He deserves it: Known as a lesula, the monkey was recently confirmed as a distinct species by Kate Detwiler ’95 and her fellow primate researchers, who gave it the scientific name Cercopithecus lomamiensis.

Say hello to a male of the newly identified species Cercopithecus lomamiensis. Photograph by Maurice Emetshu.

Published in the open-access science journal PLOS One in 2012, the announcement of the new primate has prompted stories in The New York Times, the BBC and CNN, among many others. It’s only the second new species of African monkey to be confirmed in the past 28 years.

In addition to contributing key genetic data to the research paper, Detwiler is also the article’s corresponding author, meaning she was responsible for squiring the paper through the publication process and responding to inquiries about its results.

The lesula’s path to species-hood began in 2007, when it was noticed by a research team led by famed primate researchers John and Terese Hart, conservation biologists with the Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation and Yale’s Peabody Museum.

So how do you pronounce “Cercopithecus lomamiensis“? Let Kate Detwiler tell you:

The Hart team was doing a biological inventory in the “heart of the heart of the Congo,” in Detwiler words, when they saw the monkey. Ironically, the animal wasn’t seen in the deepest African bush but in a village in central Congo, where it was leashed to a post as a child’s pet.

Over the next several years, the field researchers headed into the rainforest to observe the monkey and gather the heaps of information needed to prove that it was distinct from the very similar Cercopithecus hamlyni, or owl-faced monkey.

Detwiler and her fellow researchers were able to prove that Cercopithecus lomamiensis is genetically distinct from Cercopithecus hamlyni, the owl-faced monkey, seen here. Photograph by Noel Rowe.

Detwiler entered the picture later, after Hart sent an inquiry to the New York University Molecular Anthropology Laboratory, where she was completing a doctorate, asking for help with genetic testing.

An avid follower of the Harts’ fieldwork, Detwiler couldn’t believe her luck. It was as if Watson and Crick had called asking for a little help with a certain double helix theory.

“I put everything else on hold,” she said.

She did the genetic extractions and sequencing, and soon “realized that at the genetic level, we had something distinct” from C. hemlyni. “It was different, and uniquely different.”

She even allowed herself a shoutout in the lab. “We’ve got a new species!”

Additional evidence came from researchers’ assessments of the monkey’s morphology (its form and appearance).

“Our results,” Detwiler and her fellow researcher wrote, “unambiguously identify the new primate as a distinct species, Cercopithecus lomamiensis.”

While gratified by the media attention (much of it noting the monkey’s distinctive blue buttocks), Detwiler, who studied a similar monkey species for her Bates honors thesis, hopes the story will energize efforts to protect the lesula and continue the inventory work that is a prerequisite to conversation efforts.

She has since traveled to the Congo to learn more about the field site and to develop the  collaborations needed for further research, including deployment of remotely activated cameras, known as camera traps.

“On a personal note, just being in the space and landscape of the Congo basin forest, which is so massive and remote, is so exciting,” she said. “On a global scale, it hopefully will excite us to protect the Congo’s unique wildlife and keep these inventories going.

“There are still places in the world that have not been explored, where we can make new discoveries.”

But I was more interested in the scholar than the skates.

A participant as well as scholar of culture, Rand often injects personal experiences into her work. Here, skating in Falmouth, she bends back her leg for a catch-foot spiral, a move she describes in Red Nails, Black Skates. Photograph by Mike Bradley/Bates College.

Red Nails, Black Skates (Duke University Press, 2012) is something of a crash course in Rand’s area of cultural criticism, specifically the overt and insidious ways that gender and sexuality, as well as race and class, shape all of our identities and experiences.

That begs the question — in my case a series of questions — about the intertwined personal, scholarly and pedagogical commitments that influence cultural critics like Rand, the college’s Whitehouse Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Women and Gender Studies.

In other words, how does she approach writing and teaching about something as both amorphous and intimate as culture?

“We participate in culture,” says Rand. “I want to show how we are participating in culture by modeling a critic who also looks critically at her own investments and the things she studies.”

