Faculty News
Anthropology
Kenneth Smail has had two papers accepted for publication. "Remembering Malthus: A Preliminary Argument for Significant Reduction in Global Human Numbers" and "Confronting a Surfeit of People: Reducing Global Human Numbers to Sustainable Levels in Environment, Development, and Sustainability" will appear in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
American Studies
Peter Rutkoff's story collection, Cooperstown Chronicles, was recently published by Birchbrook Press. The "tales of youthful love and other capers at summer camp on Lake Otsego" are illustrated with wood engravings by Frank C. Eckmair.
Art and Art History
Read Baldwin was reelected to a three-year term on the Gambier Village Council in the November elections. Melissa Dabakis has been named a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, where she was in residence in June. Claudia Esslinger's Texture Mapping, a video/music piece created with Korean composer Yunkyung Lee, will appear in Juneau, Sitka, and Ketchican, Alaska, as part of the South East Alaskan Singing Pictures concert series in August. The piece will also travel to the Ohio cities of Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Toledo, as well as Chicago, Illinois. This summer, Esslinger will be developing a new digital classroom for the arts in Bexley Hall with Marcella Hackbardt, Assistant Professor of Drama Jon Tazewell, and Library and Technology Consultant Christopher Barth. Joseph Slate, professor emeritus, will have two picture books published this year. Miss Bindergarten Plans a Circus with Kindergarten, the fifth book in his Miss Bindergarten series, will be published by Dutton in July, and The Great Big Wagon that Rang: How the Liberty Bell was Saved, a narrative poem, will be published by Marshall Cavendish in September. All of the Miss Bindergarten books have spent time on the Publisher's Weekly bestseller list, and Alessandra Lacavaro '99, the educational marketing director for Penguin Putnam, has written a study guide for teachers based on the series. Karen Snouffer will take a junior leave in the fall to continue studio work that addresses loss, memory, object, and place. She has been developing work evolving from the death of her father two years ago. Eight years ago, Snouffer's father made an audio tape in which he talked about his experiences as a soldier in World War II. In September, she will travel to France and Germany to visit sites her father discussed. Upon her return, she will develop an installation to be shown at Cincinnati's Weston Art Gallery in the Arnoff Center for the Arts in 2003. The work will incorporate text from letters Snouffer's father sent to her mother while stationed in Europe. Snouffer received funding for this project from the Ohio Arts Council and Kenyon College. For the third year running, Martin Garhart was invited to display his work in the Yellowstone Art Museum's Annual Invitational Exhibition, which opened in January, 2002. In February, Garhart spoke at the Library of Congress Reference Forum and the Library of Congress Professional Association on such topics as "What of Art in this Carnival Culture?" and "Art, Drawing, and the Fallacy of Talent." Garhart was awarded a six-week residency at Wyoming's Ucross Foundation in April.
Biology
Chris Gillen will be an instructor in the Great Lakes Colleges Association Teaching Workshop for the summer. Later in the year, Tania Gonzalez '87, a doctoral student at the University of California, San Francisco, will start a one-year stint in the department as a Kenyon Dissertation Fellow. This spring, Harry Itagaki presented work at the fourth International Symposium on Insect Molecular Science in Tucson, Arizona. The department welcomes Bob Mauck, a new assistant professor with research expertise in animal behavior and ecological modeling. Michael Radmacher, a mathematician with an interest in biological systems, will be a new assistant professor of mathematics and biology. Joan Slonczewski published two papers on protein regulation in Escherichia coli bacteria in the Journal of Bacteriology with student co-authors Michael Barnhart '04, Lisa M. Maurer '04, Nikki Oyelakin '04, Dawn Stancik '02, Lauren Stancik '02, and Yuliya Yoncheva '04. Slonczewski recently taught a new course on microbial ecology, with topics ranging from life on Mars to electricity-generating bacteria. In April, she presented "Cloning Humans: What's Next?" as an invited all-campus lecture at the St. Louis University Arts and Sciences Day Colloquium. She chaired a seminar on "Proteomic and DNA Array Approaches to Physiology" at the American Society for Microbiology general meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, in May and is currently at work on a basic microbiology textbook to be published by Norton.
Chemistry
A paper by Scott Cummings on the photochemistry of platinum(II) anti-cancer drugs has been accepted by The Journal of Photochemistry Photobiology A: Chemistry, an international journal of photochemistry. The paper, co-written by Kenyon students Jessica Carney '99 and Sarah Hobert '97, was based on work completed last summer.
