Mellon fellow Corby Kelly in the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center’s main stage theater and (below) with classics students in his classroom. PHOTOGRAPHS BY | KELLY MACWILLIAMS

BY | ERIN PETERSON

Beth Severy-Hoven, chair of the Classics Department, has been teaching Lysistrata for years. So when she sat in on a class about the Greek comedy taught by Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Corby Kelly, she wasn’t expecting to gain new insight into a play she knew so well.

“Corby has a lot of performance experience, so he was teaching students about more than just an ancient text,” she says. “The class had a conversation about how a director might have more influence on a performance than the author or translator. They discussed modern ideas about gender, and how you might stage the play without offending people. It was fascinating—and it will change how I teach that text now.

For Severy-Hoven, that experience got to the heart of what the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship is all about. The two-year fellowships, which offer funding for up to two promising humanities and social sciences scholars each year, help Macalester breathe new life into its curricula while providing a launching pad for the careers of freshly minted professors. “It’s wonderful to have somebody new for a couple of years,” she says. “The fellows get to develop their teaching and research, and it energizes a department and gets them thinking about what they do in a fresh way.”

With the help of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Macalester began offering fellowships in 1999. Since then, 11 new professors in disciplines ranging from economics to English have served as fellows. When the funding term ended in 2005, Macalester received $1.5 million from Mellon to create an endowment that will permanently sustain the program for two fellows each year. The college has raised another $1.5 million to fully endow the program.

Provost Kathleen Murray says the program has paid and will continue to pay big dividends. “The fellows really enrich the intellectual community,” she says. “When you bring in these bright young stars, their enthusiasm is infectious, and think that has a genuine benefit campus-wide.”

Mellow fellow Andrew Billing believes that fellows’ research can help raise Macalester’s national profile.

Moving Macalester Forward
The Mellon program started as an experiment. Although many saw the potential for a program that would provide two-year positions to promising scholars, no one was sure it would succeed. “That’s where Mellon came in,” says Murray. “They provide funding for a time, and if it’s a program that works, they expect you to figure out how to sustain it.” Similar Mellon-funded programs are offered at several other colleges across the nation.

When the program began, it gave a boost to several initiatives that Macalester had been working on, including lowering the student-faculty ratio and increasing the number of faculty members doing interdisciplinary work. “It helped us move from a 12:1 student-faculty ratio to a 10:1 ratio,” says Murray. “And although we knew we would eventually be hiring tenure-track faculty members with an interdisciplinary emphasis, this program helped us get there a bit earlier than we would have otherwise.”

The program is also luring some of the nation’s best scholars from large research universities. The prestigious fellowships, which offer low teaching loads, relatively high salaries, and plenty of mentoring from veteran faculty members, encourage scholars to take a closer look at careers at small, private liberal arts schools, which might not otherwise have been on their radar. “If we can bring these scholars in for two years, we have a chance to show them the value of this type of education,” says Murray.

It’s a strategy that works: While the positions are capped at two years, one former fellow, Sarah West, has gone on to take a tenure-track position in Macalester’s Department of Economics. Others speak glowingly of their time at the school, and are more inclined to recruit graduate school students from colleges like Mac.

The short time commitment makes the hiring process less challenging, and also encourages departments to take risks on scholars who might not fit the traditional Macalester mold. Often, the scholars end up being a perfect fit.

Andrew Billing, who started his two-year fellowship in the French and Francophone Studies Department last fall, says the scholars do their share to boost Macalester’s reputation. A significant portion of the fellow’s time is devoted to research, and the college reaps some of the benefits of their work. “We go to conferences and publish under the Macalester name,” he says. “Hopefully, that’s good for the profile of the college.”

Student-Centered
While academic departments are always happy to have another member and fellows are delighted with the time to focus on their research, students are the primary beneficiaries of the program. Because of the fellows, Mac students can take new courses, connect with scholars who share their academic interests, and get candid advice about academic life after college.

Adding a professor to a small department like classics has an immediate impact, says Severy-Hoven. During fall semester, for example, Kelly taught a course on Greek comedy that the department hasn’t been able to offer in the past. Jacob Cormack ’10 says a Latin class he took with Kelly last year encouraged him to take on a larger independent project translating Latin poetry this year. “Corby’s enthusiasm and passion for Latin rubbed off on me,” says Cormack. “It wasn’t until I had a class with him that I began to fully appreciate the beauty of Latin poetry. He’s had a big influence on the direction I’m taking in my Latin studies.”

Because fellows arrive at Macalester soon after completing graduate school, they offer some of the most cutting-edge research in the field. This gives Macalester students an advantage as they look forward to graduate school or careers after commencement. The French Department’s Billing says his responsibilities to students extend well beyond the classes he teaches. He’s talked to several students about graduate school—what they should look for and when they should go, he says. “I think it’s helpful that I’ve done graduate work recently. I can tell them what it’s like and what the job market is like today.”

Kelly has assisted with a range of student endeavors, including reading senior honors projects, supervising independent study projects, and getting the Aristophones play The Birds produced on campus. Says Kelly, “There’s no limit to the things you can get involved in here.”

The influence of Mellon fellows like Kelly and Billing begins when they step on campus, but doesn’t end when they move on. “Fellows contribute new ideas and directions that we can pursue even after they’ve left,” Severy-Hoven says. “And that long-term ripple effect is really valuable.”

Erin Peterson is a regular contributor to Macalester Today.