Rohini Kurup
Number of articles: 7First article: October 14, 2016
Latest article: February 24, 2017
Popular
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Santoro podcast sheds light on the liberal arts experience
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Students working to form group for women in finance, investing
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Japanese Students Association plans remembrance of internment
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Local filmmaker engages campus in ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’
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Diamond Walker '17 teaches students about natural hair care
Longreads
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Japanese Students Association plans remembrance of internment
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Students working to form group for women in finance, investing
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Local filmmaker engages campus in ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’
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Israeli photographer to speak on Jewish identity, masculinity
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Diamond Walker '17 teaches students about natural hair care
All articles
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Students working to form group for women in finance, investing
Citing a lack of opportunities for students to learn about finance at Bowdoin, a group of female students are working to start a chapter of Smart Woman Securities (SWS), a national organization committed to providing an undergraduate community with resources for women interested in investing and personal finance. Currently, SWS has chapters at large research institutions and women’s colleges; the Bowdoin chapter would be an atypical choice for the organization.
Bowdoin SWS is in the soft launch process this semester and if successful, will be officially chartered next fall.
The chartering initiative is spearheaded by a founding team of four students across class years: Jiaqi Duan ’17, Leaf Ma ’18, Carina Sun ’19 and Ruilin Yang ’20. The students wanted to teach women at Bowdoin about finance, and according to their Facebook page, provide them with the, “[s]kills necessary to make investment decisions through global market education, exposure to industry professionals, and real-world financial experience.”
Duan wanted to bring SWS to Bowdoin after her involvement with the organization during her junior year away at Harvard University. She is familiar with being in the female minority in economics classes and finance internships—one of her economics classes at Bowdoin had three women in a group of 30 students. She found Harvard’s branch of SWS to be useful and empowering.
“I realized how much I had benefited from SWS when I was at Harvard—I just thought it would be an amazing opportunity to bring here to Bowdoin,” Duan said.
Sun explained that because learning about the basics of finance is difficult at Bowdoin, she wanted to start the organization to teach other women these important skills.
“You probably just want to deal with personal finance, manage your money, invest in stocks. There is no path for you to get involved in finance if you are not an economics major,” said Sun.
Around 100 people signed up for the group’s mailing list and about 20 came to its initial information session. However, there has been some concern about the group’s presence on campus.
The Bowdoin College Finance Society, which states that its primary purpose is to help students launch careers in finance, is largely male-dominated. This led to concern that starting a female finance group would further divide men and women interested in finance on campus. However, Sun disagreed, noting that nothing stops students from participating in both groups.
“There isn’t a lot of overlap, especially in terms of the events or the frequency of meetings,” Sun explained.
She added that the groups have different goals. While the finance society is more career-oriented, Sun said that female empowerment is a crucial focus of the SWS mission.
The organization must become nationally chartered before it can formally charter with the College. The process of chartering with the national organization has been complex and takes a year to complete. In December, the students submitted a 10-page interest application. After passing that round, they submitted a 30-page document in January explaining their plans for the soft launch process this semester.
During the soft launch process, the founding team is provided with funds and holds weekly conference calls with the SWS national organization. During this process they are required to put on three events and provide the national organization with weekly updates.
The three events planned for the semester are an investment-themed “Jeopardy” night, a panel discussion on personal finance and an asset allocation simulation workshop.
At the end of the semester, the group will submit its final chapter prospectus—a reflection and evaluation of its work over the semester. If the charter is approved, SWS will start with a 10-week seminar series in the fall.
The seminar series will be based on materials provided by the national organization. The founding team hopes to bring speakers, preferably professionals in the finance field, to lead the discussions. It hopes that the lectures will be both enjoyable and instructive, and has high hopes for the organization’s future success at Bowdoin.
“We want it to be something that is of a really high standard, that people know is going to be somewhat of a time commitment, but if they put in the time, they are going to get so much out of it,” Duan said. “They are going to know that when they put it on their resume, this is going to be something that has a lot of recognition, and it does.”
