Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr in the Media: MSNBC

NBC’s Luke Russert visited Bryn Mawr last Thursday to gauge students’ reactions to Sarah Palin and Joe Biden in the vice-presidential debate.

McAuliffe inauguration to be Webcast live

The inauguration of Jane Dammen McAuliffe as president of Bryn Mawr College will be celebrated this week with a series of events including a picnic, performances, and presentations by student-faculty research teams. The festivities will culminate in a formal investiture ceremony at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 4.

All alumnae/i and friends of the College are invited to attend the weekend’s events, but for those who can’t be there, the College will offer a live Webcast of the inauguration ceremony as it happens. The Webcast will be hosted on a server capable of streaming to about a thousand simultaneous viewers. The streaming video will remain available for a month after the event.

A broadband Internet connection, a contemporary Web browser, and a media player (Windows Media® Player 9.0 or later for PC users, Microsoft Silverlight for Mac users) are necessary to view the presentation. The presidential inauguration Web site includes a page that explains the system requirements in detail and offers a test of the technology so that viewers can make sure they are prepared to receive the Webcast.

Bryn Mawr geologist’s new theory looks to explain the breakup of the Pangaea supercontinent

This summer Associate Professor of Geology Arlo Weil and his colleagues published a groundbreaking report offering a new explanation of the process by which the supercontinent Pangaea broke apart and ultimately gave shape to many of today’s mountain ranges and other major geographic features.

“Pangaea was this nice stable supercontinent. The question is, ‘Why did it break up into a lot of pieces?’” says Weil.

The key concept is something called “self-subduction.”

As Weil explains it, geologists are pretty much in agreement about how the earth’s geography has changed over the last 200 million years, but consensus starts to break down once you go further back in time.

“The modern sea floor records the drift of continents through time for the past 200 million years, but beyond that it becomes less clear. We lose the oceanic record due to its consumption back into the earth’s mantle at active plate margins,” says Weil.

When talking about the shifting of tectonic plates, geologists usually envision plate boundaries where active crust formation takes place. Where two separate plates meet, one plate is pushed under the other and subducted into the Earth’s mantle in a never-ending cycle.

These processes of crust formation and subduction create volcanic and seisimic activity and drive current plate movement.

“That’s why there’s so much volcanism along the mid-oceanic ridges and in the Andes, the Cascades, Alaska, Japan and down into Southeast Asia,” explains Weil. “Two hundred million years into the future, North America and South America are going to collide with Asia. Australia is moving northward and will sweep up all of Southeast Asia and collide with China and India.”

However, Weil and his colleagues have hypothesized that a somewhat different process—self-subduction—was the primary mechanism that led to the breakup of Pangaea.

Before breaking up some 300 million years ago, Pangaea was a supercontinent made up of most of today’s existing continents. In the center of the supercontinent was a large triangular ocean. At the top of this ocean was Eurasia; at the bottom, India. When self-subduction occurred the ocean began to close up like a Pac-Man closing its mouth. This kind of plate cannibalism ultimately caused plate failure and the formation of new internal plate boundaries.

In addition to creating two plates where there was once only one, self-subduction caused dramatic geologic changes to occur all across the Pangaea supercontinent.

“Think of Pangaea like a pie with a slice taken out of it,” says Weil. “However, when you cut out that piece, all the others move around the center to fill in the gap, and you get compression around the center and extension around the outside.

“The idea for self-subduction was inspired by a lack of consistent and reasonable explanations for a number of geological observations that a lot of my colleagues and I were working on in the core of what was formerly Pangaea,” he adds.

Before Weil and his colleagues proposed this hypothesis, researchers believed the Pangaea supercontinent either collapsed under its own thickness or broke apart due to intense thermal anomalies from the mantle. But these ideas did not explain many of the contemporaneous geologic events that were occurring throughout the globe at the time of Pangaea breakup. None of the preexisting ideas explained all the available geologic data.

Weil joined this research team because of his own interest in trying to uncover the answer to a question few probably ever think to ask: Why are so many mountain ranges curved?

“If you look at the earth today, almost all mountain ranges have some degree of curvature in their map view. The Appalachians bend around; the Himalyas are certainly very bendy; the Alps kind of swing through Europe.”

In trying to unravel the mystery of bending mountain ranges, Weil has spent much of the last 13 years in the Cantabrian-Asturian mountains of northern Spain, which would have been at the core of Pangaea when self-subduction occurred.

“Prior to self-subduction there was a much more linear belt there, but when that plate started scrunching in on itself it caused the belt to bend around and become curved like it is today. This is one of the fundamental manifestations of the self-subduction model,” Weil says.

“What’s more, we can now look at many geological features on the periphery of Pangaea that previously geologists associated with more localized ad hoc phenomena, and put them into a unifying global-scale hypothesis supported by extensive geologic data. It’s somewhat of a fantastical idea but it seems to work” he adds.

Weil and his colleagues are in the process of trying to raise more funds to allow them to continue to test their hypothesis, and he’s planning to return to Spain to continue his research in the summer.

