Faculty Digest
Anthropology
Rita Kipp presented a paper during a workshop held at the London School of Economics in September. The workshop brought together social scientists who study South Africa and Indonesia to talk about what religious and ethnic differentiation in those countries owes to Dutch influences. David Suggs has a new book coming out this summer, in the Harcourt Brace "Case Studies in Anthropology" series, entitled A Bagful of Locusts and the Baboon Woman: Constructions of Gender, Change and Continuity in Botswana. He also has a forthcoming article, entitled "`These Young Chaps Think They are Just Men, Too': Redistributing Masculinity in Kgatleng Bars," which will appear in a special issue of the journal Social Science and Medicine. Suggs says he is busily and happily preparing for his sabbatical in the coming year, when he will begin researching alcohol use at Kenyon.
Art and Art History
Claudia Esslinger presented an exhibition entitled "Projected Memories" at the Denison University Art Gallery. The 16-millimeter film and sound installation ran from mid September to mid October. Esslinger's sabbatical show, called "Still/Moving Images" and featuring digital prints and video projects from former installations, was presented in Kenyon's Olin Art Gallery from April 26 to May 27. Esslinger recently received an Ohio Arts Council Professional Development grant enabling her to go to Seoul, South Korea, to work with a composer and sound installation artist. They will collaborate in the next year on a video/musical performance that will be part of "Crosssound" in Juneau, Alaska. Martin Garhart was once again invited to participate in the Annual Invitational Show at the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana. This year, he and John S. Giarrizzo '77, of Powell, Wyoming, whose work is also in the show, gave a joint museum-sponsored presentation, entitled "On Painting," as one of a series of four special programs that featured artists with work in the show. Garhart's work was also part of a group show at the Mansfield Art Center based on the theme "Places of the Mind." Barry Gunderson was the featured artist at the Art Access Gallery in Bexley, Ohio, for the month of March. The exhibit, entitled "Inside/Outside Contemporary Folk Art," consisted of twenty pieces, including "Peace Weapons," "Critters," and his recent "Thinking Reclining Nudes." Gunderson is currently working on a $30,000 public-art commission for the Coventry area of Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The piece will have four welded aluminum figures whose arms will be outstretched to form a double archway-the "Coventry Arch." The project will be installed the end of May. He is also working on an $80,000 public-art commission for the City of Kettering, near Dayton, Ohio. The sixteen-foot-tall project, which also features welded aluminum figures creating archways for passage, will be installed in Lincoln Park Civic Commons to celebrate the many performers at the nearby Fraze outdoor amphitheater. The completion date for "Song and Dance" is the end of June. Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Marcella Hackbart presented a "Visiting Artist Lecture" at the University of Cincinnati in February. Her solo exhibition "Flesh and Blood" will run from May 11 to June 8, 2001, at 516 Magnifico Artspace, Albuquerque, New Mexico. An installation by Karen Snouffer opened at the Art Center in South Miami, Florida, on April 7. It is a piece called "Extraordinary Father, Ordinary Objects," which she created for a show last fall at Denison University. On the gallery walls and floor, she drew in paint large objects related to fishing, which her father, who passed away last year, loved as a pastime. Snouffer also integrated among the drawn surfaces very small paintings of objects he used on a daily basis.
Biology
Siobhan Fennessy reports that, last August, two of her students gave papers (oral presentations) at an international conference in Quebec, Canada. She and Christina Bush '00 presented a paper on using plant communities as indicators of ecological integrity, and Fennessy and Laura Marx '00 coauthored a paper on the role of mycorrhizae in aquatic plants. The conference was sponsored by INTECOL, the international ecology association. Fennessy says both papers were well received. Last October and November, she was invited to present papers at two conferences. One was in Seattle, Washington, hosted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where she gave a paper on landscape ecology and aquatic eco-system restoration, and the other was in Boston, Massachusetts, hosted by the Massachusetts Bays Program, where she gave a paper on "Using Biology to Signal Ecological Health." In January, Fennessy received a $50,000 grant from the EPA to investigate the diversity and ecosystem processes of restored wetlands. Two students will be working with her this summer on the project, which is scheduled to run for two years. Christopher Gillen and Daniel Bowles '00 recently had a manuscript published in the Journal of Insect Physiology 47: 523-532, 2001, entitled "Characterization of Rb uptake into Sf9 cells using cation chromatography: evidence for a K-Cl cotransporter." Bowles was an honors student in molecular biology who did his honors research in Gillen's laboratory. Two papers coauthored by Wade Powell appeared in late 2000, one in Toxicological Sciences 57 and the other in Marine Environmental Research 50. The papers report findings about the function and evolution of proteins involved in how fish respond and adapt to pollution (dioxin) exposure. Powell's coauthors for both papers are collaborators from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Joan Slonczewski was featured in the January issue of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Bulletin. The story highlighted her "Biology in Science Fiction" course, an introductory-level offering for nonscience majors that she teaches once each academic year. As the HHMI Bulletin describes it, Kenyon students explore biological principles by studying creatures in speculative fiction, such as an alien "shepherd" from Slonczewski's novel The Wall Around Eden.
