Panel 2: The Early Years of Coeducation

Moderator: Nancy Frankenberry (REL) Panelists: Brenda Silver (ENGL) and Lynn Higgins (COLT, FRIT, Dean emerita) Mary Hudson (PHYS) Deborah King (SOC) Nancy Frankenberry is the John Phillips Professor in Religion Emerita. She was the first woman hired in the Religion Department, the first woman tenured in the Religion Department, and the first female chair of that department. Since retiring from the teaching portion of her career in 2015, she has served as President of the Metaphysical Society of America (2017) and President of the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought (2016-2020). Her most recent publications are “Contingency After Nagarjuna and Rorty,” Review of Metaphysics (March 2019); “Map is Not Territory, Menu is Not Meal,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 31 (2019); “The Fate of Radical Empiricism and the Future of Pragmatic Naturalism,” in Pragmatism and Naturalism: Scientific and Social Inquiry After Representationalism, ed. Matthew C. Bagger (Columbia University Press 2018); and “Naturalisms, Ineffability Claims, and Symbolic Meanings,” in The Question of Methodological Naturalism, ed. Jason N. Blum (Brill 2018). Her chapter “Wildman’s Eff’ing Symbology” is forthcoming in a volume on Religion in Multidisciplinary Perspective (2020). Brenda R. Silver is Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor Emerita at Dartmouth College; she also held the position of Adjunct Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. She joined the English Department at Dartmouth in 1972, the first year of co-education, and was one of the original founders of the Women and Gender Studies Program. She has taught courses on Twentieth-Century British Fiction, Postmodern Fiction, Popular Fiction, Cyberculture, and, always, Virginia Woolf. Her publications include Virginia Woolf\u27s Reading Notebooks, Virginia Woolf Icon, and Rape and Representation, edited with Lynn A. Higgins, as well as articles on Woolf, Charlotte Bronté, E.M. Forster, John Le Carré, textual editing, anger, hypertext, popular fiction in the digital age, and other contemporary literary and cultural narratives. Lynn A. Higgins is the Edward Tuck Professor of French Studies at Dartmouth College. With a B.A. from Oberlin College and a PhD from the University of Minnesota, she arrived at Dartmouth in 1976, just one month after the first co-educational class graduated. She was one of the original co-founders of the Women’s Studies Program, and co-taught its first course. With Brenda R. Silver, she launched the Feminist Inquiry Faculty Seminar in 1977 and directed a Humanities Institute on Gender and War in 1990. She teaches courses on 20th- and 21st century French literature and cinema, including a course on French women filmmakers. She served for eleven years as chair of her department and from 2011 to 2016 as Associate Dean of the Faculty for Interdisciplinary Programs and International Studies. Her publications include New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France; Bertrand Tavernier; Rape and Representation, co-edited with Brenda R. Silver, and articles on an array of topics including documentary film, gender and humor, and gender and war (World War II and the French war in Algeria), and cultural figures such as Chantal Akerman, Roland Barthes, Marguerite Duras, Diane Kurys, Patrick Modiano, Alain Resnais, and others. Mary K. Hudson, Space Physicist, PhD UCLA 1974, is Professor of Physics and Astronomy Emerita and served for eight years as Chair of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. She is currently a Senior Research Associate at the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. Hudson is a co-principal Investigator on two experiments on the NASA Van Allen Probes satellites designed to study earth\u27s radiation belts, and on the Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses (BARREL) along with Professor Robyn Millan of the Physics and Astronomy Department at Dartmouth. Hudson and her students study the weather patterns that originate from solar eruptions, following the energy and mass transfer through the interplanetary medium, all the way to the earth\u27s ionosphere. Current areas of investigation include the evolution of the radiation belts; how the ionized particle outflow known as the solar wind and the magnetic field of the sun interact with the magnetic field of the earth, producing electrical currents in the ionosphere; and the effects of solar cosmic rays on radio communications near the earth’s poles. Professor Hudson is also funded through NSF to study solar energetic particles and their access to the atmosphere. Deborah K. King. Born in Kansas City, Missouri during the early 1950s, Associate Professor King has been a beneficiary of the civil rights and women movements’ successful court cases, legislative battles and protest demonstrations. From racially segregated public schools, she earned her B. A. from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL and her Ph. D. in Sociology from Yale University. Professor King’s scholarly interests encompass law and social control; race, class and gender intersections; and historical/cultural sociology. Those scholarly endeavors have always worked synergistically with her efforts toward institutional and social change. While completing her dissertation research on the federal enforcement of affirmative action employment policies in higher education, she co-organized a group of Yale law and graduate students who wrote an amicus curiae brief for the 1978 Bakke case. Her Signs article, Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist Ideology, has become a classic and helped lay the conceptual foundation for intersectionality. During the 1991 congressional confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, Professor King along with historians Elsa Barkley Brown and Barbara Ransby organized a nation-wide campaign to challenge the misrepresentations of Black women that arose with Anita Hill\u27s allegations of sexual harassment. Within weeks – and long before cell phones and social media -- 1,500 Black women signed the “Statement of African American Women in Defense of Ourselves (AAWIDO)” and raised over $50,000 for a full one-page ad in the New York Times plus major African American and other newspapers. More recent scholarship examines the role of First Lady Michelle Obama as an “othermother,” and the survival strategies of Black women beauticians during the great recession. One of the never-ending projects is an analysis of the popular visual representations of prisons and correctional ideology as presented on picture postcards during the late 19th - early 20th century. Currently, her energies are focused on one project: the recovery of Dartmouth\u27s relationships with the institution of slavery. Previous students in the course have established a website and conducted a campus walking tour of relevant sites. The term’s seminar is preparing an exhibition in Rauner Library for the winter term. Professor King’s related research examines the representations of Black women, enslaved and formerly enslaved, who are esteemed in the early histories of elite colleges, including Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Princeton, Harvard and Yale. She has been on the Dartmouth faculty since 1980, where she was the first African American woman to gain tenure. She has chaired both the Sociology and African & African American Studies Program, and served on steering and personnel committees of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies as well as AAAS; as a committee member and mentor for both the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the Chavez-Eastman-Marshall Dissertation Fellowships. As an officer of the Dartmouth Black Caucus, she was pivotal in leading its efforts to establish the E. E. Just 1907 Professorship in honor of a pioneering cellular biologist and one of Dartmouth\u27s early Black graduates. For more than forty years, she has participated in varied initiatives to recruit historically excluded groups into academic careers and to support their professional development and success. Preparing the way for the next generations of scholars of color and women has been an enduring professional commitment and a great joy

