Smith College Research Articles

Aus den Ruinen der alten erschaffen wir die neue Welt! Herrschaftspraxis und Loyalitäten in Kosovo (1944–1974) by Isabel Ströhle (review)

REVIEWS 785 Other opportunities existed for ordinary people to learn what the authorities expected of them, including engagement with propaganda, broadly conceived. Yekelchyk makes an original analysis of people’s attendance at public lectures and talks, and their reading of newspapers; his attempts to gauge their enthusiasm make for an important addition to the study of Stalinist subjectivities. Labour was the crucial means through which people exercised their citizenship and expressed their commitment to the Soviet state, and Yekelchyk importantly extends his definition of labour to voluntary work and to investment in state loans. It is useful to read this in the light of Dale’s greater emphasis on post-war workers’ autonomous survival strategies. But Yekelchyk’s most important contribution is to add more weight to the scholarly rehabilitation of Soviet elections as important incubators of citizenship, notwithstanding the lack of choice they offered. He analyses the work of ‘agitators’, the public culture of the campaigns, and the practice of voting, including the expression of dissent. These two monographs offer a fine-grained picture of late Stalinist life in two different cities. They focus on different social groups, use different sources, and adopt different methodologies. They are written by scholars whose personal engagement with this history is quite different. But their conclusions are quite similar: people and power combined to redesign citizenship in a workable way after the Second World War. Late Stalinist life was unstable and dangerous but functional, and Yekelchyk in particular shows that it was capable of being reformed into a new and more stable and responsive variant of Sovietness after 1953. Both these very successful and enjoyable books deserve a wide readership among specialists in Soviet and post-1945 European history. Their fluent and accessible presentation, combined with the interesting questions they raise and the engaging material they deploy, make them very suitable too for students on higher-level courses. Faculty of History Mark B. Smith University of Cambridge Ströhle, Isabel. Aus den Ruinen der alten erschaffen wir die neue Welt! HerrschaftspraxisundLoyalitäteninKosovo(1944–1974).Südosteuropäische Arbeiten, 155. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich, 2016. 424 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €54.95: £77.00: £41.99. Historical references are never far away in ongoing political debate, policy and academic research on Kosovo’s status and Kosovo-Serbia relations. Yet SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 786 there has been little international research on political and socio-economic developments in Kosovo during Yugoslavia’s twentieth century. Isabel Ströhle makes an important contribution to this field with a balanced and multifaceted study of the legitimation of Socialist Yugoslav rule in Kosovo up to the constitutional consolidation of 1974. The Yugoslav Communists maintained that the legitimation of their rule in Kosovo relied on the region’s accelerated socio-economic development. The author clarifies that the integrative potential of economic growth paired a new culture of materialism, consumption and individuality made some inroads in Kosovo during the 1960s, especially in dramatically transforming urban environments. However, the reach of the Yugoslav Dream was limited along the lines of the north-south divide in Yugoslavia and ethnic and rural-urban divergences within Kosovo. Particularly rewarding is the chapter on Kosovo’s large rural underclass, which was not only socio-economically but also geographically, symbolically and chronologically isolated from ‘contemporary’ socialist urban society. Ströhle also examines Yugoslav attempts to transform society. Regardless of the Communists’ radically modernist and anti-traditional discourse, in local practice the Party and affiliated mass organizations relied heavily on traditional patriarchal social hierarchies and structures for reaching the population. At the same time, local elites appropriated the Party’s structures to increase social capital within the local, ‘traditional’ community and the wider, ‘modern’ society. It is this interplay between progressive and conservative social relations that characterizes the socialist transformation of society in Kosovo. Except for its socio-economic underdevelopment, Kosovo was also particular in Socialist Yugoslavia for its majority-Albanian population. Based on the thoughtful use of Reinhart Koselleck’s historical categories of ‘spaces of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectations’, Ströhle insightfully analyses the repressive practices of the Yugoslav state security services in Kosovo. She argues that at the collective level, the state...

