UVM NOTEBOOK
photo by Sally McCay
The way we wore
Stage magic of costuming built on painstaking research
Room 210 in the Royall Tyler Theatre has vanilla-bland walls, thin strips of sunlight straining through the windows. The only splashes of color are from the assorted Gatorade and Nalgene bottles and Green Mountain Coffee cups set in front of the fifteen or so students. It’s not the bright, animated scene—bolts of gold and scarlet fabric unfurled?—you might expect to find in a class titled “Fundamentals of Costuming.” The quote written on the dusty chalkboard isn’t from Bob Fosse, but Teddy Roosevelt. And the only sound, beyond the crackling of tracing paper and the occasional squeak of a repositioned chair, is Professor Martin Thaler.
Like the classroom, Thaler’s advice on costume design is not quite what you expect. “Read the play,” urges the professor of theatre, referring to the students’ booklets of Arsenic and Old Lace. “Read it again. And read it until you know it.”
For twenty-five years, Martin Thaler has been dressing UVM up for hundreds of productions from The Maid of Judah to The Toys Take Over Christmas. But in order to share the secrets of the stage with students, the Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award winner prefers to dress down. It’s not only Thaler’s attire—blue jeans and a blue polo shirt—that goes back to the basics, but also his approach.
“There’s so much research that goes into it,” says Kate Godkin, a junior theatre major who reports that Thaler’s teaching has given her the confidence to draw and paint, skills she never thought she could learn. “He’s really encouraging—one step at a time.”
Thaler’s first significant steps into theater were as a teenager back in Ridgefield, New Jersey. When school let out, he’d take the ten-minute bus trip to Manhattan with five dollars for a matinee and ten for an evening show. “I was in awe of it all,” says Thaler. “I loved musicals and was just amazed at the art and craft. It’s changed over the years, but the thing that’s always stayed the same is the sense of awe in the final product.”
Decades later, Thaler continues to bring that abiding sense of awe and his own experiences with the stage into the classroom at UVM. His credits include working with the Muppets in New York and designing Shogun costumes at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to millinery at the Theatre by the Sea in Matunuck, Rhode Island, and styling for Wall $treet Week on Maryland Public Television.
Last year, Thaler brought his students to New York City to work with an off-Broadway director. “The success of the teacher is really what the students are doing, and that was a day where it was really wonderful to see them take such pride in the work they were doing,” says Thaler. “It gave them a sense of value in their work and the whole process of collaboration.”
Inside Room 210, a student reads aloud the Roosevelt quote: “In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” Thaler threads this sentiment into his own emphasis on the importance of research in costume design, holding up an old Saturday Evening Post illustrating T.R. The lecture unfurls into a discussion of Boris Karloff, McCall patterns, heretical directors, and moldy basements. “Anybody know what a solar toupee looks like?” asks Thaler.
This is where the color and drama—the expected elements— come into Thaler’s teaching. They come from his own passion for the story behind the story, and they animate the students just as watercolors on canvas or costumes on an actor would.
For Thaler, costume design represents a knitting together of several liberal arts fields: psychology, sociology, economics, religion, and more. “To me, it’s a treasure hunt,” he says. “It’s all about blending the history and research and the imagination of theatre into the construction and design process. And you’re finding a way to express your own vision through somebody else’s.”
—Sarah TuffTop teachers
Professor Martin Thaler is one of four faculty selected as this year’s recipients of UVM’s Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award. He is joined by Emily Bernard, associate professor of English; Mandar Dewoolkar, assistant professor of engineering; and Robert Erickson, senior lecturer in computer science.
The awards memorialize Robert H. and Ruth M. Kroepsch and her parents, Walter C. and Mary L. Maurice. Robert Kroepsch served as registrar and dean of administration at UVM from 1946-56. His wife, Ruth, graduated from UVM in 1938 and her father, Walter Maurice, graduated from UVM in 1909. All four were teachers.
Emily Bernard, a scholar of African-American literature, has published two well-received books, Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship and Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. She has used the former in her classes to help students plumb their own relationships and attitudes about race. “Good writing is life-saving,” Bernard says. “I’m the person I am today because of what I have read.”
Mandar Dewoolkar’s geotechnical de-sign class includes semester-long service- learning projects in which students use historic structures in Vermont to analyze various engineering problems. They collaborate with community partners from site visits to final presentations, which range beyond engineering to take in historic preservation, societal needs, and economic factors.
