Faculty Digest
Art
Marcella Hackbardt had four digital photographs in the exhibit "Beautiful Dreamer" at the Spaces Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, in September and October. Karen Snouffer, who is on sabbatical leave this year, has been working on a painting project related to her father's role in World War II and the liberation of France. In May, she traveled to Epernay, France, a small town where her father, now deceased, had been billeted as a military police officer for several weeks after Patton's entry into the country. Snouffer met with the eighty-six-year-old Maurice Lausanne, a former member of the French police and French underground. She hopes to return in the spring of 2006 to exhibit her work in the Hôtel de Ville and to continue meeting citizens or family members of people who were touched by the German occupation and the eventual liberation by the Americans. One of the paintings from this project is on the cover of Professor of American Studies Peter Rutkoff's most recent book, The Last Hedgerow.
Art History
Sarah Blick is on sabbatical leave this year. She is continuing to edit Peregrinations, her online journal devoted to medieval art and architecture, while finishing editing a volume of essays on medieval art in memory of Brian Spencer and working on a book-length manuscript on the pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. In May 2006, she will be part of a round-table discussion on electronic publishing at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Melissa Dabakis will lead the first contingent of Kenyon students in the new off-campus study program, Kenyon in Rome and Florence (Italy). She and fourteen students, with majors ranging from art and art history to economics and classics, will be in residence in Trastevere (Rome) in February. They will spend three months in Rome and one month in Florence. While in Rome, Dabakis will continue her study of American women sculptors in Rome from 1850 to 1876. Two essays from this project will soon appear: "Angelika Kauffmann, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and the Arcadian Academy in Rome" in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture, and "'Ain't I a Woman?': Anne Whitney, Edmonia Lewis, and the Iconography of Emancipation" in Looking High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture. Eugene Dwyer is preparing two seminars, one on Pompeii and the other on the history of collecting, to be taught at Kenyon during the spring semester. He will give a paper on the Renaissance artist Hubert Goltzius at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in San Francisco in March. His essay on the victims of Pompeii will appear in a collection of papers, Antiquity Rediscovered. Visitor Monica Fullerton is offering a seminar on the art and archaeology of ancient Athens and will be teaching Greek art in the spring. In June, she will attend a conference in Siena on sacred images in the ancient Mediterranean. Kristen Van Ausdall will teach a seminar on women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy in the spring. Her article on Donatello's Eucharist Tabernacle has been accepted for publication in Artibus et Historiae and she is currently editing a book on Eucharist studies. Daniel Younger will accompany his wife, Melissa Dabakis, to Rome in the spring. The American Academy has offered him a visiting artist residency during March and April 2006. In addition to teaching and assisting with the administration of the Kenyon in Rome and Florence Program, Younger will work at the American Academy on his artistic and scholarly project, "Rome and the Touristic Image." This series of photographs taken in and around Rome reflects upon the visual languages of the touristic image and its display and consumption in different contexts throughout the city.
Biology
Christopher Gillen and Harry Itagaki competed in the Columbus Marathon in October. Gillen ran the entire race, while Itagaki participated in the relay portion with Patricia and Ray Heithaus. In January, Gillen and Itagaki accompanied Kenyon seniors Marissa Stearns, Rhadha Thombre, and Meredith Wylde as they presented their work to the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology meetings. Andrew Kerkhoff published an article in the October issue of the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography titled "Plant allometry, stoichiometry, and the temperature-dependence of primary production." It was coauthored by Brian Enquist from the University of Arizona, James Elser of Arizona State University, and William Fagan from the University of Maryland. The paper presents a mathematical model of how geographical variation in growing- season temperature, the stature of plant communities, and their use of nitrogen and phosphorus affect the flux of carbon between the atmosphere and the biosphere. Understanding this process is important for predicting ecosystem responses to global warming. Kerkhoff, with Kenyon senior biology major Katherine Boicourt, is also testing one of the important underlying assumptions of the model: whether the size distribution of plants affects small-stature communities like prairies, meadows, deserts, and tundras in the same way it affects larger-stature communities. Boicourt and Kerkhoff have begun a pilot study examining the size distribution of the plants in the restored prairie at the Brown Family Environmental Center. Boicourt is also beginning a study describing the different "niches" of prairie plant species based on measurable characteristics of their leaves, stems, and seeds. Wade Powell's laboratory group has published a new paper, "Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptors in the frog Xenopus laevis: Two AHR1 paralogs exhibit low affinity for 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin," in the November issue of Toxicological Sciences, the journal of the Society of Toxicology. The authors, in addition to Powell, are Catherine Beck '02, Emelyne Dengler '05, Tatyana Klimova '03, Jeremy Lavine '04, Ashley Rowatt '03, and Aric Whitington '04.
Chemistry
Yutan Getzler was the sole organizer of the Sixth Annual Ohio Inorganic Meeting, which convened on Kenyon's campus this fall. The meeting, initiated by the inorganic chemistry faculty at Ohio State University, moves around the state. This was the first year that it was hosted at a nondoctoral-granting institution. More than eighty people from Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania attended, including a number of Kenyon students who presented their research during the conference. The topics discussed included chemical sensing, bio-inorganic model compounds, MRI contrast agents, anti-cancer agents, photochemistry, nanoparticle synthesis, fundamental structural studies, and new catalysts. Sheryl Hemkin and Maxim Lavrentovich '08 presented their research on the modeling of spontaneous calcium oscillations in astrocytes at the International Society for Neurochemistry in Innsbruck, Austria, last August.
