Faculty Digest
Anthropology
Ken Smail attended the fifty-third annual Star Island Conference, "Emergence: Nature's Mode of Creativity," sponsored by the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, on Star Island, New Hampshire, July 29-August 5, 2006. Smail presented a seminar/workshop titled "Confronting a Surfeit of People: Reducing Global Human Numbers to Sustainable Levels."
Art and art history
Sarah Blick's edited volume Beyond Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges: Essays in Honour of Brian Spencer will be published in early 2007. She continues to edit Peregrinations, an online journal devoted to medieval art and architecture. She also completed a number of entries on pilgrimage art that will appear on the CD-ROM Pilgrimage, to be published by the Centre for Christianity and Culture in York, England. In January 2007, she presented a paper on "A Re-Discovered Early Shrine of St. Thomas Becket, Canterbury Cathedral" at a conference connected with the Faith and Fortune Exhibition in Bruges, Belgium. In May 2007, Blick will be part of a roundtable discussion on teaching pilgrimage at the International Congress on Medieval Studies.
Melissa Dabakis, who is on sabbatical, is finishing her book, The American Corinnes: Women Sculptors and the Eternal City, which addresses issues of gender, creativity, and expatriation in the mid-nineteenth century. Her article "'Ain't I a Woman?': Anne Whitney, Edmonia Lewis, and the Iconography of Emancipation" appeared in the anthology Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (2006). As the founding director of the Kenyon in Rome and Florence Program, Dabakis spent the 2006 spring semester in Italy, with thirteen Kenyon students and teaching three courses.
Eugene Dwyer recently published an article, "From Fragments to Icons: Stages in the Making and Exhibiting of the Casts of Pompeian Victims, 1863--1888," in Interpreting Ceramics and is finishing an article proposing a new interpretation on the function of the Pantheon in Rome. Two other articles focusing on different aspects of the plaster casts of the bodies of Pompeian victims made in the late nineteenth century will appear in a volume of essays, Antiquity Recovered, being edited for Getty Publications by Victoria Coates and Jon Seydl, and in another volume of essays, Sculpture/Archaeology, being edited for Ashgate Publishing by Thomas Dowson. Spring semester he is teaching a seminar on Herculaneum and Pompeii.
Marcella Hackbardt's work appeared this fall in several group exhibitions, including "Growing Pains," at the Ohio Arts Council's Riffe Gallery in Columbus, Ohio; "Image Ohio," at Fort Hayes Shot Tower Gallery in Columbus; and "Convergence," at the Wooster Art Museum in Wooster, Ohio.
Denise Hinnant, visiting assistant professor, is finishing her dissertation on Augusta Savage, an early twentieth-century African-American sculptor, and is teaching a seminar spring semester on "African-American Women Artists."
John Tain, Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Teaching Fellow, is finishing his dissertation on Matisse and Modernism in the First Decade of the Twentieth Century. He recently presented a paper, "Artistic Production and the Avant-Garde, Paris c. 1900," at the conference "Practicing Pierre Bourdieu" at the University of Michigan, and talked about the French artist Edgar Degas on Rhythm and News on 91.9 FM, WKCO, in conjunction with an exhibition of Degas landscapes at the Columbus Museum of Art. Spring semester he is teaching a seminar on "Art of the 1920s."
Kristen Van Ausdall has begun her duties as coeditor of a volume on Eucharistic art for Brill Academic Press in Leiden. She will lead the second contingent of Kenyon students in the off-campus study program Kenyon in Florence and Rome (Italy) in spring 2008. Spring semester she is teaching a seminar on "Blood and Bread: Sacred Art of the Italian Renaissance."
Dan Younger, director of the Olin Art Gallery, who was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome during spring 2006, will teach "History of Photography" in spring 2007.
Yan Zhou, curator of visual resources, lectured in eight cities in China this past summer on contemporary Chinese art in the context of globalization and postcolonialism. An article,"'Forest of Stone Steles'--Translation within and between Cultures," is now under consideration for publication in a scholarly journal devoted to Asian studies. Spring semester he is teaching an intermediate course on "Chinese Art since 1840."
Dance and drama
Wendy MacLeod's ten-minute play Snake Oil was lauded in the Columbus Dispatch's review of the Contemporary American Theater Company's Shorts Festival: Ghost Light, in October 2006. Also in the fall, MacLeod traveled to the Magic Theater in San Francisco for a script-in-hand reading of her new play, Birnham Woods. The reading featured Jenny Bacon, Stephen Barker Turner, Jennifer Erdmann, and Chris Herold, and was directed by artistic director Chris Smith. It was a return to the Magic for MacLeod, who also premiered her critically acclaimed play The House of Yes there.
Economics
Jay Corrigan presented his work at two professional meetings last summer: the Global Conference on Business and Economics in Cambridge, England, and the American Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting in Long Beach, California.
David Harrington has an article forthcoming, with co-author Ward Sayre, in the journal Regulation titled "Paying for Bodies, But Not for Organs: Funeral Regulations and Anatomical Gift Laws Are Fueling the Gray Market in Body Parts." Sayre taught at Kenyon from 1999 to 2001. The article argues, and presents evidence, that the body scandals at medical schools such as UCLA, Tulane, and Texas are due to flawed regulations. Sayre and Harrington were invited to write an op-ed piece for the Web site of the Washington Post, based on the Regulation article. Also, the Institute of Justice recently sued the Maryland State Board of Morticians, citing Harrington's estimates of the harm done to consumers by Maryland's anti-competitive funeral regulations. It cleared an important hurdle when U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett rejected motions to dismiss the case, ruling that the regulations may potentially violate the equal protection, due process, and commerce clauses of the U.S. Constitution.