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Japanese Students Association plans remembrance of internment
Next week, the newly formed Japanese Students Association and the Student Center for Multicultural Life will pay tribute to the 75th anniversary of Japanese-American internment during World War II. With themes of remembrance and commemoration, the week will focus on a student-created exhibit representing the dehumanization of Japanese Americans and a lecture by Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies Connie Chiang to provide important historical and cultural context to Japanese-American internment.
February 19 marks the 75th anniversary of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps in response to growing anti-Japanese legislation and racism in the U.S. and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
In years past, events commemorating the Day of Remembrance have been smaller in scale. This year, however, students felt that the event was even more important to mark given the current political climate.
The Day of Remembrance exhibit will be installed in public spaces such as the dining halls on Bowdoin’s campus. It is based on a similar project by artist Wendy Maruyama on display in the University Art Gallery at San Diego State University. Maruyama created thousands of tags similar to the ones Japanese Americans were forced to wear when taken to the internment camps. The students working on the project were inspired by the striking visual and wanted to recreate it at Bowdoin.
“A travel tag for luggage makes sense but a travel tag for a person is dehumanizing,” said Kiki Nakamura-Koyama ’17, one of the interns at the Student Center for Multicultural Life and an organizer of the project. Organizers plan to install the tags in the dining halls, where they cannot go unnoticed.
As with Maruyama’s work, the approximately 400 travel tags made by students will commemorate the incarcerated Japanese Americans by displaying their names, relocation centers and assigned identification numbers.
Another key part of the commemorations will be Chiang’s talk. Mitsuki Nishimoto ’17, co-president of the Asian Students Association and a leader of the Japanese Students Association, invited Chiang to speak on the event because of her expertise on Japanese incarceration.
“We thought that she would be a great person to not only educate the campus about the history and legacy of that but also to facilitate a conversation of what remembrance means in the present day,” Nishimoto said.
In her talk, Chiang will discuss the broad history behind the Japanese incarceration, highlighting the fact that the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war was the culmination of years of federal and state-sanctioned anti-Japanese sentiment. She will also talk about the impacts of the incarcerations and the parallels to today’s xenophobia and politics.
“This is not something that happened in just three years, it actually started much earlier and continues to this day,” said Chiang.
“It has had a very long-lasting impact on the Japanese-American community specifically but I think Asian-Americans more broadly,” said Chiang.
In the second half of the program, Chiang will facilitate a discussion. She plans to bring documents, such as a copy of Executive Order 9066 and a “loyalty questionnaire” for attendees to look through and discuss.
Chiang said that she hopes that students of all backgrounds will find the talk interesting, regardless of whether or not they have an immigrant background or have a personal connection to the historical events.
Nishimoto said that while it has always been important to remember the internment of Japanese Americans, this year it felt particularly pertinent.
“Remembrance, I think, takes on even greater meaning in this current political climate,” Nishimoto said.
Nishimoto added that President Trump’s recent executive order barring immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries and his proposed Muslim registry offered significant parallels to the events of the World War II period.
Chiang plans to touch on the parallels between the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II and Trump’s recent executive order.
“I think there are real substantive differences but also uncanny parallels as well,” Chiang said.
Nakamura-Koyama hopes that the talk and installation will encourage people to notice the contemporary relevance of the incarcerations.
“We forget so easily that we had discriminated against an entire people just because they had the ‘face of the enemy,’ she said. “That is the message that I want to get out, remembering that America’s history is not as pure as we’d like to believe and that we’re very vulnerable, in times of fear like right now, to making this mistake again.”
The art installation will be set up on Sunday, February 19, and the lecture will take place the following Wednesday.
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Swanson '18 turns family scenes to artful screens
Television screens in trees may seem unusual, but for junior Nevan Swanson, it was just part of the artistic process. Titled “Screens,” Swanson’s summer photography project aims to explore associations with screens, their content and their environment. The project is currently on display in the Edwards Center for Art and Dance.
