Radio and rugby are among the interests of the college's newest employees.
Cathy Evan (Ohio University BA 1980), administrative technician in audiovisual, came to Oberlin 6 March from North Coast Cable in Cleveland, where she worked on several television productions. Before that she had a radio career for 11 years in West Virginia, Texas, Illinois, and Ohio, working mostly as a disc jockey but also as music director and program director. She was a disc jockey for Cleveland's WNCX FM 98.5--a rock-format station--and music director for Elyria's WBEA (now WNWV FM 107.3). Evan says she came to Oberlin for the "academic setting." She can, she says, "combine a lot of my experience in this setting." Her hobby is work-related: she collects antique radios.
The Allen Memorial Art Museum's new curator of modern and contemporary art, Amy Kurlander (Vassar College BA 1983), will start work 1 August. She expects to receive the PhD from Harvard University this year. She is now a graduate student assistant at Harvard art museum's Agnes Mongan center for the study of prints, drawings and photographs, where she has also served as a curatorial assistant in the department of drawings and the department of prints. Earlier at the National Gallery in Washington she was a part-time curatorial assistant in the department of contemporary art.
The National Gallery's center for advanced study in the visual arts awarded her a Mary Davis Fellowship from 1989 to 1991, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York awarded her a Theodore Rousseau Fellowship from 1992 to 1994. With these she studied landscape collections in France. She has published articles on the work of Adolph von Menzel and Max Klinger and is writing her PhD dissertation on Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot's later landscape practice.
Liesl Strickler (Carleton College BA 1993) has been assistant director of the annual fund since 3 April. While holding a similar title at Carleton College, she set several fund-raising records, including the largest fifth-reunion gift. As an undergraduate at Carleton majoring in biology, she chaired the senior-class gift committee that raised the highest dollar total in Carleton's history.
She also played rugby, and after graduating she was recruited by the Twin Cities Amazons. Last year that team placed third in the US Women's National Rugby Championships. Strickler, who grew up in Montana, also enjoys down-hill skiing. Why did she leave Carleton for Oberlin? "I came here because of the quality of the staff," she says. The development office staff is "really an exceptional group of people to work with." She adds that as a high-school student she was accepted for admission at both Carleton and Oberlin and "almost came to Oberlin."