“As with any scientific endeavor, you try to answer one question and you get a million more,” says Weil.

Sixteen Bryn Mawr students and two other faculty members will get a firsthand view of Weil’s active and ongoing research program when he leads a Geology Department field trip to northern Spain over the fall break.

A Google Earth tour of the upcoming trip is available on the Department of Geology’s Web site.

Student production of The Laramie Project to usher in LGBT History Month

When the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard drew the nation’s attention to the issue of hate crimes based on sexual orientation, Paige Walker ‘09 never heard much about it. She was 10 years old, and most adults in her conservative community didn’t discuss such matters with children.

That sort of silence about the effects of homophobia is precisely what Walker hopes to counter with a student production of The Laramie Project. The play is based on interviews with people who were affected by the crime and its aftermath, including citizens of Laramie, Wyo., the city where Shepard was killed.

Walker, a veteran of the annual student productions of The Vagina Monologues, is directing the show; Elise Marraro ‘10 serves as production head, and Steph Migliori ‘09 as “Lights and Tech Guru.” The Office of Intercultural Affairs is sponsoring the performances as a kickoff event for LGBT History Month in October. Oct. 12 marks the 10th anniversary of Shepard’s death.

Shepard, an openly gay student at the University of Wyoming, was robbed, severely beaten, and tied to a fence in a remote rural area where he was left to die. Police who investigated the case suggested that Shepard had been targeted because of his sexuality, and the case drew national attention, especially from LGBT organizations and supporters of hate-crime legislation. An anti-gay group staged a demonstration at Shepard’s funeral, carrying signs with slogans such as “God Hates Fags” and “Matthew Shepard Rots in Hell.”

Shepard’s killers are now serving life sentences, after one pleaded guilty and another was convicted of felony murder and kidnapping.

About a month after Shepard’s death, the Tectonic Theater Project, led by Moisés Kaufman, began to interview people in Laramie. Tape recordings of those interviews, along with court records and personal journals, were the basis of the play’s script.

In the Bryn Mawr production, the play’s 55 characters are portrayed by nine actresses: Anisha Chirmule ‘10, Aly Honsa ‘09, Allison Keefe ‘11, Jane Morris ‘10, Amanda Preston ‘09, Leah Kane Riseman ‘09, Dina Rubey ‘09, Megan Smith ‘10, and Larken Wright-Kennedy ‘11.

“Each character is represented by a singular prop and changes in the actor’s voice and demeanor,” Walker explains. “We didn’t conduct the interviews, so we can’t reproduce the gestures and voices of the characters, who are real people. So we don’t recreate the moment, but allude to it, as the play’s creator Moisés Kaufman says.”

“It’s a very demanding play for the performers,” Walker says. “Each one plays characters who are all over the map in terms of attitudes and emotions — sometimes two or more in the same scene.”

“The range of characters shows how so many different people were affected in so many different ways, whether they knew Matthew Shepard or not,” Marraro says.

“A lot of the play is about how a community is defined,” Walker adds. “People in Laramie had a hard time reconciling their own sense of what Laramie is about with the perception of the town as the site of a brutal hate crime. At the time, newscasts sometimes used graphics that showed the state of Wyoming dripping with blood.”

“But then one of the lines in the play that I found most powerful was from an older, closeted gay man who had felt very isolated by his sexuality. He saw a group of people marching in memory of Matthew Shepard in the University of Wyoming’s homecoming parade. By the end, that group was bigger than the whole parade. So his perception of the community changed, too, and he felt less isolated from it.”

“That focus on how community is defined and how individuals’ actions affect that system made the play seem perfect for Bryn Mawr,” Walker explains, “because we are very conscious of those issues in our own community.”

Performances of The Laramie Project will take place this Friday, Sept. 26, and Saturday, Sept. 27, at 8 p.m. in the gymnasium of the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Walking groups from the College’s main campus to the GSSWSR will leave from Pem Arch at 7:15, 7:30, and 7:40 p.m.; vans will leave Pem Arch and do continuous runs from 7:15 til 7:50 p.m. Admission is open to the public and free, although the show’s organizers will be collecting voluntary donations to the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

Bryn Mawr in the Media: The New York Times Magazine

Annalisa Crannell ‘87 is one of the “Class Acts” in this photo spread of academics showing off their sense of style and fashion.

Chat about Candide with Arden’s artistic and managing directors

In conjunction with the Arden Theatre’s production of Candide—a staging of Leonard Bernstein’s musical version of Voltaire’s classic satire—the Hepburn Center has organized a discussion led by Artistic Director Terry Nolen and Managing Director Amy Murphy, a 2008-09 Hepburn Fellow, about the background of the play, the major themes and issues it raises, and the process of adapting it for the Arden. The discussion will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 7:30 p.m. in Haffner’s Dorothy Vernon Room.

There are still a few places available for a dinner with Nolen and Murphy that the Hepburn Center will be hosting for students, faculty, and staff at Wyndham at 6 p.m. the evening of the  discussion. To sign up for the dinner, contact Leslie Rescorla.