Classics
Robert Bennett plans to spend most of the summer in Gambier watching an addition being built onto his house and writing a paper on the cinaedus in Roman satire and his relation to slavery. He will be part of the staff of the Great Lakes College Association Course Development and Teaching program at DePauw University in June. He and Jerry Townsend will attend Hamilton College's thirtieth reunion of the first graduating class at Kirkland, which once served as Hamilton's coordinate women's college. In August, he will visit his father in Northern Virginia and take part in a reunion with his high-school music teacher. Adam Serfass, a new faculty member in classics and the Integrated Program in Humane Studies, will defend his doctoral dissertation at Stanford University in May.
Dance and Drama
In March, Balinda Craig-Quijada took fourteen Kenyon students to the American College Dance Festival at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The students presented two dances for adjudication. Craig-Quijada was invited to teach a master class and sat on a panel discussing composition and choreography. She will attend a Marcia Segal critical dance-writing workshop this summer, as well as teaching and studying at the Green Mountain Dance Teachers' Retreat in Vermont. She was recently commissioned to choreograph Silent Conversations, a piece performed by graduate students at Ohio State University. Craig-Quijada has been elected to serve a three-year term on the Northeast Board of the American College Dance Festival Association. A play by Wendy MacLeod was chosen for the Contemporary American Theater Company's fifth shorts festival in May. Nine people wrote the eight winning plays, which were chosen from 104 submissions. Each ten- to fifteen-minute script is set at a departure/arrival gate at Port Columbus. MacLeod's play is entitled Atlantic Crossing. In February and March, three of MacLeod's plays--The House of Yes, The Shallow End, and The Water Children--were performed at the University of Miami's Ring Theater as part of the American Playwright Series, which highlights the work of a notable American dramatist. This summer, Maggie Patton, professor emeritus, will direct The Pirates of Penzance for Opera Columbus. The show will be performed June 21 - 23 in the Southern Theater. She will then choreograph an Opera Columbus production of The Man of La Mancha, to be performed in the Southern Theater July 26 - 28. Patton remains involved with Opera Columbus's education program and will prepare the opera Little Red's Most Unusual Day for their school tour beginning in the fall. She will teach in the program's June Opera Camp for children ages nine through sixteen. Some of the participants will audition for Brundibar, a children's opera written by Hans Krasa in 1943 and originally performed by child inmates at Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp. Brundibar will be performed April 12 and 13, 2003, in the Leo Yazenoff Theater in Columbus, Ohio.
Economics
David Harrington and Kathy Krynski's article on "The Effect of State Funeral Regulations on Cremation Rates: Testing for Demand Inducement in Funeral Markets," was published by the Journal of Law and Economics in April. After stepping down as associate provost this summer, Kathy will spend next year on sabbatical in Claremont, California, where David will be a visiting associate professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College.
English
Jennifer Clarvoe has been awarded the2002-03 Rome Prize in Literature and will be leaving at the end of the summer to spend the year writing at the American Academy in Rome. In July, she will teach in the master of fine arts program at New England College in New Hampshire. Lewis Hyde's annotated volume, The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, was published by Northpoint Press in May. The Washington Post has described the book as "much enhanced by Hyde's intelligent and entertaining introduction." Theodore Mason is serving as the first vice president of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. He will assume the presidency in 2003. Mason has also joined the staff of Duke University Press's reference series American Literary Scholarship and will be contributing articles on African-American literary theory to the second edition of the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
History
Clifton Crais has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend to conduct research in South Africa on the origins of systemic insecurity. Crais recently organized the Fourth North East Workshop on Southern Africa, an international conference, and is completing work on a new book entitled A Century of Sadness: Politics and Poverty in Rural South Africa. Crais wrote a long review article entitled "Past the Pax," which explores recent directions in the study of the British Empire, to be published next fall in the Journal of Social History. In recognition of distinguished scholarship, Crais has been asked to serve a five-year term on the editorial board of the International Journal of African Historical Studies. In addition to evaluating articles and reviewing books, Crais will encourage scholars to submit their work, suggest the names of promising historians to act as authors or book reviewers, and offer overall advice to the journal.
