new directions in the arts - Lafayette Magazine - Lafayette College

CURRICULAR CROSSOVERS
Kerns and his colleagues are leading a new wave of
curricular crossovers at Lafayette. Funded by a threeyear,
$300,000 Mellon Foundation grant for innovative
alliances, faculty members have developed courses
in everything from the mechanics and aesthetics of
fluids to the harmony between music and lyrics. This
multidisciplinary mission is supplemented by a new
series of lectures by prominent change agents and a new
series of practical fellowships for students in the creative
and performing arts. The whole campaign extends the
strategic plan’s call for global citizenship, strengthens
the College’s strong suits in humanities and sciences,
unites left brains with rights.
The brain is the spine of The Neuroscience of Music,
one of the new Mellon-financed courses. Scheduled to
debut in fall 2011, it will be team-taught by Lisa Gabel,
an assistant professor of psychology and an authority
on music and memory, and Jennifer Kelly, an assistant
professor of music and an authority on music and
movement. They expect to explore why melodies can be
healthy and why different societies play the same tempos
differently. They also expect to learn from one another.
Kelly looks forward to testing how music changes
emotions; Gabel looks forward to testing a musiceducation
system called “rhythmic gymnastics.”
Parallel universes united in The Art and Science
of Flow Visualization, a course team-taught by Jenn
Stroud Rossmann, assistant professor of mechanical
engineering, and Karina Skvirsky, assistant professor
of art. Skvirsky, a photographer, taught students how to
develop images of clouds. Rossmann taught them how to
read clouds as weather maps. Everyone found a common
ground in Harold Edgerton’s remarkably clear photo of
a bullet piercing a playing card, one of his many examples
of scientific art.
The fluids class was an intellectual lubricant for
Lauren Novotny ’11, an art history/economics and
business major who once wanted to be a meteorologist.
She discovered the magic of density by burning incense.
She encountered moral ambiguity—also known as the
banality of evil—in Skvirsky’s photos of lynching sites
near the Mason-Dixon Line. She learned it’s pretty cool
to study with two very different teachers at the same
time.
The course changed the teachers’ courses, too. Skvirsky
says she feels free to embrace science, something she once
feared. Rossmann feels free to be more conversational,
more colloquial. “In an engineering class it’s rare to
have true discussions—it’s basically Newton’s Law and
this is what we want to do with it,” she says. “Karina is
8 lafayette • SPRING 2010
Students mounted an exhibit of
photographs in a seminar taught by
Jenn Stroud Rossmann (mechanical
engineering) and Karina Skvirsky (art).
“I enjoyed learning about both fluid
mechanics and art,” says Melanie
Schor ’11, who majors in international
affairs and French. “It was interesting
to see both sides.”
brilliant at leading really meaningful, meaty discussions,
helping students unpack and interpret knowledge. I was
absolutely taking notes as to how to imitate her.”
EXPLOITING FREEDOM
Rossmann and Skvirsky are exploiting a freedom that
neuroscientist Elaine Reynolds has exploited for two
decades. During her 12 years at Lafayette, the associate
professor of biology has ventured outside her academic
specialty, cell molecules, to develop courses on aging
and fear. She admits she probably wouldn’t have this
advantage at a research university, where she’d be
confined to writing grant proposals and managing
graduate students.
In 2007, Reynolds helped Kerns and architect