Chemistry
A paper by Scott Cummings on the photo-physics of platinum(II) terpyridine complexes has been accepted by Inorganica Chimica Acta, an international journal of inorganic chemistry. The paper, coauthored by Kenyon students Sarah Hobert '97 and Jessica Carney '99, was based on work completed last summer. In March, Cummings presented a seminar on his photochemistry research at Purdue University and attended a course on "Time-Resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy" at the University of Maryland Medical School. In mid May, he attended a National Science Foundation Chautauqua short course on "Increasing the Retention of Underrepresented Groups-and the Learning of All Groups-in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Courses" at the University of Dayton. In his spare time during the spring semester, Cummings kept busy with four research students. Anthony Watson presented his research on the organic synthesis of various natural products (anti-HIV, anti-cancer, and anti-fungal) to the College for the Natural Sciences Colloquium in September. In addition, he was invited to the University of Akron in October and to Wright State University in January to give seminars on his research. Teaming with his wife and colleague, Kate Doan, Watson presented a talk on "green chemistry" at the First Congregational Church in Mount Vernon, Ohio, in December. The presentation was advertised in the Mount Vernon News, and the entire Knox County community was invited. Visitors from as far away as Columbus attended the talk, which covered the more environmentally friendly areas of chemistry research and development.
Classics
Robert Bennett reports that the classics department is pleased with the prospect of hiring a tenure-track faculty member for the fall of 2002. The new person will teach with Bennett for four years and then replace him upon his retirement. A Mellon grant has allowed for this position and similar ones in history and political science. The new faculty member should be a historian of ancient times with strong teaching abilities in Greek and Latin. For the first four years of the appointment, the new person will teach half time in the Integrated Program in Humane Studies (as will those in the other two departments). The department expects to be interviewing at the meeting of the American Philological Association in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 3-6, 2002. Carolin Hahnemann will have a junior research leave for the fall of 2001. She hopes to spend part of the summer in Washington, D.C., and the fall at Oxford University. William McCulloh continues to teach Sanskrit in his retirement. He currently has five Sanskrit students at four different levels of proficiency. McCulloh has also found time to rejoin the Knox County Symphony as a violist after many years' absence and to provide assistance to the baritone section of the Harcourt Parish choir.
Dance and Drama
Balinda Craig-Quijada joined the Kenyon faculty this year as program head of dance. Last fall, she represented Kenyon and presented her work at a conference on Chinese dance in Beijing, China, sponsored by California State University at Long Beach. Her husband, Philip Brooks, is teaching a class in fiction writing in the English department. For the first time since its 1995 production of Sin, the Kenyon College Dramatic Club presented a play written and directed by Wendy MacLeod. The Water Children, a politically charged play that addresses the issue of abortion with a mixture of romance, humor, and sadness, made its Kenyon debut in February. Another MacLeod play, Schoolgirl Figure, has been optioned by HBO, and her short play Chemistry was recently performed in Chicago, Illinois, as part of a multimedia evening called Sketchbook One, directed by Eric Ziegenhagen '93 and starring John Roberts '93. The ten-minute Chemistry was judged by a Chicago critic to be one of the best presentations, "a funny piece from Macleod in which a laboratory scientist can only arouse his girlfriend when wearing goggles."
