Sagolla graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in English Literature and later obtained a Masters in Education from Harvard. He has contributed to Macromedia Studio, Adobe Creative Suite, and Odeo. Currently, he works at DollarApp, an iPhone app development company.

President Rebecca Chopp

She shared that experiencing other people's passions is one of the great joys of her job as president and she celebrated the accomplishments of several alumni she's met since joining the Swarthmore community. President Chopp also suggested that students might learn from the faculty's life experiences, when she said "even as you study the subjects that the faculty teach you, study the faculty as exemplars of passionate living."

In more than a dozen future events, and in general, she adds she is "particularly eager to gain insight into which aspects of the Swarthmore experience should endure; what values we most treasure; and how those values can help shape our decisions as we look forward to the future together."

Peggy Seeger was a special guest at Swarthmore's 2009 Alumni Weekend. She gave a talk titled "Scalpels or Sledgehammers? Music as a Tool for Activism." Her visit was organized by Swarthmore Folk, a group of alumni interested in carrying forward the tradition of folk music on the campus.

Currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University, Rivlin is the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office and is an expert on urban issues as well as fiscal, monetary, and social policy. She has served as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget in the first Clinton Administration and as vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board .

The Bernie Saffran Lecture is named for an economics professor who taught and mentored generations of Swarthmore students until his death in 2004.

"Tonight," she added, "we induct you into the Swarthmorean tradition of minding the light: critical thinking, questioning your own judgment and that of others, being skeptical but not cynical, taking risks in your exploration of the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences, and participating vigorously in this intensely scholarly community."

Joining President Chopp at the event were Reid Wilkening '10, sociology professor Sarah Willie-LeBreton, and Acting Dean Garikai Campbell '90.

Reid, a biology and history major from Denver, Colo., is an RA and a member of the Student Health Advisory Council. As captain of the men's swimming team, he was named to last season's Centennial Conference Academic Honor Roll. Last fall, he also helped bring Broken Social Scene and RJD2 to campus as chair of the Large Scale Events committee.

In both this lecture and article, Assistant Professor of Music Barbara Milewski examines a selection of Zywulska's camp songs and the contexts in which they were created. She also considers the stylistic qualities that lent Zywulska's post-war writings their force and the extent to which they were developed in the works she created in Birkenau.

Milewski is at work on a book devoted to exploring amateur, unofficial music-making in the Nazi camps through the lives and compositions of three survivors. She is also the co-producer and translator of the annotated disc Ballads and Broadsides: Songs from Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1940-1945.

After an introduction by Sven-David Udekwu '09, Professor of Spanish Aurora Camacho de Schmidt delivered the Last Collection on May 30, 2009. Speakers at this address, an assembly-style gathering, are chosen by the senior class.

Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action Barry Schwartz argues two things. First, markets have their place, but that place isn't every place. And second, even in their place, to work properly, markets depend on nonmarket values that market competition actively corrodes.

There have been many translations and adaptations of Antigone in Manipur — including one in which Creon wore the Indian flag as his headgear. Assistant Professor of Theater Erin Mee describes how, in these productions, Antigone is about the conflict between regional autonomy and national stability. These productions have been used to articulate and celebrate regional culture, and to establish a regional identity that is distinct from, if not in opposition to, the national identity and culture imposed on Manipur’s citizens by the Indian government. As such, they mount both a cultural and political resistance to the national government.

Morgan, Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot Professor Emerita of History, was the first African American professor at the College, and the first African American woman to be granted tenure. She is the author of Children of Strangers, the first work of African American family folklore by a folklorist.

Weinstein's talk draws on the third chapter of the book, "Dark Twins," and charts Faulkner's immersion, as a man and as a writer, in a sea of racially unmanageable waters. "His testimony is all the more telling," Weinstein adds, "for the fissures it reveals."

Shaw - who escaped slavery and ran to the fight for freedom, who soldiered as one the United States Colored Troops, and who, in the face of the federal betrayal still rose to become an independent entrepreneur and landholder - encourages us to rethink the black past. Courageous, defiant, and financially savvy, Shaw represents the often overlooked first generation of black middle class land holders in the post-Civil War South.

Orchestra 2001 will honor President Al Bloom at the world premiere, taking place Fri., Feb. 6, at Philadelphia's Kimmel Center. A second performance will take place in Lang Concert Hall on Sun., Feb. 8.

