Faculty Digest
Academic Advising
Jane Martindell gave two presentations this past fall. She spoke on "Re-engineering Orientation: The Possible Cornerstone for Student Success in the New Century" at the National Orientation Directors Association conference in Denver, Colorado. She also coordinated the Colorado/Wyoming Association for Women in Education (CWAWE) fall conference, entitled "Beyond Lip Service: Forging True Alliances." Martindell served as president of CWAWE until a February 1998 transition.
Anthropology-Sociology
Prentice Hall recently released fourth editions of two of John Macionis's books, Seeing Ourselves: Classic, Contemporary, and Cross-Cultural Readings in Sociology and Sociology: The Basics. He has completed a World Wide Web site (www.macionis.com) that describes many of his textbooks. In November, Macionis presented a lecture at Monroe County Community College in Rochester, New York, on the changes new information technology is likely to bring to U.S. society. In December, he spoke at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, on social changes in the century to come. Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban are currently working with students on a poster session about social and functional variation at a secondary administrative center in the Naco Valley, Honduras. The session should appear in the proceedings of the 1998 Society for American Archaeology Meetings, held in Seattle, Washington, in March. In November, they gave a paper on identity formation among elites and commoners during the Late Classic Period in the Naco Valley as part of an invited session at the American Anthropological Association Meetings. Schortman and Urban spoke on a similar topic at the University of Pennsylvania's Maya Weekend in April 1997.
Art and Art History
Several essays by Eugene Dwyer, "Luxury," "Excess," "Destruction of the City," and "The Evil Eye," appeared in the Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography in December. He presented a paper entitled "Sidonius Apollinaris and the Portraits of Ancient Philosophers" at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in Toronto, Canada, in February. Work by Martin Garhart was exhibited in a show entitled "Heart and Soul" at the Flanders Contemporary Art Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in October and November. The drawings, etchings, large oils, and watercolors displayed were in the mode of representational contemporary realism. A picture book by Professor Emeritus of Art Joseph Slate, Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten, won the 1997 Blue Hen Award for the best children's book published in 1996. The award, sponsored by the Delaware Library Association, is voted by the children of Delaware. Gregory Spaid lectured on his art at Indiana University in late October. He also recently gave a workshop on hand-coloring of photographs at Indiana's Wabash College. In July 1998, he will have an exhibition of his photos of Nantucket architecture at the island's Athenaeum Library. Spaid has been photographing there since the early 1980s, when he taught photography at the Nantucket Island School of Design and Art.
Biology
Jessica Chew '98, Elizabeth Millard '98, and Kathryn Edwards presented a poster on their research at the American Society of Space and Gravitational Biology meetings in November. Chew is investigating how a vertical fundal cell called a sporangiophore detects and responds to gravity, while Millard has succeeded in a six-year effort to sequence the calmodulin gene from phycomyces. Raymond Heithaus has been elected to a two-year term on the board of the Ohio Academy of Science. The academy's trustees represent academia, government, and industry. Harry Itagaki is on sabbatical this year, working at Ohio State University. In September, he presented a paper on "Physiological and Anatomical Investigations of Taste in the Fleshfly" at the Fifth European Symposium on Insect Taste and Olefaction, held on the coast of Sardinia. Itagaki ran in the Columbus Marathon in November with Associate Professor of Mathematics Bradley Hartlaub. Joan Slonczewski spoke at Context X, central Ohio's literature-oriented science fiction and fantasy convention, in early October.
Chemistry
Scott Cummings and Karen Downey '98 attended the Eighth Annual Symposium for Undergraduates in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois in November. He has also been doing research on the photophysics of platinum terpyridine complexes with Downey, Sara Hobert '97, and Marla Fiorelli '99. Cummings received a Faculty Development Grant to present this research at the Inter-American Photochemical Society winter conference in Clearwater, Florida, in January. Rosemary Marusak has been invited to join the editrial board of the international scientific journal Metal Based Drugs.
