College of the Liberal Arts Electronic Magazine, Issue 15, September, 2003

Issue 15, 9/12/03

Contents:

Africana Research Center Head Named

October Events

Liana Brown's Robotic Arm

Aimee Betz, Fulbright Scholar

Trivia

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Penn State

College of the Liberal Arts

Alumni Relations and Development

LIBERAL ARTS MAGAZINE ON ITS WAY

   The 2003 issue of Liberal Arts will arrive soon in the mailboxes of Liberal Arts grads all over the country, but it will not look the same. Our design changes reflect the increasing potency of the Web in our efforts to communicate with alumni.
   Inside the magazine, however, you will find the same in-depth stories we have published before, this time with a thematic focus: knowledge. While it may seem simplistic and obvious for a university magazine to focus on "knowledge," the way our faculty and alumni are encountering it and learning about it is compelling enough to risk a few questions from readers. Some of our faculty, including Londa Schiebinger (right), are looking at the cultural reasons behind the fact that, while we (as a culture, society, etc.) know a great deal, there’s much more we don’t know, and the reasons we don’t know some things are pretty interesting. We also have a story on our Fulbright students and their plans for travel abroad, many of whom you will hear from over the coming year as they send dispatches to us to publish in LAzine. You’ve already heard from one of those students, Aimee Betz, abroad this year in Korea, and another of her digests appears in this issue.
   Another story in this issue of LAzine comes from our psychology department, and is about one of their graduate students. We include it because a piece in the magazine examines the developing neuroscience focus in psychology. Yet another piece in Liberal Arts explores a leading bioanthropologist’s compelling findings on skull formation; and more stories profile our alumni whose knowledge of the confection industry, ancient books, and healthier dogs have the potential to color various parts of our daily lives. Taken as a whole, the magazine examines the healthy variety of knowledge and its mechanisms in a new, easy-to-read, highly visual format. We hope you enjoy it.
   That said, due to the success of our Web communication of late, our current printing may be the last issue of Liberal Arts magazine. However, we are not foreclosing the idea of a print publication appearing annually. We've just realized that our Web publication gets you Liberal Arts news in a more timely, more regular, and more varied fashion than the magazine ever did. So, in the interest of being both efficient and respectful of your time (and reading predilections), we will be exploring ideas for our annual print publication over the coming year. Your thoughts, of course, are welcome.
   In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the 2003 issue of Liberal Arts.

BEVERLY VANDIVER APPOINTED NEW HEAD OF AFRICANA RESEARCH CENTER

   You can often find Beverly Vandiver at the local State College coffee shop, the Daily Grind, reading or researching with a smile on her face. "People will come up and ask me why I'm smiling," she says. "It's because I love what I do."
   Beverly Vandiver, associate professor of counseling psychology at Penn State, will now use that same passion in her new position as the director of the Africana Research Center (ARC). The Africana Research Center was developed to assist in building racial diversity at Penn State and to examine historical and current knowledge of African Americans, Africans, and Afro-Caribbean peoples. "If people know about and can contribute to the Africana Research Center, their involvement will go a long way toward easing cultural tensions and providing a way for people to share knowledge and incorporate that knowledge about people of African descent in their scholarship, classrooms, and communities," Vandiver explains.
   In the past eight years she worked only in the College of Education, but Vandiver will now split her time between teaching in counseling psychology and directing the ARC. One of Vandiver's initial goals is to continue to build the identity of the Center. To begin this process, she stresses the importance of investigating similar research institutions at places like Harvard and Temple. "We need to ask 'What have they done already? What is it we can contribute in a long term manner?'"
   She also emphasizes the need to tap into scholarship that the ARC has already undertaken. For instance, the ARC is a co-sponsor with the Rock Ethics Institute and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center on a working lecture series called "Breaking the Silence,” a multidisciplinary project on the topic of slavery and unfair labor practices. The series is designed to understand the extent and nature of such human rights violations and aims to investigate how to eradicate them. Through this joint initiative, the goal of this project is to foster scholarship and research in this area and to have an impact on K-12 education and university curricula. The ARC also offers a yearly undergraduate research symposium and provides funding for research, symposia, outreach projects, and other scholarly work.
   Vandiver hopes to put her knowledge and zeal to work for the ARC to eventually etch a local and state-wide reputation, as well as to have the ARC to evolve into a nationally recognized center. While Vandiver recognizes the hard work ahead, she sees it as a challenge. As she puts it, “I have an enormous amount of energy and passion when it comes to doing what I love.”

