Work by members of the Linfield College faculty will be featured during a faculty symposium recognizing “Global thinkers, local engagement” on Thursday, March 7, at 7 p.m. in the Richard and Lucille Ice Auditorium in Melrose Hall at Linfield.
The symposium is part of a week-long celebration in honor of Miles K. Davis, Linfield College president, who will be inaugurated Friday, March 8.
Faculty will include Lissa Wadewitz, associate professor of history; Chad Tillberg, professor of biology; Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, associate professor of English and the Ronni Lacroute Chair in Shakespeare Studies; and Marie Chantalle Mofin Noussi, associate professor of French and Francophone studies.
Wadewitz will present “The Adventures of Ranald MacDonald, Trained in the Liberal Arts.” MacDonald was born to a Scottish father and a Clatsop Chinook mother at Fort Astoria, Oregon in 1824. In 1835, he was sent to Winnipeg to get a proper liberal arts education that fueled MacDonald’s passion for learning and desire to see the world. At 18, MacDonald left home to work as a whaler, a gold prospector, and, most famously, as the first English teacher in Japan. Although foreigners were not allowed in Japan at the time, MacDonald purposely shipwrecked himself and convinced Japanese officials not to execute him. This native Oregonian thus came to connect the local to the global through his lived experience as he repeatedly used his liberal arts training to adapt to a rapidly changing and globalizing world.
Tillberg’s research focuses on ants, which have captured the imagination of philosophers and scholars since antiquity. What is it about this group of animals that makes them such a fascinating comparator for human individual and societal behaviors? In what way might we benefit from a scientific understanding of ant behavior? How has the liberal arts environment of Linfield College informed one myrmecologist’s scholarly journey?
Pollack-Pelzner and students have been working with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to document the theater’s ambitious Play On project: 36 playwrights from around the English-speaking world (majority women, majority artists of color) hired to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. It’s a common practice in other countries, where Shakespeare is routinely translated into contemporary speech, and it was the practice in English from the 17th century through the late 19th, when Shakespeare’s language was considered obscure and in need of updating. Why did that practice change? Why should a diverse group of playwrights revive it today? And how does Linfield play into this project? Global thinking meets local practice through Oregon Shakespeare, which is transforming what Prospero in “The Tempest” calls “the great globe itself” into “such stuff as dreams are made on.”
Noussi will examine how the French colonial policy of assimilation affected the political and social spheres and prejudiced agriculture and the environment in general, disrupting the lives of native peoples. Noussi looks at Cameroon, a West African country nicknamed “Africa in Miniature,” to analyze the various ways that monoculture, both cultural and agricultural, influences life in the former French African colonies.
The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Charles Dunn, committee co-chair and professor of mathematics, at 503-883-2273, cdunn@linfield.edu.
