Colm Singleton '98 and Narayanan Kasthuri '96 have also been awarded Rhodes scholarships, which provide full expenses and a stipend for two years of study at Oxford University. Seniors Alex Heneveld, Andrew Neitzke, and Aisha Williams have earned Marshall scholarships, which cover tuition and expenses for two or three years of study at any university in Great Britain.

Qalbani, an economics major, will study international economics and macroeconomics at Oxford. His particular interest is exploring the ripple effect of political events on international monetary systems.

Singleton, a history major, received the only Rhodes awarded to his native Bermuda. Especially interested in imperialism and colonialism, he intends to study law. He expects to return to Bermuda and to use his law degree "to work with emerging markets," he said.

Currently enrolled in a master of science program at Washington University in St. Louis, Kasthuri plans to study neuroscience at Oxford.

Math major Heneveld plans to use his Marshall scholarship to study at either Sussex University or the University of Edinburgh, where he will pursue his interest in cognitive science; specifically, he said, he would like "to understand how people think when they're playing the game Go."

Neitzke, also a math major, will spend his first year at Cambridge University doing a one-year master's program. During the second year he will do independent research.

Williams, a Woodrow Wilson School major who studies Latin American economic and political development, will work toward a master of philosophy degree in development studies at Oxford, with a concentration on Latin America. Last year's winner of a Truman award for undergraduates committed to a career in Latin American affairs, she hopes eventually to work for the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or United Nations.

With four of 32 recipients, Harvard produced the most Rhodes scholarships awarded to U.S. citizens. Besides Princeton, Wellesley College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill produced two awardees. Harvard also topped the list of Marshall scholars with eight.

Bodies, desires, and modern times
Professor of History Christine Stansell '71 examines our changing perceptions of sexuality
The first assignment in Christine Stansell '71's course Sex and Sexuality: Bodies, Desires, and Modern Times (Women's Studies 308/History 484) was to analyze the graffiti in campus bathrooms. In a three-to-four-page paper, the students were to determine whether the graffiti is what the French philosopher Michel Foucault would call "sexual discourse," meaning a way of talking about sex that purports to be honest but is actually implicitly controlled by rules and regulations.

Sex and Sexuality looks at the way people have related to other people's bodies from Ancient Greece through modern times. Students examine how different political movements, social systems, and cultural movements have affected sexual practices and notions of sexual pleasure.

"We dip heavily into the rich American social history of sexuality, which is very carnal, very palpable," says Stansell, a historian of American women. The course, she says, "explores the texture of people's sexual lives, how human beings organize themselves into youth culture, black culture, or gay culture. Students look at a wide range of topics connected to erotic life like amusements, contraception, and the sociability of cities. We pick apart the elements that make a sexual relationship like marriage different in 1910 than it was in 1830."

The history of sexuality can be made very abstract. But Stansell tries to focus on "bodies in actual times and places," how people conceived of a sexual body in different times, and "how people experienced sexual pleasure," she says. For example, the class analyzes George Chauncey's Gay New York, a social history of homosexual life in New York from 1890 to 1945. In it, says Stansell, Chauncey explains that in the 1890s sex between working-class men was considered something you "did" to someone else; it was an act of release or mastery, not one of connecting with another person.

The notion of sexuality "is a historical construct which we then try to unpack," says Stansell, who earned her Ph.D. at Yale and whose latest book, American Moderns: Sex, Art and Radicalism, 1890-1919, will be published next year by Metropolitan Books of Henry Holt. One of her goals in the course is to get students to understand that "sexuality" is a modern term. "The idea that our sexual likes and dislikes and our orientation and choice of partners are part of the essence of our character, of our very beingsthat is a 20th-century notion," she explains. In other eras, people were not labeled as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. "Some scholars argue that in Ancient Greece men could move with some ease and fluidity between partners of the same sex and partners of different sexes," says Stansell. "That fluidity did not define that person in his mind or her mind or the minds of others as bisexual."

The students study topics such as lesbian sexuality in medieval and early modern Europe, sexual categories, lesbians in American Indian culture, the relationship between capitalism and gay identity, class and gender in Victorian England, abortion, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and the invention of heterosexuality. Among other authors (see reading list on previous page), they read Foucault, whose work forms the basis of most historical studies of sexuality in the last 15 years, explains Stansell. They write a weekly paper and a term paper.