Very near zero
Physics of the deepest freeze
Dennis Clougherty, UVM professor of physics, knows a lot about what happens when the temperature plunges toward zero. He’s not talking about a tough day on the ski slope. He’s interested in what happens near real zero, as in minus 459.67 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. Down there, say at a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, things get strange.
He’s been involved in theoretical research of ultracold atoms since 1990, when, together with Nobel prize-winner Walter Kohn, he helped shed light on a puzzle: how can ultracold atoms be repelled from surfaces even though the fundamental interaction is attractive? “The effect is known as quantum reflection,” Clougherty explains, since the quantum wave properties of matter don’t allow very cold atoms to get close enough to a surface to stick. “I have also made contributions to research in superconductivity, another effect that is seen at low temperatures,” he says.
That’s why he was asked to serve as scientific advisor to a new two-part NOVA television special, “Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold,” based on a book by Tom Shachtman. The PBS program aired this January.
“My role as scientific expert was primarily in education and promotion of the program,” he says. For example, he gave about eighty students from Edmunds Middle School in Burlington an on-campus demonstration of the effects of liquid nitrogen in November, including shattering tennis balls and levitating superconducting magnets.
But liquid nitrogen is a balmy minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s not until the temperature drops to a hair above absolute zero that the, well, coolest effects show up. There, not only quantum reflection, but other otherworldly possibilities emerge, like liquids that flow up and out of containers, seeming to defy gravity—and a state of matter that is not gas, liquid, or solid called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Predicted by Einstein in the 1920s, this bizarre material was created in laboratories in 1995.
By putting atoms of sodium or other elements into a kind of bowl and then cooling them sufficiently, “they fall into a common ground state; the wave functions of the atom overlap; they become indistinguishable,” Clougherty says. Some physicists call this condensate a “superatom.” Clougherty describes it as “a state of matter with an identity crisis.”
And, in a way, many of the complex materials that Dennis Clougherty studies have an identity crisis. They’re liquids and solids that have “multiple electronic and structural phases competing at low temperatures,” he says.
The NOVA program offers mostly a historical account, beginning in the 1600s, of how civilization has been deeply changed by mastering the cold. Without this research, “we wouldn't have air conditioning, refrigeration, modern rocket propellants, or maglev trains,” Clougherty says. And his own research could contribute to new technologies like “atom chips” that store cold atoms along a surface, allowing for more powerful computers.
But Clougherty is a theorist. It’s the laws of matter than excite him more than the uses. And his interest in extreme cold is but part of his larger interest in tying threads between the microscopic world of particles ruled by strange laws of quantum mechanics and complex behavior in the macro-sized world of wires and ceramics and circuits.
Facing up to global warming
This could be the tipping point. If many climate scientists are right, in the next ten years we will either start to decrease world-wide carbon emissions or global warming will go over an ecological cliff where changes to the planet—rising seas, mass extinctions, agricultural failures, and extreme weather—begin to spiral wildly.
So what’s a graduate student to do?
For Valerie Esposito and Samir Doshi, answering that question became a calling. These two doctoral candidates in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources spent months organizing UVM’s role in Focus the Nation, a national “teach-in” on global warming held January 31 at more than 1,900 universities and other places.
Esposito and Doshi, with support from many other students, faculty, and staff, developed one of the country’s most ambitious agendas for the event. They expanded UVM’s program beyond the one-day national effort to include eighty teach-ins plus thirty other events over six days—drawing praise from the national organizers and attention from
the Christian Science Monitor and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
With echoes of the civil rights teach-ins of the 1960s, faculty in departments from art to animal science took time during their regular courses to lead discussion about climate change, what Esposito and Doshi call “the issue of our generation.” At UVM, events ranged from a lecture on the ravages of mountaintop removal for coal mining to a performance of The Boycott, a play about a sex strike called by the First Lady in response to climate change.
“If nothing else, we hope that people will see from this week of events that the science is solid,” Esposito said, “It’s just the political climate that’s questionable.”
—Joshua Brown
Aging liberally
Research by a pair of senior UVM professors is shifting the conventional wisdom that an older American is necessarily a more conservative American. The study by sociologist Nick Danigelis and Stephen Cutler, published in the October 2007 edition of the prestigious American Sociological Review, has sociologists and politicians alike rethinking the attitudes and social and political leanings of older Americans.