Woo is a professor of economics at the University of California at Davis, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., and the director of the East Asia Program within the Earth Institute at Columbia University. An expert on the East Asian economies, particularly China, Indonesia and Malaysia, he has advised the U.S. Treasury Department, the IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations.

Professor of History Tim Burke explores the evolution and implications of massively-multiplayer online computer games. The media hype about virtual worlds has often been excessive, but they are both an interesting media form that has exciting creative possibilities and a novel opportunity to study and think about the way that human societies form, organize, and become richly complex.

For more on the pervasiveness and changing nature of gaming culture, check out Second Skin, a documentary written and produced by Victor Piñeiro '00. The film is touted as one of the best docs of 2008.

Composer: Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn
Movement 1: Molto allegro agitato
Performers: Halleh Balch '12 - violin, Paul Wiggins '11 - cello, Corey Silberstein '12 - piano

Hughes joined the public policy faculty of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School at the age of 25, then later taught public policy at Penn's Fels Institute, Harvard's Kennedy School, and at Swarthmore College. He has been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute and his research has appeared in the leading journals of several academic disciplines, including the Journal of Urban Economics, Political Science Quarterly, Economic Geography, Journal of the American Planning Association, and Urban Studies.

Visiting Lang Professor George Lakey presents a multi-dimensional strategic framework for change.  Based on research but guided by vision, the framework offers meaningful actions for the next four years for people with diverse gifts and backgrounds seeking unity of collective strength.

In the 2008 Bernie Saffran Lecture, Michael Greenstone '91 provides estimates on the impact of climate change on mortality in the US and India. He also presents estimates of the costs of the adaptations that people will undertake to protect themselves against the health risks posed by climate change and finally, he analyzes the implications for climate policy.

Michael Greenstone '91 is the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings.

Composer: Johannes Brahms
Movement 4: Allegro
Performers: Stephanie Hsu '07 - violin, Henry Heaton '09 - cello, Glen Ye '09 - piano

At First Collection, held in the Scott Outdoor Amphitheater, each new class is welcomed to campus by members of the Swarthmore community.  After an introduction from President Bloom, political scientist Rick Valelly '75 welcomed the Class of 2012 by sharing the prophecy, and caution, he brought with him to Swarthmore when he transferred to the College, why he was and remains so happy here, and his top 10 list of things to do that he says will guarantee their happiness as undergraduates. Valelly joined Jess Engebretson '09 at this annual event.

In her welcome to the Class of 2012,  encouraged them to reach out to each other and search out their different gifts.  "But keep in mind that the rest of us will also be learning from you," she said.  "You are going to enrich this campus with your humor, your compassion, your curiosity.  We are so glad that each of you is here."

Engrebretson, an English literature major from Washington, D.C., is a senior producer at War News Radio who worked this summer for the ENOUGH Project, which works to end genocide and crimes against humanity.  She was followed at the podium by political scientist Rick Valelly '75.

But those theories, while well-intentioned, fit poorly with empirical evidence of most citizens’ expressed preferences. Not only now, but since the days of ancient Greece, democracies have struggled to keep citizens’ attention and energies focused on political affairs. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, widely (but wrongly) considered to be an unqualified optimist for American “civic engagement” in the Jacksonian era, worries about the elusiveness of citizens’ attention and energy.

So while popular governance has almost always been a story of “attention deficit democracy,” Tocqueville gives us strategies for engaging citizens more effectively. Berger closes by examining the 2008 presidential election and asking whether Barack Obama’s charismatic appeal will be only a temporary stimulant or an opportunity to re-engage citizens with political institutions and each other.

"Honoring Our Changing Stories"

In her address at Alumni Weekend, environmental lawyer and award-winning author Rishi Reddi '88 spoke about "honoring change in our lives," including examples from the College's history in which students "challenged this school to live up to the ideals of its Quaker founders."

Rishi Reddi was born in Hyderabad, India, and grew up in England and the United States. Her book Karma and Other Stories, published by ecco/ HarperCollins in April 2007, received the 2008 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awar and one of those stories, "Justice Shiva Ram Murthy," appeared in Best American Short Stories 2005.

Writing is only one of Rishi's professional paths. She earned her law degree from Northeastern University in 1992 and, having been interested in nature and the environment for years, became an environmental attorney for Massachusetts.

Rishi continues her dual pursuit of law and literature, working part-time for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and writing a historical novel based on the first South Asians who moved to Southern California in the 1910s. Rishi also serves on the board of South Asian Americans Leading Together, a national, non-profit organization dedicated to fostering an environment in which all South Asians in America can participate fully in civic and political life, and have influence over policies that affect them.

