Ali Akhtar, assistant professor of religious studies and of classical and medieval Studies. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

Six new tenure-track members of the faculty began teaching at Bates College in autumn 2012, representing the fields of dance, economics, German, neuroscience and psychology, religious studies, and classical and medieval studies.

All beginning their Bates careers as assistant professors, they are:

Ali Humayun Akhtar, religious studies and and classical and medieval studies;

Rachel Boggia, dance;

Jason Castro, psychology and neuroscience;

Raluca Cernahoschi and Jakub Kazecki, who were hired in a joint appointment to the German faculty;

and Paul Shea, economics.

(Bates has also engaged biologist Larissa Williams, who starts at Bates during winter 2013, and historian Lydia Barnett, who begins teaching at Bates in autumn 2013.)

Ali Humayun Akhtar

Read a profile of Akhtar.

Assistant Professor of Dance Rachel Boggia. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

Appointed assistant professor of religious studies and of classical and medieval studies at Bates, Akhtar studies the complex interactions among political, religious and intellectual establishments in Europe and the Islamic world in medieval and early modern times.

Akhtar is a native of New Jersey. Prior to Bates, he taught at Bard College and at New York University, where he received his doctorate in both history and Middle Eastern studies. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Cornell in 2004.

Rachel Boggia

Read a profile of Boggia.

Appointed assistant professor of dance at Bates in 2012 after two years at the college as a visiting faculty member, Boggia employs sophisticated technology in her art and teaching.

Boggia served as acting director of the Bates dance program in 2010-11 after teaching at Wesleyan University and at Connecticut and Dickinson colleges. She earned her MFA in dance from The Ohio State University in 2003 and a bachelor of science degree in neurobiology at Cornell in 2000.

Jason Castro, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Jason Castro

Read a profile of Castro.

Analyzing neural electrical patterns and chemical imaging that reveals cellular activity, Castro, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience, investigates the relationships between the properties of neurons and sensory capabilities, such as the ability to distinguish between odors.

Castro came to Bates from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where he had been a postdoctoral fellow since 2008, the year he received his doctorate in neuroscience at Pittsburgh. In addition to a 2002 liberal arts diploma from the European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin, Germany, Castro earned bachelor’s degrees in biology and English literature at the University of Rochester.

Raluca Cernahoschi

Read a profile of Cernahoschi.

Assistant Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Cernahoschi, who has been a visiting professor at Bates the past two years, is a native of Romania. But her Romanian education never introduced her to one of her primary academic interests: the literature produced by that nation’s German minority.

Instead, it wasn’t until her graduate studies at the University of British Columbia that she discovered this literature. “I happened to be taught by one of the only North American experts on this literature,” Cernahoschi explains — Peter Stenberg, now professor emeritus of German at UBC.

She taught previously at Central Connecticut State University, McMaster University and UBC. She earned a bachelor’s degree in German studies and English at Mount Holyoke College.

Jakub Kazecki

Read a profile of Kazecki.

Kazecki has done considerable research on the connection between war and humor, as evidenced by his book Laughter in the Trenches: Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives, released in July 2012 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Assistant Professor of German Jakub Kazecki. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

A native of Poland, Kazecki taught at Central Connecticut State University for four years prior to Bates, and previously taught at McMaster University in Ontario and the University of British Columbia, where he received a doctorate in Germanic studies.

He earned master’s degrees at Adam-Mickiewicz-University in Poznan, Poland, and at Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S.

Paul Shea

Read a profile of Shea.

People’s expectations influence the economy, which makes the accurate prediction of expectations important to economists. That’s an aspect of the field that interests Shea, a macroeconomist and econometrician who develops mathematical models for such predictions.

Working with algorithms that simulate various factors affecting economic behavior, he aims to model expectations such that the agents — the theoretical people in his models — “are just about as smart as the people who actually make decisions in the economy.”

Paul Shea, assistant professor of economics. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

David A. Aschauer. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

The Cape Elizabeth (Maine) Land Trust announced July 26 the establishment of the 113 Fund to honor the life and work of David Alan Aschauer, the late Elmer W. Campbell Professor of Economics at Bates.

The CELT said that 10 percent of the net proceeds from this year’s Aug. 19 Tri for Preservation — a sprint triathlon, duathlon and aquabike event to benefit the land trust — will be donated to the fund. Additionally, Aschauer’s family will match all contributions dollar for dollar up to the first $1,500. The proceeds of the fund will be given to Bates to support research and internships in the economics department.

Athlete participants in the race may contribute to the fund when they register for the Tri for Preservation. Contributions may also be made on the CELT website.

A leading economist, Aschauer was also an athlete who loved the natural world, including the beauty of Cape Elizabeth. He was competing in the August 2011 Tri for Preservation when he suffered physical distress while swimming off Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth. He was rescued but subsequently passed away.