Undergraduate Research Experience For STEM Students: Efforts And Outcomes

Undergraduate research for STEM students involves students who are attending college or universities pursuing a bachelor's degree, majoring in fields related to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics(STEM). Research experience for STEM undergraduates has been viewed as a positive experience that has several benefits such as developing intellectual mentality, enhancing teamwork skills and improving preparation for graduate study. In this paper, we provide an overview of HBCU-UP research experience with STEM students at Philander Smith College for the last few years. Projects in Bioinformatics and Human-Computer Interaction of two Computer Science faculty and their teams are shared. Efforts in implementing research experiences and outcomes of these efforts are discussed.

Reflections on My 1969 Smith College School for Social Work Thesis: Children’s Use of Humor in Psychotherapy

ABSTRACTI had wanted to do my thesis on family’s use of humor in therapy. My first lesson was that that was too complicated a project—a lesson in practicality, which influenced my entire future career. My thesis also gave me the chance to focus on children’s resourcefulness and resilience, rather than just on their problems and psychopathology. After graduation, my advisor proposed that I publish my thesis. Her generosity in mentoring me toward publication was an extraordinary boon. I had no idea how to go about submitting something for publication, and she guided me through the process, giving me confidence to proceed professionally. I believe practitioners need to be encouraged, as I was, to push their ideas and insights into expanding theory and practice for the benefit of our communities for the future. We have a great need to push the boundaries of support, change, healing, and transformation.

Epitaph for a Thesis: Bridging the Gap between Grief and Growth

ABSTRACTThis narrative and descriptive essay traces the legacy and impact that the Smith College School for Social Work thesis had on me as an individual and social worker. It explains the personal experiences I was facing immediately before beginning the thesis, which was the sudden death of my father, and the journey of self-discovery and healing that took place as I was writing it. The essay ends with a reflection on the importance of research and the value I found in the thesis process within my personal and my professional life.

Research Methods: Serving the Thesis Legacy through a Social Justice Commitment

ABSTRACTThis reflection celebrates the ways in which the research methods courses (as they have historically served as the gateway to the thesis) have supported the justice ethic, including the antiracism commitment, within the Smith College School for Social Work. Discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of justice as a core value in social work education traces the evolution of distributive justice, relational justice, and strengths-based justice. Specific examples of how the research methods sequence has applied justice-based education within the curriculum are detailed, along with a presentation of qualitative and quantitative data supporting these efforts.

The MSW Thesis: A Rich and Scholarly Tradition at Smith College School for Social Work

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article is to trace the history and evolution of the Smith College MSW thesis. Ms. Helen Leland Witmer, who also founded Smith College Studies in Social Work, was instrumental in creating an assignment that provides MSW students a hands-on research project that focused on gathering and analyzing data on agency-related mental health issues. Former and current chairs of the research sequence describe how the thesis evolved during their tenure and noted the positive aspects of how the thesis enhanced the students’ education and post-MSW opportunities. The increasing technological developments of the past few decades have had an immense impact on (1) the students’ ability to research and critique the literature in-depth, (2) the ease of writing and editing the document, and (3) the use of quantitative and qualitative software platforms for data organization and analysis. However, recent and growing challenges affecting students, faculty, and administration have led to the discontinuation of the thesis as the assignment for the specialization CSWE requirement.

The SSW Master’s Thesis and the Smith College Libraries: From Collecting to Collaborating to Cutting-Edge Experimentation

ABSTRACTSmith College is one of a handful of liberal arts colleges to offer a master’s degree in social work. The Smith College School for Social Work (SCSSW)’s thesis requirement has had a major impact on the Smith College Libraries over the years, as the library role shifted from simply collecting books and journals in support of SCSSW—and warehousing the SCSSW thesis output—to developing a large array of services and teaching practices in support of the program. This reflection piece will detail the evolution of these services, practices, and support; it will also illustrate several ways the libraries used SCSSW as the proverbial “guinea pig” to test new services, new forms of access and authentication, new kinds of digital collections, new technologies, etc. In many ways, the master’s thesis has been a major driver of change for the Libraries—while at the same time it has provided an opportunity for collaborations in teaching and learning.

Research and Writing Is Social Justice Activism

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article is to reflect on my personal experience completing the master’s thesis component of the Smith College School for Social Work, which inspired me to enter a field of social justice work postgraduation. My specific research topic began from a deeply personal space and evolved into a public career in speaking, multiple professional publications including the National Association for Social Work’s Social Work journal, and ongoing continuing education seminars including Smith College itself. My intention is to inspire future students to value and pursue the field of social work research, as I believe it is the highest form of advocacy.