What defines a "good death?" What happens when a young person dies suddenly? How do mothers, fathers, and siblings make sense of the unexpected passing away of a son or a brother? What discourses do people draw on to explain such a loss? Based on recent ethnographic research in a low-income neighborhood in Cairo, I examine the role of religion in offering people a set of ideas and discourses that they can actively utilize to understand and accept mortality in general and unexpected mortality in particular.

Unlike Western societies, where death is usually hidden and relegated to specific isolated spaces, death in Egypt is a public occurrence that mobilizes families, networks, and communities. Sharing in praying, carrying the coffin, participating in the burial, paying condolences, and respecting the memory of the dead and the feelings of his/her relatives are expected from neighbors, relatives, and friends. At the same time, death is widely discussed by men, women, and children and addressed by religious figures in the media and local mosques. In fact, death is the most commonly addressed topic by different sheikhs in weekly lessons in local mosques, TV religious programs, numerous audiotapes, and various books and booklets.

The death of young men in particular, which is usually sudden and tragic, is the focus of much attention. Religious figures often view the increasing number of such deaths a minor sign that the Day of Judgment is approaching. They repeatedly explain the notion of "good ending" (husn al-khatima), which all Muslims should to aspire to and work to secure. They also vividly describe the meaning of a "bad ending" (sua' al-Khatima), which should be avoided at all cost. On the other hand, we have family members, relatives, and friends, who link the timing and nature of death, the place of burial, and testimonies by others who attend the washing, praying, carrying, and burying in their attempts to present the passing of the loved one as a "good death." This lecture explores how these different actors selectively appropriate religiously and socially supported ideas, texts, and views in their attempts to attach positive meanings to the death of young men and present it within the highly cherished notion of "good ending."

Lok Siu, associate professor of anthropology and Asian/Pacific/American studies, New York University

In her talk, Lok Siu proposes an approach to Asian American studies that examines more fully the extent to which hemispheric dynamics and processes link the experiences of Asians across the Americas. Siu, author of the award-winning Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama, argues that adopting this approach will inevitably transform the historiography of Asian America and will bring Asian American studies into productive dialogue with fields such as Latin American studies, Canadian studies, and American studies. Siu is introduced by Assistant Professor of English Literature Bakirathi Mani.

The Genevieve Ching-wen Lee '96 Memorial Lecture was established in 1996 by her family to promote awareness of and research on Asian American issues. Each year the College welcomes to campus a leading scholar in the field.

Pieter Judson '78 asks whether Austria-Hungary was truly an empire. He argues that how we answer this question shapes the way we view contemporary East-Central Europe. If, as most people do, we see the world through a nationalist lens, then we will categorize Austria-Hungary as a classic empire, one that ruled over several "captive nations." After the break up of Austria-Hungary in 1918, nationalist activists propagated just such a myth of Austria-Hungary as an imperial "prison of nations" in order to legitimize their new states of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Twentieth-century social scientists too were invested in seeing Austria-Hungary as an imperial entity, one that had held together the complex ethnic mosaic they thought of as Eastern Europe. Finally, nostalgists pining for the lost world of fin-de-si???cle Budapest, Prague, or Vienna also promoted memories of Austro-Hungarian culture as particularly imperial in nature. All these views, Judson argues, are wrong-headed, originating in our need, like that of the nationalists, to see Eastern Europe in terms of well-defined nations and cultures. Austria was in fact a genuinely constitutional state with no ruling nation and no oppressed minority nations, but also one with no national identity.

Ensemble: Gamelan Semara Santi (Balinese Classical Percussion Orchestra)
Composition/composer: Sekar Ginotan, composed by I Wayan Lotring ca. 1930.
Artistic directors: I Nyoman Suadin and Thomas Whitman
Recorded: December 9th 2007 in Lang Concert Hall

Music composed by I Wayan Lotring (ca. 1898-1983); as taught by I Madé Gerindem, village of Teges, Central Bali (d. 1989)
Gender Rambat Soloists: Mark Loria, Abram Lipman
Suling (bamboo flutes): Laura Keeler, I Nyoman Suadin

"Sekar Ginotan takes its name from a common flower. It was composed by I Wayan Lotring, one of the most influential composers of twentieth-century Bali. He was particularly famous for spiking his compositions with unpredictable rhythms and asymmetrical gong cycles. There are four main parts heard on this recording: a fast introductory section for the full ensemble; a slower section; a section in medium tempo; and a fast closing section. This final section is itself composed of two contrasting types of music: a fast, loud ostinato alternating with a quirky and rhythmically lopsided passage. The composition concludes with a graceful fade into silence."
~ Tom Whitman, Associate Professor of Music

Listen to the Swarthmore College Orchestra perform Robert Schumann's Symphony no. 3 in E-flat Major, op.97 (Movement 5: Lebhaft [Lively] Schneller [Faster]).

