Washington College Taps Beloit Economist and Administrator As New Provost and Dean

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Washington College has named Emily Chamlee-Wright as its new Provost and Dean. Chamlee-Wright currently serves as Associate Dean at Beloit College in Wisconsin, where she also teaches economics and directs the Miller Upton Programs on the Wealth and Well-being of Nations.

Washington College president Mitchell B. Reiss says Chamlee-Wright stood out among a remarkably strong field of candidates because of her strengths as both a scholar and an administrator. “It is clear that Dr. Chamlee-Wright understands what it takes to be a great teacher and scholar, and what it takes to be a great liberal-arts college in the 21st century,” he adds. “She impressed us all with her passion for engaged learning, both in the classroom and in the field. In these challenging economic times, we also value her experience in bringing financial stability and sustainability to high-quality academic programs and in expanding summer programs at Beloit. Her talents, energy and creativity will help us move Washington College forward in significant ways.”

Associate Professor of Politics Melissa Deckman, who chaired the search committee that unanimously endorsed Chamlee-Wright for the position, says the students, faculty and staff who met with the candidate on campus in mid- February were struck with her high level of enthusiasm. “She was dynamic and approachable and generated lots of good ideas,” says Deckman. “Both on paper and in person, Dr. Chamlee-Wright evidenced a wonderful balance of confidence and humility, leadership skills and collegiality. She takes a holistic view of scholarship and teaching, and the College community appreciated her big-picture approach to building and sustaining an engaging learning environment for students.”

Chamlee-Wright says she was attracted to Washington College in part by its commitment to interdisciplinary and integrative learning, and also by the widespread confidence in its mission. “It was clear to me that the board of trustees, the administration, the faculty and the staff are unapologetically ambitious on behalf of the College and on behalf of the liberal arts,” she says. “Washington College offers students the ideas, investigative skills, and creative foundations necessary to navigate unchartered territory and then expects them to engage in genuine discovery. This is the kind of education that is truly emancipating.”

Chamlee-Wright grew up in northern Virginia and spent summers sailing the Chesapeake Bay with her family. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University, where she also received her master’s and bachelor’s degrees. Her academic research combines her expertise in economics with her skills as an ethnographer, focusing on the interplay of cultural and economic processes. “My primary interest is to understand how cultural and economic processes combine to foster widespread social coordination. What allows society to achieve a level of ‘social intelligence’ that no individual could ever design?” In recent years, she has turned this question in the direction of examining how communities rebound—or fail to rebound—in the aftermath of catastrophic disaster, with particular emphasis on post-Katrina recovery in New Orleans.

Chamlee-Wright is the author of three books: The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery: Social Learning in a Post-Disaster Environment (Routledge 2010), Culture and Enterprise: The Development, Representation, and Morality of Business, with Don Lavoie (Routledge 2000), and The Cultural Foundations of Economic Development (Routledge 1997). She is also co-editor of The Political Economy of Hurricane Katrina and Community Development (Edward Elgar 2010) and a manuscript titled How We Came Back: Voices from Post-Katrina New Orleans, which is under review for publication.

A former W.K. Kellogg National Leadership Fellow, she received the Underkoffler Award for Excellence in Teaching at Beloit in 1997. As Associate Dean at Beloit, she has worked with colleagues to expand summer programs, oversee campus museums (Wright Museum of Art and Logan Anthropology Museum), advance faculty development, and promote the performing arts.

Chamlee-Wright will be moving to Chestertown with her husband, Brian, and two daughters, Linden, 11, and Cailin, 9, over the summer and will start her new job in July.

Long History of Jews in Germany to Be Presented in Washington College Lecture

Chestertown, MD — Washington College's Office of the Provost & Dean will present "In Search of Ashkenaz: A Bittersweet Journey to Jewish Roots in Germany," a lecture/slide presentation by Dr. Gary S. Schiff, Adjunct Professor of History, at the Casey Academic Center Forum on Tuesday, November 11, at 5 p.m.

The lecture is presented in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom of November 1938 in which nearly 100 German Jews were murdered and nearly 30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps. It was the prelude to the Holocaust.

"In Search of Ashkenaz" is based on Schiff's July 2008 trip to Jewish historical sites in Germany; these sites tell a story going back through long centuries. "Jews have been living in Germany, as far as we can document, for at least 1,700 years," said Schiff. "There's a much deeper historical narrative there than just the 12 tragic years from 1933 to 1945."

"Ashkenaz" is the Old Hebrew word that referred to the Rhineland in particular and German-speaking lands in general. Herein lay the origins of Yiddish, a unique Hebrew-German language hybrid that the Jews took with them as they later migrated to Eastern Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Today, an estimated 90 percent of the world's Jews are of Ashkenazi descent.

Schiff's journey into the Ashkenazi past included visits to medieval Jewish synagogues and cemeteries dating back to the 11th century, to the ornate 19th-century Rothschild Palace that now houses Frankfurt's Jewish Museum, to the recently restored New Synagogue in Berlin, to the modernistic Munich Synagogue, and to Berlin's Jewish Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. (Libeskind, the son of Holocaust survivors, also designed the forthcoming World Trade Center Memorial to be erected at 9/11's "Ground Zero" in Lower Manhattan.)

Schiff also paid a visit to a place where Ashkenaz's most tragic memories dwell: the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. "My biggest impression was how small it was, how crowded it must have been," he said. Originally built to hold 7,000 inmates, "When the Americans liberated it in 1945, there were 32,000 survivors there among all the dead."

