged Research in Environmental Studies,” the capstone course for the major.

Pieck has also had a leading role in the development of a new program and major in Latin American Studies, to begin in fall 2013. “This major speaks to not only the influence the rest of world has had on the region, but the region’s influence on the world, especially the U.S. We are seeing a much more profound impact of Latin American cultures and populations in the U.S. and that’s very exciting.”

Studying nature and human nature

Pieck says, “I’ve always been interested in the multiple meanings that nature has for people and how those meanings become sources of people’s identity — their hopes and their antagonisms among each other. How do people identify with particular places and forms of nature, and how do they negotiate the changing forms of nature?

“My other set of interests is around forms of political participation related to nature, especially the politics around access to nature and natural resources.”

In short, Pieck said, “I look at the nexus of power and nature. Political participation is a question of meaning-making. That’s why I’m also so interested in social movements and NGOs, because they are ways in which people are trying to participate or trying to make claims on nature.”

Why focus on South America? She explained, “South America has some of the world’s most evocative forms of nature,” which have also become flashpoints for conflicting economic and environmental interests. 

“When you build an asphalt highway in the middle of a rainforest, it has enormous environmental and social ripple effects.”

Her current research focus, the Interoceanic Highway, is a prime example of struggles triggered by competing desires for rapid economic progress, a healthy environment and a just social order.

The project to build a highway between Brazil and Peru — “running through the rainforest, then snaking up over the Andes mountains and back down to the Peruvian coast” — was initiated by the two countries to provide a trade outlet to the Pacific for the commodities that are fueling their booming economies: natural gas, oil and timber plus minerals including copper, zinc and gold.

Over 1,500 miles of roadway from Brazil to Peru, such as this stretch between Puerto Maldonado and Cusco in Peru, photographed in 2004, have been paved and modernized as part of the Interoceanic Highway project. Photograph by Patrick Nouhailler.

“As studies across the world have shown,” Pieck says, “when you build an asphalt highway in the middle of a rainforest, it has enormous environmental and social ripple effects.” These include creeping deforestation, sedimentation of rivers, internal mass migration and increased illegal activity such as the drug trade and human trafficking. The case of the Interoceanic Highway is complicated by the fact that important national parks and indigenous reserves sit nearby.

But South America, and in fact Latin America more broadly, also presents what Pieck calls “really creative thinking about how you resolve some of these conflicts.”

Pieck pointed out that the tradition of collective action and social movements is very strong in much of the region, with such movements changing the face of government in Ecuador and Bolivia, for instance; and that the kinds of participatory, democratic and earth-oriented alternatives articulated by the Landless Movement in Brazil or the Zapatistas in southern Mexico have had global echoes as well.

“All in all, Latin America is a fascinating region for the study of contested nature,” she said.

Teaching and learning at Bates

As an undergraduate at another small, private, residential liberal arts college, Pieck found she greatly enjoyed the strong sense of community and close interaction between students and faculty.

“It was in college that I finally learned how to make sense of the environmental conflicts I had witnessed growing up,” she said. “My professors fundamentally changed the way I understood the world. It was the first time I thought about the crucially important role faculty could play in the lives of their students. I want to make that kind of impact on my own students.”

Spring is when Bates seniors complete their required theses — a time of year when Pieck gets a particularly strong opportunity to have impact with some of those students. She has supervised more than 30 thesis students.

“The most challenging part — and I think students would agree with me — is to find the right kind of question: one that is interesting, one that you care about answering, one that is going to lead you to some original conclusion. And, on top of that, one that you can address adequately in a semester or two. That’s a tall order.

“Negotiating the complexity of the world in their work.”

“Once they have found that question — often with my guidance, sometimes without — that’s a sweet moment. The wheel stops spinning, they find the traction and they go! They come up with great papers, great theses, and I learn new things about topics that I might never have gotten to on my own.

