Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2005
Carol Lawton, Jerald Podair, and Fred Sturm, C’73, have been named to
endowed professorial chairs.
Lawton, professor of art history, is the Ottilia Buerger Professor of Classical
Studies; Podair, associate professor of history, is the Robert S. French Professor
of American Studies; and Sturm, professor of music, is the Kimberly-Clark Professor
of Music.
Appointments to named professorships recognize academic distinction through
teaching excellence and scholarly achievement.
Classical studies
Carol
Lawton, a specialist in ancient Greek sculpture, joined the Lawrence
art department in 1980 and serves as curator of the Ottilia
Buerger Collection of Ancient and Byzantine Coins. She has made research
trips to Greece each of the past 25 years. Working with the American School
of Classical Studies
in Athens, she is studying Greek and Roman votive reliefs excavated from
the Athenian Agora.
She has received research fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the J. Paul Getty Trust and is the author of the 1995 book Attic Document
Reliefs of the Classical and Hellenistic Periods.
In 2004, Lawton was recognized with Lawrence’s Award for Excellence in
Teaching, becoming the only faculty member to earn all three of the college’s
major teaching awards. She
was the recipient of the Young Teacher Award in 1982 and the Freshman Studies
Teaching Award in 1998. She earned her Ph.D.
in art history from Princeton University.
The Buerger professorship was established in 2002 by a bequest from the estate
of Ottilia Buerger, a 1938
Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Lawrence with a degree in Latin. A native of Mayville,
Buerger taught Latin and English for several
years at high schools in Goodman, Wautoma, and Beaver Dam.
Combining a life-long interest in history, classics, and numismatics, she
began coin collecting as a hobby in the 1950s and wound up assembling a world-renowned
collection of ancient Greek and Roman coins. Her collection of 352 coins
was
donated to Lawrence after her death in 2001 and is used extensively today
as a teaching and research resource for students and faculty studying the
ancient
world.
American studies
Jerald
Podair joined the Lawrence faculty in 1998. A one-time Wall Street
lawyer, he turned his attention to 20th-century American history in the early
1990s,
focusing his research interests on urban history and racial and ethnic relations.
He was recognized in 1998 with the Allan Nevin Prize from the Society of
American Historians, which honored him for the single most outstanding dissertation
in American history that year. It was published as the book The Strike
That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis in
2003 by Yale University Press.
He served as a consulting scholar for the recent Joseph McCarthy exhibition
at the Outagamie County Museum and worked with documentary filmmaker Richard
Broadman as a historical consultant on a film chronicling the history of
Black-Jewish relations in modern New York City. He earned his doctorate at
Princeton University.
The French Professorship was established in 2001 by a gift from William Zuendt
in honor of his former high school counselor and long-time friend, Robert
French, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Lawrence in 1948 with a self-designed
major in American studies. The professorship is intended to embrace a broad
array of American subjects, including history, literature, political thought,
and artistic expression, in examining America’s past.
French, a devoted student and collector of items relating to Abraham Lincoln
and his legacy, helped establish the Lincoln
Reading Room in Lawrence’s
Seeley G. Mudd Library and donated a collection of more than 1,500 items related
to Lincoln, among them books, artwork, and published speeches.
Music
Fred
Sturm, director of jazz and improvisational
music, is in his second stint
as a faculty member in the Lawrence Conservatory of
Music. A 1973 Lawrence
graduate, he first directed jazz studies here from 1977-91, then returned
in 2002 after spending 11 years as professor and chair of jazz studies and
contemporary
media at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
An award-winning composer, his jazz compositions and arrangements have been
performed by Bobby McFerrin, Wynton Marsalis, and Clark Terry, among others,
and have been issued by numerous record labels, including Concord Jazz, RCA,
and Warner Brothers Records. Sturm received a Grammy Award nomination in
1988 and was named the 2003 recipient of the ASCAP/IAJE Commission in Honor
of Quincy
Jones, a prize granted annually to one established jazz composer of international
prominence.
He currently serves as principal guest conductor of the Hessischer Rundfunk
(German Public Radio for the State of Hessen) Big Band in Frankfurt, Germany
and as visiting conductor of professional jazz ensembles and radio orchestras
in Europe. During his nearly 30-year university teaching career, Sturm’s
jazz ensembles have been cited by Downbeat magazine as the finest
in the United States and Canada eight times.
The Kimberly-Clark Foundation established the Kimberly-Clark Professorship
in Music in 1995 in recognition and support of the cultural contributions
Lawrence makes to the quality of life in the community.