Faculty Digest
Art and Art History
Sarah Blick continues to edit Peregrinations (http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu), an online journal devoted to medieval art and architecture. 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 March 2007, she lectured on "Veneration of the Holy Dead: Shrines, Pilgrims, and Pilgrim Souvenirs" in conjunction with the exhibition "Final Farewell: the Culture of Death and the Afterlife" at the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She has also begun editing a volume of historical essays in memory of her father, Boris Blick. Claudia Esslinger is on sabbatical for the year, working on collaborative video projects. She was artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, California, for three months this spring. Esslinger has been nominated to receive another Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award. She has also been nominated for an Izzy Award (a San Francisco-based dance honor) for her costume design for a dance piece by Leslie Seiters '94, titled "OXA," which premiered at Kenyon in 2006 and is being recognized for its visual design and choreography. Marcella Hackbardt contributed to several recent exhibitions last fall, including "ImageOhio" at Fort Hayes Shot Tower Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, from October through December 2006, and "Convergence" at the College of Wooster Art Museum in Wooster, Ohio, where Hackbardt won the Juror's Choice Award. She also cocurated with students in her Photography of Invention class an exhibition of contemporary and historical tintypes and ambrotypes on display at Olin Library Special Collections, from November 13 through December 13, 2006. Karen Snouffer's solo exhibition, Souvenir, which was displayed in January and February 2007 at Kenyon's Olin Art Gallery, presented the work she created while on sabbatical during 2005-06. These thirty-four photo-collage paintings reveal Snouffer's most recent studio processes of combining historical and contemporary photo images with oil paint. This body of work addresses the artist's continuing exploration of object, place, and person within the context of memory. Specifically, these paintings honor the stories surrounding her father's experiences in World War II and those of the citizens of Épernay, France, a city she came to know intimately during a four-week sabbatical visit. Snouffer also participated in a three-person show in October 2006 at the Roy G. Biv Gallery in the Short North district in Columbus, Ohio. John Tain, Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Teaching Fellow, is completing his dissertation on Matisse and the avant-garde. Last fall, he presented papers at "Practicing Pierre Bourdieu," an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Michigan, and at an international symposium in November 2006 in Paris on the art critic Pierre Restany, in conjunction with the Centre Pompidou's Yves Klein exhibition. In spring 2007, Tain offered a seminar on Western art of the 1920s, which sometimes met in conjunction with G. C. Waldrep's English course on Dada and Surrealism.
Biology
Siobhan Fennessy was invited to present a paper at the annual Society of Wetland Scientists meeting in a symposium on innovative teaching for ecologists, to be held in June 2007 in Sacramento, California. Several students are also attending and presenting the results of research done with Fennessy, including Ellen Herbert '07 and Jesse Rosenbluth '07. Sara Burns '07 and Liz Deimeke '06 are co-authors. Fennessy was asked by the Ecological Society of America and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (part of the United States Agriculture Department) to do an analysis of the effectiveness of department-sponsored wetland restoration and conservation programs on agricultural lands, part of a nationwide assessment of their conservation programs. (The goal is to scientifically quantify the environmental benefits of conservation practices and programs.) The analysis will be published as a paper in a special issue of the journal Ecological Applications (the top journal in the field). Fennessy was recently the keynote speaker at the Ohio Environmental Council's annual meeting. She spoke about how urbanization affects the ecological condition of wetlands. Chris Gillen, Mark Haussmann, Harry Itagaki, and Bob Mauck, along with four Kenyon students--Andrew Boylan '07, Lina Moe '07, Emily Vaughn '07, and Jenni Zangmeister '07--attended the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in Phoenix in January 2007. Gillen is also the author of Reading Primary Literature: A Practical Guide to Evaluating Research Articles in Biology, recently published by Benjamin Cummings. Haussmann's research on Leach's storm petrels was prominently featured in an article in the February/ March issue of National Wildlife magazine. Haussmann works with Mauck and several Kenyon Summer Science students at the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island, in New Brunswick, Canada. Last summer Drew Kerkhoff attended a workshop on global ecology. He presented the same research to a larger audience at the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in August 2006. In October 2006, Kerkhoff gave a presentation at Michigan State University's Kellogg Biological Station on macroecology of nitrogen and phosphorus in the seed plants. He also published at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute at the Ohio State University. The workshop brought together a wide variety of applied mathematicians, climate scientists, and ecologists interested in problems of global change. Kerkhoff also attended a Gordon Research Conference on the metabolic basis of ecology and evolution, where he presented his research on the metabolic allometries and N:P stoichiometry of alpine plant communities. Wade Powell attended the annual meeting of the Society of Toxicology in Charlotte, North Carolina, in March 2007. Three students accompanied him: Anna Zimmermann '07, Diana Spahlinger '07, and Lisa King '07, all of whom presented results from their ongoing work in Powell's lab.
Chemistry
In February 2007, Scott Cummings attended a meeting of the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) to plan for a "Focus the Nation" initiative to heighten the country's understanding of issues and implications of global warming and to support effective environmental and energy policies at the national level. He also attended the American Chemical Society national meeting in Chicago, Illinois, on March 25-27, 2007. Cummings presented a paper titled "Luminescent platinum aryl acetylides" at the Central Regional American Chemical Society (CERMACS) meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, on May 20-23, 2007. This research was conducted with Katie Wetzel '07.
