With the exception of Hakimah Abdul-Fattah and Cameron Sheldon, who were abroad, the 2013 Fulbright grant recipients attended a May 13 reception at the home of Bates President Clayton Spencer. From left: Catherine Tuttle, Libby Egan, Tara Prasad, Marisa Mohrer, Spencer, Valerie Jarvis, Hansen Johnson, Nora Flanagan, Taryn O’Connell. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Known as a top producer of students receiving prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Grants, Bates this month will graduate 10 such students — a record number for the college.

Supporting an academic year of research and teaching in more than 155 countries outside the United States, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program is funded primarily by the U.S. Department of State and sends some 1,800 U.S. citizens abroad annually.

The 2013 Bates recipients comprise one student awarded a study/research grant, for a biology project in Norway; eight who have received English Teaching Assistantships for work in nations from France to Malaysia; and one recipient of a Fulbright Austria U.S. Teaching Assistantship. The assistantships support students who both pursue their own research and work to improve local students’ English and knowledge of the United States.

Meet Bates’ 2013 Fulbright recipients:

• Hakimah Abdul-Fattah of Holland, Pa. An anthropology major and French minor, she received an English Teaching Assistantship for work in France.
• Emily “Libby” Egan of Harvard, Mass. A sociology major and education minor, she received an English Teaching Assistantship for work in Bulgaria.
• Nora Hanagan of Singapore. A politics major and education minor, she received an English Teaching Assistantship for work in Turkey.
• Valerie Jarvis of Granville, Mass. A major in biological chemistry with a minor in Spanish, she received an English Teaching Assistantship for work in Malaysia.
• Hansen Johnson of Stowe, Vt. A biology major and music minor, he received a research assistantship for work in Norway.
• Marisa Mohrer of Guilford, Conn. A psychology major and minor in German, she received a Fulbright Austria U.S. Teaching Assistantship.
• Taryn O’Connell of Georgetown, Mass. A major in environmental studies and minor in history, O’Connell was awarded an English Teaching Assistantship for work in Malaysia.
• Tara Prasad of Lincoln, R.I. A major in biological chemistry and minor in education, Prasad received an English Teaching Assistantship for work in South Korea.
• Cameron Sheldon of Canton, Conn. A politics major and Spanish minor, Sheldon received an English Teaching Assistantship for work in Armenia.
• Catherine Tuttle of Pittsford, N.Y. A double major in Spanish and English, Tuttle was awarded an English Teaching Assistantship for work in Spain.

Kinney, a Bates trustee for 27 years, including 17 as chair, was considered a creative entrepreneur and model corporate leader who, when appointed CEO of General Mills in 1973, was praised for his “good, gutsy Maine business sense” by his predecessor.

As a corporate leader, he said that he took the advice of a business mentor back in Bar Harbor, Maine, by throwing himself into service to the nonprofit world, especially to Bates.

As Kinney received a Bates honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1985, then-President Hedley Reynolds lauded him for being “always thoughtful for the needs of others, always ready to serve, always ready with a helping hand.”

Born in Burnham, Maine, and raised in Pittsfield, Kinney was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate who earned money for college by working and living in the home of Lewiston mill industrialist Scott Libbey Sr.

Kinney received $500 in scholarships from Bates. At the time of his death, he was the college’s most generous living donor.

He also received about $500 in scholarship support from Bates, prompting Kinney to tell Dean of the College Harry Rowe, at graduation, that “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’ll try to pay you back the scholarship money.”

At the time of his death, he was the college’s most generous living donor.

In 1942 while doing a Works Projects Administration study along the Maine coast, Kinney approached Matthew Highlands, a legendary University of Maine food scientist, with a crab question. Crabs could be had for a penny each — lobstermen were just tossing them from their traps — so could anything be done with them?

“You can cook them, process them and put them in hermetically sealed cans,” Highlands said. With World War II interrupting the supply of crab meat from Japan, the demand was rising.

Kinney learned the business at home, a few cans at a time. By the 1950s his North Atlantic Packing Co. was a $2 million-a-year business selling canned crab and other products and employing 400 in Bar Harbor.

Kinney then joined Gorton’s. For a society more and more eager for convenience, Kinney again used emerging food technology to lead Gorton’s to expand its frozen, ready-to-cook fish products, including the iconic fish stick and, by the 1960s, the fish for McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish.

Under Kinney, Gorton’s earnings went from $122,000 on sales of $12.1 million in 1958 to $1.44 million on sales of $71.9 million in 1968.

