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Selected Courses

Introduction to Diplomacy Theories of International Relations International Law Legislative Toolkit

Biography

RICHMOND, Ind. — What do apple pie with cheddar cheese, stonings in Libya, frequent trips to the Soviet Union, climbing roses, students’ tattoos and the Nuclear Freeze Campaign have in common? Welling Hall, professor of politics and international studies, will be spending a sabbatical year in Washington, D.C.Welling Hall, professor of politics and international studies, will be spending a sabbatical year in Washington, D.C.In some way, they have all contributed to Welling Hall’s success in and out of the classroom. That success is evidenced by two prestigious honors Hall recently secured — an appointment to the Fulbright Specialist Roster and an American Political Science Association (APSA) Congressional Fellowship. “I was hoping for one of the awards, but to end up with both is just dazzling,” says Hall, a professor of politics and international studies, interim Plowshares Professor of Peace Studies and director of the campus Model United Nations program. When Hall began to think about her planned sabbatical for the academic year 2009-10, she realized that she did not want to spend the time in a cubicle writing a book. “I began exploring hands-on opportunities,” Hall says. “After all, it was my hands-on experience back in the 1980s on the Nuclear Freeze Campaign that started me down this path in the first place.” Both honors will provide plenty of practical experience. The APSA Fellowship gives Hall a front row seat to politics by placing her in Washington for one year to work on policy. In a group of 30 Fellows, Hall will be one of three or four U.S. political scientists. “Fellows interview with different offices and work with a particular senator, representative or committee,” she says. “Given that my emphasis is international studies and peace studies, I am hoping that I will be able to work in the Senate.” For the Fulbright Specialist Roster, Hall will be on an on-call list for five years to evaluate, assess and mentor emerging peace programs. “During that time I can accept up to two different appointments anywhere in the world for up to two months,’ Hall explains. “This is a natural extension of the work I do as Plowshares Professor.” Looking back, Hall says a career in international studies and peace was not part of her plans. Digging Her Way to Disarmament “I thought that when I grew up I wanted to be a classical archaeologist,” she says. “The summer between my junior and senior year in college I worked at the University of Pennsylvania archaeological excavation in Cyrene, Libya.” While on the dig, Hall and her associates endured 120-degree temperatures, faced heavy government restrictions and were pelted by stones thrown by Libyans who believed the group was prospecting for oil. “I decided then and there that archaeology was not going to be in my future,” she says. “I was pretty apolitical at the time.” Her first job after college was as an editor for the now defunct Lincoln Library of Essential Information, where assignments involved researching the arms race and world population. “This began to inspire my current interests,” she says. “It led to my working as an intern in the American Friends Service Committee in the Midwest, building a grassroots constituency in Ohio for disarmament.” After being demolished in a televised debate with the head of the Ohio Navy League, Hall decided to take two graduate courses, one on arms control and one on Soviet policy. “I found it fascinating and didn’t leave grad school until I had diploma in hand,” she says. Traveling frequently to what was then the Soviet Union with fellowships from Title VI and the Ford Foundation, she completed her master’s degree and doctorate at The Ohio State University and joined the faculty at Earlham in 1986. “My fortune cookie at my interview dinner read ‘Stop searching, you have found true happiness!’” Hall remembers. Exciting International Diversity in the Classroom Hall attributes much of her success to the incredible students she feels blessed to have had in her classes. “When I talk to my colleagues at conferences and tell them that a third to one-half of my students are international, they are amazed,” she says. “Just having that kind of extraordinary diversity in the classroom has inspired me to ask questions that I wouldn’t otherwise be asking. Having extremely bright students encourages me to find ways to be on the cutting edge of the field. I just love them. I feel lucky that I click with them.” Hall’s colleagues at other liberal arts colleges, she says, may have one or two international students. “They are working to convince their students that they should care,” she says. “While on the other hand, when I am teaching about atrocities I might have three students in class whose family has survived or not survived a civil war. This isn’t just theoretical stuff for them. They demand answers, and as a class we have to take the material seriously. That’s a joy for a teaching professor.” Her enthusiasm for teaching and her students is unmistakable. “Welling likes to build a network of like-minded students, and because of her I have been surrounded by people who care about gaining peace by using diplomacy instead of war,” says senior Carlos Parades, a senior politics and French double major. “Welling gives a high value to her relationships with people.” Ideas, Recipes Feed Students’ Minds, Bodies Three times each week, Hall hosts classes in her College Avenue home and supplies coffee and tea for the morning class and homemade soup for the noon class. “She’s a great cook; just ask her to make her apple pie with cheddar cheese,” raves Jennifer Walker ’07, who says she was “alternately grateful for Welling’s presence and support and amazed by her expertise” during her work with Hall at Model United Nations conferences, which Hall has directed on campus since 1995. “She wasn’t just a professor,” Walker says referring to a course Hall taught on nuclear weapons. “It felt like she was there with us on our journey exploring the course materials. I looked forward to the discussions in her classes. People may not realize, or they might overlook her subtle talent here, but I feel Welling was a master at leading discussions. She led when was necessary, knew when to begin with a question, or a statement, or a passage from the reading. She helped people evolve their thinking, and at the same time, she was open to evolving her own thinking. “In a way, the openness she demonstrated became a piece of education that I walked away with when I left Earlham,” Walker declares. Students listen intently at a point being made during Earlham's Model U.N. The program here is guided by Welling Hall.Students listen intently at a point being made during Earlham's Model U.N. The program here is guided by Welling Hall.Hall says that while her 14-year-old son Cory is sometimes jealous of the time and space that she devotes to her students, he also has been able to do some “pretty cool things” with them, like recently spending a week in New York visiting 12 different missions to the United Nations. “He’s much more politically aware than I was at his age,” she says. “He's already counting down to the 2012 election when he can vote for the first time!" In May she plans to take Cory with her to Tokyo Friends School where she will be Quaker-in-Residence for two weeks. The Quest for Beautiful Things Often in her teaching career Hall has found that the global issues can have deep personal resonance. She recalls teaching a class, The Responsibility to Protect: Global Atrocities, with tough subject matter at a vulnerable time in her life. “I knew we would be discussing these horrifying events and my father had just died,” Hall says. “I wondered how I was going to get though the semester.” A chance discussion with a colleague gave her an idea. While she was sitting and digging in her flower garden, associate professor of religion and African & African American Studies James Logan walked by and asked what she was working on. “I told him that I needed to make beautiful things happen to get through what I was dealing with,” she remembers. Logan went on to include Hall’s idea in his baccalaureate speech last year and Hall decided to sustain her emotionally wrenching class by asking students to spend the last five minutes of each session sharing a thing of beauty. “We had all kinds of things: precious teddy bears, tattoos, video clips,” she says. “All of the things the students shared were based on relationships and it seemed that they focused on beauty and love to sustain them. It was a good way to end a course about genocide and war crimes.” Hall’s students both past and present are excited about the prestigious awards and are confident that they are well deserved. “I’m very excited for Welling to be coming to D.C.,” says alumna Walker, who now works at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service in the capital. “Not only will she do good work, learn a lot and engage a whole new group of people for the better, but she will be able to walk away from the experience with lessons learned that she’ll pass on to the rest of the Earlham community. “Plus, we need more common sense in this town. It feels like common sense is often in short supply here.”

