Senior Lecturer in Theater Kati Vecsey.

Katalin Vecsey, an expert in theatrical uses of voice and speech, offers a talk at Bates titled “The Different Voices of Meryl Streep” at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 12, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, the Kroepsch Lecture is open to the public at no cost. Refreshment service starts at 4:15. For more information, please call 207-786-6066.

Senior lecturer in theater at Bates, Vecsey received the 2012 Bates award for excellence in teaching, the Kroepsch Award. Bates students and recent graduates nominate faculty for the Kroepsch, and a committee of previous recipients selects the honoree.

Vecsey is expert in both the anatomy and the aesthetics of speech in performance. In addition to teaching courses exploring voice, speech and gender, she works with students in every Bates theatrical production and also directs plays.

Streep, who has won three Academy Awards and been nominated for many more, is one of the best actors of our time. Her use of voice, including her facility with diverse accents, is often cited.

“I am going to use her to explain what I do as a voice coach,” says Vecsey, “and how important voice is in establishing a character.”

For instance, in last year’s biopic “The Iron Lady,” for which Streep won her third Academy Award, the actress even captured the before-and-after speaking styles of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who took elocution lessons early in her career to learn to speak with more authority.

For her Oscar-winning performance in 1982′s “Sophia’s Choice,” in which Streep portrays a Polish immigrant, she “spent three months learning the Polish language,” says Vecsey.

“She then rehearsed her Polish accent in English in order to capture the natural rhythms of speech. She spoke all day in her new accent, so much that her own child did not recognize her voice. She also picked up some German.

“It’s a tremendous amount of work.”

But a convincing voice, of course, is only one part of constructing a character, Vecsey says. “Streep works very hard to find the character and it really shows. She is one of those actors who can do anything because she has the empathy to become the character, but doesn’t judge the character.

“That’s something I try to teach my students: It doesn’t matter who you play, you cannot judge the characters you are portraying. You have to accept them and find something that you love about them — otherwise people will not believe you on stage.”

A native of Budapest, Hungary, Vecsey was that nation’s first voice and speech teacher to be trained at the Hungarian Academy of Drama and Film (now the University of Drama and Film), completing her training in 1991. She came to Bates in 1996 and was promoted from lecturer to senior lecturer in 2011. Vecsey lives in Lewiston with her husband, John Painter, and their son, Kelen.

Praised by students for her creativity and clarity in conveying the complex technical and moral aspects of neuroscience, Assistant Professor of Psychology Nancy Koven is one of this year’s two recipients of the Bates College award for superior teaching.

Koven, a clinical neuropsychologist who studies connections between brain regions and cognitive and emotional functions, shares the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching with Sonja Pieck, assistant professor of environmental studies.

Pieck is on sabbatical during the winter semester and spring Short Term in 2011. Bates students and recent alumni nominate faculty for the Kroepsch award, and a committee of previous faculty Kroepsch recipients selects the honoree.

Koven researches the anatomical roots of such cognitive functions as working memory or self-evaluation, and affective functions like attention to one’s own emotions. Her particular focus is how these regions and processes are interrelated in people suffering from mental illness, such as bipolar disorder.

Koven, who joined the Bates faculty in 2006, teaches courses in abnormal psychology, cognitive neuroscience and affective neuroscience, among others.

“In neuroscience we have great technology, and it takes about all of your attention span just to keep up with it,” she says. “But the field lags behind on the front of translating that into the real world and dealing with real people.

“A big challenge for me in teaching is to get students to realize that that gap exists, and to know that it’s a gap they need to bridge — and also to realize that sometimes knowing the answers is not always what it takes to make someone better. You need to take the facts and situate them in the individual’s context.”

As a teacher, “I encourage my students to take what they’ve just learned, repackage it and teach it to somebody else,” Koven says. “When I walk through Pettengill at the end of the day and hear students teaching each other — saying, ‘Wait, back up, you forgot something’ — that makes me smile. They’ll tell me, ‘I knew I really knew it when I had to teach it to somebody else.’ ”

Storytelling, too, is a favored technique for imparting dense and complex concepts. “The best teachers I ever had were great storytellers,” Koven says. “I learn best when I situate myself almost as a reader trying to learn a story. And then when I teach, even though it’s science, I try to teach it like a story.”

When Scott Sinisgalli of the class of 2010, now a health policy research assistant at Mathematica Policy Research in Cambridge, Mass., took Koven’s “Cognitive Neuroscience” course, Koven explained the effects of diseases like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s by framing certain brain regions as characters trying to get messages to other regions.

“At the end of the story, she showed why each symptom occurred in the context of the chain of messages,” Sinisgalli says. “Her approach focuses on the fundamentals of what’s happening at each step, and how they affect the end result.”

For her honors thesis, a rigorous yearlong research project, senior psychology major Rachel DiStefano of Randolph Center, Vt., is investigating underlying causes of a condition in which an individual can’t identify or describe emotions. Koven is her adviser in this research into the affliction, called alexithymia.

“Her passion for research has been contagious,” says DiStefano, “and has made me appreciate the importance of psychological research on a broader level.”

Typically for Bates, the connections between Koven and her students endure past Commencement. Allison Earon pursued a master’s degree in public health after graduating, in 2009, and will graduate this spring from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory.