In 1973, he took the helm of General Mills, which had acquired Gorton’s in 1968. He served as CEO of IDS Mutual Fund Group in the 1980s.

A “compelling example that commitment to the common weal is the indelible mark of liberal learning.”

At Commencement 1985, when he received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Bates, then-Dean of the College Carl Benton Straub praised Kinney for “his compelling example that commitment to the common weal is the indelible mark of liberal learning.”

In 2008, Kinney received the college’s Benjamin Elijah Mays Medal, awarded for distinguished service to Bates and the larger community worldwide, and in 2005 he was a charter inductee into the Benjamin Bates Society, an honor accorded the college’s leading philanthropists.

Kinney provided major support for Pettengill Hall (1999), was instrumental in securing foundation grant funding for the Olin Arts Center (1986) and established an endowed professorship in history and a scholarship fund.

In Minnesota, Kinney served as a director of the Minnesota Symphony, the Guthrie Theater and the YMCA, among many others.

The commitment that I’ve had, emotionally and monetarily, was focused on Bates.”

Elsewhere in Maine, his support and service went many nonprofits, including the Bangor Theological Seminary, Maine Central Institute, Friends of Acadia National Park and The Jackson Laboratory. His Maine corporate board service included Hannaford Bros. Co., IDEXX Laboratories and Unum.

When Kinney offered his oral history to Bates’ Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library in 2005, he explained how a business mentor in Bar Harbor, a banker, encouraged him to make one or two meaningful commitments to organizations outside of business.

“The commitment that I’ve had, emotionally and monetarily, was focused on Bates,” Kinney said.

Kinney is also credited with significant reform of the Bates Board of Trustees in the 1980s when he introduced a resolution that mandated trustee retirement at age 70.

As he said in his oral history, “As smart as some people are when they’re 75 or 80 or whatever they may be…on the average you’ve got to have younger people. They stimulate the thinking…you want to renew, you need new blood.”

With support from the late U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie ’36, among other trustees, the resolution was approved.

“Youth will keep the organization healthy,” said Kinney, who backed up that idea by mentoring at least two generations of young business leaders in Maine.

Kinney is survived by his wife, Margaret (Margee) Kinney; daughters Jeanie Small and Isabella Keating; stepdaughter Lucy Thatcher Penfield; stepson Ford Thatcher; seven grandchildren, including Samantha Kinney Leone ’93; two step- grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; and his sister, Elizabeth Kinney Jones ’44. He was predeceased by his son, E. Robert Kinney Jr. ’70, who is survived by his widow, Sally Greenlaw Kinney ’69.

His memorial service is at 4 p.m. on Friday May 17 at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis.

Bates expects to award bachelor’s degrees to approximately 450 students, representing 35 U.S. states and 28 countries, on May 26. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Gary Hirshberg, prominent internationally in the organic food movement as co-founder and chairman of the organic yogurt producer Stonyfield Farm, will deliver the Commencement address and receive an honorary degree.

During Commencement, which begins at 10 a.m. on the Historic Quad and will be livestreamed at bates.edu/live, the college will also confer honorary degrees on:

• William Cronon, eminent scholar and teacher in the field of environmental history whose writings have shaped public discourse about nature, wilderness preservation and the liberal arts;
• Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Bates’ seventh president, scholar of Middle English literature and now executive director of the Center for Talented Youth at The Johns Hopkins University;
• Vivian W. Pinn, M.D., distinguished physician and pioneering leader and mentor at the National Institutes of Health who fought for greater gender equity in all realms of women’s health, medicine and research.

Clayton Spencer, concluding her first year as president of Bates, will confer the honorary degrees.

“It is a profound honor to recognize the accomplishments of these four distinguished leaders and welcome them to our alumni ranks,” said Spencer. “In their lives and work, they exemplify the possibilities that await our graduates, and they show us how the values that define the Bates experience can shape, and take shape in, the world.”

Commencement concludes the undergraduate careers of the 450 members of the Bates Class of 2013, representing 35 U.S. states and 28 countries.

More about the 2013 honorands

William Cronon

William Cronon, Doctor of Letters

A leading American scholar and teacher in the field of environmental history who is a powerful defender of liberal education and academic freedom, William Cronon is a prize-winning author whose books and articles are, in the words of The New York Times, “strikingly literary” generators of “ideas that have repeatedly shaken up the ways people think about nature.” As a thought leader in a field that emerged in the 1960s alongside the environmental movement, Cronon pursues the ideal that the study of history should pay close attention “not just to human beings but to all our companions on this planet…to say nothing of the ecosystems and climates and geophysical processes without which we cannot hope to understand the wider contexts within which human history unfolds.”