Over the course of the project, Swanson recorded videos on his family’s old camcorder once used for home movies, treating it as a “visual diary.” He played the videos on television screens in different locations, which he photographed by either freezing certain frames or doing long exposures.
Through the images, he attempts to show a layering of time and the overlap of moments that took place in the past as they may appear in the present.
“Life in the present can be different because of the context,” Swanson said.
Swanson took his photos with a medium-format film camera, which allowed him to create high quality images without the comfort and immediacy of a digital camera. The images were shot primarily in Maine—around Lisbon Falls, Brunswick and Bar Harbor—and also in his home in Connecticut.
At the start of the project, Swanson was unsure of what direction to take and was driven to try a variety of options.
“I was trying to experiment as much as I could with what I wanted to do, the types of pictures I wanted to take and how I wanted to take them,” Swanson said. This opportunity was both rare and valuable.
According to Swanson, the freedom to experiment was liberating.
“I can’t do that all the time here. I don’t have the ability to break away from one certain idea and just go off on that idea for a long time.”
Swanson received the Patterson Research Fellowship last year, which supports student research over the summer months. The funds allowed him to spend his summer in Maine pursuing an independent photography project under the mentorship of Associate Professor of Art Michael Kolster.
Charlotte Youkilis contributed to this report.
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Diamond Walker '17 teaches students about natural hair care
When she was 16, Diamond Walker ’17 stopped using relaxers— lotions used to chemically smooth or straighten very curly hair— and started looking for natural hair products. She found that products on the market were expensive and decided to make her own hair products with simple ingredients found at a grocery store. Now, years later, Walker has begun to share her discoveries in a series of hair care tutorials at Bowdoin.
The tutorials, which took place throughout the month of November, were split into three parts. Walker decided to break up the series according to the way she washes her own hair. She discussed oil treatments and herbal hair rinses in the first program, shampooing in the second week and deep conditioning in the third.
“Each session I would explain what the topic was, its benefits and how to carry it out,” Walker said.
In the first tutorial, Walker helped participants make herbal hair rinses.
“I had bought rosemary and thyme leaves. We boiled [the mixture], let it sit, put it in containers and made our own rinses. I explained how to use them, and people were able to take them home and use them,” she explained.
Walker said that she saw a specific need for this type of program at Bowdoin. Her intended audience was anyone interested in using non-commercial products.
“It was more so people whose hair wasn’t responding well to store-bought products and wanted to know more about the process,” Walker said. “Caring for natural hair isn’t something talked about growing up because lots of women get relaxers even though that is changing over generations. A lot of us grew up with straightened hair and had to learn to care for our hair all by ourselves,” she added.
She created the program to be helpful for people of all hair types and wanted the tutorials to be open to the whole campus.
She spread the word about her tutorials by placing cards in students’ mailboxes. This helped Walker reach a wider audience and led more students to come to the tutorials than she expected.
Walker intended the tutorials to be a one-time series, but she is open to continuing them if there is a high demand.
If she were to host more tutorials, she said she would want to gear them toward naturally kinky hair.
“At Bowdoin, the community is very white so we can’t find many of our products in stores here. [A tutorial] could just be really helpful,” she said.
Walker felt that the event was a success.
“The people who did come learned a lot and were really into it and that’s all I could ask for,” she said. “If someone was having a real problem with their hair, and I could offer advice that was helpful, it made me really happy knowing that I could possibly make them more confident. Hair is a very important part of everyone’s identity. Whether you shave it off or grow it long, we express ourselves through our hair.”
Walker hopes that the tutorials helped students learn more about natural hair care and inspired them to create natural products for themselves.
“Making your own products is very liberating and you know exactly what’s going into your hair and your scalp. For me it’s a really rewarding experience,” said Walker.
