By Anita V. M. Shea
Dean (Retired), School of Arts and Sciences
Until 1997, undergraduate research activities in the School of Arts and Sciences were based mainly in selected departments relying on a nucleus of committed faculty or on an occasional grant. In general, those efforts were neither publicly acknowledged nor supported in concept by the college community. That [...]

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By Andrew Darien
Department of History
Many students view the research and scholarship of their professors as a mysterious and nebulous world, far removed from the more familiar classroom experience of lecture and discussion. The History Department at Salem State College removes that mystique by asking its majors to take themselves seriously as scholars. Our students understand [...]

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By Scott Nowka
English Department
“So why does every letter ’s’ look like a lower-case ‘f’?”
This is the question that always precedes one of the most exciting types of discussions we have in my undergraduate or graduate classes. What does it mean? That my students have ventured out beyond the annotated, comfortably modernized, and silently emended editions [...]

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By David Gow
Psychology Department
Undergraduates Heidi Kien and Sarah Luong have been editing digital sound files—a lot of digital sound files. It is not particularly glamorous work. These files will serve as stimuli for an NIH-funded study into the biological and psychological mechanisms that allow listeners to adapt to and understand accented speech. Like most basic [...]

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by Marcos Luna
Geography Department
The theme of this edition of ASpect is undergraduate research. In addition to soliciting the contributions of faculty members of the School of Arts and Sciences (SOAS), the SOAS Communications Team endeavored to learn about undergraduate research activities amongst our various departments. The survey that the SOAS Communications Team put to Chairs [...]

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By Jon Aske
Foreign Languages

Introduction
In order to get a better idea of the degree to which research is an important part of the academic programs of the School of Arts and Sciences, the communications team sent a survey to the chairs of the twenty SOAS academic departments with the following five questions:

Does your department require [...]

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By Brad Hubeny
Department of Geology
“How do we know that environmental concerns like global warming and pollution should be taken seriously? All of these changes could just be natural, right?” asked Steve, an outspoken student in my Physical Geology class.
These questions led to a lively class discussion centered on the fact that humans have only kept [...]

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