English
In January, work by Jennifer Clarvoe was featured on the Poetry Daily website (www.poems.com). Her new book of poems, Invisible Tender, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for "a first or very early work by a poet of genuine promise." The prize is $5,000 and a celebratory reading in April at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Clarvoe will also be doing a reading in June at the Grolier Poetry Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. William Klein reports that his web site devoted to the Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter book is now at the first stage of development. The project grows out of work with his son Thomas Klein '90 and Brian McFadden '90 concerning the riddles and the International Congress on Medieval Studies meetings at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. With others, particularly Jon Wilcox at the University of Iowa (who was Thomas Klein's outside honors examiner) and Craig Williamson, author of A Feast of Creatures: The Anglo-Saxon Riddle Songs, they have formed an informal "Kalamazoo Riddle Group." The web site includes a brief history of the group along with texts and translations of the riddles and a bibliography of work devoted to their study. The address is www2.kenyon.edu/AngloSaxonRiddles. They plan to make it a comprehensive web site on the riddles with "all the bells and whistles."
History
Reed Browning won the 2000 Casey Award for the best baseball book of the year for his biography Cy Young: A Baseball Life. The award was presented by the literary baseball magazine Spitball, which praised the book for its originality and depth of coverage, especially in view of the limited living resources for providing background material on Young. A new book by Bruce Kinzer, England's Disgrace? J.S. Mill and the Irish Question, was recently published by the University of Toronto Press. Peter Rutkoff has been named professor of American studies, a newly defined full-time position. He will also serve as director of the College's American Studies Program, which he helped to create in the late 1980s. Rutkoff will continue to teach at least one course each year in the Department of History and to supervise the work of some history honors students. William Scott and Rutkoff have received a $367,000 grant from the Cleveland Foundation that will enable them to do three more years of workshops for Cleveland teachers on the Great Migration (see the story on page 36). This summer the two will lead a select team of Cleveland-area social studies teachers to Charleston, South Carolina, for ten days of intensive fieldwork which will include a course on "Gullah as a Second Language." The grant is part of a long-term project to restructure how teachers are trained and supported in the Cleveland Public School system. Scott and Rutkoff are working with the Avery Center in Charleston, Cleveland State University, the Dubois Center at Harvard University, Oberlin College, and the Western Reserve Historical Society to accomplish this goal. Scott has also recently participated with ten other historians from across the country in an Internet Round Table sponsored by the Organization of American Historians. The discussions, on "Teaching the American History Survey," were published in the March 2001 issue of the Journal of American History. Other participants were from Brown University, Le Moyne College, Oberlin College, the University of Mississippi, the University of Michigan, and Washington University. Wendy Singer has received an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, for August. The interview is part of a project about the nature of creativity that Singer began last year. She is particularly interested in the Dalai Lama's perspective on creativity as an organic part of the human brain and a necessary consequence of human development. For the interview, she submitted questions in advance to the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In addition to the questions about creativity, Singer will also explore issues relating to human rights, globalization, and the environment. Roy Wortman contributed an article entitled "The Political Culture of Contemporary American Liberalism and Firearms Prohibition" to the fall 2000 issue of the Journal on Firearms and Public Policy. He also provided two articles to the Winter 2001 issue of the Journal of Indigenous Thought. In March, Wortman presented a paper on American Indian historical thought, at the Southwest Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In addition, Wortman has initiated and will coordinate a faculty development seminar for June 25-30, 2001, on "Teaching Native American Literatures Across the Disciplines." The seminar will be taught by Kathryn Shanley, who is chair of the Department of Native American studies at the University of Montana. Funded by Kenyon's Teaching Initiatives Fund, the seminar is open to faculty members who desire an intensive introductory study to American Indian literatures and who wish to integrate American Indian literature into their courses.
Mathematics
Keith Howard was mentioned in the January issue of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Bulletin for the support he receives from an HHMI grant to establish mathematics courses that emphasize computer modeling of biological problems.