The environmental and social impact a business has on the world around it is a rapidly growing source of competitive advantage. CEOs of some of the world's leading companies are now tackling global challenges such as climate change and the widening rich-poor gap, not as cost constraints but as business opportunities. Based on his new book, Sustainable Value, published by Stanford University Press in February 2008, Chris Laszlo '80 discusses sustainability-driven business leadership and emerging sustainability practices based on case studies at DuPont, Wal-Mart and other global industry leaders.

Composer: Edwin B. Edwards
Performers: Hannah Epstein '10 – clarinet, Dan Cianci – trumpet, Ed Dewey '10 – trombone, Garth Griffin '09 – piano, Harry Russin '09 – banjo, Dan Perelstein '09 – bass, Yaeir Heber '11 - drums

Professor Murphy also discusses why public school education in many American cities, is for minority parents, an intellectual, social, and economic death sentence for their children, and why Dewey’s ideal of ideological ground fell to the neo-conservatives while the progressive shattered into fragments after the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Strike.

"From the perspective of a typical bacterium or virus, the human body is a perfect incubator: constant temperature, filled with nutrients, bathed in moisture! So why are we still around? How do bacteria sense the presence of a host's immune response? How can both the bacterium and host survive? We'll consider these topics from a co-evolutionary and inter-dependent point of view," Vollmer says. "As well, we will explore the concept that there are many beneficial bacterial commensalisms, upon whom our lives depend. My talk will provide an overview to the intertwined worlds of humans and microbes. It will also include examples of how microbiology is an ideal vehicle for promoting science literacy throughout the Swarthmore curriculum."

"Philosophers have traditionally classified mathematical knowledge as 'a priori' and scientific knowledge as 'a posteriori,'" Baler says. "In other words, mathematics can be done without leaving one's armchair, while physics cannot. In this lecture I challenge both sides of this traditional picture. On the one hand, are there such things as 'mathematical experiments' and what kind of role might they play in mathematics? On the other hand, can conclusions be justifiably reached about the nature of the physical world that do not depend on observation or experiment?"

The lecture is intended for a general audience and no specific mathematical or scientific background is presupposed.

"In my lecture, I discuss the global context for the emergence of modernism in Japan in the 1920's and 1930's, as well as the ways in which Japanese modernist poetry deployed the distinctive qualities of the Japanese written language," Gardner says. "Although the prewar Japanese state could be characterized as both authoritarian and imperialist, the 1920's were a time of relative political liberalism and cosmopolitanism. This was also a period of rapid urban growth, as well as the rise of communications and transportation technologies such as radio, cinema, and aviation that seemed to shrink the size of the globe. Among the dizzying cultural developments of this period was the emergence of new types of literature in Japanese that we can identify as modernist and avant-garde, inspired in part by such European avant-garde movements as Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. In my talk I will look at the work of four modernist poets, and show how each of them positions his work in terms of Japanese literary tradition, Western cultural hegemony, and Japan's expanding empire in East Asia."

"Twelve years after the first discovery of planets outside our own solar system, we now know of more than 200 extrasolar planets," Jensen says. "This is enough to allow us to start to see emerging patterns that may yield clues to how Jupiter-like planets form, though current techniques are not yet able to detect Earth-like planets. I discuss what we have learned so far from our study of extrasolar planets, and the prospects for detecting Earth-like planets in the near future."

"Why does Greek mythology figure centrally into some of the most pivotally modern works in the performing arts? If we have lost a romantic, sentimental attachment to ancient Greece as a cultural ideal, what significance can Greek myth have for us?" asks Ledbetter. "In this lecture I discuss Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, Martha Graham's Night Journey, and Balanchine's Apollo and show that, in different ways, each of these works employs a kind of classicism that - somewhat paradoxically - evokes the ancient past specifically for purposes of modernizing its art form."