CONTRACEPTION

A natural for this course is a look at contraception, which wasn't widely available until after 1916 and, says Stansell, allowed "women for the first time the separation of sex and reproduction." She adds that many of her students have trouble imagining a time without contraception.

The course spends a good deal of time exploring the modern world of gays and lesbians. During one seminar, the class discussed the gay-liberation movement and a memoir by Martin Duberman, who in the 1960s had been a closeted professor at Princeton. In Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, Duberman discusses his struggle at first to be heterosexual and then his gradual understanding of his homosexuality in a hostile society.

Several students expressed impatience at Duberman's slow and painful journey to accept himself and to fully enter the gay community. Asked Justin Anderson '00, "How can you let society control your life?" In response, a gay junior told his classmates they can't understand what it's like to be considered "deviant." Like Duberman, he too had struggled with his sexuality, and as a freshman had even gone to a psychologist to be "cured."

Fourteen students from a variety of departments took Sex and Sexuality last fall, the first time it was offered to undergraduates. They enrolled, says Stansell, because "students here are very interested in understanding the sexual landscape they're becoming a part of. They are interested in how and why someone becomes straight or gay." Although the students came to the course with contemporary issues they were grappling with, Stansell pushed them to learn some history that "outstrips those demands for relevance," and to learn about worlds that are not their own.

-Kathryn Federici Greenwood

Sex and sexuality
A reading list by Professor Christine Stansell '71

The History of Sexuality; Volume One, by Michel Foucault (Vintage, 1980)-This French philosopher provides a new intellectual basis for the history of sexuality. He challenges the idea that in the modern era, sexuality is characterized by honesty, openness, and authenticity.

Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, by Martin Duberman (Penguin, 1991)-A historian and playwright's account of growing up in the 1950s and '60s as a golden boy of the Ivy League as he sought to "cure" his homosexuality through psychiatry. It includes a chapter on the author's stint as a history professor at Princeton in the 1960s.

Intimate Warriors: Portraits of a Modern Marriage, 1899-1944, Ellen Kay Trimberger, ed. (Feminist Press, 1991)-A collection of letters between two Greenwich Village writers trying to navigate the currents of feminism and free love in the world of the avant-garde.

Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade, by Rickie Solinger (Routledge, 1992)-A social history of the prevalence of teenage pregnancy in the 1950s and '60s and the differing fates of white and black unwed mothers.

Gay New York, by George Chauncey (Basic Books, 1995)-With the skill of a novelist, the author reveals the existence of a broad-based, biracial, metropolitan gay life in an era before anyone "came out of the closet."

"When I'm Bad, I'm Better": Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment, by Marybeth Hamilton *90 (HarperCollins, 1995)-A cultural study of how previously censored material crossed over into respectable show business in the 1920s.

In Memoriam
Malcolm Diamond, Richard Lester *36
Malcolm L. Diamond, a professor of religion, emeritus, died on De cember 27, 1997, of complications from multiple myeloma. He was 73 and a resident of Princeton.

The first master of Stevenson Hall, Diamond joined the faculty in 1953. He taught psychology, religion, and philosophy of religion until his retirement in 1992.

Diamond earned his 1956 Ph.D. in philosophy and religion from Columbia and worked with leading figures in religious thought, including Martin Buber, W. Richard Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich.

Since the fall of 1981, he worked in the field of family therapy and marriage counseling. In 1985 he earned an Ed.S. degree in family therapy from Seton Hall University.

A political activist, Diamond in the 1960s campaigned for civil rights in the South and participated in demonstrations against the Vietnam War. During World War II, he served in the Navy in the Pacific Theater.

His article "Coping with Cancer" appeared in the April 4, 1994 PAW. The story is available on PAW's Website, at http://www.princeton.edu/~paw.

Richard Allen Lester *36, a prominent labor economist and dean of the faculty, emeritus, died on December 30. He was 89 and a resident of Hightstown, New Jersey.

He is best known for research on wage determination and minimum wages. In the 1940s, Lester developed the "range theory of wages," which recognized that individuals in similar jobs were often paid very differently. He used this theory to explain why higher minimum wages might not have the dire employment consequences predicted by their opponents.