Transformative Holding: A Reflection on the Legacy of the Smith School for Social Work Thesis

ABSTRACTThe Smith College School for Social Work thesis offers the student the opportunity to be nurtured into a competent clinician within the holding environment of the advisor–advisee relationship. My master’s thesis focused on caregiver response to infant sleep-related crying. This reflection describes the progression in my thesis process from focusing on how letting an infant “cry it out” neglects the infant’s psychological development to a more nuanced understanding of the caregiver’s subjectivity as central in the infant’s development of regulatory functions. My shift in understanding of the self and self-other relating was only possible through the deeply personal experience of being held within the advisor–advisee relationship. The containing function in this relationship parallels the way in which a “good enough” caregiver nurtures an infant. I conclude with a clinical vignette that exemplifies the expression of my internal transformation.

Quentin Quesnell’s Secret Mark Secret

Unbeknownst to most, in June of 1983, Quentin Quesnell made a visit to Jerusalem in order to personally inspect the Mar Saba document known as the Letter to Theodore. This is significant because it adds Quesnell to a small group of people who have testified to have seen the Letter to Theodore in person, and an even smaller group who have commented on its appearance and contents first-hand. Following Quesnell’s death in 2012 many of his personal belongings were acquired by Smith College (Northampton) and recently released to the public for viewing. Among Quesnell’s belongings was a journal full of notes, along with photos and letters to his wife Jean Higgins, all relating to Morton Smith’s discovery of the Letter to Theodore at Mar Saba and to Quesnell’s 1983 visit to Jerusalem. On the basis of these documents the following article offers a summary of Quesnell’s part in the debate over Smith’s discovery and a report of his inspection of the manuscript.

About the Authors

About the Authors

Elsa Nettels (1931–2016)

Research Article| May 15 2017 Elsa Nettels (1931–2016) Edith Wharton Review (2017) 33 (1): 274–280. https://doi.org/10.5325/editwharrevi.33.1.0274 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Elsa Nettels (1931–2016). Edith Wharton Review 15 May 2017; 33 (1): 274–280. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/editwharrevi.33.1.0274 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressEdith Wharton Review Search Advanced Search [Editor's Note: Elsa Nettels, respected scholar of American literature and longtime member of the Edith Wharton Society, passed away on December 30, 2016. The Edith Wharton Review offers this tribute and farewell.]Elsa Nettels will long be remembered both for her fine scholarship and for her support of younger scholars. She once told me that it was important, when reviewing other people's work, to be generous rather than vicious, to look for whatever in the work enhanced our understanding of its subject rather than what was flawed, and her wise counsel has guided me well. But knowing Elsa for more than thirty-five years, what stands out for me is how we laughed together. There was the time when we left the Smith College library after a day of research and she led me unerringly to the café that had the best brownies. That was the first time we confessed to... You do not currently have access to this content.

Nutrition and Physiological Recovery in Smith College Swimmers

Nutrition and Physiological Recovery in Smith College Swimmers

Take cues from your student-veterans to build a veteran-friendly community

CHICAGO — How do you create a customized experience for your student-veterans on campus? Creating a distinct hub for your student-veterans to cater to their unique needs when entering higher education can help. In a session at the Council on Adult and Experiential Learning annual conference, Cheryl Harris Curtis, director of educational enhancement services; Laura Colson McLean, Ed.D., dean for Metropolitan College; and Melita Pope Mitchell, Ed.D., assistant dean and director of adult degree programs, all at Johnson C. Smith University, shared strategies they adopted when their institution created a centralized hub for student-veterans that has boosted retention and student success on campus.

“A Voice From ‘the Northern Capital of the Caribbean’: An Interview with Moira Crone”

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A Program Aimed toward Inclusive Excellence for Underrepresented Undergraduate Women in the Sciences.