William Cronon is a leading American scholar and teacher in the field of environmental history and a powerful defender of liberal education and academic freedom.

A Rhodes scholar, Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, Cronon’s landmark publications include 1983’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, published in 1991. His provocative 1995 article, “The Trouble with Wilderness” — first published in abridged form in The New York Times Magazine and later in full form in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature — argued that U.S. environmentalism was overly focused on wilderness preservation, thus failing to safeguard the more accessible natural world of everyday human life.

At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where Cronon holds the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professorship of History, Geography and Environmental Studies, he has strengthened the undergraduate honors program by focusing it more on “engagement with the life of the mind, empowerment of undergraduates to do real and important work, and involvement in community,” in the words of Richard White of Stanford University. In 2011, after his scholarly criticism of partisan legislation in Wisconsin prompted a politically motivated request for his email records, Cronon’s erudite response in his blog, Scholar as Citizen, was saluted by The New Yorker for its great “civil courage.” The immediate past president of the American Historical Association, Cronon holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and doctorates from Oxford and Yale universities. Cronon’s son Jeremy is a member of the Bates Class of 2013.

Elaine Tuttle Hansen

Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Doctor of Letters

“Our essential task is to be alive to change,” said former Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen in her inaugural address. As the college’s seventh president, from 2002 to 2011, Hansen led Bates through a decade of change, both predicted and unforeseen — from the Endowing Our Values fundraising campaign, the largest in the college’s history, to laying the basis for innovative programs that effectively doubled the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds.

Elaine Tuttle Hansen was praised for executing the complex task of “creating the time and means to identify shared goals.”

In the classic teacher-scholar model of fostering listening and questioning, Hansen early in her tenure engaged the campus in strategic planning efforts that served, as she once said, to “leverage uncertainty and respond creatively to new and emerging information and opportunity.” What followed was the college’s first Campus Facilities Master Plan, which led to the construction of a new dining Commons, a College Street residence hall, and Alumni Walk; the award-winning conversions of historic Hedge and Roger Williams halls into academic centers; and the renovation of Garcelon Field.

Later in the decade, Hansen issued Choices for Bates, the result of a collaborative college-wide planning effort that identified strategic areas of focus including the Arts Collaborative, an integrated introductory science and math curriculum, a Learning Commons and the Diversity in Excellence project. Praised by the Board of Trustees in 2011 for executing the complex task of “creating the time and means to identify shared goals,” Hansen initiated additional efforts that allowed Bates, during the global economic recession, to maintain its excellence in academics, financial aid and student life while curtailing costs. A trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and recipient of honorary degrees from Haverford and Morehouse Colleges, Hansen now leads the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, where she remains at the center of the national discussion of higher education aspirations and access. A distinguished scholar of feminist and Middle English literature and the author of three books, Hansen earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Mount Holyoke College and master’s and doctoral degrees in English literature from the University of Minnesota and University of Washington, respectively.

Gary Hirshberg

Gary Hirshberg, Doctor of Humane Letters

As a global leader of the organic food movement, Gary Hirshberg, co-founder and chairman of Stonyfield Farm, exemplifies how to marry sustainability and corporate success. Beginning in 1983, Hirshberg has grown his company from a seven-cow organic farming school to an operation topping $360 million in annual sales, making Stonyfield the largest organic yogurt producer in the world.

“Hirshberg’s message is simple,” said Sierra magazine in 2007. “Reducing a company’s environmental impact is good for the bottom line.”

The company is considered a model of corporate environmental consciousness: becoming the first U.S. manufacturer, in 1995, to offset 100 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions; developing environmentally friendly packaging; and treating waste with an anaerobic digester that runs partly off the biogas it produces. “Hirshberg’s message is simple,” said Sierra magazine in 2007. “Reducing a company’s environmental impact is good for the bottom line.” Through partnerships with industry giants and major retail chains like Wal-Mart, Hirshberg, the author of Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World, proved that organic and sustainable food options could be brought to the masses at a profit. “When we run an item past the supermarket scanner,” he argues, “we’re voting — for local or not, for organic or not.” That mantra — and a compelling appearance in the acclaimed 2009 documentary Food, Inc. — has helped Hirshberg take the sustainable food debate to the boardroom and dinner tables across the country.

