CC bids farewell to Peter Leibert, Sara Lee Silberman and Melvin Woody

Professor of Art Peter Leibert

The teaching careers of an artist, a historian and a philosopher are drawing to a close at Connecticut College.

Professor of Art Peter Leibert, Associate Professor of History Sara Lee Silberman and Professor of Philosophy Melvin Woody will retire after teaching at the College for more than three decades. They will be recognized for their dedicated teaching and service to CC at a dinner on Commencement weekend.

Peter Leibert

Leibert, an accomplished ceramics craftsman, joined the CC faculty in 1968 as an instructor of both ceramics and photography. He has shared his artistic work in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Japan and was promoted to the rank of professor in 1985. Throughout his career, Leibert has served several terms as chair of the art department and on various college committees.

In 2003, Leibert was selected to be a master teaching artist for the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and was also chosen by his faculty colleagues to receive the Connecticut College John King Faculty Teaching Award for teaching excellence.

Leibert brought more than his talents in the visual arts to the CC classroom. A master musician, he plays the button accordion, concertina and pipe and tabor for the Westerly Morris Men, a group he founded that specializes in traditional English Morris Dancing.

Leibert told The Day in a recent interview that he hopes to continue teaching part-time in retirement.

“I may teach privately. I have the facilities,” Leibert says. “Ideally, I’ll bring together clay, music, dance and song somehow. That’s how you get a well-rounded individual.”

Sara Lee Silberman

Silberman, who came to the College in 1966, specializes in the history of the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

She is motivated by the personal pride she takes in her work and by her genuine interest in the material she teaches. But Silberman is quick to add that she is also inspired by her students.

Their openness, their interest in the material and their often interesting questions “made the classroom experience a happy and stimulating one for me for nearly 40 years,” she said.

Silberman is completing a biography of Dr. Edith Banfield Jackson (1895-1977), a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine from 1936 to 1959. She has published several articles on Jackson, who won prestigious awards for pioneering work in parent-infant bonding, in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, The Psychoanalytic Review, American National Biography and Notable American Women.

Professor of Philosophy Melvin Woody.

Melvin Woody

Melvin Woody started teaching at the College 42 years ago, in 1963. He is the current longest-serving member of the faculty.

Woody lectured on many subjects throughout his tenure — existentialism, social and cultural theory, and the philosophy of mind, psychiatry, law and history. Freedom’s Embrace, his 1998 book, is the culmination of three decades of discussions with CC students, faculty, and colleagues from around the United States. It is from these discussions that CC’s interdisciplinary Freshman Focus program and studies in cognitive science were created.

Woody has contributed to the Berkeley Summer Research Seminars and also to “Mind, Self and Psychopathology” at Cornell University for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has served as a liaison between the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry and other philosophical associations. He also served as program chairman at the annual meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America in 2000.