Created to foster inclusive excellence, Smith College's Achieving Excellence in Mathematics, Engineering, and Science (AEMES) Scholars program provides early faculty-mentored research opportunities and other programming as a way to foster success in academic outcomes for underrepresented women in science. Using academic record data, we compared Scholars' outcomes over time with those of underrepresented students before program launch and to relevant peer comparison groups. Since its launch, AEMES Scholars have achieved significantly higher gateway life sciences course grade point averages (GPAs), rates of persistence in life and natural sciences, and participation in natural sciences advanced research relative to baseline. Gains for Scholars in gateway course GPA eliminated the significant gap that previously existed between science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-underrepresented and other students, whereas gains in natural sciences persistence now has Scholars continuing in STEM at significantly higher rates than all other students. Many of the gains for AEMES Scholars were echoed in findings of improved outcomes for our STEM students overall since AEMES' launch. Underrepresented students who were not part of the Scholars program also evidenced increased gateway course GPA over this same period. We discuss potential explanations for these outcomes and ongoing work aimed at achieving further inclusive excellence for women in the sciences.

Moving Beyond Cis-terhood

In 2013, controversy sparked student protests, campus debates, and national attention when Smith College denied admittance to Calliope Wong—a trans woman. Since then, eight women’s colleges have revised their admissions policies to include different gender identities such as trans women and genderqueer people. Given the recency of such policies, we interrogate the ways the category “woman” is determined through certain alignments of biology-, legal-, and identity-based criteria. Through an inductive analysis of administrative scripts appearing both in student newspapers and in trans admittance policies, we highlight two areas U.S. women’s colleges straddle while creating these policies: inclusion/exclusion scripts of self-identification and legal documentation, and tradition-/activism-speak. Through these tensions, women’s college admittance policies not only construct “womanhood” but also serve as regulatory norms that redo gender as a structuring agent within the gendered organization.

Ann S. Blum (1950–2015)

Ann S. Blum (1950–2015)

Dressing in the Dark

Notes on Contributors PAUL DEAN is a freelance critic living in Oxford, UK, and a Founding Fellow of the English Association. He is a frequent contributor to The New Criterion. DENIS DONOGHUE is Emeritus University Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. His most recent book is Metaphor (Harvard, 2014), and he is currently writing a book on the question of taste. ANDREW FORGE (1923–2002) was an English painter, art critic and academic. His work can be found in public collections including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Yale University, Tate Gallery, and the Arts Council of Great Britain. Among his writings are books on the works of Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg, Monet, and Degas, as well as numerous essays. The essays in this issue are taken from Observation: Notation: A Selection of the Critical Writings of Andrew Forge: 1955–2002, edited by David Cast, forthcoming from Criterion Books in 2018. JOEY FRANTZ's poetry and criticism have appeared in The Adirondack Review, The Hopkins Review, and The New Criterion. He teaches chess for a living in Seattle. JACK L. B. GOHN, when not practicing law, is the author of a column on law and policy in the Maryland Daily Record, a theater critic for BroadwayWorld.com, and an occasional book reviewer. JULIANA GRAY's third poetry collection, Honeymoon Palsy, is forthcoming from Measure Press. Poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2016 and journals such as Birmingham Poetry Review and Waccamaw. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University. DANIEL GROVES is the author of The Lost Boys (UGA Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in Paris Review, Yale Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. JEFF HARDIN has authored five collections of poetry, including No Other Kind of World, Restoring the Narrative, and Small Revolution. His poems appear in The Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, and North American Review. He has received both the X. J. Kennedy Prize and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. AARON HENKIN creates and produces original radio programs for WYPR, including Out of the Blocks. His past work includes a weekly cultural program called The Signal, and the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings program Tapestry of the Times. Aaron's stories have aired nationally on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and internationally on BBC and CBC. [End Page 643] JEFFERSON HUNTER is The Hopkins Review's film critic and the Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of English and Film Studies, Emeritus, at Smith College. He has recently authored a website, A Word in Your Ear, about unusual English words and phrases (sophia.smith.edu/blog/wordinyourear). STEPHEN KAMPA has two volumes of poetry—Cracks in the Invisible (Ohio University Press) and Bachelor Pad (Waywiser Press)—and currently teaches at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL. His third collection, Articulate as Rain, is forthcoming from Waywiser in March 2018. JOHANNA KELLER is the music critic for The Hopkins Review, and teaches at Syracuse University's S. I. Newhouse School of Public Relations. RICHARD KENNEY's most recent book is The One-Strand River (Knopf, 2007). He teaches at the University of Washington's marine laboratories in Friday Harbor, and lives with his family on the Olympic Peninsula. HAILEY LEITHAUSER's debut collection, Swoop (Graywolf, 2013), won the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award and the Towson Prize for Literature. She has recent or forthcoming work in Agni, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and The Yale Review. She lives in Silver Spring, MD, where she occasionally teaches at the Bethesda Writer's Center and the West Chester Poetry Conference. JAMES MAGRUDER's stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Normal School, New England Review, Subtropics, Bloom, and elsewhere. He is the author of Sugarless, Let Me See It, and the recent Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall. He teaches dramaturgy at Swarthmore College. AMIT MAJMUDAR's next book is a verse translation from Sanskrit of the Bhagavad Gita, with commentaries, entitled Godsong (Knopf, 2018). He is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist, a novelist, and the first Poet Laureate of Ohio. ANDREW MOTION served as Poet Laureate of the U.K. from 1999 to 2009. He now lives...