A 1972 graduate of Hampshire College, Hirshberg has received numerous awards for corporate and environmental leadership, including a 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and has served on a variety of nonprofit and corporate boards. In 2011, he was appointed to the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations by President Barack Obama. He currently writes on food and environmental issues for The Huffington Post, and is chairman and founding partner of Just Label It, a national campaign for a federal requirement to label genetically modified foods. He is married to writer Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, and they have three children, including Ethan Hirshberg, a member of the Bates Class of 2013.

Vivian Pinn, M.D.

Vivian W. Pinn, M.D., Doctor of Science

With the medical establishment under increasing criticism for its shortsighted treatment of women’s health, the National Institutes of Health in 1991 chose exactly the right person to confront the problem: Vivian W. Pinn. She became the first director of the NIH’s new Office of Research on Women’s Health, designed to advance the fair representation of women in research as both subjects and practitioners. In her 20 years in the post, Pinn worked to expand women’s health research beyond the traditional foci on breast and reproductive health and to bring more women and minorities into medicine and medical leadership.

Vivian Pinn worked to expand women’s health research and to bring more women and minorities into medicine and medical leadership.

Pinn’s accomplishments at the NIH culminated a lifelong passion for advancing equality in all aspects of health care. Daughter of an African American family in segregated Virginia, Pinn set her sights on medicine at the age of 4. With one grandparent suffering from cancer and another from diabetes, she noticed that “whenever the doctor came, they were always better afterwards, and I liked that,” Pinn has said. Her resolve to enter medicine was galvanized by her mother’s death, caused by cancer that went undiagnosed because the doctors did not take seriously the complaints of a black woman.

Pinn graduated from Wellesley College in 1962, where she was one of four black women in her class. She went on to the University of Virginia School of Medicine, where she was the only woman in her class and the only minority student. She was associate professor of pathology and assistant dean of student affairs at Tufts University School of Medicine before joining the faculty at Howard University College of Medicine, where she became the third woman in the United States to chair an academic department of pathology. Among her many honors, Pinn is the namesake of an advisory college for medical students at the University of Virginia, and received the Dean’s Medal from the Tufts University School of Medicine in 2011 for her work in recruiting students of color, expanding financial aid and mentoring medical students. She is senior scientist emerita at the Fogarty International Center of the NIH.

Davis Project for Peace recipients Spencer Collet ’13 and James LePage ’13. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

Initiatives to foster Israeli-Palestinian dialogue through the Web and nurture collaborative conversations in a recently liberalized Myanmar have garnered Davis Projects for Peace awards for three Bates students.

The $10,000 awards support international projects that college students undertake to “bring new thinking to the prospects of peace in the world,” in the words of philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis. Learn more.

Two seniors, Spencer Collet of Leawood, Kan., and James LePage of Cumberland, Maine, received the award for “Tweets for Peace,” their project using the Internet to enhance communication between Israeli and Palestinian youth. The pair will work with former participants in the Seeds of Peace conflict resolution program that takes place every summer in Otisfield, Maine.

2013 Davis Project for Peace recipient Aung Myint ’14. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

Aung Myint, a junior from Yangon, Myanmar, received his award for “Minorities, Monasteries, and Conversations,” a reading-discussion program to help build the capacity for critical judgment and constructive dialogue among ethnic minorities in his native country. Using Burmese translations of English texts from the Maryland-based Touchstones Discussion Project, Myint will coordinate gatherings in Buddhist monasteries in Yangon.

Learn more about the Bates students’ Projects for Peace:

• Tweets for Peace
• Minorities, Monasteries, and Conversations

A Boston police officer shouts instructions on Boylston Street in Boston on April 15, 2013. Photograph by Bates photographer Mike Bradley, who was at the marathon earlier in the day and returned to cover the aftermath for a New York City media outlet.

Marcus was reporting on the race when the bombs transformed Boylston Street just before 3 p.m. on April 15.

After the bombing, runners weren’t able to collect belongings that had been transported back to Boston from the race start in Hopkinton. By evening on April 15, thousands of yellow plastic bags with runners’ gear had been collected near the finish line, including this pile on Berkeley Street. Photograph by Mike Bradley/Bates College.

