Faculty Digest
American Studies
In February, WVIZ in Cleveland presented Gullah Culture Week, a series of distance-learning programs produced in conjunction with Professor of History Will Scott and Peter Rutkoff's Teaching American History grant on Cleveland immigrants and migrants. Visiting Instructor of History Sylvie Coulibaly was one of the TV hosts, as was Joyce Coakley, who coordinates Kenyon/ Gullah activities in Charleston, South Carolina.
Art
Professor Emeritus of Art Joseph Slate H'88 has published two picture books this year: Miss Bindergarten Has a Wild Day in Kindergarten and What Star IsThis?
Asian Studies
Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Teaching Fellow Anna Xiao Dong Sun gave a paper in April at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting in San Francisco. This spring she is also chairing the Graduate Student Paper Award for the History of Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. Sun has also been named to a new, tenure-track position as instructor of sociology and Asian studies at Kenyon. She earned her B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton.
Biology
With the help of Pat Heithaus , Siobhan Fennessy worked with four Summer Science students--Carolyn Barrett '06, Lizzy Deimeke '06, Ellen Herbert '07, and Casey Smith '06--on a field project to evaluate the ecological health of wetlands in the Cuyahoga River Watershed. This river and its watershed have been an ecological bellwether since the 1960s, when the river repeatedly caught fire due to heavy pollution.The summer project, funded by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was designed to measure progress in environmental cleanup and to serve as a model for using rapid bioassessment protocols to quantify the ecological condition of wetlands. In January, Fennessy was appointed associate editor of the journal Wetlands, and she was invited to speak at a conference on Water Quality Trading in Chicago in February. The meeting was sponsored by the EPA to identify research gaps that must be addressed before new policies to protect water quality can be implemented. Fennessy was also selected to lead a symposium at an international meeting of wetland scientists in July, in Cairns, Australia. Joan Slonczewski and Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Multicultural Affairs Chris Kennerly accompanied sixty Kenyon students to help with cleanup efforts in New Orleans over spring break, March 12-18. The group stayed in a 300-person tent at a FEMA base camp and worked to strip houses to the studs to prepare them for eventual renovation.
Classics
Paolo Asso is in his third year as an assistant professor of classics at Kenyon. Although a committed Latinist, in the past two years Asso has been teaching the yearlong intensive course in elementary Greek. Last fall he team-taught "Classical Mythology" with President S. Georgia Nugent. An advanced Latin seminar on Horace's odes has provided some respite from verbal aspects, moody secondary sequences, fear clauses, and the potential optative. In January 2006, Asso attended the meetings of the American Philological Association in Montreal, where he presented his paper on "Queer Consolation: Melior's Dead Boy in Statius's Silvae 2.1" at the panel on Queering Mythology, sponsored by the Lambda Classical Caucus. Asso's larger projects include two commentaries, on Books IV and IX of Lucan's Civil War, and a monograph on "Africa in the Romans' Imagination: Ethnography, Racism, Imperialism, Identity." In 2006-07, Asso will be on junior leave and will spend the academic year working on research projects as a visiting assistant professor at the classical studies department of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he will rejoin his partner, Frederick F. Wherry. Adam Serfass is on sabbatical for the academic year 2006-07 as a visiting scholar in the graduate group for ancient history and Mediterranean archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. His article on "Slavery and Pope Gregory the Great" was published in the March issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies. Serfass gave a paper last fall at a conference on "Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity" held by the Pappas Patristic Institute in Brookline, Massachusetts. The paper, titled "Wine for Widows: Papyrological Evidence for Christian Charity in Late Antique Egypt," has been selected for publication in the conference proceedings. He will give a paper, titled "The Economic Rationale for Clerical Service in Late Antiquity," this spring at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society in Chicago, and for two weeks this spring will conduct research at the American Academy in Rome.
Dance
Julie Brodie performed "Uprooted," a solo dance choreographed by Adjunct Dance Instructor Kora Radella , for Columbus Dances II and at the North Carolina Computer Music Festival. Her piece "Dis-still-ation" was presented at the American College Dance Festival conference at Ohio State University (OSU) in March, and in April she presented her research on the visual system and dance-training at the National Dance Association conference in Salt Lake City. Brodie is also continuing her Labanotation studies at OSU this semester. To celebrate the dedication of the Kenyon Athletic Center in April, Brodie reconstructed the "Protein Synthesis Dance" originally created for an educational film made in 1971 at Stanford University.
Drama
In February, Jonathan Tazewell starred as legendary actor-singer-activist Paul Robeson in a one-man play produced by the Red Herring Theater Ensemble in Columbus, Ohio. The production was so well-received that the run was extended, and the Columbus Dispatch praised Tazewell for "a triumphant performance." When the Kenyon professor "delivers a majestic and moving rendition of 'Old Man River,'" the reviewer wrote, "the audience can almost close its eyes and imagine Robeson onstage." At Northwestern University, Wendy MacLeod served on the "Screen and Stage Writer's Panel," along with Rebecca Gilman; Greg Berlanti, creator of Everwood ; and other film and television writers. The March 31 event kicked off Northwestern's new M.F.A. program in film and theater. One of MacLeod's plays, Juvenilia, was produced in Kenyon's Hill Theater in February.