Dance and Drama
Julie Brodie created a new, evening-length work, "Fault Lines," in collaboration with Claudia Esslinger of the art department and adjunct dance instructor Kora Radella Feller. Part of the piece premiered in "Columbus Dances 2," February 2-4, 2007, and the whole work was produced by the Cleveland Public Theater Big [BOX] series. "Fault Lines" will also be presented in Cleveland's Ingenuity Festival of Art and Technology in July 2007. In March 2007, Brodie presented "Kinesthesia, The Sixth Sense for Dancers: Breathing, Sensing, and Feeling," for the National Dance Association convention in Baltimore. In August 2007, Brodie will present her work on notating contemporary choreography for the International Council of Kinetography Laban in Mexico City. As part of his junior leave, Daniel Elihu Kramer directed A Midsummer Night's Dream for Boston Theatre Works in February 2007. The Boston Globe's reviewer described the production as "an enchantment of delights… On a nearly bare stage, with minimal costumes that aren't even credited to a designer, and deploying each of its eight actors in at least two roles, this 'Dream' manages to cast the spell that can elude more lavish stagings… It's all that this spirited and polished cast, directed with zest and clarity by Daniel Elihu Kramer, needs to make a 'Dream' come true." Wendy MacLeod's play Things Being What They Are was produced in May 2007 at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, New York. The play was directed by Leonard Foglia, whose Broadway credits include The Heidi Chronicles and Master Class.
Economics
David Harrington and Robert Warnock '07 presented a paper written together with Eduardo M. Rodriguez '07 at the Southwestern Social Science Meetings in Albuquerque in March 2007. The title of the paper was "Georgia Manicurists: Are Vietnamese Displacing African-Americans?" BusinessWeek had an article about Harrington's research on organ and body donations (written with Ward Sayre of Agnes Scott College, formerly an instructor at Kenyon) in its issue of February 5, 2007.
English
Jennifer Clarvoe presented a poetry reading at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Atlanta in March 2007, and a talk on the poetry of Frank Bidart at the meeting of the American Literature Association in May 2007. Patricia Vigderman's book, The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, recently published by Sarabande Books, is a meditation on art and personality, and an investigation into unorthodox patronage and unexpected appropriation.
Modern Languages and Literatures
Paul Gebhardt received a research grant last summer from the Whiting Foundation. On his junior leave, Gebhardt spent six weeks researching, as well as visiting his family, in Germany in March and April 2007. After this trip, he presented a paper titled "The Image and the Frame: Visual Potentiality in Tom Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior" at the European Cinema Research Forum at the Ohio State University in April 2007. He also reviewed a book by Rochelle Tobias, The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan, in the academic journal Colloquia Germanica.
Philosophy
Juan De Pascuale was recently reappointed to the board of trustees of Knox Community Hospital. He serves on several committees, including the quality of care committee and physician recruitment committee. De Pascuale was also appointed by the National Research Council to serve as chair of the philosophy review panel for the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program. This is his seventh year serving on the panel, the third as chair. Yang Xiao simply loved his junior leave spring semester! He stayed in Gambier to complete his book manuscript (and to play squash at the KAC). Xiao attended the American Philosophical Association conference in San Francisco in April 2007. In addition to giving a paper on the moral psychology of ritual action in early China, he was a panelist in one discussion session, and the chair of another. In March 2007, Christopher Yeomans attended a University of Chicago seminar on the work of political philosopher John Rawls. In April 2007, Yeomans gave a symposium paper on Hegel's theory of retribution and punishment at the Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco.
Physics
The American Association of Physics Teachers, as part of its seventy-fifth anniversary celebration, recently published a booklet of interviews with seventy-five outstanding physicists who have been instrumental in research and education. Included were Kenyon's two emeritus professors of physics, Thomas B. Greenslade Jr. and Franklin Miller Jr. Miller's article on the "Two Electrons" is being published in The Physics Teacher, and Greenslade recently curated a show of early physics apparatus at Denison University.
Political Science
David Rowe presented a lecture titled "Globalization and the Future of Asia" at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in February 2007.
Psychology
Allan Fenigstein and Matt Preston '02, who is currently a student at the Ohio State University College of Medicine, have co-authored a paper, "The desired number of sexual partners as a function of gender, sexual risks, and the meaning of 'ideal,'" to be published in the forthcoming Journal of Sex Research (2007, Vol. 44).
Religious Studies
Mary Suydam contributed chapters to two books: "Bringing Heaven Down to Earth: Beguine Constructions of Heaven," in Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages, edited by Carolyn Muessig and Ad Putter, from Routledge Publishing; and "Women's Texts and Performances in the Medieval Southern Low Countries," in Performance and Performativity in the Middle Ages, edited by Elina Gertsman, from Routledge. Suydam also wrote the following encyclopedia articles: "Performance Studies" and "Spirituality," in Encyclopedia of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, edited by Margaret Schaus, from Routledge; and "Beguines," in Encyclopedia of Women in World History, from Oxford University Press. Suydam reviewed Claire Waters's Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), in Medieval Sermon Studies, vol. 50, 2006.
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