   October will be a busy month in Liberal Arts. Things get underway on Homecoming Weekend. Friday night, October 3, the College and the Department of English will host former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove. Beginning at 8:15 p.m. in the HUB/Robeson Center’s Heritage Hall, Dove's reading is the 2003 Emily Dickinson Lecture in American Poetry, an endowed lectureship established by George and Barbara Martino Kelly. Dove is the author of seven collections of poetry, a book of short stories, a novel, and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. For more on Dove, click here.
    The next day, Saturday, October 4, Liberal Arts will take part in the Penn State TailGreat, starting at 9 a.m. in the Bryce Jordan Center. Come join us during the Penn State TailGreat for refreshments, door prizes, and give-aways before the Nittany Lions tackle the Wisconsin Badgers. This event is open to Liberal Arts alumni, their families, and friends and will be in the BJC in Room E. Use the Mezzanine entrance—east side of the BJC. The first 200 alumni who mention this article will receive a certificate for free University Creamery ice cream.
   Admission is free! TailGreat entertainment includes a Blue Band show and pep rally featuring the cheerleaders and the Nittany Lion mascot. No RSVP necessary. For more information call the Liberal Arts Alumni office at 814-863-1223 or e-mail LAalumni@la.psu.edu
   At the end of October, the Department of Philosophy and the Rock Ethics Institute will host the 2003 Lippin Lecturer, Kelly Oliver. Oliver's talk will begin at 4 p.m. in Boardroom I at the Nittany Lion Inn and is supported by the Richard B. Lippin Lectureship in Ethics, an endowment established by Richard and Ronnie Lippin. A professor of philosophy and women's studies at Stony Brook University, Kelly Oliver specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy and feminist theory. Oliver's talk, "Witnessing Ethics," will explore how bearing witness to extreme atrocities carries with it an enlarged sense of individual agency and ethical responsibility. In her argument, Oliver will use the work of Holocaust survivors and the contemporary Truth and Reconciliation Council as models for understanding the complexity of "witnessing" in an ethically responsible way. For more on the lecture, click the link above.

Liana Brown might ask you to hold a robotic arm with a movable elbow and shoulder. With the arm, she may request that you to watch a dot scooting across a computer screen and to use it to point at the dot the moment it vanishes from your sight.
   "What you don’t know is that the robotic arm is being controlled so that your arm is pushed slightly to the right, making it harder to move in the direction you want to go," Brown explains. "At first, you won’t know there’s opposition, but eventually, you will unconsciously learn to compensate for the resistance and hit the target with greater accuracy."
   The test, in part, is meant to gauge how learning a new motor task influences how you perceive a moving object. "What that might mean is that what you learn with your hands can influence expectations about what you see," Brown says.
   Her project fits into her current post-doctoral work at Group for Action and Perception (GAP), a part of the University of Western Ontario's psychology program whose central concern rests on research about how vision is used to control movements.
   Brown's interest in motor control issues began when she was an undergraduate; inspired in part by a movement disorders class she took. After graduation, she worked for at the Toronto Western Hospital giving cognitive tests to people who suffered strokes, heart attacks, brain tumors; "pretty much any kind of event that might affect brain functioning." After meeting David Rosenbaum, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, at a conference, she was inspired to apply to Penn State's Ph.D. program in cognitive psychology. She earned her Ph.D. working with Rosenbaum and Robert Sainburg, assistant professor of kinesiology, both of whom encouraged her to pursue her post-doctoral work.
   Brown's experience at Penn State has been a good one. "I love Penn State because the departments are very collegial." Brown says. For the next two or three years, Brown will pursue her research at the University of Western Ontario. After that, she wants to keep pushing forward in the field of cognitive psychology, as both a researcher and a professor.

