Christopher A. Faraone `78, professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, presented the 2002 Mario and Antoinette Romano Lecture, "From Wandering to Demonic Wombs: Magic and Gynecology in the Roman Empire" to an audience of faculty, students, and members of the Binghamton community on Thursday, March 14, 2002. Both Harpur College Dean Mileur and Faraone’s former professor, Jerry Kadish, welcomed him back to campus.

Faraone’s lecture chronicled the history of how the uterus was perceived in medical and scientific thought. Beginning with the Hippocratics and Plato, Greek male writers found the womb "good to think with" as they tried to distinguish women from men and justify their control over women. The idea that the womb wandered about a woman’s body, causing uniquely female diseases such as "hysteria" enjoyed great popularity until dissections proved it is incapable of movement.

However, those outside medicine such as healers, peddlers, and magicians maintained that myth for their own benefit. A "wandering womb" could cause speechlessness, labored breathing, and suffocation. Faraone shared drawings of amulets and rings worn by women from the 2^nd all the way to the 10^th centuries to keep their wombs in place. Such jewels, made of silver, lead, gold, hematite, and other gemstones, allegedly had the power to command the womb to "lie down like a sheep."

Faraone explained that over the centuries, the womb was perceived differently by doctors and healers. Hippocratics, in the 5^th century B.C., felt the womb turned around because it was attracted to moisture. This could be prevented by intercourse and childbirth and cured by exposing the woman to foul smells. Several hundred years later, Plato and his contemporaries compared the womb to a wild animal, moving around the female’s body out of a desire to bear children. From the 4^th to 9^th centuries, doctors felt the womb not only traveled, but was capable of biting, hissing, and roaring. Priests performed exorcisms to alleviate the suffering.

The presentation ended with questions, answers, and refreshments. Professor Kadish remarked that the lecture was fascinating. "It's something we don't ordinarily think of. The two things illuminate each other, medicine and magic."

Faraone’s teaching and research include ancient Greek poetry, religion, magic, and history. He has written five books and is currently at work on a number of projects that aim at understanding the social and intellectual context of the performance of magical rituals during the Roman Imperial period. Faraone said he became interested in this particular subject because there has been so much new information uncovered in the last few years. "It's interesting to see the trends, medical and magical. Now we see the picture more clearly because we have a lot more information."

A double major in English and History, Faraone said he learned a lot about ancient history from Harpur College's faculty. "My wife, Susan (Hitchens `76), and I met here and got a terrific undergraduate education. We had a great time here. It's an honor to be back." The Faraones met in a seminar about Dante's Inferno taught by Frank Newman. Binghamton seems to be a Faraone family tradition. His sister, Stacie, graduated from the Decker School of Nursing in 1982.

The Mario `69 and Antoinette Romano Lecture Series was endowed in 1984 by the couple as a tribute to Mario's years as a Harpur College student. Each year, their endowment sponsors a lecture given by esteemed speakers in economics, history, art history, and medicine.

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Harpur College alumnus Aaron Mair `84 was featured in the November — December 2001 issue of Sierra Magazine for his commitment to raising awareness of contaminated fish in New York’s Hudson Valley. In the article "Fishing for Life," author Paul Rauber explains how both Native Americans who subsist on the bounties of lakes and rivers, and those who fish for the pure relaxation and enjoyment of it, are risking their lives by eating their catch — fish that carry toxic levels of PCB’s, Polychlorinated Biphenyls, which are used in pesticides and as insulation and cooling electrical equipment.

The article chronicled Mair’s long commitment to protecting the environment, especially when it hit too close to home. Rauber wrote, "In the early 1990’s, he went up against a trash incinerator that spewed thick black soot over his Albany neighborhood of Arbor Hill and may have caused his daughter’s asthma; a lawsuit shut down the plant." Mair continued in his pursuit of a cleaner environment and took on General Electric, spearheading a successful campaign for the power giant to clean up the Hudson River around their abandoned plants, removing more than a million pounds of PCB’s.

Environmentalism is in Mair's blood. "It's been an active part of my rearing. I come from a very green and small town called Peekskill, NY. I'm descended from sharecroppers from the South whose interaction with the land never ceased... I learned to swim in the Hudson River, even though we didn't know how polluted it really was," said Mair, "The river was the focal point for Southern families to gather. Southern culture is river culture, whether you're a Southern Baptiest or a lover of fish. I was reared in a Southern style of living and being an environmentalist goes back to my family's farming roots. It's a tradition that was passed down from my parents. You can take people out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the people. My parents always kept their country roots."

