Hampshire College

Two professors at Hampshire College have been awarded Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation fellowships for academic year 2008-2009:

Baba Hillman, assistant professor of film and video, will conduct research in France for Zones de Non-Droit, her film-in-progress about the housing project, or cité, of La Rose des Vents north of Paris.

Jason Tor, assistant professor of microbiology, will conduct field research in Death Valley National Park in southeastern California, analyzing rock varnish and surrounding geologic features.

The Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation awards fellowships to teachers, with an emphasis on college and university teaching. The aim is to broaden and stimulate teachers’ minds through travel and study in new locations so as to enhance the quality of instruction. Both Tor and Hillman will integrate their research into their teaching at Hampshire College.

Hillman is collaborating with a small group of Rose des Vents residents who are originally from Mauritania, Mali, and Algeria. Over the past fifty years, La Rose des Vents, like many of the cités outside Paris, has become a suburban ghetto that embodies not only the inhabitants’ geographical exclusion from the center of Paris, but also their exclusion from educational opportunity and employment. Hillman’s film investigates the ways in which the cité’s landscape of surveillance and isolation, functioning as an internal border zone, restricts the movement of residents, making them outsiders in a country where they are citizens and making it difficult for them to claim any space as their own.

Hillman will develop a new interdisciplinary course entitled “Performance, Text and Memory in Transnational Cinema,” combining film/video production and performance and emphasizing the work of Maghrebi filmmakers and authors. The course will engage students who are working with issues of displacement and migration, as well as students who are working with languages other than English or across multiple languages in their film and videomaking.

Tor will use his research on rock varnish to develop materials to be used in Hampshire courses he teaches, including “Geomicrobiology” and “Microbial Ecology.”

Rock varnish is a layered veneer of clay minerals that forms very slowly. Some scientists hypothesize that microorganisms are at least partly responsible for some of the features of rock varnish. Rock varnish may exist on Mars, and if so, may be a niche for colonization by extraterrestrial life forms such as bacteria. Studies of rock varnishes on Earth may lead to design of experiments in coming decades for detection of life on other planets. Ultimately, by studying present day geomicrobiological processes, scientists hope to better predict Earth’s trajectory into the future.

Samples and data collected by Tor also will be available to his students for use in their own research projects.

• Whiting Fellowships Fund Faculty Research