Research Projects

In progress: "Quaker Responses to Atrocity Crimes" In progress: "Making the Transition: From Undergrad Commitments to Life on Capitol Hill" "International Law and the Responsibility to Protect" International Studies Association Compendium Project. April 2010. Senior Consulting Editor, Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace: Global Conflict, Nonviolence & Transformation, with Nigel Young et al. Oxford University Press. February 2010.

Professional Memberships

International Studies Association\ International Peace Research Association American Society for International Law Academic Council for UN Studies American Political Science Association

More About Me

Capitol Hill needs more Earlham students working for peace. This is what Professor Welling Hall kept thinking during her year as a policy adviser to a progressive member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Hall spent 2009-2010 as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in Washington, D.C., in Congressman Keith Ellison’s (D-MN) office. She was surprised to discover that the average age for D.C. staffers was about 27. “I kept thinking that these were the people responsible for running the country and that Earlham students should be among them,” she says. “I kept thinking we need to have Earlham graduates in these positions.” Staffers often begin their careers with internships where they learn how Congress works from the inside, Hall says. The internships frequently lead to more advanced career work. “These staffers began creating relationships as interns that they are still using today,” she says. “Getting internship experience while a student is an irreplaceable stepping stone to getting a job on Capitol Hill later. Internship opportunities are only available to students; they go away after graduation.” Teaching Practical Skills During her time in Washington, Hall began envisioning a classroom experience to help Earlham students secure the internships. The resulting class “Legislative Toolkit” was offered this spring for the first time and prepares students for civic engagement. The course helps students translate how the work that they do in the liberal arts classroom is directly related to effective engagement in the legislative process. The course teaches skills and methods that are useful preparation for internships and jobs in government or as lobbyists. “I decided to create and teach a course where students develop a portfolio of the type of writing that needs to be done in these internships,” she says. “While I was in Washington, I had to unlearn approaches to writing. I thought I knew how to be succinct, but I learned that there are whole other levels of succinctness that I knew nothing about.” Syed “Onik” Kamal, a senior international studies major from Bangladesh, says the course has helped him to understand the work that goes on behind the scenes. “One of the best things about the class is that it is practice-oriented,” Kamal says. “We have gained useful practical experience.” Kamal says the list of tools in the legislative toolkit includes research skills, strategy sheets for different types of writing, lobbying and speaking skills, and an overall better sense of the work that takes place on Capitol Hill. “It all makes more sense now,” says Kamal, who has applied to different Washington think tanks, where he hopes to work for a year before entering graduate school to study international law and diplomacy. Field Trip Syed "Onik" KamalSyed "Onik" Kamal '11 hopes to find a position with a Washington think tank.Hall and the students in the course also attended the Friends Committee on National Legislation's 42nd Annual Grassroots Legislative Conference and National Student Lobby Day (LegCon) for five days in March in Washington D.C. “The DC trip was very informative,” says Levi Simpson, a sophomore from New Salisbury, Ind., who is working to secure a Washington internship for summer 2012. “We spent the first couple of days learning about lobbying and how to lobby from (Friends Committee on National Legislation), and then we took what we learned and used it as a basis for our own ideas with representatives from our home areas.” Simpson, who also plays football and runs track at Earlham, plans to pursue politics and/or law. “I think politics is exciting,” he says. “In 20 years I would like to see myself in office somewhere, maybe at the state level. I want to help people and being able to represent the people from where I am from adds to that excitement.” Simpson says the course opened his eyes to the amount of work carried out by staffers and interns. While responsibilities vary for interns, Hall says a significant portion of their efforts is spent on mail. “There are more than 4,000 pieces of mail coming in to each office each week,” she says. “Interns do a considerable amount of mail work, sorting and cataloguing. Interns also act as office receptionists and greeters. They attend hearings, meetings, briefings, seminars and testimonies. Interns carry legislation around for signatures, take bills to the Congressional cloakroom. They get to hear all the scuttlebutt around the office, and they attend lavish receptions where lobbyists try to impress them.” Hall’s yearlong Capitol Hill experience has inspired yet another new course entitled American Congress, which incorporates the Legislative Toolkits course and will be offered in alternate years. by Denise Purcell Public Affairs Assistant