Mair’s commitment to the environment is evident in his list of accolades. The first African American to serve as chair of New York State’s 41,000 member Atlantic Chapter of the Sierra Club, he has 17 years of experience in environmental activism. He currently serves as President of the Arbor Hill Environmental Justice Corporation (AHEJ), an organization he founded with the settlement from a lawsuit against a polluting trash incinerator. From 1998 to 2000, AHEJ was a member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Mair is also the founder, board member, and a lecturer for the W. Haywood Burns Environmental Education Center in Albany, an outfit that has worked tirelessly to educate New York state residents about the contamination of fish in the Hudson River.

"The majority of my volunteer service involvement has centered around issues of equity in the delivery of services to New York State’s economically disadvantaged," said Mair. That service has resulted in a long list of accolades. In 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 2 granted Mair its Citizen Environmentalist Activist Award. The previous year, he received the Capital District Fields of Dreams Community Service Award for revitalizing an abandoned park for youth recreation, as well as the New York Council of Community Services Community Builders Award for serving the people of the Albany area. In 1997, the Albany branch of the NAACP gave Mair their award for Environmental Activism.

Mair said his intellectual grounding in the environmental movement began with the reading of Wendell Berry in Andrew Milnor's graduate class in Political Science at Binghamton. His years at Harpur College gave him a strong foundation for his later work as an activist.

"The most important piece was campus life," he said, "It was not just students, who from my period were quite engaging, but the support and stewardship of each student by the faculty. David Cingranelli, Mark Selden, James Geschwinder, Jim Petris, Immanual Wallerstein, to name a few. These individuals were really instrumental in taking a raw confused mind and absolutely imbewing it with the fundamentals of class and caste based thinking."

"Campus life and culture are very strong at Binghamton and it's something I always enjoyed. I think the campus has done a lot for the surrounding community. Student support services at Binghamton are second to none."

Mair is employed by the New York State Department of Health as a researcher. His job took him to the World Trade Center on September 13th. He was part of an inter-governmental team that provided on-site analysis of the debris pile hazards and subterranian fires to the NYC Fire and Police Department's Rescue and Recovery Teams. Sadly, Mair lost a cousin, Linda Mair-Grayling, an employee at Marsh & McCllelan Co., on September 11th.

Mair is married to Harpur College alumna Marian (Pacheco) `84. They have 3 daughers, Marjana, 18, Heba, 16, and Marian ("mini Mair"), 14.

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These Tickets Could be Yours!

Scandal fills the night and one man rules the city. John Lithgow stars as J.J. Hunsecker, the most powerful gossip columnist in America, who creates celebrity or ruins lives with a stroke of his poison pen. With music by Marvin Hamlisch.

Join our second annual Broadway Theater Party on April 18, 2002, with a pre-theater reception at Sardi's, followed by Sweet Smell of Success at the Martin Beck Theater! Tickets are limited so please reserve early.

For more information, call 607-777-4278 or contact harprsvp@binghamton.edu.

For more information about the musical, check out http://www.sweetsmellthemusical.com
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Are you ready for sun, adventure, and a fascinating destination in Europe?

Alumni and friends are invited to join Harpur College's Greece 2002 tour from May 22 to June 7. Visit Athens, with its ancient ruins and brisk cosmopolitan pace. Then enjoy a private coach tour of the mainland with ancient ruins and picturesque villages and countryside. The second week, we hop from island to island, including Crete, Santorini, Delos, and Mykonos. This tour is rich in activies, but includes plenty of free time too.

The price has just been reduced to $1995. This includes airfare, quality hotels, most meals, all entrance fees, transporation within Greece, guest lectures, and all activities.

For a detailed packet of information and answers to your questions, please contact Dr. Katharine C. Krebs, director, Office of International Programs, at 607-777-2336 or by e-mail at kkrebs@binghamton.edu.

Huei-ying Kuo (M.A. `02), a doctoral student in Harpur College’s Sociology Department, will participate in "Embedded Enterprise in Comparative Perspective," a joint workshop of Princeton and Northwestern Universities, April 11 — 14, 2002. Selected for her proposal, Kuo is one of 23 junior scholars from around the world to join this prestigious workshop with five eminent social scientists as faculty mentors. The workshop will allow these young scholars to bring together comparative empirical and theoretical research focused on the embedding of economic enterprises within social, political, and cultural institutions.

