Faculty Digest
Anthropology
Rita Kipp spent part of June and July in the Netherlands, where she participated in a symposium on the history of Christianity in Indonesia. She spent two additional weeks there conducting research in libraries and archives. Kenneth Smail attended the annual meetings of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society at Amherst College from June 8 to June ll. In July, he presented an invited paper on the giving of hostages, in absentia, to a symposium on the prevention and control of aggression. The symposium was part of the Fourteenth World Meetings of the International Society for Research on Aggression, held at the University of Valencia in Valencia, Spain. Smail also presented a paper entitled "Is There a Surfeit of People?" at the annual meeting of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences in Washington, D.C., over the Labor Day weekend. He has recently published several chapters dealing with global population, one in Population: Opposing Viewpoints (Greenhaven Press) and one in Seeing Ourselves, a textbook by Kenyon sociology professor John Macionis.
Art and Art History
Sarah Blick spent the summer finishing several articles on medieval pilgrim souvenirs and their relationship to now-lost monumental art in Canterbury Cathedral. Blick took a one-week research trip to England at the end of May to examine surviving medieval shrine bases as part of an article she is working on that attempts to reconstruct the fabled shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Eugene Dwyer spent a week in late May in Pompeii, Italy, studying the House of the Faun. Dwyer is writing a study of the house's design. A whimsical sculpture by Barry Gunderson named Poinky Pig participated in the Cincinnati, Ohio, Big Pig Gig Public Art Project this summer. Made of fiberglass, the four-foot-high pig is painted in shades of pink with the letters o-i-n-k scattered freeform across his body. Gunderson says, "It's like silent noise. When I thought of a pig, I thought of pink. So it's rather conventional, but it's also fun and silly. This is a great release for me." Gregory Spaid won an Ohio Arts Council (OAC) Individual Artist Fellowship for the year 2000, his sixth grant from the OAC. In September, a book of his photography of rural America over the last ten years, entitled Grace, was published by Safe Harbor Books.
Biology
Christopher Gillen has received a $30,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study "Cation-chloride cotransporters in the gills of the fiddler crab." The start date of the grant was April 1.
Chemistry
Scott Cummings spent the summer doing research with a collaborator at the Center for Photochemical Science at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. He also completed work with collaborator Richard Eisenberg of the University of Rochester on a chapter for Progress in Inorganic Chemistry. A paper by Cummings describing work done at the University of Rochester on platinum diimine complexes is in press at Coordination Chemistry Reviews. Kate Doan and Anthony Watson announce the birth of a son, Eric Louis Doan Watson, on May 8, 2000. Eric's big sister, Abigail Jane Doan Watson (three), has a May 9 birthday. Watson reports that final exam week is definitely not a good time to have a baby. Rosemary Marusak, who is on sabbatical this year, was elected last year to a three-year term on the Chemistry Council of the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR). Over the summer, she attended the national meeting of the CUR, held at the College of Wooster. Marusak received a POWRE (Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education) grant from the National Science Foundation for her sabbatical, which she is spending as a visiting professor of chemistry in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, working on the effects of chemotherapeutic agents on tissue cell lines.
Classics
Cliff Weber spent late May and early June sightseeing and attending concerts in Europe, where he and his traveling companions were joined by Carolin Hahnemann's mother for four concerts of the Schubertiade in Austria. After meeting a July 1 deadline for submitting to referees his manuscript entitled The Dionysus in Aeneas, Weber left Gambier for Boston, Massachusetts, where he spent the month of July with close friends.
Dance and Drama
Gregory Halloran, visiting assistant professor of dance, has been invited to become a founding member of the Alliance of Dance Notation Educators, established by the Board of Directors of the Dance Notation Bureau. The alliance, designed to support teaching excellence and curricular development, will conduct regular meetings at conferences such as the Congress on Research in Dance and the International Council of Kinetography Laban. In July, Harlene Marley played Miss Prism in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Paradise Valley Community College in Arizona. In the Sunday, July 30, New York Times, Emmy Award-winning actress Allison Janney '82 credited Thomas Turgeon with much of her success as an actress. Janney says, "The most important lesson I learned about acting was from my college professor, Tom Turgeon, who told me, `You need to listen more.' It's so much more fun to do it that way."
English
Former Visiting Instructor of English Erin Belieu was awarded a $10,000 Ohio Arts Council Award in Poetry last May while still at Kenyon. Belieu is now a member of the faculty at Ohio University in Athens. Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky has received a Mellon Collaborative Technology grant to fund research into new ways to teach Shakespeare and film. Lobanov-Rostovsky is working on this project during his 2000-01 sabbatical.
History
Cy Young: A Baseball Life, written by Reed Browning, was published in June by the University of Massachusetts Press. Billed as the first major biography of the legendary pitcher, the book is a first for Browning as well. Although he has been an avid fan of baseball since his childhood, and although he has written numerous articles on the subject, he has based all three of his previous book-length publications on eighteenth-century European history. Browning was interviewed about Cy Young for the Orlando, Florida, radio station Orlando Magic, and the interview aired on September 17. In May, Peter Rutkoff and Will Scott received the Ohio Academy of History Publication Award for New York Modern (Johns Hopkins) for 2000. Also in May, the two received notification from the American Philosophical Society that they had been awarded a grant for research on "North by South," their long-term project focused on the Great Migration of African Americans from rural South to the urban North. It is the first time that the Society has funded a collaborative project in the humanities or social sciences. The society noted that they "were especially impressed that the Kenyon Faculty Development fund has also substantially supported the project, an indication of Kenyon's serious commitment to scholarship."