Modern languages and literatures
Jianhua Bai was appointed to serve on the World Languages Academic Advisory Committee (2006-09) and selected to serve as chair of the AP Chinese Language and Culture Development Committee for the College Board. Bai was also selected to serve as a National Advisory Board member (2006-10) for the Center for Language Education and Research of Michigan State University.
Adriano Duque, a visiting professor, received the Faculty Mentoring Award in the department of Romance languages at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in spring 2006. Duque participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute "Representations of the 'Other': Jews in Medieval Christendom" in Oxford, England, in July and August 2006.
Paul Gebhardt presented a paper titled "Narratives in the Face of Death: GDR Historiography in Good-Bye, Lenin!" at the fifty-ninth annual Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in Lexington, Kentucky, in April 2006. He is preparing an article for publication on the relationship between Rilke's Book of Hours and the early philosophy of Nietzsche, and taught intermediate and third-year German last fall, as well as a new course on "Images of the German Family" in German and Austrian literature and film. During his junior leave in spring 2007, Gebhardt plans to research and write on German film after 1990, a project which includes the paper on Good-Bye, Lenin!
Political science
Pamela Camerra-Rowe participated in a faculty development seminar in Brussels and Berlin in July 2006 titled "Challenges to German Identity in the European Context." Participants met with European Union and German government officials to discuss European Union enlargement, the constitutional treaty, immigration, and national identity issues. Camerra-Rowe was also invited by the German embassy in Washington, D.C., to participate in a symposium titled "Prospects for European Integration" in November 2006. Guenter Gloser, minister of state for Europe at the German Foreign Office, was the keynote speaker, and there were panel discussions on European Union enlargement and immigration issues.
Joseph Klesner and his family are happy to be back in Gambier, where Klesner is chairing the Department of Political Science this year, after a rewarding sabbatical year in Dublin, Ireland. His recent and upcoming publications include "Social Capital and Political Participation in Latin America: Evidence from Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Peru," in Latin American Research Review, 42, 2 (June 2007); "Mexico and Brazil," Chapter 22 in Comparative Politics: A Global Introduction, third edition, by Michael Sodaro et al. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007); and "Economic Integration and National Identity in Mexico," Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 12, 3/4 (September 2006), pages 481-507. Klesner presented papers titled "Turnout in the 2006 Mexican Election: A Preliminary Assessment" at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia, August 31-September 3, 2006; and "The Sociology of Voting and Participation in the 2006 Elections" at a conference on "Mexico's 2006 Elections" at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, November 30-December 2, 2006.
Psychology
The Psychological Record, which had been published at Kenyon under the editorship of Charles E. Rice, professor emeritus of psychology, since 1976, moved in January 2007 to Southern Illinois University to be managed by a new editor. Rice was only the fourth editor in the Record's nearly seventy-year history, and the editor with the longest tenure by far. The lead article in the first issue he edited was written by Jon L. Williams, now professor emeritus of psychology, and David Lopatto, of Ohio University.
Religious studies
In October, Joseph Adler served as a panelist evaluating grant applications for the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C. Another member of the panel was Kenyon alumnus Joel Brereton '70, associate professor of Asian studies and religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In November, Adler presented a paper titled "Confucianism as Religion/ Religious Tradition/Neither: Still Hazy After All These Years" at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, also in D.C.
Sociology
John Macionis continues to work as an environmental activist, serving as president of the board of the Lake George Land Conservancy (LGLC) in New York state, the local land protection organization, which is affiliated with the Nature Conservancy. On September 24, 2006, Macionis presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for the LGLC's new headquarters in Bolton Landing, New York. Nancy Williams, executive director of LGLC, announced, "The Lake George Land Conservancy is proud to name its new facility in Bolton Landing the Macionis Family Center for Conservation in honor of the outstanding contribution made by John and Amy Macionis and their children, McLean and Whitney." In October 2006, Macionis joined a group of about a dozen authors from Knox County at the Knox County Historical Society in a broad survey and sampling of the types of writing that have been done in the county over its history; gave the keynote address on the importance of a global perspective in sociology to the New York State Sociological Association at its annual meeting at the State University of New York, Brockport; and visited Houston Community College at the invitation of the sociology faculty to discuss teaching and recent developments in the discipline. In November 2006, the twentieth U.S. edition of Macionis's Society: The Basics appeared from Prentice Hall; it continues to be the most popular introductory textbook in the field.
George ("Mac") McCarthy is on sabbatical this year. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship for the year and will be working on his next book, Between Traditions: Aristotle and Kant in Classical Social Theory. SUNY Press has already accepted the work for publication. McCarthy is also working on another book with Royal Rhodes, chair of the religious studies department and Donald L. Rogan Professor of Religious Studies. McCarthy will undertake research in Germany in April 2007 for their forthcoming book, Justice Beyond Liberalism: Natural Law in Catholic Social Thought in the United States, Ireland, and Germany. He will deliver a paper in May titled "Aristotle and Weber: the Classical Origins of Phronesic or Moral Social Science" at an international sociology conference at the Athens Institute for Education and Research in Athens, Greece.
Anna Sun delivered papers titled "Organizing World Religions" on the panel "Eurasian Visions: Exploring and Mapping Asian Space and Religion" at the Social Science History Association's annual conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 2, 2006; and "Classifying Chinese Religions: Theoretical Reflections and Ethnographic Evidence" at the American Academy of Religion's annual conference in Washington, D.C., on November 18, 2006, on a panel organized by Joseph Adler of Kenyon's religious studies department. Sun is also one of three coprincipal investigators on a project called "Empirical Studies of Religions in China," funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
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