Classics
In September, Cliff Weber presented the results of his sabbatical research in a three-part lecture at Kenyon entitled "The Goddess Diana and Virgil's Virgin Queen." The department is searching for a sabbatical replacement for Robert Bennett during the 1998-99 academic year, who will then serve as a successor to William McCulloh when he retires in June 1999.
Dance and Drama
A new play by Wendy MacLeod, The Water Children (written with an Amblin Playwriting Commission), recently opened at New York City's Playwrights Horizons to favorable notices. In November, she sat on a panel at the Women in Theater Conference in New York with fellow playwrights Emily Mann, Wendy Wasserstein, and Mary Irene Fornes. MacLeod is spending her sabbatical year writing in New Hampshire.
English
A collection of stories by David Lynn, entitled Fortune Telling, will inaugurate a new literary fiction series from Carnegie Mellon University Press. The book is due out this spring. In October, Ted Mason attended a conference entitled "Diversity, Opportunity, and American Achievement" in Miami, Florida. Early this year, his essay "The African American Anthology: Mapping the Territory, Taking the National Census, Building the Museum" appeared in American Literary History, and a review of his essay "Against Containment" is scheduled to appear in African American Review. Mason has been invited to write an entry on Paul Robeson for the Oxford Companion to United States History.
History
Clifton Crais has been appointed a panel chair for history for the African Studies Association and a member of the board of the Journal of Social History. In the classroom, he is teaching a new seminar on resistance, revolt, and revolution in twentieth-century Africa. Crais is also chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee, which is examiing the College's system of faculty evaluation. Ruth Dunnell was on leave through the end of 1997, translating law codes and Buddhist morality tracts for a book project, The Merciful Monarch: Buddhism, State, and Society in the Tangut Realms, Twelfth-Thirteenth Centuries. She recently adopted a daughter, two-year-old Lotte Louise Hanjia, from Yangzhou, Jiuangsu. Dunnell reports Lotte is adapting well to life in rural Ohio. Ellen Furlough attended an interdisciplinary conference, "Learning from the Mall of America: The Design of Consumer Culture, Public Life, and the Metropolis at the End of the Century," in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in November. She is currently working on a paper entitled "Places and Politics: Tourism and the French State, 1930s-1970s" to be delivered at the Institute for French Studies at New York University in April and at Cambridge University next summer. Furlough is also teaching two new courses this year, "From the Titanic to Total War: Europe 1900-1939" and "Victorian Sexualities." Andrew Richmond '96, an affiliated scholar in history, is currently the editor-in-chief of The Papers of Philander Chase, a project he started as a senior honors project in 1995. In June, he attended the 1997 Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His project will be published on the Kenyon website under "Visitor's Center." Wendy Singer attended a conference entitled "The Symposium on Peasant Studies" at the University of Virginia in May 1997. Her paper, "When Peasants Were Men," will be a chapter in a book on peasant studies that emerged from that conference. In October, she gave a lecture at Kenyon called "Telling Histories: India's Freedom Movement Fifty Years Later." The lecture celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence last August.
Interdisciplinary Studies
Lewis Hyde's new book, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, was published in January by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. (See the article on page 10.) He undertook an eighteen-city tour in late February and early March to promote the book.
Mathematics
Bradley Hartlaub is on sabbatical this year, continuing his work with statisticians at Ohio State University. He will be teaching a graduate-level nonparametric statistics course in the spring. Hartlaub and Douglas Wolfe, who have submitted a paper on ranked-set sampling methods, are beginning work on a textbook on intuitive introductory statistics. Hartlaub ran in the Columbus Marathon in November with Associate Professor of Biology Harry Itagaki. Brian Jones reports he is enjoying being a father to his daughter, Noelle, who was born last spring. Although he says fatherhood takes more time than he expected, he completed and submitted two research papers last summer. Carol Schumacher continues work on her real-analysis text in addition to her work as department chair. She directed two Summer Science projects on dynamical systems. Stephen Slack irected the Summer Science research project of Mark Rich '98. The subject of the project was "Godel's theorems."