Aschauer raced in the event wearing bib No. 113. His daughter, Erika Rodrigue of Augusta, Maine, will race No. 113 in his honor at this year’s Tri for Preservation.

As a tribute to his life and to ensure continued learning from his personal and professional teachings, the land trust partnered with Aschauer’s family and Bates to create the 113 Fund.

“We wanted to remember Professor Aschauer and his work in an appropriate way,” said Ted Darling, President of the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust. “We worked with David’s family and Bates to establish the 113 Fund as a lasting tribute to his work.”

Aschauer was known as a fine teacher, scholar, adviser and colleague. Bates Dean of the Faculty Pam Baker ’70 said at the time of his death that he was “revered at Bates and throughout his profession.”

Bates environmental economist Lynne Lewis. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

“Desperate Alewives,” a Maine Public Broadcasting Network documentary featuring Bates environmental economist Lynne Lewis among others, has been nominated for a New England Emmy in the category of Outstanding Environmental Program. The program is part of the MPBN series Sustainable Maine.

The 35th Annual Boston/New England Emmy Awards, sponsored by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Boston/New England chapter, will be presented June 2 in Boston.

A river herring called the alewife — aka sawbelly, mooneye, gaspereau and big-eyed or spring herring — is an essential component in the fresh- and saltwater food chain along much of the Eastern Seaboard. In Maine, alewife populations have plummeted, prompting research by a group whose members include scholars from Bates, Bowdoin College and the University of Southern Maine, many of whom are featured in the MPBN segment.

Watch Desperate Alewives.

“I think if we don’t care, it’ll be too late,” Lewis says. “Policymakers always want to know the costs and benefits — and the costs of these decisions always tend to be very localized, the politics very intense, about taking out a dam or putting in a fish ladder.

“But the benefits accrue to so many different people: to the anglers, to the property owners, to the codfishery, to the lobster fishery.”

Associate Professor of Geology Beverly Johnson.

Lewis and her Bates colleague Beverly Johnson, a geology professor depicted in the documentary, are collaborating with faculty from Bowdoin and USM on the project “Maine Rivers, Estuaries and Coastal Fisheries,” funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Experimental Programs to Stimulate Competitive Research (ESPCoR) through a grant to the University of Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative.

That initiative is designed to connect research with concrete action that promotes the economy, vibrant communities and healthy ecosystems in and beyond Maine.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the collaboration will weigh the costs and benefits of river rehabilitation in Maine and the effects of rehabilitation efforts on fisheries and economies.

Chair of Bates’ economics department, Lewis’ own research explores the potential benefits and costs of river rehabilitation and, specifically, dam removal.

Johnson’s research seeks to reconstruct the Gulf of Maine’s ancient nearshore ecosystem in order to help scientists predict current responses to natural and human influences. Funded by a $393,000 NSF grant, that interdisciplinary project also includes biologist Will Ambrose and archeologist Bruce Bourque of Bates and Robert Steneck of UMaine’s School of Marine Sciences.

Romina Istratii, who graduates from Bates in May, will use the award to travel to Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia and Rwanda to research the dynamics of food security, gender bias and the role of women in farming.

The Watson 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 that’s on a topic deeply important to the recipient and is conducted outside academe and the recipient’s home culture.

Video: Romina Istratii ’12 at the Mount David Society Scholarship Luncheon, March 30, 2012:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Istratii belongs to the 44th class of Watson recipients, drawn from 15 states and seven countries and planning research in 74 countries. Fellows receive $25,000 for 12 months of travel, college loan assistance as needed and an insurance allowance.

Istratii’s research proposal is titled “Meeting the ‘Voiceless’: Understanding How Women Can Transform Food Insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa.” Although women far outnumber men as farm workers in many African countries, gender bias and male dominance of economic and societal institutions constrain women farmers’ opportunities for advancement.

“This situation contributes to persistent food insecurity,” Istratii writes in her Watson proposal. At the same time, while existing research demonstrates the role of gender bias in putting women farmers at a disadvantage, the voices of such women are all but absent in that research, a void that Istratii hopes to address.

She will interview women farmers, academic experts and women’s rights activists. “I am intrigued to hear African women narrate their own stories and share their own perspectives,” she writes.
“The literature shows that women are crucial to food stability, but it fails to project what women think and how they see their role as forces of security and economic growth.

“Do women consider themselves equal to men? Do they feel that more egalitarian circumstances on the farm could increase the welfare of the household and the community more broadly? Do they associate their personal circumstances with food insecurity? What would they say to their governments and the extension agents that work to empower them?”

