Celebrating bold and boundless faculty

Mount Holyoke College’s faculty consists of bold and boundless leaders who provide opportunities for bright minds to meet bold ideas. The College’s faculty celebrated some of its own at the Faculty Awards Ceremony on Thursday, March 6, and lauded key faculty members’ achievements and contributions to the community.

“The Annual Faculty Awards Ceremony is always a wonderful opportunity to applaud our faculty’s incredible work in preparing students to navigate complexities and make meaningful contributions to scholarship, the arts and society,” said Provost Lisa Sullivan. “I deeply value the chance to celebrate our colleagues’ extraordinary research, teaching and service.”

Desmond Fitz-Gibbon, professor of history, was awarded the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Award for Teaching for helping his students grapple with sensitive and difficult subjects. His teaching provides the tools of historical analysis needed to make sense of current times. Yet, Fitz-Gibbon has a light touch, earning him praise from his students, who say he “has a knack” for making learning fun. According to his students, Fitz-Gibbon is “always quick with a joke” — or a story, map or work of art that can transport them to another time and place. “He helped me love the humanities,” said one student. “He made me think,” said another, “about things I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in.”

Fitz-Gibbons’ own inquisitive scholarship and high academic standards animates his teaching, and his courses help students understand how abstract ideas connect to the materiality of everyday spaces. As these courses feature primary sources, the students must engage in the rigorous work of original interpretation and analysis.

Tian Hui Ng, professor of music and director of the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra, was awarded a Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship. Ng launched the Monsters Ball tradition on campus when he arrived in the fall of 2011. He also inaugurated the annual Mary Lyon concerts, which celebrate the compositions and contributions of women in music. Ng has premiered several powerful new works with the orchestra, including the opera “Dark River — the Fannie Lou Hamer Story,” “Invitation to a Die-In,” and the recent “Shell Shaker.” Ng and the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra were awarded the 2015 American Prize in Orchestral Programming.

Ng has also held extended conducting posts at the University of Massachusetts, the Pioneer Valley Symphony, the Springfield Symphony and the New England Philharmonic. He is the conductor, artistic director and founder of the MIFA Victory Players, a new music chamber ensemble based in Holyoke who have commissioned several new works.

Kerstin Nordstrom, associate professor of physics, also received a Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship. Within the field of granular physics and complex fluids, Nordstrom studies how materials flow and deform. In 2019, she received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, which is a prestigious honor for faculty members who demonstrate excellence as teacher-scholars early in their careers. The Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement recognized Nordstrom as a Cottrell Scholar in 2019, and she has been elected to co-chair the upcoming 2026 Granular Matter Gordon Conference.

Nordstrom has received $1.4 million of grant money over the past 10 years. After obtaining funding, she founded Science Launch, which brings together incoming first-year students from underrepresented groups in the sciences, building a cohort and helping them with college skills before classes begin. Since the fall of 2018, Nordstrom has engaged the public by leading SciTech Café, and she regularly appears on WHMP’s “The Bill Newman Show.” She has made additional radio appearances to discuss the science of hunting ghosts and the physics of rainbows.

Mark Shea, senior lecturer in English, has been awarded the Mount Holyoke Faculty Award for Teaching. For more than a decade, Shea has taught his students new ways to hear the intuitive and emotional frequencies of common phrases such as “I feel like.” As the faculty director of the Speaking, Arguing and Writing Program and the coordinator for the English for Speakers of Other Languages program, his linguistic ethos centers on the intersection of race, language and power. By demonstrating how language operates as a technology of power that both connects and controls, Shea has strived to reframe multilingualism at Mount Holyoke as a resource rather than a deficit.

During his evaluations, Shea’s students regularly praise him, consistently commenting on how “funny,” “hilarious,” “entertaining” and “fun” his classes are. An undeniable sense of enjoyment, pleasure and warmth emanates from his classes; one student said that “it felt really good to be laughing at 8:30 am most days.”

Eleanor Townsley, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Sociology, has been awarded the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Award for Service. One of her most enduring contributions to MHC has been her pioneering work connecting academic excellence with career readiness. Long before this became common practice, Townsley recognized that our students would benefit from internships that were “embedded in preparation and reflection,” as one colleague said. With this insight, Townsley has taken a leading role in establishing the Lynk program, which has since become a model for other schools.

Since 2013, Townsley has been the director of the Nexus program, nurturing eight tracks that engage faculty across divisions. Her participation in faculty seminars, such as “Global-Local Synergies” and “Conversations Across Social Sciences,” has fostered interdisciplinary dialogue and innovation, but her institutional leadership extends far beyond these programs. She has served as department chair of Sociology and associate dean of faculty, and she has also worked on countless committees, such as the Advisory Committee on Appointments, Reappointments, and Promotions. Most recently, she has been co-chair of the Career Readiness and Curriculum Strategic Planning subgroup, building on her commitment to connect liberal arts education and postgraduate success.