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Israeli photographer to speak on Jewish identity, masculinity
Acclaimed Israeli photographer Adi Nes will visit Bowdoin on Tuesday to deliver the Harry Spindel Memorial Lecture. His large-format photographs tackle issues of Jewish identity and masculinity, and will be a part of the exhibition “Art and Resolution: 1900 to Today” at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
Nes was invited to be the lecturer after Harrison King McCann Professor of English Marilyn Reizbaum sent the Museum a proposal for his photographs to be displayed. She is exploring his work in her upcoming book “Unfit: The Jewish Science of Modernism.”
In his lecture, titled “Issues of Identity,” Nes will speak about his artistic style, his use of staged photography and the ways in which his photographs reflect the various facets of Israeli identity.
The exhibit will feature Nes’ photographs, which are large-format staged images that tell fictional stories about Israeli society. According to Reizbaum, the size of the photographs is important as it contributes to the dramatic nature of the images.
She added that by working on the same scale as old master artists, such as French Romantic artist Delacroix, Nes is able to speak to current moments and the ways in which they answer questions of Jewishness.
Ellen Tani, Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow at the Museum, explained that the images are “references to an ideal utopia and on-the-ground grit of daily life.”
“He works in series and most of the works are untitled, and that’s purposeful because it lets the viewer come cleanly to the work without their own expectation of what it’s about without looking at it,” Tani said.
The larger exhibit, “Art and Resolution: 1900 to Today,” focuses on how artists use their practice to reckon with various challenges of our time.
“When I was putting it together, I was thinking about, in a global sense, what are artists confronting in their world in the last 100 years?” said Tani.
Tani felt as though Nes’ work fit well with the exhibition as it added a new dimension to the conversation about 20th and 21st century artwork.
“The drive of his photographic practice aligns really nicely with that theme and provides a really fascinating angle to which other works in our collection can’t necessarily speak, namely issues of ethnic difference in Israel, within Jewish culture and around issues relating to masculinity in Israeli culture,” Tani said.
Reizbaum, who has been in contact extensively with Nes for her book, expects that students will enjoy hearing Nes speak. According to Tani, the Museum hopes that the lecture and exhibit will allow students to gain new global perspectives on the concepts of difference and conflict, specifically in relation to race.
“So many of our conversations are preoccupied with racial frictions we are familiar with in the U.S.,” Tani said. “I hope that this stretches people’s notions of how this isn’t something that is unique to our culture. The fact that this is a human difference, is something that is experienced worldwide and that has great impact on lives that we don’t necessarily understand.”
“Art and Resolution: 1900 to Today” will be on display at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art fromNovember 15 through April 16, 2017.
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Local filmmaker engages campus in ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’
More than 30 years after auditing a class at Bowdoin on poet Wallace Stevens, writer and filmmaker Alison Johnson returned to campus Wednesday evening to screen her documentary film on the modernist poet.
The film explores Stevens’ life, touching upon his childhood, undergraduate experience at Harvard, marriage, family life and career in both insurance and poetry. Weaving Stevens’ poetry together with a biographical account of his life, the film showcases the ways in which Stevens’ life experiences informed his poetry.
The idea behind the film originated in the 1980s, when Johnson audited a seminar at Bowdoin. She said she was drawn to Stevens’ work and letters but failed to find a well-written biography about him, so she decided to write her own.
She conducted large amounts of research, using Stevens’ letters housed in the Huntington Library in California as a main resource. Her biography, titled “Wallace Stevens: A Dual Life as Poet and Insurance Executive” was published in 2012.
The idea for the film, however, did not arise until much later in 2014, after the Wallace Stevens house in Hartford, CT suddenly went on the market. Johnson considered how it could be dedicated as a museum to commemorate the poet. She gathered fellow Stevens enthusiasts with hopes to either buy the house or have the new owners open it up to the public as a museum. When the plans to buy the house fell through, Johnson decided to take a different approach.
