2018 Schedule

Welcome

Neurobiology of Memory: Use It or Lose It

Adam Hall
Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Neuroscience and Biochemistry, Smith College

Current research in the human brain is unraveling mechanisms that enable encoding, storage and retrieval of everyday memories. Dr. Hall will discuss these processes with a focus on the cellular and molecular pathways that are critical to learning and memory. The talk will also examine effective means of enhancing memory processing and retrieval as well as how drugs and disease states can affect memory consolidation.

Adam Hall earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge, U.K., and his doctorate in biochemistry at the Imperial College of Science and Technology at the University of London. His lab studies the effects of anesthetics in the mammalian nervous system. One particular research effort examines the long-­term effects of anesthetic agents and sedatives by detecting associated genes through screening of mammalian genomes.

Is Fiction True: The Relationship Between Fiction & Nonfiction

Blanche McCrary Boyd
The Roman and Tatiana Weller Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence, Connecticut College

The relationship of fiction and nonfiction is not obvious. What do we mean when we say “based on a true story”? In 1995, Professor Boyd spent a great deal of time covering the Susan Smith case. Smith rolled her car into a lake with her children inside it and lied for eight days, claiming they had been kidnapped. Since that time, Professor Boyd has been working on a novel, Tomb of the Unknown Racist, which will be published in May. In this latest book, a mother kills her children bur her story is entirely different from Susan Smith’s. So how does the imagination transform what is “real”? One goal of any novel is to make the reader believe what she is reading is true. Is that the same goal of nonfiction?

Among Blanche Boyd’s awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fiction Fellowship, a Creative Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission. and the Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction. She graduated from Pomona College and holds an M.A. in English from Stanford where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing. She is a member of P.E.N., the Authors Guild, the Writers Guild of America and Phi Beta Kappa. A native of South Carolina, Boyd has taught at Connecticut College since 1982.  

Box Luncheon Served

Women’s Leadership in the 21st Century

Mary Pope Maybank Hutson, ’83 
Vice President of Alumnae Relations and Development, Sweet Briar College

Mary Pope will address how leadership is reflected through mobilizing stakeholders (alumnae, parents, students and other supporters) and the lessons learned throughout the near closing of Sweet Briar College. She led the Saving Sweet Briar Inc. campaign’s major donor task force from March 2015, when the former administration announced its intention to close the college, through September 2015, when the group delivered its final payment to Sweet Briar. This fulfilled the terms of the settlement agreement to keep the college open. 

Mary Pope Hutson served on Sweet Briar’s new board of directors until her appointment as Vice President of Alumnae Relations and Development. She was also chosen to be chair of the Advancement Committee and a member of the Building and Grounds Committee. For 13 years prior, she served as executive vice president of the Land Trust Alliance in Washington, D.C., a land conservation organization.

She also has raised funds for historic preservation and in the political arena in the US and abroad. A native of Charleston, S.C., Mary Pope graduated from Sweet Briar with a Bachelor of Arts in international affairs. She is not only committed to women’s leadership; she has been breaking gender barriers throughout her career.