While at the concentration camp site, Schiff encountered a group of young German Army officers. "I asked them why they were here. They said, 'This is part of our training.' I thought that was noteworthy, that they're taught to revisit this grim part of their past, so it won't be forgotten."

Schiff found himself before Dachau's crematorium alongside one of the officers. "I asked him what he thought of it," Schiff recalled. "And he looked me in the eye and just said, 'Horror... Horror.'"

Admission to "In Search of Ashkenaz: A Bittersweet Journey to Jewish Roots in Germany" is free and open to the public.

October 29, 2008

'Sankofa' Screened at Washington College

The African-American Heritage Committee and Washington College will present a showing of the film "Sankofa" at Norman James Theatre on Friday, June 13, at 6:30 p.m., with food, drink and discussion following.

"Sankofa" features a lush, expressive style and energy, juxtaposing the brutalities endured by plantation slaves with the beauty of the landscape and the spiritual will of the oppressed. Layered throughout the film is a complex musical score composed of African drumming, electronic rhythms, and American jazz and blues. It's a visceral and deeply moving portrait of plantation life viewed from an African perspective.

"History is power," said director Haile Gerima, "which is why we named the film 'Sankofa.' 'Sankofa' is a philosophical, mythological bird passed down from generation to generation from the Akan people of Ghana. The name means [that in order] to move forward, you must reclaim the past. In the past, you find the future and understand the present."

The special screening of "Sankofa" is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost & Dean and the Office of Campus Events & Visitors. Admission is free and open to the public. (Some material is not suitable for audiences under 16 years old.) For more information, call 410/810-1416.

June 6, 2008

Channeling Thelonious: 'Blue Monk' At Washington College, February 13

Chestertown, MD, January 31, 2007 — It will be an afternoon of jazz, poetry and drama as award-winning playwright Robert Earl Price reads excerpts from "Blue Monk," his play about jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, at Washington College's Casey Academic Center Forum on Tuesday, February 13, at 4:30 p.m.

Price's evocation of the immortal jazz giant known as the "Genius of Modern Music" will be accompanied, appropriately enough, by the Washington College Jazz Combo, under the direction of Ken Schweitzer.

Monk (1917-1982) recently received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize "for a body of distinguished and innovative musical composition that has had a significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz." While he has been dubbed "the High Priest of Bebop," Monk's unique style was considered too avant-garde even for many of his fellow cutting-edge bop musicians in the 1940s, not to mention the listening public at large. But by the late 1950s, tastes were catching up with Monk's complex, sophisticated musical phraseology, and his fame and fortunes were on the rise. By 1964 he was on the cover of Time magazine. Many of Monk's compositions—"Round Midnight," "52nd Street Theme," "Blue Monk" and others—are among the most oft-recorded standards in the jazz canon. In 1993 he was honored with a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

It's hard to imagine a more apt playwright to tap into the Monk mystique than Robert Earl Price, who has tackled similar subjects—the tragic jazz icon Charlie Parker, the legend-shrouded bluesman Robert Johnson—in some of his other theatrical productions. When "Blue Monk" was produced in Johannesburg, it was so well received that it ended up as one of five plays nominated for South Africa's National Theater Award. (Price's Charlie Parker opus, "Yardbird's Vamp," likewise enjoyed overseas success, playing to standing-room-only crowds for the duration of its Berlin run.)

Price, a graduate of the American Film Institute, was a protégé of the Oscar-winning director Jan Kadar and Pulitzer/Emmy winner Alex Haley. Price was the script consultant for the Peabody Award-winning production of "The Boy King" (the story of Dr. Martin Luther King's youth) and a principal writer on the CBS/Alex Haley series "Palmerstown, U.S.A." Price's many awards include the American Film Institute's William Wyler Award for screenwriting and a Cultural Olympics Commission for theater.

Currently playwright in residence at Atlanta's famed 7 Stages Theatre, Price also is a poet of some note, with four collections of verse—Bloodlines, Blood Elegy, Blues Blood and Wise Blood—published to date. His poems also have appeared in scores of journals and magazines. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for poetry, a Broadside Press Award, a Bronze Jubilee Award, and dozens of other poetry prizes and notices.

"Blue Monk" is being presented by the Washington College Drama Department, the Black Studies Program, and the Dean of the College. Norman James Theatre is in William Smith Hall. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, call 410-778-7888.

Words from Dean Scholz

Campus Ceremony on the Front Lawn, September 13

Chestertown, MD, September 13, 2001 — The tragic events of this week have touched every one of us. Many of us have friends, relatives, and loved ones among the dead or among those still missing in New York, Washington D.C. and in Pennsylvania. By attacking these innocents, those responsible for this terrible act have attacked each one of us. We are joined in outrage and grief.

We come together today to express our solidarity in the face of this destruction. It is a time to remember that even in Chestertown we are members of a global society. As an educational community, we remain united in our pursuit of truth, united in the love of the wisdom that grows from it, and united in our commitment to peace around the world.

We also come together today to reflect on the lives of those who have perished, to honor the memory of those who died at the hand of terror as well as those who sacrificed their lives in acts of rescue.

In placing flowers at the feet of our founder's statue, we declare the community of Washington College to be of one heart. We dedicate our labors to the support of each other in this time of need and to the preservation of all that is good in our community, in our nation, and in the world.

I will now place a wreath on behalf of the College to witness our respect for the victims and in evidence of our dedication to the values inscribed in the mission of Washington College. I invite all of you to join me in the laying of flowers in acknowledgement of our community's deep sense of sorrow and solidarity.