Sentimental Educations

This chapter establishes H.D.’s difficulty at Bryn Mawr, her brief engagement to Ezra Pound and her wilting affection for him, beside her stronger attraction to impoverished Frances Josepha Gregg, who lived with her mother, once an active lesbian. H.D. and Frances thought themselves “witches,” reading each other’s minds. They traveled with Gregg’s mother on a European tour. At this same time, Bryher was isolated, with only her father’s library as refuge. She met Elizabethan cross-dressers like Bellario through her imagination. After her parents had a “Scotch marriage” in 1909, just when her mother gave birth to a male heir, John Jr., she learned they had been unmarried when she was born. Bryher rejected her gender assignment. From World War I on, she kept rat poison by her side, fearful of being locked up for her nonconformity. Bryher was sent to Queenswood as a day student.

One Homer, or Two? Some Suggested Stylistic Separators in the Homeric Poems

How many Homers (if any)? This is a question that has bedevilled professional Hellenists since the Alexandrian period. Luckily, such misgivings have not, in general, disquieted students or casual readers, who simply read, study, and enjoy the two lengthy epic poems traditionally ascribed to a composer or, if you lower the date a little, an author, to whom generations have given the name “Homer.” In 1955 the distinguished British Classicist D. L. Page delivered a set of lectures at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, entitled The Homeric Odyssey whose main thesis was that the two epics were composed in separate places ( a fortiori by different authors), independently of each other. My project in the study that follows is to examine more closely the stylistic features called into court by Page to attest to the separateness of the two works in respect of authorship. My ulterior motive is to look for explanations of the discrepancies Page claims to have found on a hypothesis other than separate authorship. Page’s linguistic “separators,” as they might be termed, fall into several categories: dialectal, the words used and especially those with the intensifying prefix ἐρι- “exceedingly”; morphological, e.g. datives plural with the short termination -οις vs. the long -οισι; metrical, the lengthening (or not) of naturally short vowels before mute + liquid or nasal; lexical, words, phrases and formular expressions that are favoured by the Iliad and which might be expected to occur also in the Odyssey but don’t, and vice versa, words and formular phrases found exclusively or predominantly in the Odyssey but which are rare in or totally absent from the Iliad.

IDEAS AND IDEALS: HONOURING JOYCE MITCHELL COOK

In the twentieth century, most PhD-trained academic philosophers in both the United States and United Kingdom were white men. The first black woman to earn a PhD in Philosophy was Joyce E. Mitchell Cook (1933–2014). A preacher's daughter from a small town in western Pennsylvania, Cook earned a BA from Bryn Mawr College. She went on to earn degrees in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology from St Hilda's College at Oxford University before earning a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 1965. At Yale she served as Managing Editor of the Review of Metaphysics and was the first woman appointed as a teaching assistant in Philosophy. She taught at Howard University for nearly a decade and held positions in national government service in Washington, DC, before retiring to a life of independent study of the black experience. Although she did not publish much in her lifetime, Cook deserves to be remembered as: first, an academic trailblazer who proved that race and gender are not barriers to excellence in philosophy; second, a public philosopher who broke barriers as a foreign and economic affairs analyst and presidential speech writer; third, among the first philosophical bioethicists of informed consent and experimentation on humans; and, fourth, an analytic philosopher of race, opposing claims that blacks suffer from inherited intellectual inferiority. Cook's achievements can inspire women of all backgrounds who love philosophy to pursue graduate studies and academic careers.

Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden (b. 1911–d. 1988) is an artist best known for his inventive collage methods, evident in his production from the mid-1950s to the time of his death. Influenced by synthetic cubism, fauvism, and German expressionism, Bearden created intimate collages of cut-out magazine and book images—figures and forms of everyday life and of canonical art from around the world as well. The collages served as the basis of other projects in which Bearden photographed, photocopied, and enlarged them to produce matte, black-and-white prints. Bearden also made unique mixed media work, bringing together a variety of papers and materials and reworking the bas-relief surfaces additively with paint, ink, and graphite and subtractively by abrading them. His mature production included watercolor drawings, oil monoprints, sculpture, limited edition prints (etchings, lithographs, and serigraphs), fabric and textile work, and commissioned public murals and stage design as well. A student of George Grosz during the 1930s, Bearden started out as a social realist painter who admired Mexican muralism of the period that heroicized the poor and working classes and satirized the rich and powerful. Early in his career, Bearden was a political cartoonist and illustrator for student publications at Boston University and New York University as well as for African American newspapers and magazines. In search of universal themes, Bearden, in an expressionist mode, interpreted ancient Greek myths, biblical narratives, and Federico Garcia Lorca’s poems during the 1940s, a decade during which he enjoyed some success. His work was included in the annuals of major museums and in African American art surveys, and it was the subject of monographic exhibitions organized by galleries in New York and Washington, DC, even during World War II when he served in the US Army. The Museum of Modern Art and Bryn Mawr College acquired his paintings. When support for Bearden’s art dwindled, he traveled in Europe for several months, and, once back in the United States, he returned to his job as a New York City social worker. He also took up songwriting, penning lyrics for jazzy tunes and romantic ballads that won popular acclaim. Encouraged by friends, among them Hannah Arendt and Henrich Blucher, Bearden returned to visual art making in the mid-1950s. He made abstract paintings and Dada-influenced collages. The latter mostly featured people of African descent as totemic forms and as dramatis personae in diverse narrative traditions. The iconic figures of his compositions included working-class African Americans whom he knew from spending summers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his grandmother, Harlem’s Big Band leaders, and black healers, conjurers, and musicians from the rural US South and from the Caribbean island of St. Martin. An artist, curator, writer, and community organizer, Bearden often worked collaboratively: he co-wrote books on art theory and art history and he co-founded artists’ groups and art exhibitions spaces. A humanist and anti-racist activist, Bearden was a vocal advocate for the arts, for African Americans, and for greater opportunities for artists of all races and backgrounds.