Asked about her intended audience, Rand replies, “I envisioned the book being for a wide range of people. First of all, I have to admit I really wanted skaters to read it. I’m always interested in having my writing be accessible within and outside academics.

“Although I wanted to say hard and complicated things, I wanted to say it in an accessible way,” she says.

One such strategy was to divide the book into a series of short essays, allowing readers to encounter the ideas at their own pace.

Whether writing about a cultural phenomenon or teaching one of her courses here at Bates, Rand encourages her audience to recognize how they, too, perform and respond to gender.

Nothing about figure skates is more obvious than their “gender coding” by color, Rand writes, which was popularized by Sonja Henie, seen here in Boston in the 1930s. Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

In her course Women, Gender, Visual Culture, which she is teaching this semester, Rand asks her students to “understand that it is not as if some people over there have a gender story. Everyone has a gender story.”

That said, she’s not interested in “busting open all kinds of gender notions and throwing them all out.”

She explains that some people find pleasure in traditional expressions of femininity, herself included, and masculinity. What’s important, however, is that those expressions not be the result of restrictive stereotypes.

That self-awareness permeates Rand’s writing. For her, it says something about what she calls “the politics of academic work and the politics of criticism.”

As a scholar, Rand recognizes that she participates in the cultural phenomena she studies and is not shy about putting her personal perspectives front and center.

“People all have a personal stake in what they are studying and working on. They may tell you about it or they may not tell you about it. But I don’t believe, not only with popular culture but in any critical or academic endeavor, that there is a critic at some elevated level looking down.”

• July 4th social at the Air Force Academy.
• Orientation at Bowdoin.
• Homecoming at Colorado College.
• Two swine flu vaccine clinics at Bates.

Trick question, really. All four events led to an uptick in flu cases at their respective colleges— even the vaccine clinics at Bates.

During a vaccine clinic in October 2009, Miljan Zecevic ’10 receives his vaccine injection. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

This curious fact, that a vaccine clinic could be linked to a surge in flu cases, is explained in a recent scholarly article, “The Effect of Mixing Events on the Dynamics of pH1N1 Outbreaks at Small Residential Colleges,” by Bates epidemiologist Karen Palin and mathematician Meredith Greer in the Journal of American College Health.

Of the many U.S. colleges that saw outbreaks of swine flu cases in the summer and fall of 2009, Palin and Greer looked at Bates, Bowdoin, Colorado College and the Air Force Academy because of their similar size and their residential, undergraduate structure.

It’s a no-brainer that a college mingling event like homecoming or orientation would create robust opportunities for human-to-human spread of a virus. But the vaccine clinics at Bates, held on Oct. 10 and 15 four years ago in Chase Lounge, followed protocols that did not allow students to come into infectious proximity with one another. (The researchers stress, too, that vaccines and vaccine clinics are Very Good Things.)

Instead, suggest Palin and Greer, the role of the clinics in the spread of H1N1 at Bates in 2009 has to do with how those clinics influenced events outside Chase Hall, specifically student traffic patterns.

To investigate the spread of H1N1 during the Bates outbreak, the researchers used a standard mathematical model that categorizes all community members as either susceptible to the disease, infected or recovered (hence the model’s acronym, SIR).

The SIR model assumes a small community that is “well-blended.” At a place like Bates, “well-blended” means members live in close proximity and encounter each other in classrooms, residence halls, the library, club activities, athletics facilities, arts venues and, of course, in Commons.

“The SIR model did not match the reality we observed,” Greer says.

“Bates is about as well-blended as any modern-day community,” says Greer, associate professor of mathematics.

Mathematician Meredith Greer found that the standard model for tracking the outbreak of disease didn’t work for the Bates H1N1 outbreak of 2009. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Based on the initial Bates data, the SIR model suggested a slow, steady increase in flu cases. But what happened at Bates was “in stark contrast” to the model’s predictions. Three days after each flu clinic (a common incubation time for H1N1), the number of cases at Bates spiked.

Indeed, “the SIR model did not match the reality we observed,” Greer says.