The study is based on U.S. General Social Survey data measuring changes in attitudes that occur within cohorts at different stages in life. The political leanings of nearly fifty thousand Americans were examined with regard to how they felt about the political and economic roles of historically subordinate groups (e.g., women and African-Americans); the civil liberties of groups considered outside the U.S. mainstream (e.g., atheists and homosexuals); and privacy issues (e.g., right-to-die and sex between consenting adults).
Results showed that although change occurred in both the 18-39 and 60-and-over age groups, the movement among the older group was greater and was most often toward “increased tolerance rather than increased conservatism.” The research is especially significant because it is some of the first work to show over an extended period of time that people age sixty and older become more liberal at a faster rate that their younger counterparts on a number of measures.
“It proves that some of the commonly held beliefs about older people being rigid and unwilling to change aren’t true,” says Danigelis.
Presidential Pursuits
Students work front lines in New Hampshire
The cost was an extended debate on a cold New Hampshire porch, but for UVM junior Harry Mallory, the reward was sweet: another Republican primary vote for John McCain.
Ah, New Hampshire. Seems ages since the presidential candidates packed up and left northern New England for the long march through the primary season. But the January 8 vote was the right time (semester break) and Vermont’s neighboring Granite State, the right place, to afford UVM students the chance to get deeply involved in one of the nation’s highest-profile primaries.
Take the undergrad on that chilly porch. “The voter liked Giuliani, but after about thirty minutes of debate, he said he’d vote for McCain,” Mallory says. “Those are the interactions you remember most because about fifty percent of the people you approach don’t really want to talk to you. Some of them flat-out yell at you, but you can’t really blame them because they’ve been approached by all the campaigns.”
With campaigns eager to harness youthful energy, opportunities were easy to find. Almost every candidate attracted at least some student support, though most UVM College Democrats signed up to work for Barack Obama’s campaign. One of them, sophomore Alex Robbins of Virginia, state director of Vermont Students for Obama, saw the Illinois senator speak in 2005 while working on a gubernatorial campaign.
“Obama blew me away,” says Robbins. “It was one of those moments you knew you’d never forget. He’s truly in a league of his own.”
Robbins joined up soon after and has worked for Obama’s campaign ever since. His work focused on helping UVM students from New Hampshire vote absentee and canvassing door-to-door.
The student volunteers share a commitment to their candidates and a taste for competition. After nudging the one vote from the Giuliani to the McCain column, Harry Mallory was quick to shoot an e-mail to his friend UVM junior Sumeet Sharma, a volunteer for the former New York mayor. “He made sure I heard about it,” says Sharma.
For some students, like Sharma, there’s lesson in a loss. “New Hampshire may have sealed my fate,” he says. “I learned a lot and really had to understand the issues to talk intelligently about Giuliani, but there’s not much security in it. If your candidate doesn’t win, there’s nowhere to go.”
He’s thinking about a career in policy.
photo by Rich Dionne
Young man and the sea
Undergrad follows love for lobstering
Nate Berg ’08 already has his dream job lined up for after he graduates in May. The hours are terrible, it’s physically demanding, and his dad was hoping for a different career path. But as far as Berg is concerned, it doesn’t get any better than captaining your own lobster boat on the Atlantic.
For Berg, there was never a question about his future employment once he started working on the Emily Manning lobster boat in Warren, Rhode Island. His dream wasn’t initially shared by his father, Dr. Geoffrey Berg, a Providence physician, who bears some responsibility due to helping his son land a high school summer job lobstering. But dad eventually accepted the idea after seeing his son’s passion for the classic New England trade, which took a turn for the serious with the purchase of the Emily Manning last May.
Owning and operating a fishing boat and a business while also attending college full time has been challenging. Berg drives four hours almost every weekend to Warren for a twelve-hour work day that starts at 3 a.m. between the Mt. Hope and Newport Bridges. Post-graduation, he plans to work this schedule seven days a week.
While UVM doesn’t offer an academic focus in lobstering, Berg has exhausted the curriculum in his dual major of community and international development and community entrepreneurship. This spring, his business is the focus of a semester-long study for him and several other students. “We’re using all my financial information dating back five years to project five years ahead,” he says. “It can be an unpredictable history.”
