Kahn Liberal Arts Institute

The Louise W. and Edmund J. Kahn Liberal Arts Institute supports collaborative research among Smith faculty, staff and students, Five College faculty, and visiting scholars—all without regard to the traditional boundaries of departments, programs and academic divisions. Each year the institute supports long- and short-term projects that are proposed, planned and organized by Smith College faculty. Kahn Fellows work together on topics that are broad enough to encompass a variety of disciplinary perspectives and focused enough for a meaningful investigation.

Kahn Institute Updates

Fall Porch Party!

Thursday, September 5, 4–6 p.m.
Meet new colleagues and reconnect with old friends at the fall Kahn Porch party. New faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

Featured Events

‘The Role of Social Media in Learning about Science and Religion,’

Monday, September 16, 5 p.m., Klingenstein Browsing Room

Reception afterward in the Skyline Reading Room hosted by the provost, 6:15-7:45 p.m.
Neilson Professor Eszter Hargittai ’96 will discuss how social media have become an important information source for people on a myriad of topics including the sometimes-contentious domains of science and religion. Which social media platforms are popular for seeing and discussing these topics? Do people tend to have negative or positive experiences with them? Why might people avoid related conversations? This talk draws on interviews with 45 American adults and a survey administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,505 US adults to explore what contexts encourage learning about science and religion versus turn people away from it.

For More Information

‘Before Writing: LLMs as Reading Machines,’

Thursday, September 19, 5 p.m., Klingenstein Browsing Room

Tim Laquintano, director of the College Writing Program at Lafayette College, will give the talk, "Before Writing: LLMs as Reading Machines” as part of the Kahn Institute short-term project, "Generative AI & Writing." Students have quietly been using large language models (LLMs) for a variety of use cases related to reading—and these activities tend to be undetectable by instructors. After considering how LLMs might affect undergraduate reading and learning, the talk will conclude with a brief profile of some classroom activities designed to help students acquire a more critical understanding of LLMs.

Explore the Kahn Institute

Kahn Fellowships

Projects

News & Events

A Retreat into Writing

With an eye toward productivity and community, the Kahn recently sponsored a writing retreat for faculty and staff, held over three days at the Red Barn at Hampshire College.

“This feels like a vacation, but I’m actually working,” said Danielle Carrabino, a curator at the Museum of Art.

Learn More About the Retreat

About the Kahn Institute

In 1998, a group of faculty members proposed the idea of a liberal arts institute as an innovative way to provide intellectual as well as physical space for scholarly development. Their goal was to create an imaginatively designed and managed institute, outside the curriculum but creatively linked to it, to give faculty, students and outside experts a place to collaborate on research projects of broad scope. They also envisioned a rich series of public events related to these projects to enhance the intellectual life of the college.

A generous bequest from Louise Wolff Kahn ’31 substantially augmented the Louise W. and Edmund J. Kahn Fund for Faculty Excellence, making it possible to establish the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute in 1998. The institute opened in September 2000 on the third floor of Neilson Library and is now located at 21 Henshaw Avenue.

Staff

Communications/Publicity & Project Manager

Lauren Anderson
413-585-4021

Administrative Coordinator

Christine Reynolds
413-585-3721

Lauren Anderson
Communications/Publicity and Project Manager, Kahn Institute

Alexis Callender
Assistant Professor of Art

Danielle Carrabino
SCMA Curator of Painting and Sculpture

Jean Ferguson
Director of Learning, Research and Technology

Susan Fliss
Dean of Libraries, ex-officio

Christophe Golé
Professor of Mathematical Sciences; Faculty Director of the Clark Science Center

Suzanne Gottschang
Professor of Anthropology and of East Asian Studies; Director of the Kahn Institute

Colin Hoag
Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Jessica Nicoll
Director & Chief Curator of the Smith Museum of Art, ex-officio

Christine Reynolds
Administrative Coordinator, Kahn Institute

Sujane Wu
Professor of East Asian Languages

About the Director

Suzanne Gottschang is a medical anthropologist whose work contextualizes how individuals navigate governance and knowledge systems at the intersections of health, science, and medicine. Her research and writing are rooted in China and the US and cross anthropology, East Asian studies, gender studies, public health, and science and technology studies. Her current research focuses on the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases in horses and how horses, their caregivers, and veterinarians deal with the uncertainties of treatment and care by drawing on experiential and anecdotal knowledge and practices as well as those of evidence-based veterinary medicine.

Her book, Formulas for Motherhood in a Chinese Hospital, is the first ethnography about how a Chinese hospital’s staff, new mothers, and their families navigated the UNICEF-WHO Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative’s policies and practices to promote breastfeeding at a time of unprecedented social and economic change. Relations between biomedical practices and heightened expectations of femininity and sexuality demanded by consumer culture, alongside international and national agendas to promote maternal and child health, revealed new agents of maternal governance emerging at the very moment China’s economy heats up. The ethnography provides insight into how women’s creative pragmatism in a rapidly changing society leads to their views and decisions about motherhood. Gottschang has published in such journals as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Technology and Culture the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

She is committed to collaborative projects in her research, writing, and teaching – ranging from a three-year collaborative research project on everyday technologies in East Asia at Hong Kong University to coaching a student team in Smith College’s Engineering Design Clinic.

Research Without Boundaries

“The Kahn Institute is unique. No other college has anything quite like it—an incubator for cross-disciplinary research, debate and colleagueship, and a haven for free speech.”
–Marjorie Senechal, Kahn Institute founding director