Modern Languages and Literature
Lyn Richards spent the summer revising work on medieval and Renaissance literature (Boccaccio and Della Casa) and Italian cinema (Fellini and Tornatore). Richards also spent a number of afternoons with classics professors William McCulloh and Carolin Hahnemann, both specialists in ancient Greek, taking turns reading aloud, in Italian, from a fantasy epic by the sixteenth-century writer Ariosto.
Music
Theodore Buehrer presented a paper on "Constructivism and Aural Theory" at a regional meeting of the College Music Society in March in Muncie, Indiana. In July, his article entitled "Prolongational Structure in the Pitch-Centric Music of Bartok" was printed in Indiana Theory Review, vol. 18, no. 2.
Philosophy
Juan De Pascuale was appointed a research fellow at the Hong Kierkegaard Library of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, for the summer of 2000. The library is the world's most important center for the study of Kierkegaard. De Pasquale spent the month of June at the library finishing some work in progress and researching new projects. Andrew Pessin had a busy summer. After traveling to a family wedding in Florida, he spent two weeks in Washington, D.C., at a faculty seminar on holocaust studies at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. He followed this by traveling to Blacksburg, Virginia, to participate in a four-week National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on Descartes and his contemporaries, at which he presented a paper. Pessin spent the remaining weeks of the summer preparing for several new courses he is teaching this year.
Physics
An article in the Conway, Arkansas, Log Cabin Democrat reports that Benjamin Schumacher traveled to Conway in July to talk with students at Arkansas's Governor's School about "the physics of impossible things." In a wide-ranging discussion that included fate, paradoxes, time travel, and theoretical particles called tachyons that cannot travel slower than light, Schumacher encouraged the students to think about impossible things because, among other reasons, some things that were considered impossible in the nineteenth century are now considered possible in quantum physics. Paula Turner spent the summer at the University of Washington in Seattle, participating in a National Science Foundation project to improve the sensitivity and resolution of an astronomical spectrograph operated by the university on a telescope in southern New Mexico. Turner also directed the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science/Mathematics workshop for incoming students at Kenyon for the third consecutive year.
Political Science
Pamela Camerra-Rowe interviewed government officials in Germany in July for a new research project on the effect of globalization on the German Social Democratic Party. This September, Kirk Emmert presented a paper on Winston Churchill's World Crisis at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C., and also participated in a panel on Churchill's Aftermath at the Seventeenth International Churchill Conference in Anchorage, Alaska. Joseph Klesner was very involved in observing the Mexican presidential and congressional elections as an official "International Visitor" and in writing about them before and after their occurrence. He completed a pre-election report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., and a post-election report on the overthrow of the ruling party. Also for CSIS, Klesner served as a panelist for the workshop "Countdown to the 2000 Mexican Presidential and Congressional Elections" in June. He has completed a chapter called "Divided Government in Mexico's Presidentialist Regime: The 1997-2000 Experience" for Divided Government in Comparative Perspective, forthcoming from Oxford University press in 2001, and he has recently been quoted as an authority on Mexican politics in numerous newspapers and other periodicals. Devin Stauffer delivered a paper on Plato's Gorgias at the American Political Science Association meetings in September in Washington, D.C. A book by Stauffer entitled Plato's Introduction to the Question of Justice is scheduled for November 2000 publication by SUNY Press. Stephen Van Holde is editing a special issue of Comparative Social Research on the comparative politics and sociology of conscription.
Religious Studies
Last summer, Joseph Adler spent a week in Beijing and three weeks in Taiwan with international studies major Philip Davolos '01. The two received a grant from the ASIANetwork Freeman Student-Faculty Fellows Program to do collaborative research on ancestor worship in Chinese families in Taiwan. While in Beijing, Adler visited Storer Associate Professor of Asian History Ruth Dunnell and her daughter, Lotte, who were in Beijing for the 1999-2000 academic year. In late March, President Robert A. Oden Jr. spoke at the Bronxville School in Bronxville, New York, as part of their College Presidents Lecture Series. His topic was "Making Sense of Myths from Antiquity." Donald Rogan received the honorary degree of doctor of divinity from the General Theological Seminary in New York City during the institution's May commencement ceremonies. The citation for Rogan described him as a "self-confessed generalist, whose range of interests, sympathy for his subject matter, and sympathy with his students the General Theolological Seminary is pleased to honor."
Sociology
In recognition of his work as an author, scholar, and teacher, John Macionis has been appointed the Prentice Hall Distinguished Scholar in Sociology. The title was created in his honor by the publishing company, which will present Kenyon with an annual grant to enable Macionis to continue his work as a teacher and scholar. In July, Prentice Hall published revisions of three of Macionis's textbooks: Sociology, eighth edition; Cities and Urban Life, second edition; and Seeing Ourselves, fifth edition. After a busy sabbatical year spent working on the revisions, Macionis found time this summer to learn Scottish bagpiping and to sail in the Star class races at Lake George, New York, where the Macionis family spends summers. He and his wife, Amy, also joined forces with several college students to provide an evening of vocal and guitar music for the local yacht club.
Women's and Gender Studies
In March, the Department of English at Eastern Michigan University presented a program, entitled "Arthur's Hitler/Hitler's Arthur: Medieval Knighthood and Fascist Desire," that was based on a paper by Laurie Finke and Martin Schictman, a professor of English at the university. The paper is the last chapter, entitled "Paranoid History," of a book co-written by Finke and Schictman, King Arthur and the Chronicled Traditions from the Normans to the Nazis.
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