"We live in a breakthrough period for 'nonviolent struggle,' when pro-democracy movements are using it to overthrow dictators and human rights advocates are using it to save lives during civil unrest," Lakey says. "My question is: how can this social technology be made even more powerful for achieving justice, democracy and peace?

"I argue that it's time to view nonviolent action not just as an overall concept but to break it into three different applications, and I'll argue further that these applications are different from each other in important ways. By 'nonviolent struggle' I mean an approach to waging conflict in which the protagonist uses methods of protest, intervention and/or noncooperation without the use or threat of injurious force. It's often called 'people power.' Researchers are struggling to keep up with the increased use of people power around the world, the better to understand it."

"What is perception for? Here I argue that perceptual systems work very hard to improve the precision of perceptual discrimination — to the point that the metric accuracy of perception is often sacrificed in favor of precision," Durgin says. "This principle is illustrated by many illusions that reveal the way perceptual systems alter their coding spaces when they adapt to contingencies — such as those that exist in the multisensory array of visual, vestibular, kinesthetic and auditory information produced during walking. Because walking is so common, our perceptions are actually distorted during walking so as to make us more sensitive to the perceptual information that we can expect to receive as feedback. As a result, we are highly tuned to walk accurately but our conscious experiences of the individual sensory variables (e.g., optic flow speed) are often biased and inaccurate during walking."

"When and why does western fiction become difficult to read? My lecture takes on this question," Weinstein says. "Modernist writers of unknowing refuse to tell the West's favorite story: that of a hero or heroine moving through trouble and eventually coming to know. I explore how we in the West came to tell that favorite story, why we have cycled and recycled it for over two centuries. Then, around the turn of the last century, a group of thinkers and writers-Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, and Freud among them-worked to reshape our very sense of the human drama. They revised our most commonsensical ways of understanding ourselves in space and time and among others. The aim of the lecture is to explain why they are so difficult to read. No less important, I'll try to persuade my audience that their difficulty is invaluable."

"For a majority of the world's languages, resources such as bilingual dictionaries, syntactic parsers, and morphological analyzers are sparse or non-existent because they are expensive to manually create, both in time and money," Wicentowski says. "Unfortunately, complex tools such as voice-recognition and machine-assisted language translation rely heavily on the existence of such resources. This talk will focus on my work in developing automatic methods for acquiring morphological analyzers directly from data with minimal human supervision."

"Shakespeare's plays were famously ubiquitous in 19th-century America: as burlesques, as minstrel shows, as circus performances, as variety theater, and as high culture, sometimes all at once," Johnson says. "This paper examines the role of Edwin Booth, the great late-century tragedian whose brother shot Lincoln, in the formation of a distinctly elite Shakespeare, as narrated by a supporting actress named Kitty who had a terrible crush on him."

"The research presented in this paper focuses on literal and figurative representations of movement and displacement in Francophone West African film," Yervasi says, "and shows how cinematic stories of displacement embody the problems of contemporary postcolonial relations: the problems of neocolonial economic policies, cultural alienation, and the attendant issues of constituting nationhood in opposition to their colonial past. The films, Ousmane Sembene's Borom Sarret [The Wagoner] (Senegal, 1964), Djibril Diop Mambety's La petite vendeuse de Soleil [The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun] (Senegal, 1999), Moussa Touré's, TGV (Senegal, 1997), and Mweze Ngangura's Pièces d'identités [ID] (Democratic Republic of Congo, 1998) reflect three dominant thematic patterns from the mid-1960s to the present: local travel from village or suburb to the city; movement between African nations; and travel out of Africa, in other words, patterns of escalating proportion: migration, displacement, and diaspora."

"What does it mean to be South Asian today? How has immigration, transnational adoption, and 9/11 changed the ways in which South Asians identify as Americans?" Mani asks. "This talk uses contemporary digital videos and documentary films in order to explore how South Asians create new definitions of Asian American identity and community.

"I discuss three films in this lecture that focus on three distinct South Asian immigrant groups: first-generation professionals who migrated in the 1960s and 1970s; Indian adoptees who were adopted by white American families in Minnesota the 1980s; and working-class Bangladeshi immigrants who arrived in New York in the 1990s. Whereas many professional immigrants (particularly women) feel that they must choose between being Indian or being American, I demonstrate how transnational adoptees begin to create a sense of solidarity with each other as Indians and as Americans. These films document the ways in which first and second-generation immigrants create imaginative relationships with their countries of 'origin' at the same time that they embody and produce racialized subjectivities as South Asians in the United States."