Modern Languages and Literature
In mid April, Jane Cowles presented a paper, entitled "Nursing the Revolution: Images of Breast Feeding in Quatre-vingt-treize," at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in Lexington. From May 26 to June 3, she will attend the Conseil International d'Etudes Francophones in Portland, Maine, where she will present a paper on "L'oiseau captif: l'exil infini dan Les fous de Bassan d'Anne Hebert. Cowles's article "Speaking the (Absent) Mother: Corinne and la langue maternelle" appeared this winter in Psychoanalytic Studies, volume 2, number 4. Mort Guiney wrote a chapter for the recently published André Gide's Politics (New York: Palgrave) called "The Unrepentant Prodigal: Gide's Classical Politics and Republican Nationalism, 1897-1909." He gave presentations at the Twenty-first Century French Studies Conference at the University of California at Davis on March 30 and at a roundtable sponsored by the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University in Bloomington on April 10, entitled "The Naturalization of the Jew: The Case of Georges de Porto-Riche." Guiney says he and his wife, Amy Mock, are pleased that their two small daughters, Zoe Rose (three) and Kate Ellen (one), are happy and getting along quite well with each other "for the moment." Charles Piano gave a presentation and participated in a panel discussion at the first Interamerican Conference on the Teaching of Spanish American Literature in Guadalajara, Mexico, on March 21 and 22. He has also submitted a chapter for publication in the Teacher's Guide to AP Spanish and Spanish American Literature.
Music
Dane Heuchemer contributed two biographical articles, on the Renaissance composers Antonio Scandello and Giovanni Battista Pinello di Ghirardi, to the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Two other articles, one on Claudio Monteverdi's sacred music and another on the music of Andrea Gabrieli, were published in the Reader's Guide to Music: History, Theory, and Criticism. In November, Heuchemer gave a presentation, entitled "Teaching Music History at a Small College is . . . Different," at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He also presented a paper at the end of March for the Ohio Medieval Colloquium, which convened at Ohio State University. In February, Heuchemer completed his year as president of the Ohio Private College Instrumental Conductors Association (OPCICA). He was also one of the guest conductors of the annual inter-college Honor Concert Band that OPCICA sponsors in January at Severance Hall in Cleveland, and then again in February at the annual meeting of the Ohio Music Educators Association in Columbus. Benjamin Locke and his wife, Kay, took the Kenyon Chamber Singers on their seventeenth consecutive tour in March. Of the seven concert stops, four were sponsored and/or arranged by Chamber Singers alumni, two by current students and their families, and one by Bailey Sorton, an adjunct instructor of oboe who is also the new administrator for the Wintergreen Performing Arts in Virginia. The Chamber Singers had record numbers of Kenyon alumni in attendance at their New York City, Bethesda, Maryland, and Needham, Massachusetts, concerts. In March, Locke also attended the national convention of the American Choral Directors Association in San Antonio. He met many publishers and instrument-makers with whom he had dealt with previously via invoices, letters, and telephone calls, and he was privileged to hear many fine choirs from across the country. Locke has been invited by the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, to guest-conduct the Libertas Choir in June. Elizabeth Sayrs, a visiting assistant professor of music theory, organized and chaired a special session, entitled "Gender Studies and the Theorist: Identity, Pedagogy, Analytical Strategies," at the November 2000 annual conference of the Society for Music Theory in Toronto, Canada. At the same conference, she participated in a panel presentation and discussion at an interdisciplinary session entitled "A Look Back at the Twentieth Century: Gender and Identities." The session was jointly sponsored by the Committees on the Status of Women of six different musical societies. Sayrs's recent research on the intersection between cognitive linguistics and popular and film music was presented as "Narrative and Metaphor in `The Hanging Tree'" at a joint session of Music Theory Midwest and Society for Ethnomusicology-Midwest Conference in April at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati.
Philosophy
Edward "Ted" Hinchman, a visiting assistant professor, has won a Horace H. Rackham Distinguished Dissertation Award at the University of Michigan for his dissertation, "Trust and Reason." Only four dissertations were awarded the distinction from more than six hundred fifty defended at Michigan in 2000. He has presented or will present papers at all three of the American Philosophical Association conferences this academic year. Hinchman will be starting a tenure-track position at Claremont McKenna College in the fall.
Physics
Thomas Greenslade recently began his second term as chair of the Committee on the History and Philosophy of Physics of the American Association of Physics Teachers. At the January 2001 meeting of the association in San Diego, California, he presented a paper on the Rosse Telescope, showing slides that included Philander Chase, Rosse Hall, and the portrait of Lady Rosse in the foyer of Rosse Hall. Greenslade has also started a third term on the editorial board of The Physics Teacher, where he has published five articles and notes within the year. During spring vacation, he visited Vanderbilt University to gather information and pictures for an article about the early apparatus on display in the physics department, to follow up on articles about collections at Amherst College, Kenyon, and Transylvania University. In his spare time, Greenslade continues work on his web site on early physics equipment, which, when finished, will have information and images for nearly fifteen hundred pieces of apparatus.
