Professor Hadley Horch on 80’s movies, Dairy Queen management, aviation

Faculty chats: Gov’s Henry Laurence talks bonds trading, shepherd’s pie and 'Downton Abbey'

Associate Professor of Government and Asian Studies Henry Laurence prefaced his Oxford education with more than just a typical English prep school. He spent a year in between high school and college working on a container ship bound for Australia. This adventure was just the first of many in his life as he also worked in investment banking and ranched cattle.
Laurence grew up along the southern coast of England, frequently moving from town to town because his father was in the Royal Navy. For the most part, however, he was rooted in Goring, which “had the same feel as Brunswick—you could go to the shops and meet people to gossip.” He attended an all-male naval school before taking a gap year preceding college.
“Before I went to Oxford, I worked as a deckhand on a container ship and then I got my passage to Australia to work on sheep and cattle ranches,” said Laurence. “I was in the Indian Ocean de-rusting container lashings. That was a fantastic experience. I strongly recommend to people to take a year off.”
When he did return to Oxford, Laurence pursued studies in philosophy, politics and economics. At Bowdoin, he teaches in both the Government and Legal Studies and Asian Studies departments but he did not become involved with scholarship in the latter discipline until his post-graduate work.
“That’s one of the big differences between England and Bowdoin: in England you’re terribly specialized so there just wasn’t opportunity to study language or anything outside of your three A-levels, which is a shame.”
After graduation, Laurence spent time working for the Bank of Tokyo in London, which piqued his interest in the languages and politics of Asia and made him realize that a career in bond trading was not for him.
“Investment banking was huge amounts of fun. It was new and an intellectual challenge. This was [before] a lot of mechanization, and so there was kind of a human element at the time that was like a game. It was fun, but I don’t think it was very responsible.”
Now settled in his career as a Bowdoin professor, Laurence enjoys spending his free time watching the Premier League and following his favorite scheming character, Thomas, on Downton Abbey.
“I gave up on House of Cards because it doesn’t touch the original British one,” said Laurence. “I binge watched Breaking Bad though, and like Better Call Saul.”
Laurence is also something of a gourmand.
“I cook. It’s what I spend my time thinking and reading about,” he said. “Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is what I’d cook for myself on a desert island. And I’m getting really into Indian curries.”
His favorite Bowdoin meal?
“Shepherd’s pie, obviously,” he said. My greatest regret at Bowdoin, honestly, is that they serve up the shepherd’s pie with the eggplant parmesan and you just can’t do both. Well you can, but not in public.”
Laurence hopes one day to have a bronze statue of himself erected outside of Thorne to commemorate all the time he has spent there.
Although Laurence admits to cold-calling people in the classroom, he wants students to know that he does it to prepare them for the real world.
“It’s better to be uncomfortable now in class than later at work or in a town hall meeting,” he said. “Don’t take it personally. Where I came from, that is the standard, to be very confrontational and critical. It doesn’t matter what you think, it’s about the argument.”
Regarding other in-class practices, Laurence has been known to recount the dating misadventures of his youth in class.
“I had one student who kept a tally of my stories,” he said.
Unfortunately, Laurence declined to share any of these with the Orient.
Professor Laurence lives in Brunswick with his wife and children, who persuade him to Nordic ski and attend Arctic Monkeys concerts.

Faculty chats: Tsui engages issues of identity in Chinese past and American present

“I’m nobody, but I could be everybody,” reflected Shu-chin Tsui in her office at 38 College Street. Professor of Asian Studies and Cinema Studies, Tsui’s greatest personal and academic preoccupation is the question of identity.
“Who am I? How am I supposed to behave here?” Tsui finds herself asking these questions to her students in the classroom and to herself in her home.
Tsui emigrated from China over thirty years ago, and although she has American citizenship, she feels she will never be “mainstream American.” She spent her youth and college years in Asia, and moved to the United States for graduate school. While Tsui has made academia her life’s work, she was not equipped for scholarship from the outset.
“We did not have a high school or formal education because of China’s political history,” explained Tsui. “We are the generation of a cultural revolution.”
While American teens at the time might have been bussing tables and saving for college, Tsui was performing hard labor.
“We were sent to the countryside to do labor work for ten years. So when you ask me, ‘What’s your odd job?,’ we didn’t have that. We were in the fields doing labor by hands, by shoulders, by back. No machines. It was kind of like the American lost generation in that we lost education. I remember when I came here for graduate school I asked my T.A., ‘How do I write a term paper?’ I really asked him that.”
After years of toiling for her PhD, Tsui became a professor. She now lives in Brunswick in a house she designed, which she described as a psychological space, a place of personal identity. “My house is a home, I wanted to build it with my own hands. It’s a combination of modern simplicity with an oriental Asian touch. It’s home, and I feel very peaceful in that space. For me beauty—the beauty of even a doorframe—matters. I made my house like a museum. You have to paint a wall a certain color to reinforce the art piece hanging. My eyes are constantly looking for something symmetrical and balanced and peaceful.”
Tsui said that if she were to pursue another field of study, she would get a PhD in art history.Along with visual arts, Tsui is also interested in music. As a professor of cinema studies, most art forms interest her—though she does have genre preferences.
“I know nothing about rock, nothing about the Beatles,” she admitted. “I’m not a part of American culture at all.”
Tsui is instead a classical music aficionado, and constantly listens to it as she works.
“I like listening through really good speakers—quality matters to me,” she said.Tsui attends on-campus musical performances and makes weekly trips to see the Portland Symphony Orchestra.
“I don’t watch television. To me, it’s noise,” said Tsui.
Although Tsui eschews this form of media, she does not feel that she is missing out.
“Every day I start my day with the New York Times and the news in Chinese, simultaneously,” she said. “I don’t lose anything; I always know what’s going on.”
Tsui recounted a time when there was a write-up in the paper about a controversial film being aired for two days before official censorship would take it away.
“I brought the film that day to my classroom and we spent that week discussing it. That’s me. My classroom is directly connected to social reality. My classroom and reality are on the same page.”While Tsui describes herself as “a small potato on this campus,” she is relentlessly committed to bringing a global perspective to Bowdoin. In 2016, Tsui will put on a festival at Bowdoin to celebrate Asian independent documentary films.
“Be global,” she said. “Students choose [courses that are] comfortable or career-oriented. But each class can really open up your horizons.”
Tsui is so committed to the cutting-edge in film and to international goings-on that she is willing to put her career and personal safety on the line, she said.
“I can be detained and sent to prison by the Chinese government for this,” she explained. “I’m dealing with controversial topics. I make jokes in the dean’s office, ‘If you don’t hear from me, look for me.’”
It is because of the gambles she has taken that Tsui calls herself a global citizen.
“I am a private person; I am not social,” she said frankly. “But take my classes. I want to take [students] away from classrooms. I am fascinated about classes I’m dealing with. I want students to know that part of me.”
Looking back on her path to Bowdoin, Tsui named the risks she felt obligated to take despite the sacrifices she had to make.
“As a Chinese foreign woman, coming here was a risk. ‘Do I stay here or do I go home?’ All of my family is still in China. Also, choosing a major, looking for myself. All life is risks all the time,” she said.