But why? It wasn’t that students got infected at the clinic; a variety of established protocols made that very unlikely.

Instead, the researchers believe that the clinics created subtle changes in student traffic patterns on campus. Students took different routes to get from point A to point B, thus coming into contact not with more students on those days, but with different students.

Hosting a clinic may have “facilitat[ed] the spread of pH1N1 in unexpected and unknown ways,” the authors say.

Let’s say that on Oct. 15, 2009, student “Sarah” altered her routine by including the Chase Lounge vaccine clinic on her usual Parker-to-Pettengill afternoon route. In doing so, she came into contact with different students than usual, giving a hug to one she hadn’t seen in awhile and who, unbeknownst to her, was infectious.

It doesn’t stop there. If Sarah changed her routine, then maybe her roommate “Jessica” also changed hers, even if she didn’t plan to attend the clinic. And so on.

All of this means that “the concept of ‘well-blended’ is more complicated than originally thought,” Greer says.

Take Commons. At Bates, all students dine under one roof, blended together like stir-fry. A germophobe’s nightmare, right?

Karen Palin, an epidemiologist and lecturer in biology at Bates, discusses the H1N1 outbreak at Bates in October 2009. With her is is Associate Professor of Biology Lee Abrahamsen. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Not really, says Palin, who had her students study Commons in another context. For one, they found that food-serving areas are remarkably free of germs, “which we expected,” Palin says, “given their protocols.”

Second, they found that students tend to sit with the same friends each meal, reducing the blending and lowering the likelihood that Commons was a major reason for the spread of H1N1.

“Again, this led us to the idea that changing social patterns [due to the clinics] could really be the culprit in spreading H1N1 in 2009,” Greer says.

Palin and Greer stress that their findings are not prescriptive; they “cannot by themselves determine circumstances in which vaccine clinics should, or should not, be offered.”

Instead, their results are more observational, intended to identify “when a vaccine clinic apparently functions as a mixing event” that disrupts normal student traffic patterns, hastening the spread of an infection.

And if you still want advice for the current or any flu epidemic?

“Get vaccinated, wash your hands, and cover your mouth if you cough or sneeze,” says Palin.

She’s an aquatic toxicologist whose research interests include zebrafish, a familiar denizen of the family aquarium.

The freshwater zebrafish are valuable research specimens because they share a number of genes with humans.

An assistant professor of biology, Williams tells the Sun Journal that since zebrafish share similar genes with humans, the tiny species can help researchers in their search for clues about human diseases or afflictions.

For example, when one zebrafish gene is “knocked out,” or made inoperable, “the swim bladder does not inflate,” Williams tells Waterman. “In terms of human health, a lot of the same things that contribute to the swim bladder are analogous to our lungs.”

• View story in the Sun Journal, Jan. 16, 2013
• View Bates News story about Williams’ appointment

Asked about the impact of gender-specific toys, colors and activities, Kane tells the North Texas Public Media program Think that these choices “are not just about whether we train boys and girls to be different. It’s about whether we might be reproducing structures that systematically disadvantage girls and women.”

What’s more, Kane says, while we often believe that all gender differences in children are natural, many are actually the result of specific parental and societal choices and reinforcement.

In her interview with Southern California Public Radio’s Take Two, she says that by choosing gender-specific opportunities and surroundings for our children, “we’re constructing these categories of boys and girls and kind of convincing ourselves that it’s inevitable.”

But it’s not inevitable, she says.

Referring to the fact that many of the parents she interviewed in the study wanted to offer their children a wider range of possibilities but feared social judgments, Kane notes, “One of my hopes with this book is that…we may realize there are more of us who want to see some kind of relaxing of those constraints than we might otherwise realize, so in that sense it wouldn’t be so hard to swim upstream.”

That might mean choosing neutral colors and toys that “would be interesting to any small human being.”

• View story from Take Two of Southern California Public Radio, Oct. 25, 2012

• Listen to interview from Think of Dallas-based Public Media for North Texas, Oct. 30, 2012 

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.

