N A NOD TO the College’s Quaker history, note this prescient quote from Elizabeth Gurney Fry. “I believe there is something in the mind, or in the heart, that shows its approbation when we do right,” said Fry, a prison reformer specifically focused on the conditions women faced in prison. “I give myself this advice: Do not fear truth, let it be so contrary to inclination and feeling. Never give up the search after it: And let me take courage, and try from the bottom of my heart to do that which I believe truth dictates, if it leads me to be a Quaker or not.”

I have no excuse. I could have shredded the notes for each book, because my last four monographs were on totally different subjects. Each one generated the next by a kind of opposition. My book on five Irish cultural controversies (The Irish Art of Controversy), begun in 1991, was published in 2005; I did so much research that each controversy could have been a book. OK, I told myself, now I’m going to write about one brief event; I began work on the four-hour dinner that W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound organized for the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. It hadn’t occurred to me that a book on such a small event would require an awful lot of research. In 2014, when Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal was published, I’d completed a book about an all-male dinner from which women were explicitly excluded, although the seven men had only met because of their romantic and professional associations with women. Now, I said to myself, I’m going to write a book with women in the center and men on the periphery.

he banners hanging in the Mullan Tennis Center tell the story of one of the most successful men’s programs in Division III history: four team national championships, two NCAA doubles championships, 53 All-Americans, and more.

Despite this long list of individual and team accolades, the Garnet were in a difficult position in the 2010s; Centennial Conference (CC) competitor Johns Hopkins had won 15 consecutive conference titles, topping Swarthmore in 10 of those and taking the CC’s automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. With at-large selections difficult to come by, the Garnet did not qualify for the postseason as a team between 2008 and 2022.

After the pandemic wiped out two seasons, the program faced the challenge of rebuilding team culture and finding a way to reach the pinnacle once again. Rising to the occasion were the six members of the Class of 2026: Michael Melnikov, Utham Koduri, Max Lindstrom, Andrés Fente, Lalith Suresh, and Aamish Pal.

During a semester abroad at Trinity College Dublin, Silveira closely examined the European carceral system, puzzled by how different societies choose to punish, rehabilitate, or restore. She was struck by how different other nations’ concepts of justice were from the system she knew back home.

In his 30 years of treating patients, Frederick Marshall ’83, Professor of Neurology and Chief, Division of Geriatric Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, where he cofounded the Memory Care Program, has cared for chess grandmasters, National Book Award winners, and his psychiatrist father — all of whom had the disease.

“Aging is the single biggest risk factor for the development of dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease is by far the most common form of dementia,” says Marshall.

About 7 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, a number that is expected to nearly double by 2050. Its hallmark is the buildup of the proteins amyloid and tau in the brain. While debate has raged as to whether they cause Alzheimer’s, their presence is accompanied by inflammation, which leads to neuron death and cognitive decline.

“Either of those two stances is fatal,” says Weinstein, Emeritus Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Literature, whose book, Time’s Bounty (David R. Godine), was released in October.

“Everyone complains about getting old, but nobody wants a lot of organ recitals,” a list of complaints about one’s aging body, he says. “And a Hallmark card is even worse. That cheapens reality by bypassing it and pretending it’s not what it is. I thought the only worthwhile challenge was to go there and try and articulate what is interesting about it.”

The result is a profound, funny, and often poignant meditation on old age and death, in conversation with some of the world’s greatest literary figures. Weinstein, now 85, starts the book with the proposition that “old age could be a world less of depletion, than one of vital surprises.”

t begins with a simple walk around the neighborhood. Each fall, school kids across Philadelphia venture out into their communities, looking critically at what they like and what they don’t.

“What are they proud of? What would they like to see change?” asks Janet Chance ’87, associate director of the nonprofit Need in Deed, which engages students through action-learning projects in their own neighborhoods.

Over the next few months, the students choose a topic of neighborhood concern, learning about the issue and ultimately developing a project to address it.

“It’s about making students agents of their own learning, beginning with gaining confidence in who they are as individuals and members of a community,” says Chance, who joined the organization eight years ago, seeing it as a natural outgrowth of the social justice-focused pedagogy she learned at Swarthmore.

artin Hall is back, and it’s nothing like you remember. After more than two years of construction, the building has been reborn as a bright and airy hub designed to spark connections between technology and the humanities.

The renovated building — now home to Computer Science, Film & Media Studies, and the Creative Media Commons — opened to students on Sept. 2 to start the fall semester.

“When we walked in, we gasped,” says Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies and Department Chair Bob Rehak, who helped guide Martin Hall’s renovation as a member of the Project Working Group. “The openness, the sunlight that washes through the building, the way it’s all come together — and it smells like a new car.”

It’s a sharp break from the building’s past. For decades, Martin Hall was home to the Martin Biological Laboratory. Built in the 1930s, it housed a greenhouse and an animal research laboratory. The building’s carved limestone art deco façade was a familiar and imposing presence on campus for decades.

That’s the premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning film Rebecca (1940). But to feminist film scholar Patricia White, the haunting classic is also an allegory for the unseen women who, though long sidelined, have quietly propped up the film business behind the scenes.

“Women have long been important to film history,” says White — and not just as on-screen icons. Rebecca is a case in point. The film, which captivated White as a teenager and sparked her love for cinema, was adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s novel by the English screenwriter, and later producer Joan Harrison and several collaborators, including the uncredited Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife.

hristine Lehman ’90 has an explanation for why her law firm, Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg (RJLF), won a $236 million verdict in its very first trial: “Nobody saw us coming.”

With barely more than a dozen lawyers at the time, the scrappy boutique shop stunned the legal world in 2020 with one of the year’s largest jury awards, beating tech giant VMware in a patent infringement case.

The verdict put RJLF squarely on the legal map, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the firm’s founders.

Courtland Reichman ’90 and Sarah (Newland) Jorgensen ’90 met on their first day at Swarthmore, and went on to work together at the The American Lawyer-ranked litigation giant King & Spalding and litigation powerhouse McKool Smith, along with Reichman’s college roommate, Peter Mastroianni ’90.

Maude Muller started the program with the help of a few other members of her local Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) chapter.

She attended a UNESCO conference as a representative for WILPF and was inspired by a speaker’s suggestion that artists of the world should exchange their work to facilitate international peace and understanding.

Art for World Friendship, which Muller ran out of her home, was the first organization to facilitate exchanges of children’s art across the globe. The organization partnered with schools across the world to facilitate the art exchanges.