Whitman Stories

She describes the new lecture series Whitman faculty developed for incoming students about COVID-19 through various academic lenses.

As COVID-19 reshapes life around the globe, the Whitman College and Northwest Archives at Penrose Library wants to document how those changes have affected our greater community.

Gabriel García Márquez's literary classic One Hundred Years of Solitude refers to a plauge of insomnia that descends on the fictional town of Macondo. Santana-Acuña compares the struggles characters in the novel face with the global fight against COVID-19.

Liam Dubay gained several new skills this spring. He learned to play the five-string Baroque cello, an instrument which Whitman College purchased last year. He also figured out how to splice together video so he could create a unique self-duet performance for his final project of the semester.

Xiaobo Yuan first worked as an anthropologist as an undergraduate student while studying at Johns Hopkins University. Yuan received a research grant to do field work in coastal Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. She was investigating how faith-based organizations, specifically Christian organizations, intervened in the aftermath of the hurricane.

For Black caregivers who work with white families, the topic of race and racism may come up with children and sometimes their parents. One of the biggest hurdles when talking to white parents about race, especially for a Black nanny or babysitter, is addressing the myth that race isn’t something they need to acknowledge with their children. “A lot of white parents are steeped in colorblind ideology, and they really think their kid doesn’t notice race,” Pahlke explains.

This spring, Suzanne Morrissey was one of a handful of faculty participating in the faculty-student consultant program, organized and offered through Whitman College’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). Now entering its second year, the program connects faculty members with a student who will spend the semester evaluating a chosen course and giving direct feedback.

When nurse practitioner Carolyn Korfiatis ’05 gets to work at her small rural hospital in Mammoth Lake, California, she goes through “the car wash.”

Typically the Undergraduate Conference is a day of in-person presentations and poster sessions, where classes are canceled and the Whitman community interacts with student research. But when the college moved to online learning this spring in response to COVID-19, Keith Raether knew the conference format needed to change, too.

Comics aren’t just something Kathryn Frank enjoys reading in her free time. The newest faculty member in Whitman College’s Department of Film and Media Studies is a comics and new media forms specialist.

Inside Maxey Hall’s newly constructed Avian Communication Lab, Assistant Professor Nancy Day ’05 is fitting songbirds with tiny headphones.

In a new peer-reviewed study, Blagov found that psychopathic traits were linked to non-compliance with social distancing guidelines amid the coronavirus pandemic.