A veteran of the Boston Marathon himself, Marcus also reports on the group of nearly 300 runners who gathered in East Cambridge for a group run the next day. He writes:

“In a city still shell-shocked by the Boston Marathon bombings, and with just a few hours’ notice on social media and by word of mouth, some 270 runners answered the call put out by a local running club whose weekly get-togethers at the Courtside, a beloved dive bar, usually attract 30.”

“Boston won’t stop running.”

The group’s route that evening covered both sides of the Charles River and raised $3,000 for victim relief.

One of the organizers, P.J. Aspesi, tells Marcus that “we tried to figure out how we could come together afterward and help, and show everybody that Boston won’t stop running.”

• Read the Esquire story from April 15, 2013.
• Read the Esquire story from April 17, 2013.
• Read the Runner’s World story from April 17, 2013.

Bates’ BOLD alumni increased their total number of March Mania gifts by 63 percent over last year.

With 1,448 donations to the Bates Fund, the college’s alumni of the 10 youngest classes not only  beat the competition, they earned a $25,000 bonus for the college, bringing their total March gift to $88,205.

March Mania is the annual giving challenge that pits young alumni from four NESCAC schools against one another to see which college can rack up the most gifts to their respective annual funds in one month. This year, Bates competed against Colby (last year’s champions), Connecticut College and Trinity.

To sweeten the deal, an anonymous Bates trustee promised a $25,000 bonus to the Bates Fund if the young alumni, dubbed “BOLD” (Bobcats Of the Last Decade), reached 1,200 gifts.

The Bobcats pounced to an early lead, holding steady through the April 1st giving deadline. Bates Fund volunteer Doug Ray ’10 kept the momentum going through a promotional video and social media campaign.

“It’s really good to see digital media being adopted” for annual giving “on such a wide scale,” says Ray. “If one person posts on Facebook, that post may reach a few hundred people they know, whereas a phone call or an email really only reaches one person.

“These new forms of communication can really change the game.”

After losing last year to Colby by 63 gifts, a dedicated group of BOLD alumni volunteers — 165 in all — reached out to friends and classmates, encouraging them to give any gift, any size to reach the participation goal.

In a turn of poetic justice, current Bates seniors rallied to defeat Colby in their own special Class of 2013 March Mania competition. For one week in March, the two colleges competed to see who could garner the most senior gifts.

Twenty-nine percent of Bates seniors made gifts compared with Colby’s six percent, bringing Bates’ total Senior Gift participation for the year to 83 percent.

• View the Report of Giving for March Mania 2013.

Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Julia Foxworth ’13 of New York City, at right, spent much of April 5 “bombing” a bench on Alumni Walk — yarn bombing, that is.

Aka “guerrilla knitting” and “grandma graffiti,” yarn bombing is a genre of street art designed to raise awareness of the community environment, and inspire conversation and collaboration. Seeking to bring color and warmth to a concrete bench during a time of year that’s drab, chilly and stressful (finals are next week), Foxworth crocheted the piece with the help of 15 collaborators.

Later in the afternoon, other students were expected to celebrate the piece with ukulele playing, cupcakes, poetry, guerrilla knitting and other creative expressions. “The more color, the more collaborators, the better,” said Foxworth, shown above with classmate and fellow crocheter John Sowles. “The piece reflects the diversity of Bates.”

The piece was welcomed with simultaneous cries of “That’s so cool!” from passers-by. With the guidance of associate professor Pamela Johnson, art and visual culture major Foxworth undertook this project as an independent study complementary to her art history thesis. After Bates, Foxworth is off to a master’s program in arts administration at Columbia.

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.”

Gunnar Manchester ’15 is Valentine Crambagge in the 17th-century comedy, performed at Bates March 21-24. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

An uproarious 17th-century comedy that explores issues of marriage and gender while satirizing theatrical conventions of its time, The Swaggering Damsel appears in Bates College performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, March 21-23, and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 24, in Gannett Theater, 305 College St.

Admission is free, but reservations are recommended. For more information, please call 207-786-6161.

A play marked by “cross-dressing, sexual shenanigans, uppity servants and witty women,” in the words of one scholar, English playwright Robert Chamberlain’s 1640 The Swaggering Damsel reflects the preoccupations of a nation transitioning from a royal to a mercantile society.

Plotlines explore the financial, moral and social conditions that encumbered romance and marriage in Chamberlain’s time. The primary plot concerns a pair of lovers, Sabina and Valentine, whose affair encounters a series of roadblocks that they can overcome only after each has spent some time in the other’s shoes.