Istratii selected her destinations on the basis of unique characteristics that will inform her career objective of ameliorating food insecurity in Africa. In Senegal, she will live with a village mayor who will introduce her to the region and to female farmers, and will visit a U.S. Agency for International Development project that aims to increase female producers’ access to markets.

Next stop is Ghana, where female voices are conspicuously absent from the masses of research into food insecurity, and where members of the Bates economics faculty have been able to connect her with valuable interviewees.

In Ethiopia, Istratii will study agricultural practices in the relatively egalitarian context of the Oromo people, the nation’s single largest ethnic group. In addition to female farmers, she will interview civil rights activists, women’s empowerment organizations and journalists.

Her last stop is Rwanda, where women have been instrumental in rebuilding the country after the 1994 genocide, and where important reforms that empower women have recently been enacted. Those reforms, Istratii believes, “will have tremendous implications for food insecurity and must be studied while they are still under implementation.”

Romina Istratii of Athens, Greece, shown here speaking during the October 2012 dedication of two academic buildings at Bates College, is a Bates senior recently awarded the prestigious Watson Fellowship. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Born in Moldova, Istratii immigrated to Greece at age 4. Experiencing poverty early on, her response then and now has been to seek ways to make things better on a community scale. At Bates, she says, she found not only a responsive forum for her ideas but a community that encouraged action.

“Excellent knowledge, supreme leadership skills and bright minds might provide the world with better ideas,” she says, “but only true personal engagement with other peoples’ problems can provide the world with forces of change.”

As head of the Committee on Women’s Rights for the Model United Nations at Bates, Istratii first learned of the barriers confronting women farmers in Africa. Participating in research by Bates and University of Tennessee economists, and supported by a Stangle Family Fund Grant for Research in Economics and Law from Bates, she laid the groundwork for the Watson project.

Istratii is a triple major in economics, politics and Chinese. Along with Chinese, English and her native languages of Greek and Moldovan, she also speaks French.

The Thomas J. Watson Foundation was created in 1961 as a charitable trust by Mrs. Thomas J. Watson Sr. in honor of her late husband, the founder of International Business Machines (IBM). In 1968, in recognition of their parents’ longstanding interest in education and world affairs, their children decided that the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship Program should constitute a major activity of the foundation.

At least one Bates senior received a Watson Fellowship every year from 1985 through 2000. Bates students or graduates also received Watsons in 2002-03 and 2006-09.

Thomas Shapiro of Brandeis University.

A Brandeis University expert on public policy and racial inequality, Thomas M. Shapiro speaks on the racial wealth gap at 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road.

Shapiro’s talk is part of the 10th annual Unity Conference presented by Amandla!, a student organization that advances understanding of the many communities of the African diaspora. The lecture is open to the public at no cost.

The conference’s theme this year is Economic Diversity: What Color Is Your Money? Understanding Economic Inequality and the Racial Wealth Gap. The event is co-sponsored by the Office of the President, the departments of economics and politics, and the social sciences division. A discussion and Q&A follow Shapiro’s talk.

Shapiro directs the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis, and is the Pokross Professor of Law and Social Policy at the university’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. His research focus is the relationship between assets and the racial wealth gap.

His book The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2004) combined national data with nearly 200 interviews to explore how continuing discrimination and the pervasive lack of financial assets dramatically impact the lives of many black families.

The book was widely reviewed, including by The Washington Post, Boston Globe and other major news organizations. Hidden Cost was named a Notable Book of 2004 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

With Melvin Oliver of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Shapiro co-authored the acclaimed Black Wealth/White Wealth (Routledge, 1997). That book demonstrates how, over generations, blacks have had difficulty creating, expanding and preserving assets compared to their white counterparts. Analyzing quantitative data from more than 12,000 households, the authors illustrate the relationship between racialized wealth resources and opportunities for a better life.

The book revealed “for the first time the full economic damage caused by the special difficulties that blacks face,” wrote the New York Review of Books. “These facts need to be publicized so that white Americans can be made aware of the extent to which the civil rights movement of the 1960s failed to achieve its goal of fairness for blacks.”

David Longdon ’14, a Bates economics major from Accra, Ghana, spent the summer as a leadership intern with Lots to Gardens, a youth-focused organization in Lewiston that uses sustainable urban agriculture to create access to fresh food. Longdon’s participation included completing an associated research project in his role as a Community-Based Research Fellow with the college’s Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

In the series episode “Desperate Alewives,” Lewis joins the discussion of how restoring just one species of river fish, the alewife, can play a huge role in rejuvenating a river’s food web. In the process, Lewis and her interdisciplinary team of researchers and fisheries experts answer the always-important question: Why does river rehabilitation matter?

