A British holography artist and a member of the Bates College physics faculty offer lectures relating to the current Bates College Museum of Art holography exhibition, The Body Holographic: Harriet Casdin-Silver, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 10, in Room 104, Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

The speakers are Pearl John, of London, whose talk is titled The Art of Holography; and Hong Lin, professor of physics, whose talk is titled The Physics Behind a Hologram. The event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6158.John uses large-format holography as a means of examining self-identity. She combines holographic images with text, video and photography to reach toward meanings that exist at the boundaries between words and images, and between artist and viewer. John’s holograms and installations have appeared in Japan, Europe and throughout the United States. She currently teaches laser technology in the United Kingdom.

Hong Lin has been at Bates since 1991. Her research involves crystals that diffract light in different directions, and particularly potential mechanisms for stabilizing these diffractions, which can affect the operation of optical devices.

The Body Holographic, a collection of work by a pioneering figure in the art of holography, runs through March 19. The first American artist to develop a body of holographic work, Casdin-Silver began working in holograms — flat images that appear to represent objects three-dimensionally — in 1968. As the title indicates, The Body Holographic concentrates on the human form and its potential as a site of psychological, sexual and spiritual energy.

The exhibition is made possible by the Synergy Fund, a gift to the museum to explore ideas across disciplines through the arts. The gift is helping the museum and the college to look more creatively at how exhibitions are curated, experienced and communicated to museum audiences.

Showing simultaneously are Between Science and Art, comprising botanical X-ray photographs by contemporary Ohio artist Judith K. McMillan, and New Acquisitions: Local and Global Contemporary Photography, featuring artists from Maine, China and Africa.

A member of the Maine Art Museum Trail, the Bates College Museum of Art is open to the public at no charge. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. School groups and tours are welcome; please call 207-786-8302 to schedule.

More information is available at the museum’s Web site.

Political Scientist Mark A. Kessler has been promoted to the rank of full professor. A member of the Bates faculty since 1983, Kessler co-authored The Play of Power: An Introduction to American Government (St. Martin’s Press: 1996), a textbook concerned with the integration of women and minorities into the U.S. government and political system. Kessler, who also wrote Legal Services for the Poor (Greenwood: 1987), received dual honors from the Northeast American Political Science Association for his paper, “Legal Mobilization for Social Reform: Power and the Politics of Agenda Setting.” It was judged the best paper presented at the organization’s 1991 meeting and best paper evaluated in the American government section panels.

Kessler, who specializes in American politics, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and master’s and doctoral degrees from the Pennsylvania State University.

Aviva Chomsky, history, is the author of West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 (Louisiana State University Press, 1995). She received a Johns Hopkins University Cuban Studies Travel Grant in 1994 and spent four months in Cuba researching migrant workers in the sugar industry at the turn of the century. She teaches an on-site, month-long course on the origins of the Cuban revolution and is the author of Cuba: What the New York Times Won’t Tell You, published in The Dissident in 1995. Chomsky, who earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, joined the Bates faculty in 1990.

Matthew J. Côté, chemistry, has been published in a number of professional journals. In 1992, he was awarded a $29,500 grant from The Research Corp. for a project titled, “Scanning tunnelling optical microscopy of transparent platinum cluster films.” His visiting postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, involved using electrochemical scanning tunneling microscopy to study redox reactions of silver electrodes with atomic resolution. He received a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University and a doctoral degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Côté began teaching at Bates in 1991.

Hong Lin, physics, has researched nonlinear dynamics due to interaction among transverse modes of a laser and eliminating distortion in image transmission via four-wave mixing and phase conjugation. Her research has been published in “Optics Communications,” “Acta Optica Sinica,” and “Acta Physica Sinica.” She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China and a doctoral degree from Bryn Mawr College. Lin joined the Bates faculty in 1991.

Shuhui Yang, Chinese, specializes in Chinese vernacular fiction. He has written a critical essay titled “The Fear of Moral Failure: Self-Parody in Lu Xun’s Fiction” and co-translated Selected Chinese Songs (Beijing: People’s Music, 1983). He has been a professor of English at Fudan University in China, and received the school’s Best Teacher Award in 1983. He is a member of the American Association of Chinese Comparative Literature and the Association for Asian Studies. Yang received a bachelor’s degree from Fudan University and master’s and doctoral degrees from Washington University. He joined the Bates faculty in 1991.