Modern Languages and Literatures
Jane Cowles has returned from her sabbatical in France, where she did research on mothers in French romantic literature and audited a class in psychoanalysis at one of the Paris universities. In October, she gave a paper entitled "Napoleon's Compass: The Third Term of History in Balzac's Les Chouans" at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium in Athens, Georgia. Rose McEwen has joined the department as a visiting assistant professor of Spanish. In November, she presented a paper, "Y asi' les nacio' la conciencia: Rigoberta Menchu' y el Acuerdo de Paz de Guatemala (And Thus was Their Conscience Raised: Rigoberta Menchu and Guatemala's Peace Accord)," at the Colloquium of the Midwest Modern Languages Association in Chicago, Illinois. Over the summer, Linda Metzler spent five weeks in Bolivia, where she worked part of the time as a volunteer with Andean Rural Health Care. She traveled to several other places as well, including Tiahuanaco, where she attended the Aymara celebration of the winter solstice. Metzler also collaborated with Clara Roman-Odio on a music multimedia program, funded by a Mellon Foundation grant to the "Ohio Five" consortium. She composed texts and exercises for sections on ballads, flamenco, and protest music. In November, Metzler traveled to Spain to conduct research for a paper she hopes to present at a spring 1998 conference on poetry and politics in Spain.
Music
Camilla Cai is currently on sabbatical in Oslo, Norway, conducting research at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian National Academy for Science and Letters. She is working as part of an international team of musicologists to prepare a multivolume history of Norwegian music. Cai has also given several lectures this past year, including "Historische und Editorische Probleme mit den Ungarischen Taenzen von Johannes Brahms (Historical and Editorial Issues Concerning Brahms's Hungarian Dances)" at the International Brahms Congress in Hamburg, Germany, in April, "Composing Seen through a Woman's Lens: Virtuoso Texture in Hensel's Piano Music" at the Mendelssohn Symposium at Illinois Wesleyan University in May, and "The Origins and Language of Brahms's Hungarian Dances" at the Nottingham (England) Brahms Conference in July. All three papers will be published. Dane Heuchemer recently finished his dissertation for his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Cincinnati. The title of his work is "Italian Musicians in Dresden in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, with an Emphasis on the Lives and Works of Antonio Scandello and Giovanni Battista Pinello di Ghiradi." Heuchemer, who has been promoted to assistant professor, was among the guest conductors for this year's Ohio Private College Instrumental Conductor's Association Band in January.
Philosophy
A new book by Andrew Pessin, Gray Matters: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, was published in October. His next project, for which he has been nominated for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, will be on the subject of the concept of causation in early modern philosophy.
Physics
Thomas Greenslade has been asked to mount a photographic exhibit of his pictures of nineteenth and early twentieth century physics teaching apparatus at the Centennial Meeting of the American Physical Society in March 1999. The fifty pictures will show apparatus from the College of Wooster, Kenyon, Marietta, and Oberlin colleges, Denison, Miami, and Wittenberg universities, and the University of Cincinnati. Benjamin Schumacher gave a lecture entitled "Quantum versus classical information" at the Royal Society in London, England, in November. The lecture was part of a two-day discussion meeting on "Quantum Computation: Theory and Experiment." Timothy Sullivan will spend the 1998-99 academic year on sabbatical at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He will be working on creating "photonic crystals" that may allow electronics to be done with lights instead of electrons. Over the summer, Paula Turner presented papers and talks at two meetings. The first was a contributed poster of work on near-infrared images of merging galaxies NCG 1614 and NCG 520 at the June meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The second was a talk on the department's successful implementation of video-data experiments at the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) meeting in Denver, Colorado. In October, she presented a science-division colloquium at Kenyon entitled "Good Science from Bad Detectors," with an encore performance at the College of Wooster in November. In January, she gave a presentation on the design, construction, and use of the Miller Observatory at a meeting of the AAPT in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Political Science
Harry Clor presented a lecture entitled "The Case for Public Morality" at Claremont-McKenna College in Claremont, California in October. His book Public Morality and Liberal Society is scheduled to come out in paperback in early 1998. In October, Kirk Emmert took part in a panel that discussed Winston Churchill's India speeches at the annual meeting of the International Churchill Society in Toronto, Canada. Joseph Klesner presented two papers, "Electoral Reform in Mexico's Hegemonic Party System: Perpetuation of Privilege or Democratic Advnce?" and "Dissolving Hegemony: Electoral Competition and the decline of Mexico's One-Party Dominant Regime" at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in August. He was awarded a research grant from the Small Research Grant Program of the APSA to explore "Political Liberalization in Mexico: Electoral Reform and Opposition Advance, 1994-1997." Klesner's recent publications include "Democratic Transition? The 1997 Mexican Elections" in Political Science and Politics, "The Mexican Midterm Congressional and Gubernatorial Elections of 1997: End of the Hegemonic Party System" in Electoral Studies, and "Political Change in Mexico: Institutions and Identity" in Latin American Research Review.