A Polymorphism at Position 400 in the Connection Subdomain of HIV-1 Reverse Transcriptase Affects Sensitivity to NNRTIs and RNaseH Activity

<div><p>Reverse transcriptase (RT) plays an essential role in HIV-1 replication, and inhibition of this enzyme is a key component of HIV-treatment. However, the use of RT inhibitors can lead to the emergence of drug-resistant variants. Until recently, most clinically relevant resistance mutations were found in the polymerase domain of RT. Lately, an increasing number of resistance mutations has been identified in the connection and RNaseH domain. To further explore the role of these domains we analyzed the complete RT sequence of HIV-1 subtype B patients failing therapy. Position A/T400 in the connection subdomain is polymorphic, but the proportion of T400 increases from 41% in naïve patients to 72% in patients failing therapy. Previous studies suggested a role for threonine in conferring resistance to nucleoside RT inhibitors. Here we report that T400 also mediates resistance to non-nucleoside RT inhibitors. The susceptibility to NVP and EFV was reduced 5-fold and 2-fold, respectively, in the wild-type subtype B NL4.3 background. We show that substitution A400T reduces the RNaseH activity. The changes in enzyme activity are remarkable given the distance to both the polymerase and RNaseH active sites. Molecular dynamics simulations were performed, which provide a novel atomistic mechanism for the reduction in RNaseH activity induced by T400. Substitution A400T was found to change the conformation of the RNaseH primer grip region. Formation of an additional hydrogen bond between residue T400 and E396 may play a role in this structural change. The slower degradation of the viral RNA genome may provide more time for dissociation of the bound NNRTI from the stalled RT-template/primer complex, after which reverse transcription can resume.</p></div