Modern Languages
Jianhua Bai presented a paper on pragmatics and its implications in foreign-language teaching at the Harvard Symposium on Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language in April. The paper will be reviewed for publication. He presented "How to create video clips for low intermediate students of Chinese," at the Midwest Conference on Chinese Pedagogy in October. In April, at the annual conference of National Council for Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL), Bai presented "Empower Teaching by Integrating Multimedia Exercises into the LCTL." He was awarded six different grants in 2002 for designing teaching tools and teaching teachers. Among a number of professional honors, Bai was selected to be the director of the Middlebury Chinese Summer School for 2002 - 2005. Linda Metzler's essay, "Radical Musicality and Otherness in the Poetry of Jose Angel Valente," completed this year, has been accepted for publication in a book to be titled Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World. She plans to travel to Spain in the summer to celebrate San Fermin, see friends, and continue her research on a novel by Azorin.
Music
Ted Buehrer and his wife, Leslie, became the parents of Emma Christine Buehrer on May 10. Camilla Cai will be in Germany during May and June researching Norwegian and Norwegian-American students who attended the Music Conservatory of Leipzig between 1843 and 1920. In June, she will give a paper on the Norwegian-American chorus director who commissioned a piece by Edvard Grieg, Norway's most famous composer, at the International Grieg Symposium in Muenster, Germany. The rest of the summer she will work on an edition of Johannes Brahms's piano music, which she hopes to finish in the fall.
Physics
Thomas Greenslade Jr. retired at the end of the 2001-02 academic year and was awarded an honorary degree at Commencement for his many years of service to the College. He will continue to teach courses in electronics. John Idoine returns next fall from his sabbatical year spent at Harvard/MIT Medical School and at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. The rest of the department anxiously awaits hearing about his medical-imaging research and about his golf experiences. Benjamin Schumacher won the 2002 Quantum Communications Award honoring pioneers in the field of quantum information. The award, considered the premier scientific honor in the field of quantum communications, carries a plaque and a cash prize. He was also the winner of Kenyon's Robert J. Tomsich Science Award. He and his wife, Carol Schumacher (mathematics), were both promoted to full professor this year and will spend their sabbatical year in Pasadena, California, where Ben was named a Moore Fellow and will be working at the California Institute of Technology's new center for quantum information. Keith Rielage, holder of a doctorate in cosmic ray astrophysics from Washington University, will take Schumacher's place for the year. Tim Sullivan expects to learn a great deal about Kenyon next year as a member of the search committee to find a replacement for outgoing President Robert A. Oden Jr.
Political Science
In April, Pam Jensen chaired the evaluation committee for the Department of Political Science at Montclair State University. She was invited to present an address on the state of liberal education today at the national meeting of the American Academy of Liberal Education in Washington, D.C. She went to Amherst College to give a lecture on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at a weekend event sponsored by the Committee for the American Founding, an alumni-student association.
Psychology
Michael Levine addressed students and faculty at the Loomis Chaffee School in January. His talk, "Building Body-Friendly Schools: An Ecological Approach to Preventing Negative Body Image and Disordered Eating," was attended by Kenyon alumni Rachel Engelke '97, who teaches history at the school, Loomis Chaffee Philosophy and Religion Department Chair David Newell '75, and Loomis Chaffee Director of Admissions Tom Southworth '71.
Religious Studies
Joseph Adler was promoted to full professor. His book, Chinese Religious Traditions, was published this year by Prentice Hall. In May, he spent two weeks in China for a conference and tour on Chinese Judaism. Mehmet Ali Schubel was born to Nurten Kilic-Schubel and Vernon Schubel on April 29. Mary Suydam attended the International Medieval Studies Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in May. Royal Rhodes was named the first incumbent of the Donald L. Rogan Professorship in Religious Studies. He will assume the chair in July.
Sociology
John Macionis completed two revisions of previously published books. The ninth edition of Sociology will be published by Prentice Hall in 2003, and the second edition of Sociology: A Global Introduction, written with Ken Plummer, will be published by Pearson Education Limited this year. Macionis recently spoke at Ohio University in Athens, the Mount Vernon Nazarene College, and at Ohio State University in Columbus. In May, Howard Sacks traveled to Arizona to teach fieldworkers who are documenting sustainable agriculture practices among the Hopi and Navajo. In June, Sacks hosted a three-day oral history institute. Co-sponsored by the Rural Life Center and the Ohio Historical Society, the institute trained individuals from across the country to conduct oral history projects in their communities. Sacks also received a community service award from Knox County's Lucy Knox Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The award is given to a member of the community for outstanding achievements in citizenship, educational, historical, humanitarian, and patriotic endeavors, or environmental conservation. Sacks was recognized for his work with the Rural Life Center, the Family Farm Project, and other efforts which give local residents the knowledge and skills to preserve and promote the history of Knox County.
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