AIMEE BETZ WRITES, "ANNYEONG HASEYO MIGUK SARAM!"

   I visited my Uncle Kweon's (dad's friend from medical school) family in Seoul. They were absolutely wonderful to my friend Anne and I. Han Joo (my "cousin") showed us the Gyeongbokgung Palace, which was the main palace during the Chosen Dynasty. Most of it was destroyed during Japanese occupation and the Korean War; the government just started necessary restoration in 1996. He also showed us the Blue House where the president lives. It is very heavily guarded so we could not get very close. A few years back there was an instance where North Korean soldiers crossed over the DMZ wearing South Korean soldier uniforms and got within a block of the president's house before they were stopped. We saw other sites like the "best" universities but my favorite times were spent with the family in their apartment.
   My "aunt" would laugh and lovingly hit me every time I attempted to say anything in Korean. Han Joo, his wife and almost 2 year old daughter, Yoo Na, live with his parents. Han Joo's oldest brother lives in an apartment in the next building with his wife and two sons. On Sunday they all came over for lunch and my "aunt" made delicious Korean cuisine. It was nice to taste some homemade Korean food, the cafeteria and restaurants just do not compare. They showed me pictures of Yoo Na's one year party.
   When babies are born in Korea they are automatically one year old and when the new year arrives they become two. When I tell someone my age it is easiest to say the year because since I was born in 1980, I am 22 in U.S. years and 24 in Korean years. Since I'm a December baby I would have been 2 years old when I was 2 weeks old in the U.S. Koreans still celebrate the day of their birth and on their first birthday there is a huge party. At this party the child wears a traditional Hanbuk and the tradition is to place the baby on the ground and it crawls to a table with various items depending on the tradition of the family; a pencil, money, thread, noodles, rice, etc. The first thing that the child chooses predicts their future. For example Yoo Na chose a pencil so she will be a scholar.
   After lunch on Sunday and more sightseeing with Han Joo, he dropped us off at a hotel to meet our friend Char. His niece was having her 100th day celebration and he invited us to come and experience this part of Korean tradition. His family was so kind to allow strangers to come to such an important event. Traditionally, and it is not the case anymore, but when a baby was born the mother and baby came in contact with only immediate family until the baby passed the 100th day. The reason for this is because of bad spirits, etc. that may come with outsiders and cause the baby to get sick and die. Obviously today, with modern medicine, babies are not as vulnerable but the tradition of the celebration remains. The friends of the family were very concerned as to why we were there and pushed the father of the baby into asking us to say a few words. We explained why we were in Korea and how much we loved it here. Koreans love to know that you are actually making an effort to be apart of their culture and not just being a tourist or trying to make money teaching English. In fact, I've found it odd that when a Korean hears me speak Korean (the few phrases I know), instead of asking me "where" I learned the language as someone who is Spanish or French might do, they ask "why" I'm learning the language.
   I will just quickly update you on other events in my Korean adventures. I passed my yellow belt test last week and tomorrow is my last day of Taekwondo in Chuncheon. If I can find a good place in Mokpo I may continue towards another belt so watch out when I return to the States! I bought the shoes so that's incentive, especially since they had to special order mine because my feet were too small. I thought that wasn't going to happen to me in Korea! On Monday I got Magic Perm, which makes my hair straight for about a year. There is a picture online of me with my hair stylists! It's usually a four hour process and much more expensive in the U.S. Koreans are very big on first impressions and appearance; needless to say my pony tail everyday was not cutting it. I've also been watching many Korean movies. They are so drastically different than American movie. I've also been watching American movies with my language partner and it is frightening to think that the worlds' perceptions of Americans are molded by Hollywood. With that thought in your head, I'm going to say goodbye. I miss you all in the USA! I hope you are doing well.

Annyeonghi gyeseyo,
Aimee

We know it’s only been four weeks, but no one has yet given us the correct answer to last issue’s question: how many Penn State students won Fulbright Awards this year, and of those, how many were Liberal Arts students? We’ll keep checking the in-box to see who gets it. Good luck!