Whitman College

Abstract This chapter gives a brief survey of pertinent biographical details, especially Aldington’s education and his relationship with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), whom he met in 1911 and married in 1913. The chapter discusses the gaps in Aldington’s education and the extent to which he (like H.D.) was an autodidact, who read widely in classical literature throughout his life but at times misconstrued some of what he had read. It examines the importance that he and H.D. found in studying Greek and Latin together and attempting, almost from the beginning of their relationship, to translate ancient poetry together. It also discusses the time they spent travelling in Italy and especially on Capri in 1913, and the importance that this assumed for them both in their ‘Hellenism’ (which was based on a largely imaginative view of an idealized ancient Greece) and in their emotional lives. It considers some of the tensions and difficulties in their relationship and the effect on these of their belief that ancient Greek views of sexuality had been free from guilt or shame. The chapter offers readings of several of Aldington’s early translations and original poems, including some previously unpublished works, and examines the importance of classics for his formation of his poetic practice. It looks closely at one of his strangest works, a collection of lesbian love poems written in the voice of two ancient Greek women, Myrrhine and Konallis, and discusses the implications of these poems for Aldington’s views of sexuality and gender in his imagined ‘Hellas’. The chapter prints for the first time a long ‘Myrrhine and Konallis’ poem that was previously unpublished.

Abstract This chapter focuses on Aldington’s war poetry and the continued importance of classics for his work during the period 1914–1919. It categorizes any poems Aldington wrote that refer to the war as ‘war poems’, including poems he wrote before enlisting as well as those he wrote while on active service from 1916 to 1919. Aldington’s war poems merit consideration in their own right as undervalued examples of First World War poetry and, for our purposes, as exemplars of how Aldington’s ‘Hellenism’ persisted during the war and of how his experiences in the military modified that Hellenism. The chapter offers close readings of several poems, demonstrating that classical learning and literature play a double role throughout this period. They are foremost in the catalogue of things that Aldington presents as threatened with destruction, while simultaneously representing an imaginative refuge for the poet when he is overwhelmed by war’s horrors. The Hellenic world appears both as an object for which the poet fights and as an emblem of what the war has cost him, serving as the poet’s hope for continued sanity at the same time that it appears as part of what he has already lost.

This essay explores the challenge — and importance — of teaching gender- and sexuality-focused medieval studies in the undergraduate classroom. It particularly considers pedagogy in the Southeastern United States and teaching students who come from backgrounds with a strong focus on censoring practical and non-normative knowledge about gender, sex, and sexuality. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice, this essay argues that medieval literature provides a crucial space for students to recognize and resist the silences and distortions surrounding their own sex education. By exploring the inventive, playful, and creative ways that medieval texts approach sex and gender, students learn to see the unjust limits of their own education and are invited to see and explore — through traditional and creative class projects — alternative ways, new and historical, of understanding sex, gender, and sexuality.

Abstract Fire is a significant disturbance agent, impacting forest structure and composition. In fire-adapted forests, fire can foster biodiversity by resetting successional processes and increasing habitat heterogeneity. However, fire suppression practices have altered historical fire regimes and left fire-adapted ecosystems largely unburned and the use of unburned forests by post-fire habitat specialists is understudied. Picoides arcticus (Black-backed Woodpecker) is a post-fire specialist that thrives in recently burned coniferous forests by exploiting heterogeneous patches of live and dead trees. Despite being a regional species of conservation concern, its occurrence and habitat use remains poorly understood in the managed forests of the northern Blue Mountains of Washington and Oregon, USA. Here, we combine passive acoustic monitoring and Bayesian occupancy modeling to understand P. arcticus occurrence across two National Forests during the breeding season. We examined how the prevalence of prominent tree species, attributes of forest structure, and fire history relate to occurrence. We found the odds of P. arcticus occupancy was 3.67 times larger for every 2.88 m2 ha−1 increase in lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) basal area and 2.16 times higher with every 5.04 m2 ha−1 increase in ponderosa pine (P. ponderosa) basal area. The small number of survey stations classified as burned limited our ability to identify an effect of fire history. Our findings provide insight into how a fire-adapted species is using largely unburned forest. We also fill important knowledge gaps for a priority species of conservation concern by creating a species distribution map. Collectively, this information can inform active forest management and conservation decisions.

Light reprocessed by dust grains emitting in the infrared enables the study of the physics at play in dusty embedded regions, where ultraviolet and optical wavelengths are attenuated. Infrared telescopes such as JWST have made it possible to study the earliest feedback phases, when stars are shielded by cocoons of gas and dust. Comprehending this phase is crucial for unravelling the effects of feedback from young stars that leads to their emergence and the dispersal of their host molecular clouds. Here we show that the transition from the embedded to the exposed phase of star formation is short (< 4 Myr) and sometimes almost absent (< 1 Myr) across a sample of 37 nearby star-forming galaxies covering a wide range of morphologies, from massive barred spirals to irregular dwarfs. The short duration of the dust-clearing timescales suggests a predominant role of pre-supernova feedback mechanisms in revealing newborn stars, confirming previous results on smaller samples and allowing, for the first time, a statistical analysis of their dependencies. We find that the timescales associated with mid-infrared emission at 21 μm, tracing a dust-embedded feedback phase, are controlled by a complex interplay between giant molecular cloud properties (masses and velocity dispersions) and galaxy morphology. We report relatively longer durations of the embedded phase of star formation in barred spiral galaxies, while this phase is significantly reduced in low-mass irregular dwarf galaxies. We discuss tentative trends with gas-phase metallicity, which may favor faster cloud dispersal at low metallicities.