“Nancy’s role as my adviser has never stopped,” she says. “Now I’m applying to medical school and she just recently updated yet another letter for my application. My ongoing communication and friendship with Nancy continues to make me feel connected to Bates.”

Koven believes that her teaching simply mirrors what she sees around her at Bates. “It helps to have excellent colleagues. Everyone’s priority here is just to be the best teacher they can.”

James Hughes, Thomas Sowell Professor of Economics at Bates College, has received the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Hughes has taught at Bates since 1992. He teaches microeconomic theory and economics as it intersects with law, labor, health, the environment and gender. His areas of research include labor, health, and law and economics.

In connection with the award, Hughes gives a talk titled Wait a Minute — YOU Won the Teaching Award? at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 30, at the Edward S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. Sponsored by the Kroepsch Award Selection Committee, the college division chairs, Information and Library Services, and the dean of the faculty’s office, the event is open to the public at no charge.

“What just keeps me coming back to teaching is how much I learn through it,” Hughes says. “If there’s one big surprise that I’ve had in my career, it’s that, even though I might teach the same course over and over, not a semester goes by when I don’t find myself learning something new, learning how to explain something a little better, understanding what I’m teaching more deeply.”

“That’s what keeps it fresh and keeps it fun.”

Hughes, of Waterville, “is one of the brightest minds here,” says one of his students, senior economics major Daniela Jaeckel of White Plains, N.Y. “It’s not surprising that his classes are always hard to get into.”

“He has been the clearest professor I’ve had at Bates,” adds junior Brendan O’Brien of Mont Vernon, N.H. “He creates examples of ideas that students can relate to in order to keep their interest during lectures. And he manages to be incredibly humorous while conveying important points.

“Hughes challenges students to actually understand the material rather than just robotically spit it back.”

“There are a lot of great things about teaching in a small college environment like Bates,” says Hughes. “The best thing, I think, is that you’re teaching students who want to be there, who are highly motivated to learn, who have strong backgrounds in what you’re trying to teach.”

Hughes has conducted research on sex discrimination in labor markets in the U.S. and China. His research into fee-shifting on litigation outcomes culminated in an invitation to contribute an entry on the subject to The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law.

With his wife, Debra Barbezat, Mitchell Family Professor of Economics at Colby College, Hughes is researching the disappearance of African-American jockeys from thoroughbred racing at the turn of the 20th century.

“These jockeys were the most successful athletes in the most popular sport of the day in the late 19th century,” he says. “By 1905, African-Americans were all but gone from the sport. We want to identify these men, and learn how such a fully integrated sport was so rapidly and thoroughly segregated.”

“Teaching economics anywhere, you have to get across that this matters in people’s lives,” he says. “What I try to do with every concept, no matter how simple or obscure, is to try to make it clear that what we’re talking about comes up in the real world and that it makes a difference.

“It’s possible to use very simple economic tools to learn about very difficult problems, and if my students leave the classroom feeling that they can reflect on what’s going on in the world as an economist, even a little bit, then I think my teaching’s been quite successful.”

Hughes received his doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan in 1987, and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Boston University. Prior to coming to Bates, Hughes was on the faculty at Amherst College and The State University of New York at Albany.

Hughes is a blues fan, and builds guitars as a hobby. “I wish that I played beautifully and made ugly guitars, but it turns out I play poorly and build beautiful guitars,” he says. “So now I spend most of my free time building guitars, and not as much time as I used to playing them.”

Each year Bates students and recent alumni nominate Kroepsch Award recipients on the basis of their outstanding performance as teachers. Each year a committee of previous recipients selects the Kroepsch honoree from the list of nominees.

Bates College faculty members William Ambrose, of Poland, and Rebecca Herzig, of Lewiston, have been named this year’s recipients of the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Bates students and recent alumni nominate Kroepsch Award recipients on the basis of their outstanding performance as teachers.

Ambrose is an associate professor of biology. Herzig is associate professor in the women and gender studies program.

Ambrose’s research interests include issues affecting food supplies for organisms living on the Arctic Ocean floor and, of particular interest to Maine residents, the environmental impacts of commercial harvesting of marine worms such as bloodworms.

“The wonderful thing about Dr. Ambrose is, he facilitates our problem-solving,” wrote one of his nominators. “He allows us to find our own answers and I believe this is where some of the most important learning takes place.”

Ambrose has an A.B. degree from Princeton and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He started at Bates in 1994.

Herzig holds the only full-time faculty appointment in the Program in Women and Gender Studies at Bates. She teaches a range of interdisciplinary courses on science, technology and medicine, as well as core courses in the WGS program.

She is currently completing two books: Suffering for Science: Will, Reason, and Sacrifice in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers University Press) and The Nature of Difference: Readings in the History of Science, Race, and Sex, co-edited with Evelynn Hammonds and Abigail Bass (MIT Press).

“I always left class amazed at the insightful conclusions we had reached as a group, and at the intellectual integrity of our discussions,” a former student of Herzig’s told the Kroepsch selection committee. “This kind of collective academic achievement was possible because Professor Herzig had motivated us to read, write and think at a very high level.”

Herzig earned her B.A. in American cultural and environmental studies in 1993 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998, the year she arrived at Bates.

Kroepsch honorees are selected from the nominees by a committee of previous recipients. The annual award is funded by an endowment established in 1985 by the late Robert H. Kroepsch, a member of the Bates class of 1933.