Global Leadership in Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Care: “Following the ‘Golden Rule’ in multicentre collaborations – an interview with Jane W. Newburger, MD”

Dr. Jane Newburger is the focus of our first in a planned series of interviews in Cardiology in the Young entitled, “Global Leadership in Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Care”. Dr. Newburger was born in Manhattan, New York, United States of America. She was raised in the Bronx for her first six years of life, at which point her family moved to Yonkers, New York, where she spent the rest of her childhood. She then attended Bryn Mawr College where she majored in psychology. Dr. Newburger subsequently attended Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1974. She did her internship and residency in paediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital in 1974–1976, followed by her fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital in 1976–1979. She received her Masters in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health in 1980.Dr. Newburger has spent her entire career as a paediatric cardiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she was appointed a Professor of Pediatrics in 1999 and has held the position as Commonwealth Professor of Pediatrics since 2008. She has established herself as a leading clinical scientist within the field of paediatric cardiology, with expertise in leadership of multicentre and multidisciplinary research, including the building of collaborative groups. She has been continuously funded by the National Institute of Health since 1982, and amongst other areas has led the field in the areas of neurodevelopmental outcomes in congenital heart disease, improved methods of vital organ support, and management of Kawasaki disease. This article presents our interview with Dr. Newburger, an interview that covers her path towards becoming a clinical scientist, her interests spanning four decades of hard work, and her strategies to design and lead successful multicentre studies.

René Girard

René Noël Théophile Girard (b. 25 December 1923 in Avignon, d. 4 November 2015 in Stanford) was a French-American cultural anthropologist who discovered in the works of European novelists like Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust, and Dostoevsky the important impact of imitative desire on human relations. This insight became the basis for his mimetic theory, an anthropological approach that has not only helped to interpret literature, but has also become a theoretical tool to understand the development of human culture and particularly the role of religion in it. By distinguishing between the sacred of early religions and the holy as the core of the Judeo-Christian tradition, mimetic theory provides a theory of religion that contributes also to a better understanding of the post-Axial religions. Mimetic theory, however, reaches far beyond literature and religion, as its application in fields like anthropology, psychology, theology, and history as well as political and economic theory shows. Similar to the broad outreach of mimetic theory, also Girard himself entered many different scholarly disciplines. He studied medieval and modern history before he entered fields like literary criticism, religious and classical studies, and biblical literature. In 1947, he graduated with a dissertation on marriage and private life in 15th-century Avignon as an archiviste-paléographe from the École des Chartes in Paris. Soon afterward, he left for the United States to study contemporary history at Indiana University, where he received his PhD with a dissertation on “American Opinion on France, 1940–1943” in 1950. After working as an instructor of French literature at Duke University (1952) and as an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College (1953–1957), he held professorships at Johns Hopkins University (1957–1968; 1976–1981), in the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo (1986–1976), and finally at Stanford University (1981–1995). He received honorary degrees and awards from many different universities and academic institutions and was elected in 2005 to the Académie française. His mimetic theory consists mainly of four stages: (1) mimetic desire as he discovered it in great literature; (2) the scapegoat mechanism as the origin of human culture and early religions; (3) his theory of religion, which distinguishes between the sacred of early religions and the holiness that characterized the Judeo-Christian tradition; and (4) finally his apocalyptic view of history, which started with a chapter on Dostoevsky in his first book and culminated in his reflections on Clausewitz’s theory of war in his last book.

The Birth Of The Bryn Mawr College Black Studies Program And The Herbert Aptheker Appointment

In 1969, Bryn Mawr College hired the notorious Communist Herbert Aptheker to teach the inaugural course in what would become the Black Studies Program. Using primary sources, this essay examines the decision to hire Aptheker and what this decision can tell us about campus politics during the late-60’s/early-70’s. A sharp divide can be seen between conservative and leftist students, parents, alumnae, and even those unassociated with the College who felt it their civic or academic duty to object to or approve of the decision to hire Aptheker. As an institution of learning, Bryn Mawr’s decision of how to teach about those whose experiences have been marginalized deals with questions of who is telling whose history and how that history will be told – in particular, whether to instate a Black Studies Program with courses integrated into the general College curriculum, or have the courses separated in a potential Black Studies Department. Ultimately, this essay argues that the melee surrounding the Aptheker appointment was a product of the racial tension on-campus and amongst those with a stake in the History the College was constructing.

Poggio Bracciolini, Phyllis Goodhart Gordan, and the Formation of the Goodhart Collection of Fifteenth-Century Books at Bryn Mawr College

The Poggio Bracciolini conference was dedicated to Bryn Mawr alumna Phyllis Goodhart Gordan (1913-1994) one of the leading Poggio scholars of her generation and the editor of the only major collection of Poggio’s letters in English, Two Renaissance Book Hunters (Columbia University Press, 1974). Gordan and her father, Howard Lehman Goodhart (1887-1951) were also responsible for building one of the great collections of 15th century printed books in America, most of which is now at Bryn Mawr College. This paper draws upon Goodhart’s correspondence with rare book dealers and the extensive notes on his books to survey the strengths of the collection and to examine the process by which he built the collection and worked with rare book dealers in the difficult Depression and World War II years, the period when he acquired most of his books. The paper also considers Goodhart’s growing connections with scholars of early printing as his collection and interests grew, in particular the work of Margaret Bingham Stillwell, the editor of Incunabula in American Libraries (1940).