Literature as History: Autobiography, Testimonio, and the Novel in the Chicano and Latino Experience by Mario T. García

Reviewed by: Literature as History: Autobiography, Testimonio, and the Novel in the Chicano and Latino Experience by Mario T. García Teresa Palomo Acosta Literature as History: Autobiography, Testimonio, and the Novel in the Chicano and Latino Experience. By Mario T. García. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. Pp. 208. Notes, index.) In this book, historian Mario T. García analyzes a selection of autobiography, testimonio, and fiction by Chicanos and Latinos as evidence that writers outside the domain of recognized history contribute extensively to their community’s multi-faceted narrative. Among the Chicano accounts he covers are Memories of a Hyphenated Man by Ramón Ruiz; Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: An Autobiography; and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory. Central American writers García discusses are Yamileth López, co-author with Dianne Walta Hart of Undocumented in L.A.: An Immigrant’s Story and Evelyn Cortez-Davis. Author of December Sky: Beyond My Undocumented Life. These authors are united across familiar themes: land loss to Anglo encroachment in the American Southwest, immigration, feminism, racism, and economic inequality. García avows that each author writes with “historical agency” (13) in addressing their journeys to self-awareness in white America. For instance, after a successful teaching career at Smith College, Ramón Ruiz returned to his native Southwest to train the Chicano generation of historians. [End Page 119] Richard Rodriguez dealt with the “triple consciousness” of “Americanization, ethnicity, and sexuality” (68) that many in his community rejected. The accounts of Nicaraguan Yamileth López and Salvadoran Evelyn Cortez-Davis speak to the fortitude of Latinas. García writes that it is often female immigrants who decide whether or not their family settles into a new life on U.S. soil. Gender discrimination has not discouraged these women from working in an economy that, while exploitative of their labor, also allows the opportunity to free themselves from male domination. García uses the writings of López and Cortez-Davis to represent women who defy stereotypes of Latinas as meek. López’s feminist consciousness arose during her participation in the Nicaraguan struggle against the dictator Anastasio Somoza and guided her life in the United States. Cortez-Davis, supported by the tenacity of her mother Rosario, also established a life on U.S. soil on her personal terms. García suggests that generational differences in bilingualism, transculturation, and political activism permeate these works, which span from the Mexican American generation of political agents to Chicano Movement activists. His approach is also an incisive exploration of the multiple tracks the authors have taken in writing about themselves and their community. For example, García points out that California novelist Alejandro Morales and El Paso-reared journalist Ruben Salazar depicted the Chicano journey from distinct perspectives. In The Brick People, Morales has Octavio Revueltas, a major character, ultimately pursue the American Dream in an individualistic manner, negating the idea that his people’s vitality requires collective action. Journalist Ruben Salazar was known for his astute reporting on politics, the border, and East Los Angeles. A tear gas projectile thrown by a deputy sheriff killed Salazar as he sat in the Silver Dollar Café in Los Angeles after covering the August 29, 1970, Chicano March against the Vietnam War. This tragedy instantly made the reporter a Chicano Movement “martyr” (128). The book is filled with these and many other examples of how Chicano and Latino writers evoke a people’s history. It deserves a broad readership. Teresa Palomo Acosta Austin, Texas Copyright © 2017 The Texas State Historical Association