Faculty chats

Professor Hadley Horch on 80’s movies, Dairy Queen management, aviation

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Elena Britos

Orient Staff

March 26, 2015

Jenny Ibsen

MORE THAN A JOB: Hadley Horch, Associate Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and the director of the neuroscience program, loves teaching students, but also has many hobbies including flying and gardening.

Ask Hadley Horch what her interests are, and her answers might surprise you. Horch is Associate Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and the director of the neuroscience program. Her lab work is focused on conducting studies on crickets.

“I love my work, but I don’t eat, drink, and sleep it,” she said.
Horch is a Midwesterner who grew up in the suburbs of Indianapolis.

“It didn’t resonate with me there, and I got out as quickly as I could,” she said.

Horch decided to head east for college, enrolling at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
While Horch discovered her passion for neuroscience and held lab jobs at Swarthmore, she was not without any prior work experience. The summer before college, she decided it would be interesting to get a job painting parking meters.

“I worked at the Indiana Department of Transportation, but never did get to paint any meters,” said Horch. “I had applied because I thought that sounded kind of fun to be outside all summer. The lady I interviewed with thought it was inappropriate for a girl to be on that team, so she invented an office job for me.”

In this job, she was once asked to rip up documents and ended up with blisters on both of her thumbs.

“I did that for days, and it was ridiculous because I think they had a shredder,” Horch said.
Horch also recounted the misadventures of a former occupation: being the manager of a Dairy Queen.

“There was one night when [the other employees] changed all the clocks on me so I closed up an hour early–I was that kind of kid. I remember a massive ketchup and mustard fight in the back that I was responsible for, even though I didn’t take part in it.”

Despite the trials of her high-school jobs, Horch looks back on them fondly. When remembering her college years, meeting her husband is one of Horch’s favorite memories.

“It’s kind of a funny story,” she said. “Two friends of ours decided we should date. They were telling me he was talking about me, which was untrue, and they did the same to him. I was a sophomore, and one night I was hanging out and doing homework in my room and my friends threw this man into my room and locked the door. He literally looked like he was about to leap out the third floor window, and that is who I married.”

Horch lives in Brunswick with her husband and children, and is a dedicated gardener.

“I’m starting to do permaculture in my yard, and I just built a hugel mound,” she said enthusiastically.

Horch describes hugel mounds as brush, mud and sticks buried in a trench covered in leaves.

“They become a sort of nursery and the idea is that whatever you plant in a mound, in theory, you will never have to water for twenty years,” she said.

Horch recently ordered blueberry bushes to plant in the mound.

“I think I might have ordered kiwi vines, too. There’s a northern variety that can grow here, you eat the peel and all. I’ll need to build a trellis, though.”

Horch admits that although gardening is a real hobby for her, sometimes she would rather dream about projects than actually carry them out.

“I would love to flip houses. Not that I would have the taste or skills to do that, but I really like fixing up old houses, and this is a fantasy of mine. I thought about this when I was up for tenure [which she received in 2010], about what I would really want to do other than [teaching], and all these crazy ideas came about. I also think it would be really fun to be a movie critic.”

In her free time, Horch enjoys watching her favorite 80’s movies with her daughter and any show with a comedic, female-driven narrative.

“I kind of like vapid movies,” she said. “I like Will Ferrell and romantic comedies. I am able to turn my brain off and be pretty uncritical with those. In college, I was into dark movies about Vietnam, but I just can’t do that anymore. I just need to be pretty fluffy. I think a lot of deep thoughts at work, and that’s enough.”

Horch sipped coffee from a 30 Rock mug throughout the interview. When asked what Bowdoin students might not know about her, Horch revealed that she has her pilot’s license.

“My husband and I had money burning in our pockets, so we got licensed at Chapel Hill,” she said. “The last time I flew I was getting certified on a Piper. I hate the feeling of doing stalls, what it does to your stomach. That particular day, I really felt like I was going to hurl. Turns out I was pregnant with my first child. After that, I became more risk-averse and haven’t flown alone since, but I’m glad I did it.”

Despite her willingness to share her eclectic hobbies with the Bowdoin community, Horch ultimately wants students to know how glad she is to be teaching here.

“I really love interacting with my students. It’s kind of nerdy to say that, but I just love watching light bulbs go off. There’s really no better feeling. It’s a passion for me.”

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