With the average age of a lobsterman currently fifty-four, Berg is well positioned to take over a larger share of market as veteran lobstermen retire and fewer young people take to the sea. Even so, Berg is realistic about the potential for his career to end sooner than he’d like. “If I get too old and the aches and pains get to be too much, I’ll always have my degree to fall back on,” he says. But for now, he’s eager for more work that he likens to Christmas morning. “Every lobster trap is like opening a new present,” he says. “You never know what you’re going to find.”
—Jon Reidel G’06
Portman's Pick
Teen Vogue, a UVM undergrad, actor Natalie Portman, and a Sudan relief effort—not exactly players you’d expect to find in the same picture. But the dots connected when Emma Vick ’10, a sophomore anthropology and political science major, won a Teen Vogue “Sweet Charity” essay contest judged by Portman. Vick wrote about her internship with the New Sudan Education Initiative, a Burlington-based effort founded by Abraham Awolich ’05. The five-thousand dollar prize will seed a micro-lending program aimed at women in the communities where NESEI is building schools.
illustration by Grace O’Leary Weaver ’11
You Go Gumby!
A cherished tradition of the UVM Women’s Rugby Team, a club sport, is assigning nicknames. Herewith, a selection of the nom-de-scrums of current members of the squad. In the spirit of competition, we’ve included three ringers, among the real ones.
Can you spot them?
(answer below)
Jo
Hammer
Zuko
Fudd
Widget
Pearl
Dre
Mouth
Tap
Gumby
Scout
Woody
Jimmy
Flo
Pettie
Grendel
Coma
Cank
Saur
Marty
Guar Gum
Icebox
Trix
Jose
Tex
Chute
Galosh
Dusty
Bobbi
Splinter
Thumper
Daffy
15
UVM’s rank among mid-sized colleges and universities for number of alumni serving in the Peace Corps. There are currently twenty-five UVM alums in the field and more than seven hundred alumni have served the Peace Corps since 1961. That spirit is still going strong on the campus. “I have the easiest job,” says current UVM Peace Corps recruiter Amanda Richardson, a graduate student in Community Development and Applied Economics. “I’m more of a representative than a recruiter because there are so many students who are interested.”
photo by Stephanie Seguino
One man, twenty stories
Play grows from oral histories of El Paso’s gay community
¿El qué dirán? What will people say? Along the border that separates El Paso and Juarez, where Catholicism and poverty largely define the culture, that question determines family standing and self-respect. “It’s a very, very Mexican thing,” says Armando, age forty-seven. “El Paso’s a big city with a small-town mentality.”
Armando is one of twenty characters portrayed in successive, unrelentingly intimate monologues by assistant theatre professor Gregory Ramos in a play based on oral history interviews he conducted while living in El Paso beginning in the late 1990s. In Border Stories, Ramos, as both author and actor, gives life to experiences both humorous and tragic. His characters—an abused teenager, a lesbian bartender, a transgender prostitute, a gay priest—struggle to come out to parents (or themselves), to express their identities, to simply make a living, to cope with losing a loved one to AIDS in a place where the disease can scarcely be talked about.
“While I was in El Paso,” says Ramos, “one thing that resonated for me was the lack of a visible gay community for a fairly large city (the population of the El Paso-Juarez metroplex is more than two million). People live out their lives and desires in private ways. They have relationships but they’re never spoken of.”
Ramos performed Border Stories at Burlington’s FlynnSpace in February, part of UVM’s Sexual Responsibility Week and a benefit for Vermont CARES, an AIDS-support organization.
The perspectives of the play broadened when Glen Elder, associate professor of geography, read Ramos’s work and was struck by the connections to his own scholarship on the political, economic, and cultural nature of border-making as well as the geography of sex, race, and place. Elder opened the February performances with a lecture that put the work into a larger context, connecting the southern border stories to the experience of living near other borders, including northern Vermont, and to the metaphorical borders that exist between people.
Human pain is present in Ramos’s play in many guises —humiliation, abuse, desperation for acceptance, loss of a partner or a child. But there’s also an element of hope that guides his work as both artist and professor. “If I could underscore anything,” Ramos says, “my goal in doing this —and one of the things I emphasize in my teaching—is to use theater as a means to create public thought and social dialogue around issues like these. It can be entertaining but it’s also a tool—better society through theater.”
Quote unquote
“Mr. B, what’s the agenda here?”