Stephen Engel, assistant professor of politics. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Engel is a widely published expert on American party politics who coauthored the 2007 paper “Do Words Matter? Party Platforms and Ideological Change in Republican Politics.”

Conventional wisdom says that today’s candidate-driven campaigns make party platforms slightly more relevant than last week’s grocery store circular. In 1996, for example, then-presidential candidate Bob Dole famously admitted to not reading the Republican platform.

But as Engel tells Suzy Khimm, a contributor to the Wonkblog at The Washington Post, a platform is an opportunity for “the party base to assert its principles, figure out what its principles are, to show its own strength in the party.”

The 1860 Republican Party platform called the expansion of slavery a “crime against humanity.” Detail of a photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana.

In their paper, Engel and coauthor Julia Azari further argue that tracking changes in a party’s platform over time can explain a woefully under-studied aspect of party politics: how factional battles affect party ideology.

The paper notes that between 1976 and 1980, the Republican Party platform became more conservative. Support for the Equal Rights Amendment ended, and the platform moved to the right on abortion, among other changes.

That shift, Engel and Azari conclude, meant that “that certain ideological groups…prevailed over others within the party.”

In addition, the new platform sent a signal to certain interest groups that they could expect policy commitments from the party, say Engel and Azari. The two scholars also found that platform language and ideology were later used to “fuse the socially conservative agenda with other aspects of the conservative Republican agenda.”

In retrospect, Engel tells The Washington Post, the 1980 Republican platform was a key “document of the ideological change of the party.”

Firewalking and Religious Healing (Princeton University Press, 1989) by Dana Professor of Anthropology Loring "Danny" Danforth.

After 21 people in San Jose, Calif., burned themselves walking on hot coals during an event hosted by motivational speaker Tony Robbins on July 19, Slate asked Dana Professor of Anthropology Loring Danforth why.

Not why the 21 were burned, but why most of the 6,000 firewalkers weren’t.

The answer lies in Danforth’s book Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement (Princeton University Press, 1989).

The reason firewalkers don’t get burned, Danforth writes, has nothing to do with “religious beliefs, brain chemistry or positive mental attitudes. Instead, it relies on the distinction between temperature, on the one hand, and heat or thermal energy, on the other.”

This distinction, he says, “accounts for the obvious fact that we are not burned if we touch the hot air inside an oven, while we are burned if we touch an aluminum pan inside the same oven.”

He quotes UCLA scientists who explain that although coals may be fairly hot, because they are light and fluffy “they do not contain as much energy as we might expect from our common-sense notions of incandescent objects.”

Some people do get burned, as in San Jose. But that has to do with “how people step on the embers, how many steps they take, how tough their feet are and precisely where in the fire they step,” writes Danforth, who successfully completed a firewalk in December 1985 in Maine.

Aside from the science of firewalking — a minor focus of the book — Danforth explores the Anastenaria, a religious ritual performed in villages in northern Greece involving firewalking, trance and spirit possession.

He also explores the relationship between Greek and American firewalking rituals, briefly examining Tony Robbins’ then-innovative use firewalking in his self-help seminars.

Loring "Danny" Danforth, Dana Professor of Anthropology

Appearing at the height of the New Age movement, Danforth’s book nicely articulates an important theme in late 20th century American culture — the conflict between personal autonomy and social responsibility — that’s still being grappled with today.

Writes Danforth:

“The ritual therapy of the American Firewalking movement asserts the power of the self, a self that is free from the limits and constraints imposed by social responsibilities and moral obligations. Firewalking offers people a liberating experience of self-realization…in a world where great value is placed on individual freedom of expression and self-determination….”

However, Danforth cautions, what “makes such freedom and independence possible can lead very easily to a situation in which isolated and alienated private selves wander aimlessly in a world that has been emptied of any specific moral content.”

• View story from Slate, July 23, 2012

This depiction by illustrator Alfred Garth Jones (1872–1955) of the Peasants Revolt features a male mob, but Associate Professor of English Sylvia Federico's research proves that women stormed the castle, too.