Portraying Valentine is Gunnar Manchester, a sophomore from Rehoboth, Mass. Sabina is played by Sarah Weinshal, a first-year student from Westport, Conn. All told, 10 Bates students are performing in the piece and one serves as stage manager.

Visiting Assistant Professor of English Matteo Pangallo ’03 directs “The Swaggering Damsel.” Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

The play has been performed rarely, if at all, since the 17th century, says director Matteo Pangallo, a visiting assistant professor of English and member of the Bates class of 2003. “This is a rediscovery” akin to a world premiere, he says.

Chamberlain was an amateur playwright, so Swaggering Damsel has always been a play peripheral to the theatrical and scholarly canon, Pangallo explains. “Chamberlain’s profession was joke-book writing, and Swaggering Damsel is a joke in five acts.”

He continues, “If we look at other romantic comedies from that period, we’ll get a sense of what the professional theater industry thought the audience wanted.” But Swaggering Damsel, instead, directly reflects the interests and perspective of an audience member.

“It’s not a conventional English Renaissance comedy,” Pangallo says. “Instead, it seems to lampoon and mock all the character types and clichéd plot twists that the theater of that era was churning out en masse.”

The Bates production jacks that tendency up a notch, reveling in an over-the-top theatricality. “We place a great deal of emphasis on the fact that these are actors taking on roles, and their roles are exaggerated,” says Pangallo.

Valentine is a parody of traditional romantic heroes (to the extent that he shares a name, as well as some plot points, with a character in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona — produced at Bates just weeks before Damsel).

“Valentine’s speeches are way overblown, he spouts really bad poetry that he thinks is good poetry, he threatens to kill himself because he can’t have the woman of his dreams. All the characters on stage know that he is ridiculous, and the audience knows too.”

For the student performers and audiences alike, Pangallo says, The Swaggering Damsel offers a fresh take on a theatrical era dominated by Shakespeare — who, he points out, was in many ways atypical of English Renaissance playwrights.

“When you’re playing Hamlet, and you get to the ‘to be or not to be’ speech, you look out into the audience and see all the mouths flapping because everybody is saying it along with you. And the degree of pressure that creates to do something new can sometimes have negative effects on actors, because they start pursuing novelty for the sake of novelty.

“You don’t have that when you do a production of The Swaggering Damsel because it is novel. Its freshness, I think, is a virtue.”

Hiroya Miura conducts the Bates College Orchestra. Photograph: Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Three Bates seniors are featured as instrumental soloists in works by Franz Strauss, Max Bruch and Wolfgang Mozart as the Bates College Orchestra performs at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 9, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission is free, but tickets are required. To reserve, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The Bates orchestra is conducted by Hiroya Miura, associate professor of music. The March 9 program comprises five works:

Edvard Grieg’s music for Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1;

the first movement of Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 1, featuring hornist Molly Bruzzese of West Hartford, Conn.;

Bruch’s Romance for Viola and Orchestra, with Jessica Cooper of Unionville, Conn., as soloist;

the first movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major (K. 622), showcasing clarinetist Catherine Tuttle of Pittsford, N.Y.;

and Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye (“Mother Goose Suite”).

“We hosted a concerto competition this year,” Miura explains, “and with the high level of musicianship these three students showed, I was glad to program not just one, but three varied movements with three soloists.”

The program is further distinguished by its literary connections, Miura points out. Grieg originally wrote the Peer Gynt material in 1875 as incidental music for Ibsen’s play, while Ravel’s 1910 Mother Goose Suite was a response to children’s stories by Mother Goose Tales author Charles Perrault and others.

“The Ravel and Grieg are phantasmagorical, colorful suites,” Miura says. “Perrault wrote Ma mère l’oye for his own children, but some of the stories are quite poignant with a great sense of irony—like many of these children’s fables are.

“Grieg shares that humor and irony, but more blatantly, and both composers treated these stories masterfully while carefully balancing the sense of fantasy and ironic humor.”

Franz Strauss, father of the better-known composer Richard, was celebrated as a master of the horn. The first of his two concertos for the instrument, this work in C minor was premiered by the composer in 1865.

Bruch is known as a composer in the German Romantic vein exemplified by Brahms. He published his Romance for Viola and Orchestra in F major (Op. 85), one of the few Romantic-era compositions with viola as lead instrument, in 1911.

A standard audition piece for clarinetists, the first movement of the Mozart concerto is an allegro. Written in 1791 and one of the composer’s last compositions, the concerto as a whole is characterized by the delicacy of the conversation between soloist and orchestra.