Kuo is a perfect fit for this workshop. "My dissertation seeks to contribute to the theorization of ‘embedded’ business networks and to the historiography of Chinese business practices in colonial East and Southeast Asia," she explained, "It will compare the relationship among, and development of, six groups of sub-ethnic business networks in inter-war Hong Kong and Singapore."

Kuo began studying Sociology at Binghamton in 1997 after graduating from National Taiwan University. Her former faculty advisor, Ka Chih-ming, a top sociologist in Taiwan, received a Ph.D. from BU in 1987. "Impressed by his broad knowledge and solid research, I chose Binghamton to continue my studies."

"Here in Binghamton, I am learning how to incorporate Asian perspective in sociological thinking from Professor Mark Selden; I am also learning how to apply world-system perspective in comparative study from Professor Dale Tomich." Kuo appreciates how faculty are open to exchanging ideas with students. "Under their encouragement," she says, "I was very lucky to find my own dissertation topic." She is currently engaged in research at the Library of Congress and plans to travel to Asia for further archival research.

Her goal is to examine how the practices of the networks were shaped by the interplay of sub-ethnic cleavages, Chinese nationalism, and colonialism, and also to deconstruct the essential notion of the "Chineseness" of Chinese business networks.

"Attending the workshop will be a great opportunity for me to exchange ideas with various scholars working in a similar field. I expect to extend the paper as portions of my dissertation.

"Huey-ying has achieved an outstanding record at Binghamton and she's writing an original and important dissertation," said Professor Dale Tomich, "The department is pleased that her project has gained this recognition. Working with this select group of young scholars will certainly provide a great opportunity to present and develop her work."

In response to your much-appreciated feedback, the Harpur Hotline has begun a regular feature of alumni news. Send us anything you want: publications, promotions, marriages, babies, graduations, retirements, or anything else you wish to share. We want to share the good news about our Harpur friends and family. A great, big thank you to everyone who replied to the last Hotline's inquiry for your latest news. Here's what a few of your fellow Harpur alumni are doing:

1968: Edward I. Pollak, Ph.D., professor of psychology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, has been appointed graduate coordinator of West Chester University's MA program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He had previously served as chairperson of the Department of Psychology from 1986 - 1998. Pollak is also the editor of an international collaborative website on old world chameleons (Chamaelonidae) at http://www.adcham.com. In his spare time, Pollak enjoys playing bluegrass fiddle every Tuesday night with The Mill Creek Bluegrass Band at Dugal's Inn, Mortonville, 8 miles west of West Chester, PA.

1969: If you're a science fiction fan, be sure to check out "Swift Thoughts" by Harpur alumnus George Zebrowski. The 24 short stories span 30 years of his writing, all which take place in what he considers "possible futures." Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, saying, "Zebrowski succinctly exhibits a wide range of gritty, postmodern, impeccably disciplined glimpses into futures far and near, as well as alternate histories... All prove the innermost reaches of human frailty." Look for "Swift Thoughts" in stores next month.

1987: Michelle Kerty is a business manager with American International Group (AIG) in New Jersey, after relocating from downtown Manhattan. She is also a state certified Emergency Medical Technician, volunteering for her community ambulance corps. Michelle lives with her fiance and their dog in Rockland County, New York.

1991: Robert Cotnoir is a writer, synthesizer programmer, and co-lyricist for the band New Clear Sky. The band's most recent album,Vast, hit #1 on the Electrogarden Network Synthpop Chart in January. The American Synthpop Awards has nominated New Clear Sky for Best New U.S. Band and Best Song. Votes will be talled until April 15, 2002 at http://www.synthcon.com/awards.html and the award ceremony will take place at Synthcon in Los Angeles.

1994: Joe Kovaks spent 1997-1998 in Sri Lanka as a Peace Corps Volunteer, but the program closed early because of escalating civil war. He earned an M.A. in English from Fordham University in 1998. Kovaks is the marketing manager for science and technology policy fellowship programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In his spare time, he is writing a novel and a regular column about human rights and international affairs events for WorldView Magazine.

Please send all information and photos (.jpg preferred) to Ingrid Husisian, Hotline Editor, at husisian@binghamton.edu or by mail to the Harpur College Dean's Office, LN 2430, Binghamton University, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, NY, 13902-6000. We look forward to hearing from you!

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