Until somewhat recently, writes BBC News reporter Melissa Hogenboom, “the Peasants Revolt of 1381 is largely believed to have been led by a mob of rebel men.”

But contemporary research by Sylvia Federico, associate professor of English shows that women played an important role in “orchestrating violence against the government.”

Federico first published her findings in 2001 with the scholarly article “The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381” in the Journal of British Studies. The BBC sought her out for its story on June 14, the anniversary of the day 631 years ago when rebels dragged Lord Chancellor Simon of Sudbury from the Tower of London and beheaded him.

Indeed, when it comes to the 1381 revolt (over taxes, natch), women did “almost everything” that men did, Federico tells the BBC. “They were not shy to pick up staffs, sticks, and staves and wield them against perceived oppressors.”

“Not a legitimate topic of academic inquiry.”

Federico tells the Canadian Broadcasting Company radio program As It Happens (at the 20:40 mark of Part I) that she was “initially looking at a different aspect of the revolt” but “kept seeing women’s names” as she translated medieval Latin documents at the National Archives in Kew.

Associate Professor of English Sylvia Federico.

At first she just made a mental note of the female presence, but soon decided that a better story was in those names. That’s the nature of research, she says. “You set out looking for something else, and you bump into [a better story] by accident.”

Federico says the medieval women were right there for any researcher to find. But women are routinely “written out to the [historical] record,” she says, especially in the field of medieval history, where historically women have not been “considered a legitimate topic of academic inquiry.”

• Listen to interview from CBC As It Happens, June 18, 2012 (20:40 mark of Part I)
  

• View story from the BBC News, June 14, 2012.

Pianist Frank Glazer in 2006. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Frank Glazer, a pianist of international renown whose performing career dates back to the late 1920s, has released a book.

A Bates College artist in residence since 1980, the 97-year-old Glazer wrote the just-published A Philosophy of Artistic Performance (With Some Practical Suggestions). The book is a collection of aphorisms and advice that Glazer has been amassing since the 1930s.

The publisher is XPress Literary Publishing of Portland. Costing $16.99, the book is sold through the Bates College Store. For more information, please call 207-786-6121 or visit the bookstore website.

Glazer’s intention for the book is to offer younger pianists and other musicians a set of tools that will enable them, he explains, “to help them find and evolve their own feelings about the art in in music, instead of the mechanics of it.

“The mechanics of it anybody can teach, but the art is between the lines,” he says. “It’s invisible. Just like detectives use ultraviolet light to read invisible ink, our insight is the ultraviolet light we use to find the art.”

Among the aphorisms in the book:

“Play it as you understand it, / but try to understand it as it is.”

“Compete against a standard of excellence, / not against another person.”

“Flow does not mean fast, / and slow does not mean static; / Fast can be static, and/ slow can flow.”

Glazer traces the impulse behind the book to his studies with the influential pianist Artur Schnabel in the early 1930s. After a Schnabel performance, Glazer asked the older artist what he should study in his quest to attain real artistry.

“You won’t find it in books, only in life,” Schnabel replied.

“Now, more than three-quarters of a century later, I know the truth of Schnabel’s remark,” Glazer writes in his introduction. “One cannot know how the process will evolve, but what will help is an attitude that fosters the process: having an open mind, an abiding love of life and, not least, the capacity for work, be it ever so solitary.”

Glazer sees the book as a legacy to his students and other young musicians. But there are useful lessons here for nearly anybody doing creative work, Glazer adds.

“If I had had it when I was 19 years old, I’d have saved myself a lot of grief and questioning and wondering,” he says. “I’m glad, at long last, I lived long enough to see it happen.”

Glazer maintains an active performing schedule, with appearances at Bates, elsewhere in Maine and across the nation. Recently featured on the American Public Media’s popular program The Story, this Topsham resident has had a distinguished international career that includes numerous recordings, solo recitals and performances with orchestras and chamber ensembles.

With his wife, Ruth Glazer, he founded the Saco River Music Festival, held for many years in Cornish, Maine. A Philosophy of Artistic Performance is dedicated to Ruth, who died in 2006.