Author: Shilpa Bhongir
History professor Lynn Dumenil and Art History and Visual Arts (AHVA) professor Louise Yuhas will retire this semester after 22 and 36 years at Occidental, respectively.
Students, department chairs and fellow professors noted that Dumenil and Yuhas made significant marks in their departments, helping to add new academic focuses and providing guidance for students and other faculty.
Louise Yuhas
Yuhas began teaching at Occidental in 1977, after completing her graduate studies in Asian Art History at the University of Michigan.
Yuhas brought expertise in the fields of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Tibetan art to the college. In addition to teaching courses such as the survey course on Asian art history, Yuhas shaped the foundation for the East Asian studies department at Occidental.
“I’ve watched and helped grow the Asian Studies department into having more robust course offerings,” Yuhas said.
Yuhas has also been able to bring her academic research into the classroom. In addition to traveling to China in 1977 during a critical period of its relationship-building with the U.S., Yuhas had a unique opportunity to visit Pyongyang and Kaesong in North Korea to study propaganda art in 2009.
“It was very tightly controlled. We had to surrender our cell phones at the airport on arrival and picked them up on our way out and were constantly chaperoned, but it was a fascinating experience,” Yuhas said.
Yuhas’ incorporated these studies into her Cultural Studies Program (CSP) on propagandist art in Maoist China. Students testify to the new perspective Yuhas brought to art history.
“I think Professor Yuhas fulfilled the challenging role of teaching Asian Art History to a student body that was largely steeped in Western traditions. It essentially involved teaching a new visual language,” AHVA major Anna Jones (senior) said.
Although introducing students, and the department, to a new side of her field was not easy, Yuhas embraced this role. Students credit Yuhas’ courses as rigorous but rewarding.
”Professor Yuhas is challenging, but I think that is because she wants us to fully comprehend the complexity and uniqueness of the art she teaches,” AHVA major Adriana Gomez (senior) said.
It is still unclear whether a new hire for Yuhas would have a similar focus in Asian studies, although Yuhas stressed the importance of preserving this interest at Occidental in addition to the traditional humanities.
“I hope we don’t lessen our emphasis on Asian studies. I feel curriculum has been drifting toward the contemporary world. I think we need a corresponding emphasis on the traditional humanities, literature and arts,” Yuhas said.
Yuhas plans to pursue her love of horseback riding after she moves to Nevada, where she owns a large plot of land and horses. ”I’m sad to leave but ready to move on and pursue other passions,” Yuhas said.
Lynn Dumenil
A graduate from the ’81 class of University of California at Berkeley, Dumenil began teaching at Occidental in 1991, giving up her tenure as a professor at Claremont McKenna.
“I hated [Claremont McKenna]. Very conservative, very sexist. A position was advertised at Occidental, and I gave up tenure to come here, which is kind of a big deal,” Dumenil said.
Dumenil began her focus in U.S women’s history after realizing it was not taught at any of the institutions where she worked previously. She was also the first to introduce such a course at Occidental.
“I sort of made [the U.S. women’s history course] up, and I kept doing that because every time I moved to another institution, very little women’s history was taught,” Dumenil said. “By virtue of teaching women’s history, I started doing more work in women’s history and ended up coauthoring a book on it. I don’t think that would have happened if it wasn’t for where my teaching and my students led me.”
Students seem to return Dumenil’s appreciation, commending her for her unique perspective and lively classroom presence.
“Some of my favorite classes and meetings were the ones where she would share stories from her own experiences growing up – either as a young girl in the South where sex-segregation was very visible or as a student in Berkeley where feminism had seriously evolved into its second wave,” history major Izzy Mayer (senior) said.
In addition to teaching, Dumenil served as a Fulbright adviser, where she ran the program to mentor students interested in applying to the prestigious research-grant scholarship program and assisted in editing and reviewing their applications for the scholarship. ”She is a gifted, demanding and popular teacher, as a well as a dedicated mentor to her advisees. Her work with the Fulbright program contributed to many Occidental student Fulbright winners,”History Department Chair Sharla Fett said.
Dumenil will be taking early retirement from the college to spend more time with her husband, Norman Cohen, a retired history professor who also taught at Occidental, and to complete ongoing book projects. Dumenil is currently writing a book titled “World War I, Patriotism, and the ‘New Women,'” and intends to complete a book about American history in the 1950s, which is based off of one of her favorite classes “Happy Days? America 1946 – 1963.”
Both Yuhas and Dumenil said their students and course material were major contributors to their academic research. Dumenil’s book, “The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s,” drew from themes from a seminar course she taught at Occidental.
“I think you can [teach] at a liberal arts college in a way you can’t at a big university. Students, in some ways, push your intellectual interests in certain directions,” Dumenil said.
Changes in each department will undoubtedly follow the retirement of both professors.
“Dumenil’s retirement will leave a big hole in the department in terms of Modern U.S. history. Twentieth century U.S history is a foundational area of study for politics, Diplomacy and World Affairs, American Studies, Urban and Environmental Policy and many other majors,” Fett said.
According to Fett, the history department has made a request for a new professor to teach modern U.S. history, the proposal for which is under review by Dean Jorge Gonzalez and the Academic Planning Committee. Next fall, history professors Jeremiah Axelrod and Nancy Cohen will be teaching the courses “U.S. since 1945” and “Women and American Politics,” respectively.
While it is undecided who future professors will be, both professors are excited at the prospect of moving forward in the next phases of their careers and seeing the changes that will take place in their departments.
“If you look to the books on the shelves of the person leaving, and the books on the shelves of the new person replacing him or her, they’ll be quite different,” Dumenil said. “We change, and we read new things. It’s really exciting to think about new people coming in.”
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