Psychology
Linda Smolak and Michael Levine presented two plenary sessions at the Harvard Eating Disorders Center's Conference for Educators in October. Ellen Stoltzfus and Assistant Professor of Physics Paula Turner took a number of Carolinas-Ohio Science Education Network students to the Association for Women in Science in Central Ohio poster session in November. Stoltzfus and Turner are presenting a poster entitled "Outreach Program in Science for Middle School Girls." The program, aimed at getting girls interested in science, is geared toward students at the Mount Vernon Middle School. Jon Williams attended a conference in October on "Stress, Personality Types, and Health" in Columbus, Ohio. In November, he presented a paper he cowrote with Catherine Baez '97, "Synthetic Predator Odor Elicits Opioid Analgesia and Enhances Amphetamine-Induced Stereotypy," at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In January, he presented a paper he cowrote with Katie Hladky '98, "Pre-Exposure to a Natural Predator Odor (TMT) Disrupts Spatial Working Memory," at the Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior in Winter Park, Colorado.
Religion
In August, Joseph Adler attended a conference on Confucian spirituality at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. His paper "Varieties of Spiritual Experiences: Shen in Neo-Confucian Discourse" will appear in a volume of the series World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, published by Crossroad. In August, Miriam Dean-Otting attended a conference in Calcutta, India, organized by the Society for Indian Religion and Philosophy. She presented a paper entitled "Hugo Nergman, Leo Baeck, and Martin Buber: Jewish Perspectives on Hinduism and Buddhism." While in India, she also observed some aspects of Hindu ritual and visited synagogues in the Jewish quarter of Calcutta. Vernon Schubel presented a paper at a Central Asian studies conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in March 1997. He also presented a paper entitled "The Reconstruction of the Naqshbandiyyah Tradition in Contemporary Uzbekistan" at the International Conference on the Naqshbandi Sufi order in Istanbul, Turkey, during the summer. Schubel is continuing his research on Islam in the Turkish-speaking world. Mary Suydam spent five weeks in Belgium over the summer examining five manuscripts of the works of Hadewijch of Antwerp. She is currently coediting a book with Joanna Ziegler, entitled Performance and Transformation: A Three-Dimensional Approach to Medieval Devotional Textuality, which will be published in 1998. Suydam is also contributing a chapter entitled "Hell is the Highest Name of Love: Hadewijch of Antwerp's Dark Visions of Heaven" for the book Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays. In September, she chaired a session at the Medieval Association of the Midwest's conference at the University of Iowa. Her upcoming engagements include presentation of a paper entitled "Sacred Spaces in the Visionary Realm of Beguines: Appropriation, Construction, and Realms in Between" at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in May.
Women's and Gender Studies
Laurie Finke was a guest lecturer for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for College and University Faculty in June. She spoke on "The Literary Traditions of Medieval Women." In September, Finke delivered a lecture entitled "Building a City of Ladies: Women Writers in the Middle Ages" at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
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