Political Science
A paper presented by Harry Clor to a meeting of the American Political Science Association provided a point of reference for a syndicated column by the Washington Post's George Will. The column ran last fall in more than twenty-five newspapers nationwide, including the Los Angeles Times and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In January, Joseph Klesner accompanied a Kenyon alumni/parent tour to the Peruvian Amazon, where the group took a one-week trip by riverboat up the Amazon River from Iquitos, Peru, visiting villages and observing the flora and fauna of the rainforest. Klesner has recently published two articles on Mexican politics: "The End of Mexico's One-Party Regime," in PS: Political Science and Politics, 34, 1 (March 2001) and "Adiós to the PRI? Changing Voter Turnout in Mexico's Political Transition," in Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 17, 1 (Winter 2001). His other activities related to the political situation in Mexico have included a presentation of "Adiós to the PRI?" at the Mexican Elections Conference at the Whitehead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in December and a paper on "Race, Religion, and Region: Explaining Mexican Electoral Behavior" given at the Midwest Political Science Association's annual meeting in Chicago in mid April. A book written by Tim Spiekerman, entitled Shakespeare's Political Realism: The English History Plays, was released on February 1 by the State University of New York Press. Spiekerman's work explores the continuing relevance of important political themes in five of Shakespeare's plays.
Psychology
In February, Andrew Niemiec presented a paper, entitled "The effects of increasing masker temporal regularity on co-modulation masking thresholds in chinchillas," at the Twenty-fourth Annual Midwinter Research Meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO) in St. Petersburg, Florida. The ARO meeting is an international gathering of scientists devoted to studying speech and hearing. Also in February, Jon Williams was one of nine psychologists selected to be fellows of the American Psychological Society, a national organization for all areas of psychology.
Religious Studies
Joseph Adler and senior international studies major Philip Davolos attended the 2001 AsiaNetwork conference in Cleveland, Ohio, where they presented the results of their research on ancestor worship in Taiwan. Their three-week stay in Taiwan last summer was funded by a Freeman Foundation grant through the AsiaNetwork consortium. Miriam Dean-Otting has been awarded an AsiaNetwork grant from the Freeman Foundation for this coming summer. The Student-Faculty Research Fellowship will enable her to support and oversee the research of two students in Calcutta, India, for at least three weeks. Erin Saunders '02 will investigate social services for women in Calcutta, and Soubhik "Ronnie" Saha '02 will study the situation of Hindu refugees who left Bangladesh in the 1970s. Dean-Otting will continue her work on the Jews of Calcutta and advise Saunders and Saha. Royal Rhodes, on sabbatical at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John's Abbey/University in Collegeville, Minnesota, recently gave a lecture entitled "The Ultimate Pope: Popular Images of the Papacy in Modern Fiction." Rhodes is in residence at the abbey until the end of May.
Sociology
George "Mac" McCarthy deferred his sabbatical for a couple of years and returned to teaching this year. He has been nominated for a research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. McCarthy's latest book, Objectivity and the Silence of Reason: Weber, Habermas, and the Methodological Disputes in German Sociology, was released by Transaction Publishers in December 2000, and he has finished the first complete draft of his next work, Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece. In January, John Macionis spoke at South Florida's Broward County College and in March at San Antonio College. Both talks were on the power of the sociological perspective. Also in March, he gave the keynote address to the anthropology and sociology section of the Texas Community College Teachers' Association in Dallas on "The Information Revolution and the Future of Teaching." June will see the publication of Society: The Basics, sixth edition; Macionis's new text, Social Problems, will be published in October. Howard Sacks served as panel moderator and presenter for the "Local Food Markets" segment of a conference on "Reconnecting Consumers and Farmers" held on March 24 in Columbus, Ohio. He was accompanied by several Kenyon students participating in a Knox County project to establish local food systems. An article by Sacks entitled "Cork and Community: Blackface Minstrelsy in the Rural Midwest" recently appeared in the journal Theatre Survey, volume 41, number 2.
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