“For instance, I’ve worked with a student who did a thesis on the history of nuclear power in Armenia. Last year I had an honors student doing work on environmental NGOs in Ecuador. And I’m currently advising a student doing a thesis on the history of environmental activism in Lewiston.

“It’s very inspiring to see students deeply involved in crafting their own intellectual argument and negotiating the complexity of the world in their work.”

Pieck’s current course “Environmental Justice in the Americas” represents her broader interests as well as interests she’d like to encourage at Bates.

“I’m hoping in future years to get students involved [through the course] in related projects on campus and potentially off campus, and get us all to think more broadly about how environmental justice actually touches us on campus. I think there are much larger questions involved about meaning and participation, about the right to a healthy environment, a healthy life.

“There are larger tasks connected with that course that I am excited about and that I think are important for the campus community.”

]]> http://www.bates.edu/news/2013/03/28/pieck/feed/ 0 http://www.bates.edu/news/2013/03/22/oie-mays-biographer/ http://www.bates.edu/news/2013/03/22/oie-mays-biographer/#comments Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:30:53 +0000 Doug Hubley http://www.bates.edu/news/?p=63879

Benjamin Mays biographer Randal Maurice Jelks.

Benjamin E. Mays was a civil rights theorist, educator, preacher, Morehouse College president and mentor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Mays was also one of Bates College’s most influential graduates, a member of the class of 1920. The college presents award-winning Mays biographer Randal Maurice Jelks, a member of the University of Kansas faculty, in a talk at 7 p.m. Monday, March 25, in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St.

Sponsored by the college’s Office of Intercultural Education, the lecture is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-8376.

Jelks is the author of Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), the first full-length biography of the man King called his “spiritual and intellectual father.”

In recognition of Schoolmaster of the Movement, Jelks recently received the 2013 Literary Award for Nonfiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, one of several awards with which the organization salutes excellence in works by African-American authors.

Mays was born in 1894 to sharecroppers in rural South Carolina. His first memory was of a white mob threatening his father. From an early age, Mays was determined both to get the best education and to break the grip of Jim Crow laws on the South.

In 1917, he entered Bates as a 23-year-old sophomore after a year at Virginia Union University, where two Bates alumni on the faculty encouraged him to try their alma mater. He came to Lewiston not only for a better education than a person of color could reasonably expect down South, but to prove his intellectual equality to whites.

Proof abounded. Mays won a speaking award in his first year at Bates, finished his senior year as captain of a triumphant debate team and was one of 15 in his class to graduate with honors, among other achievements.

Central to Schoolmaster of the Movement is Jelks’ argument that by connecting the substance of Christianity with the responsibility to challenge injustice, Mays prepared the black church for its central role in the civil rights movement.

And it was at Bates, Jelks writes, that Mays laid the groundwork for “a new biblical interpretation that could mobilize black communities to take action against Jim Crow’s enforced apathy.” Mays’ studies in religion steered him toward an intellectual structure for both his Baptist faith and his personal mission “to uplift his people,” in Jelks’ words.

Mays and Bates had a profound and enduring effect on each other. As Mays famously summed up his experience in Born to Rebel: “Bates College did not ‘emancipate’ me: it did the far greater service of making it possible for me to emancipate myself, to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man.”

Those words are echoed in the college’s mission statement, which begins: “Since 1855, Bates College has been dedicated to the emancipating potential of the liberal arts.” Mays exemplifies commitments to social justice, individual worth and access to education that have always been bedrock values for Bates.

Jelks is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Kansas, with a joint appointment in African and African American studies. He is co-editor of the journal American Studies and a co-founder and editor of the Michigan-based blog theblackbottom.com, which covers politics, culture and social activism.

He received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan, a master’s of divinity from McCormick Theological Seminary and a doctorate in comparative black histories from Michigan State University. He is an ordained clergyman in the Presbyterian Church.

Jelks also wrote the award-winning African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids (University of Illinois Press, 2006).