Abstract In the coming years, detailed chemical abundances from large-scale high-resolution spectroscopic surveys will become available for vast numbers of stars across the Milky Way. Previous work has suggested that abundance ratios from these spectra can allow us to estimate ages from a large number of stars. These data will be leveraged to calibrate chemical clocks to age-date field stars, as reliable stellar ages remain elusive. In this work, we extended our empirical relationship between stellar age and their carbon-to-nitrogen ([C/N]) abundance ratio for evolved stars to older and more metal-poor stars by combining the original open cluster calibration sample and four globular clusters: 47 Tuc, M 71, M 4, and M 5. With this extension, [C/N] can be used as a chemical clock for evolved field stars to investigate not only regions within the metal-rich disk but also more metal-poor regions of our Galaxy. We have established the [C/N]–age relationship for Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) DR17 red giant stars, which have experienced the first dredge-up but have not yet undergone any extramixing, in clusters usable for ages between 8.62 ≤ log ( Age [ yr ] ) ≤ 10.13 and for metallicities of −1.2 ≤ [Fe/H] ≤ +0.3. This relationship can be uniformly applied to these stars within the APOGEE DR17 sample. This measured [C/N]–age APOGEE DR17 relationship is also shown to be consistent with stellar ages derived from asteroseismic results of APOKASC and APO-K2.

Identifying the genetic basis of reproductive barriers is essential for understanding the origin and maintenance of biological diversity. While some hybrid incompatibilities evolve as incidental byproducts of divergence, those involving sex chromosomes and mitochondrial-nuclear interactions may arise through predictable pathways shaped by genomic conflict. Yet, the extent to which such interactions drive the evolution of reproductive barriers and speciation in natural populations remains unclear. Here, we use whole-genome resequencing in North American fishes to show that two hybridizing species possess distinct, nonhomologous sex chromosomes. These chromosomes exhibit strong associations with sex, reduced introgression in natural hybrid zones, segregation distortion in backcrosses, and an enrichment of nuclear-encoded mitochondrial genes, indicative of sex-linked mitonuclear incompatibilities. We identify a third, distinct sex chromosome in another hybridizing species, indicating repeated sex chromosome turnover within the clade. Parental crosses and genomic analyses suggest that at least one of these transitions was driven by a recessive female-determining mutation, a rare empirical example of a theoretically predicted but seldom observed mechanism of sex chromosome evolution. Together, these results link genomic architecture to hybrid dysfunction and behavioral isolation, providing strong empirical support for long-standing predictions about the role of sex-linked and cytonuclear incompatibilities in speciation.

Abstract Around 124 CE, a group of unusually-named Judeans promised funds for the construction of a palm grove complex in the Western Anatolian city of Smyrna. An inscription, IvSmyr 697, names “those former residents of Judea” (οἱ ποτὲ Ἰουδαῖοι) alongside several elite individuals from the Roman polis who together donated capital to build a φοινικών (palm grove complex) in the city. This paper focuses on the strategies employed by these elite Judeans in the shadow of the Flavian subjugation of Judea and the diaspora rebellions of the early second century CE. What material and social conditions shape this act of patronage? What strategies are at work among these Judeans in their political moment, and how might their actions have been received in Roman Smyrna? Expanding upon an at times limited spectrum assigning Judeans to positions of assimilation, resistance, or ambivalence toward Roman imperial culture writ large, this paper draws on Religious Studies scholarship on imperialism and religion to analyze IvSmyr 697 to suggest a more diverse and multivalent social history of Judeans in the Roman diaspora.

We previously proposed a Vertical Attention Bias (VAB) that directs attention toward object tops and scene bottoms and robustly confirmed this effect in both adults and 4- to 7-year-old children. Our past findings are consistent with progressive ecological theory, and support that our perceptual biases are coupled to informative environmental regularities. This leads observers to generally favor a downward gaze to facilitate attending more to functionally and behaviorally relevant locations. Here, we examine orientation effects using upright or inverted images presented in triptych sets to further test the overall VAB pattern. Participants made similarity judgments between a central target image of an object or scene and flanking images containing either the same top-half or the same bottom-half as the target image. Experiment 1 presented upright triptych images and replicated past VAB findings. Experiment 2 presented the same triptychs in an inverted orientation. In this context, the environmental regularity of interactive feature placement is incongruent with conventional spatial location in the presented image. Here object and scene tops are positioned in the lower image portion, and bottoms in the upper image portion. Results extend previous findings and confirm that VAB effects favoring object tops and scene bottoms flip along with the inverted image, though statistically weaker. Taken together, the findings support that the typical vertical interactive feature imbalance in real-world stimuli drives a generic downward vantage tendency. This directs attention toward the locations of meaningful, behaviorally relevant environmental aspects, which helps focus attention on personal action space and body-level affordances.