Lewis and her team’s project is called “Maine Rivers, Estuaries and Coastal Fisheries.” Also including Bates geology professor Beverly Johnson and researchers from Bowdoin College and the University of Southern Maine, the interdisciplinary effort is part of the Sustainability Solutions Initiative at the University of Maine.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the collaboration will weigh the costs and benefits of river rehabilitation in Maine and the effects of rehabilitation efforts on fisheries and economies.

An environmental economist who chairs the Bates economics department, Lewis’ own research explores the potential benefits and costs of river rehabilitation and, specifically, dam removal.

Johnson’s research seeks to reconstruct the Gulf of Maine’s ancient nearshore ecosystem in order to help scientists predict current responses to natural and human influences. Funded by a $393,000 NSF grant, the interdiscplinary project also includes Will Ambrose (biology) and Bruce Bourque (archeology) of Bates  and Robert Steneck of UMaine’s School of Marine Sciences.

• Funeral and celebration of David Aschauer’s life: 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 17, at the St. John the Baptist Church, 39 Pleasant St., Brunswick. At his family’s request, Bates College will join the family in hosting a reception at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave., following the funeral, beginning at 12:30 p.m.
• Bates announcement of the passing of David Aschauer.
  

“He just loved the challenges. He always wanted to get better,” said Dennis Browne, Bates associate professor of Russian.

Browne twice partnered with Aschauer on Bates Fall Semester Abroad trips to St. Petersburg, Russia. “In a situation liked that, I’m designated the lead professor,’’ said Browne. “But David was so proficient in Russian, it didn’t feel that way at all. It was just so impressive, how he mastered it. He said to me a couple of times, ‘You know, Dennis, I probably worked as hard or harder to learn Russian as I did to get my Ph.D. in economics.’ I bet he did. And he was brilliant in economics.’’ View story in The Boston Globe, Sept. 1, 2011.

An economics major at Bates, Rachel Stern ’07 received a Fulbright grant to study for a master’s of business administration at IE, a business school in Madrid. Aspiring to conduct business development that is socially and environmentally sustainable, particularly with women entrepreneurs in the Third World, Stern has selected IE because of its international leadership in this field.

Coming to IE after a stint in Liberia with Robertsport Development Company, which promotes business opportunities for young people in developing countries, Stern sees the MBA as the next step in her career.

“I’ve learned the incredible importance of development, the unanticipated dangers of excessive economic aid and the interconnectedness of the world economy,” she says. “But I need the international business toolbox that I will gain at IE to put sustainable business projects into practice.”

She adds, “I’m particularly interested in IE’s eight-week venture lab. Through the lab, I plan to develop a microfinance model for West Africa that goes beyond simply funding small projects to include business education for loan seekers and their children.”

David Aschauer, a Bates economics professor known nationally for research illustrating the economic stimulus provided by government spending on public infrastructure, died Monday, Aug. 22.

Aschauer, the Elmer W. Campbell Professor of Economics at Bates since 1990, died while swimming in a triathlon off the coast of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He was 58 years old.

• Funeral and celebration of David Aschauer’s life: 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 17, at the St. John the Baptist Church, 39 Pleasant St., Brunswick. At his family’s request, Bates College will join the family in hosting a reception at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave., following the funeral.
• Click here for directions (via Google Maps) to Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. in Lewiston, Maine.
• The Boston Globe explores his zeal for life and self-improvement.

In 1988, as a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago, Aschauer made a claim that, as The Atlantic Monthly would later say, “set the economics profession on its ear.” Aschauer conducted research indicating that government spending on infrastructure — roads, bridges, airports — could improve economic productivity.

As infrastructure spending increased during the 1950s and 1960s, so did productivity; as public investment ebbed into the 1980s, so again did productivity.

Writing for The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch used Aschauer’s research as the centerpiece for his article “Taking Stock,” a widely noted assessment of federal spending priorities that appeared in the January-February 2003 issue.

That same year, Aschauer was named the single most-cited full professor of economics at a U.S. liberal arts college in the annual study Economic Scholarship at Elite Liberal Arts Colleges: Are Other Economists Paying Attention?

At Bates, David was known as a fine teacher, scholar, adviser and colleague. His teaching and research interests centered on macroeconomics, financial markets and economic growth. His recent research looked at the relationship between fiscal and monetary policy in the United States, as well as relationships between real interest rates and real exchange rates in an open-economy setting.

In addition, he investigated transitional macroeconomics, with a focus on Russia and Ukraine.

He graduated in 1975 from the University of Kansas and received his doctorate in 1983 from the University of Rochester. In the 1980s, in his role with the Federal Reserve Bank, Aschauer was a widely respected consultant to the World Bank, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Competitiveness Council, among others.

Prior to Bates, he taught at the University of Michigan. He has been a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance and the Jerome Levy Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Kiev and Bowdoin College.