Economics
David Harrington, Kathy Krynski, and Maya Federman, of Pitzer College, have published "Vietnamese Manicurists: Are Immigrants Displacing Natives or Finding New Nails to Polish?" in the January 2006 Industrial and Labor Relations Review, and "The Impact of State Licensing Regulations on Low-Skilled Immigrants: The Case of the Vietnamese Manicurists" in the May 2006 American Economic Review.
History
Matt Maguire's book, The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville , was published in March 2005 by Harvard University Press. Glenn McNair has been selected as one of thirty historians to-participate in the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History's-seminar on "Slavery: Scholarship and Public History" at Columbia-University in June 2006.
Mathematics
Judy Holdener and her husband, Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics Eric Holdener, are proud to announce the birth of their second son. Maxim Elias Holdener was born on February 27, 2006, and weighed 7 pounds, 15 ounces. Judy reports that everyone is doing well.
Modern Languages & Literatures
The Italian program at Kenyon has developed greatly in the last few years. Since the fall of 2004, James Mitchell, visiting assistant professor in French and Italian, has taught courses in Italian.In 2005, Enrico Vettore, visiting assistant professor in Italian, joined the program while Patricia Lyn Richards was on sabbatical. Last summer, Richards participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, "Inquisitions and Persecutions in Early Modern Europe and the Americas," at the University of Maryland, and in a Mellon Institute on Italian paleography at Chicago's Newberry Library. This spring, for the first time, Italian was taught in the Kenyon in Rome and Florence program by Serena Colasanti, who served as Kenyon Italian Teaching Fellow in 2002-03. She was succeeded in that position by Eleonora Redaelli in 2003-04.
Philosophy
Juan De Pascuale was interviewed by producers from Lucasfilms (the makers of Star Wars ) for a documentary on the life and work of Franz Kafka. The film is part of a series of documentaries on authors, movements, and events that have had a significant impact on contemporary culture; other interviewees for the series have included Deepak Chopra on Eastern religion and Frank McCourt for a biography of Sean O'Casey. De Pascuale was also invited by the National Research Council to serve as chair of the philosophy and religion panel of the Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship Program. This will be his sixth year serving on the panel, the second as chair. Yang Xiao continues to serve as the book review editor for DAO: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy (Kluwer/Springer). He has been invited to give a paper at the conference "Topics in Comparative Ancient Philosophy: Greek and Chinese," which he will attend in June at the University of Oxford, in England.
Political Science
David Rowe published an article titled "The Tragedy of Liberalism: How Globalization Caused the First World War" in the July-September 2005 issue of Security Studies (Vol. 14, No. 3).
Psychology
Michael Levine has won the 2006 Public Service and Advocacy Award of the Academy for Eating Disorders. Founded in 1993, the organization comprises more than one thousand eating disorders professionals around the world. Levine will be honored at the annual conference in June in Barcelona, Spain.
Religious Studies
In February, Joseph Adler was invited to participate in the conference on Neo-Confucianism and Global Philosophy at Wesleyan University, where he discussed his paper, "Zhu Xi's Spiritual Practice as the Basis of His Central Philosophical Concepts." Ennis Edmonds contributed three entries, "Revival Zion," "Ska," and "Anancy (Anansi)," to the Encyclopedia of African American Folklore, edited by Anand Prahlad, published in December 2005 by Greenwood Press. Edmonds also reviewed Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean, which was edited by Patrick Taylor and published in May 2001 by Indiana University Press, for the September 2005 issue of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. Professor Emeritus of Religion Donald Rogan is teaching "Jesus and the Gospels" again in the spring semester, but he promises it is the last time and he really will retire this time. Mary Suydam was invited to Loyola University in Chicago in October 2005 to give a lecture on "Medieval Gardens of Virtue" as part of a series titled "Gardens, Real and Imagined." She contributed a chapter, "Bringing Heaven Down to Earth: Beguine Constructions of Heaven" for Envisaging Heaven , edited by Carolyn Muessig and Ad Putter, which will be published by Routledge. She also wrote the article on Beguines for the Encyclopedia of Women in World History (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), as well as articles on Christian spirituality and performance theory for Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia (Taylor and Francis Publishing, forthcoming).
Sociology
John Macionis was named president of the board of directors of the Lake George Land Conservancy in Bolton Landing, New York. Founded in 1988, the land conservancy works to preserve the water quality, rare plants, and animals within the 150,000-acre Lake George watershed. To date, the Lake George Land Conservancy and its partners have protected more than 45,500 feet of shoreline and more than 10,600 acres of land. Macionis's family ties to Lake George go back more than a hundred years. George E. (Mac) McCarthy has been awarded a twelve-month National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship for next year. His topic, for which he has already received a book contract from SUNY Press, is titled "Aristotle and Kant in Classical Social Theory." He has also been contracted to write an article for a special edition on Continental philosophy for the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal of the New School for Social Research , titled "In Defense of Classical Democracy: The Funeral Orations of Pericles and Marx."
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