“I got to thinking,” she said. “If we could film the interior of the house, that would be very interesting, and we could then film the Wallace Stevens collection of paintings and memorabilia and put together a documentary about Wallace Stevens. Having written the biography, I had all the information to start.”
Johnson and her crew got permission to film in the house just days before it closed.“The documentary was grown out of a failure when the house museum plan fell, but I very quickly realized this is far better because by making a documentary, people all over the world can see Stevens’ house,” Johnson said.
One of Johnson’s goals is to create content for the average person to understand and enjoy.
“My feeling is that it used to be in the 1950s and 1960s, people were still writing biographies that an intelligent member of the general public that was interested in that literary feature could read and enjoy,” Johnson said. “Nowadays, everything has become so specialized that biographies are being written by PhDs for PhDs, and they are very hard to understand … I write biographies for the average reader. They are still something that people can enjoy even if they don’t have a degree in English,” Johnson said.
Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Muther invited Johnson to screen her film at Bowdoin because of Johnson’s record of meticulous and diligent research. She explained that Bowdoin students would be able to gain an interesting biographical background on Stevens as most research is done solely on his work rather than his personal life.
Johnson hopes that by screening the film, Bowdoin students are able to better understand and appreciate Stevens’ poetry, which she said is sometimes off-putting to readers because of its level of difficulty.
“[Stevens] really wanted people to get pleasure from his poems,” she said. “I think he would be upset to think too many people had been turned off by reading the ones that are too difficult.”
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Santoro podcast sheds light on the liberal arts experience
For the last several months, Associate Professor of Education Doris Santoro has been stepping into the increasingly popular world of podcasts. “Embodying the Liberal Arts,” attempts to capture Bowdoin students’ stories and share them with the broader community. Santoro hopes that the podcast will help students connect with each other more deeply and honestly.
Santoro was inspired to start the podcast while on sabbatical last year. Observing what was happening on campus, she felt as though there was a loss of respect between students.
“I like the medium of a podcast because it enables you to just listen. There is no interruption,” said Santoro.
She was further inspired after a conference where she met Marcia Chatelain, associate professor of history at Georgetown University, who has her own podcast where she interviews students. Santoro later wrote to Chatelin, who encouraged her to start a podcast at Bowdoin.
“[The podcast’s goal] is to promote the practice of empathy and compassion, to find points of connection where you may not have known to look,” Santoro said. She also wants “to foster connection where students might feel like they are the only ones going through something so that they come to realize that they are not the only one[s] who might be experiencing that.”
Santoro added that the podcast speaks to the unique nature of the liberal arts experience and the Bowdoin experience in particular.
“For a very long time I feel like people talked about ‘This is what the Bowdoin student looks like’ or that there is a norm that either students should aspire to or that they do aspire to. I try to make sure I’m talking to people who embody what it means to be a Bowdoin student in really different ways so that students themselves can see that there is no norm even if it feels like there is,” she said.
In the podcasts, Santoro asks three questions: what is most important to you, what does a liberal arts education mean to you, and what do you wish your professors knew about you.“I just love those questions and how open they are,” said Santoro.
Mitsuki Nishimoto ’17, one of the students featured on the podcast, agreed that the questions allow for open interpretation, noting that while the questions are the same, each podcast is incredibly unique.
“I know that sounds cheesy but if you look at all the different titles, if you listen to even the first five minutes of any one, there are definitely some commonalities but there are a lot of differences,” said Nishimoto.
“I think it’s really rare for professors to ask questions like that. I have never really had a space where I could talk about myself for 40 minutes,” she said. “That was really meaningful to me ... to know that a professor cared to ask me about my life.”
For Professor Santoro, these meaningful conversations with students are at the heart of the podcast.
“I think that it would be hard to listen to any of these folks no matter who they are and not come away thinking how thoughtful, brilliant and engaged they are.”
“Embodying the Liberal Arts” is available on iTunes or at embodyingliberalarts.com.