Harry Belafonte, Jr. describing the initial skeptical reaction of Crips and Bloods gang members when he initiated a retreat to discuss youth violence. Belafonte, who spoke in Ira Allen Chapel for UVM’s January celebration of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., responded that the agenda was their own and set out a challenge: “Be responsible. Find the high ground. Seize the solution. There will not be change when people are concerned only with the I of the world, not the we of the world.”
UVM SHELFLIFE
A bibliophile's quest
Librarian shines light on novel novels
When it comes to library technology, Karl Bridges is firmly planted in the twenty-first century. When it comes to reading, one of the great passions of his life, Bridges is more of a nineteenth-century guy. Which is one of the things that makes the library associate professor’s new book, 100 Great American Novels You’ve (Probably) Never Read (Libraries Unlimited), interesting and somewhat audacious. Bridges is not a literary theorist. He is not an English professor—his bachelor’s and first master’s degrees are in history. He is a book lover and black-belt reader.
“Look, I read three or four hours a day. I’ve done this almost every day since I was a five-year-old. If you do anything for forty thousand hours, you get pretty good at it,” Bridges says.
The premise of his book is summed up by the title: Bridges wanted to compile a wide sampling of pleasurable but largely forgotten novels. Some would be so-called lesser works by famous writers (Don DeLillo’s Players), some would be genre fiction (Chester Himes’s Lonely Crusade), some would be from literary favorites who never found a large audience (Laurie Colwin’s Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object), some would be just plain out of fashion (Roark Bradford’s John Henry).
Bridges, a proud generalist who works on both digital collections and classics texts at the UVM Libraries, saw the project as a quasi-Victorian effort, the kind of wide-ranging personal endeavor that was common in the nineteenth and early twentieth century but rarer today in a world of professional specialized scholarship. He estimates that he read or re-read approximately two hundred novels to develop the project, and then completed multiple rounds of self-editing and consultation to come up with a group of one hundred books diverse enough in subject, genre, era, and locale to include something that almost anyone would like.
Inveterate-reader Bridges is simultaneously positive about the state of his favorite pursuit—he visits new and used bookstores wherever he goes, and they’re usually crowded with happy readers—and a little wistful about American culture’s tendency to push pleasure reading to the periphery. He laments, “Reading is something we do when we are doing something else, like grabbing an airplane.”
Bridges would like to see more pleasure reading—quirky, individualistic, and unashamed. Maybe someone might look at his book and find a selection or two they like. But ultimately, it’s not a book Bridges plugs in conversation with a reporter, it’s books. In his perfect world, he’d like to see everyone devote one hour a week to fun reading: no memos, no monographs, no agenda besides enjoyment.
—Kevin Foley
Book shorts
The Invention of Everything Else
Samantha Hunt ’93
Houghton Mifflin
Alumna Samantha Hunt stumbled upon the peculiar life story of Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, father of technology from radio to radar to the X-ray. Intrigued as she learned more, the Brooklyn-based writer soon decided to tackle his life in fiction. The result is her second novel, set during the first week of 1943 as Tesla lives out his final days in the Hotel New Yorker, broke and forgotten. Hunt has been honored by the National Book Foundation as one of America’s top writers under age thirty-five.
Searching for Thoreau: On the Trails and Shores of Wild New England
Tom Slayton ’63
Images from the Past
Recently retired from years as editor of Vermont Life magazine, alumnus Tom Slayton turns his attention to wider New England in his new book. An avid hiker, the author hits the trails from the gentle loop around Walden Pond to the steeps of Maine’s Mount Katahdin. Slayton’s ten essays reflect on what he finds on his walks, considering them in the context of Henry David Thoreau’s experience in the same landscapes 150 years ago. Readers eager to follow Thoreau and Slayton into the woods will appreciate tips on finding the trailhead and such.
Architecture of Authority
Photographs by Richard Ross ’67
Aperture Press
Architectural spaces that exert power over the people within them have been a focal point of photographer Richard Ross’s art for the past several years. His project has taken him into churches and courtrooms, preschools and prisons, an interrogation room at Guantanamo and a cell at Abu Ghraib. “The Santa Barbara Mission confessional and the LAPD robbery homicide interrogation rooms are the same intimate proportions,” says Ross. “Both are made to solicit a confession in exchange for some form of redemption.” The alumnus was featured in the fall 2006 VQ article titled “Artists at Work,” available online here.
Answers to You Go Gumby!: Grendel, Guar Gum, and Galosh haven't (yet) hit the field for the Catamounts.
(for UVM staff)