Dance
Balinda Craig-Quijada celebrated receiving tenure by giving birth to Felix Brooks-Quijada in September. Husband Philip Brooks is caring for Felix as Craig-Quijada returns to teaching this spring. Professor of Dance Emeritus Maggie Patton is teaching part-time and directing opera for Otterbein College's music department. In January, Patton was the stage director and choreographer for Otterbein's collaboration with the Columbus School for Girls on a production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a one-act opera for children. She is directing Otterbein's production of The Marriage of Figaro, to be performed in February. Patton traveled to London, England, and then to Italy, where she enjoyed opera productions at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and La Scala in Milan.
Drama
Daniel Elihu Kramer directed Love Suicide at the Cleveland Public Theater January 13-15. Kramer created the piece, based on the classical Japanese play The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, in collaboration with a group of current Kenyon drama students, five of whom performed in the piece. Kramer was one of just five artists invited from among fifty-two proposals to be a part of Public Theater's annual Big Box series. He and the students were in residence from January 9-15. Wendy MacLeod has been invited--along with writers Lisa Kron, Theresa Rebeck, and Byrony Lavery--to write a monologue for The Virgin Mary Project, which will be performed at the Bric Studio in New York City in late April. Her play about skateboarders in Washington, D.C., Thrash, was done as a workshop at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference in July. It had a reading at Arena Stage in September and a reading in New York City in November. Jonathan Tazewell presented "Ritual and Religion in the Theater" at a Brown Bag Chat at the Mount Vernon and Knox County Library in November. The discussion was based on the play The Gospel at Colonus, which Tazewell will direct at Kenyon in the spring semester.
Economics
Jay Corrigan's paper, "Posted Price and Bid Affiliation: Evidence from Experimental Auctions," will be published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. The project was funded in part by a Kenyon Faculty Development Grant and initial data were collected with the help of Sarah Kelsey and John Runne of the Class of 2005. Assistant Professor of Economics at Susquehanna University Matthew Rousu was the coauthor on the paper. David Harrington and Kathy Krynski were resident scholars at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research last summer and presented a seminar on the impact of state licensing regulations on low-skilled immigrants, in particular Vietnamese manicurists. They presented that same paper at the American Economics Association meetings in January. Harrington also presented papers at Ohio State University, Clemson University, and the Southern Economic Association meetings. Their paper (with Maya Federman), "Vietnamese Manicurists: Are Immigrants Displacing Natives or Finding New Nails to Polish?" appears in the January 2006 edition of the Industrial and Labor Relations Review.
English
Visiting Assistant Professor of English Joseph Campana had a volume of poems, The Book of Faces, published on November 1. He presented a public reading of this new work on campus in November. David Lynn is leading the Kenyon-Exeter Program this year along with his wife, Wendy Singer of the history faculty. They have been traveling with eighteen students to theaters in Stratford-upon-Avon, London, and Bristol. Especially exciting were inventive productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Comedy of Errors by the Royal Shakespeare Company. They have also seen some contemporary theater productions, including a new play by David Edgar called Playing with Fire, which portrays racial conflict in contemporary Britain. Janet McAdams is editing a new series of books by indigenous writers called Earthworks. Launched in April 2005, the series includes works by Carter Revard (Osage), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), Deborah Miranda (Chumash/Esselen), Heid Erdric (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), and Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee/ Lumbee). For her work with the series, McAdams was named Publisher of the Year by the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. In conjunction with the New Medicines Festival of Native Writers, McAdams gave a reading from her poetry at Washington and Lee University in May 2005. Her poem, Ohio Road Song, appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Shenandoah. Timothy Shutt has two new recorded courses and accompanying books. The first is Dante's Divine Comedy, released in 2005, and the second is Masterpieces of Medieval Literature, which will be released in early 2006.
History
Wendy Singer, who is administering the Kenyon-Exeter Program with her husband, David Lynn, attended a conference at Oxford University on the "State of Play in South Asian History" and served as a commentator on a paper about political influences on the discipline of history. She also spoke at the London School of Economics on her research about women's quotas and Indian elections.
Mathematics
Judy Holdener's paper "When Thue-Morse meets Koch," coauthored by Kenyon student Jun Ma '05, appeared in the September issue of the journal Fractals: Complex Geometry, Patterns, and Scaling in Nature and Society. Holdener presented this work in October at the American Mathematical Society's Eastern Section Meeting at Bard College in New York. A second paper titled "Product-free Sets and the Card Game SET" appeared in the journal PRIMUS in December 2005. This work was presented at the Mathematical Association of America Ohio section meeting at Ashland University in October. In early November, Holdener gave a talk at Ohio Wesleyan University titled "Perfect Numbers and the Abundancy Index." This talk was based on her recent work in number theory, some of which was published in the "Proceedings of the 'Art and Math = X' Conference" at the University of Colorado in Boulder in June 2005. It features a mathematical painting that she created during her sabbatical year in 2004-05. A short paper titled "Two Sums of Sines and Cosines" will appear in a forthcoming issue of Mathematics Magazine.
Modern Languages and Literatures
Jianhua Bai prepared a chapter, published in September, titled "Overview: Past, Present, and Future [of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language]" for the AP Chinese Teacher's Guide. He was nominated to serve on the Executive Council of the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages for the 2005-06 year. In addition, he was invited to serve on the National Advisory Board for the Center for Language Education and Research for the term 2006-10, as well as to serve as chair of the AP Chinese Language and Culture Exam Development Committee for Educational Testing Service and The College Board. Bai participated in the project "Establishing High-Quality Chinese Language Programs: A How-to Guide," sponsored by the Asia Society in October 2005 in New York City. In November, he chaired a panel, "Beyond Cracking the Code: Semantic and Pragmatic Considerations on Grammar Pedagogy," at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language/Chinese Language Teachers Association conference in Baltimore. He also presented a paper, "Beyond Prescription: a Task-based Approach to Teaching Training," at the conference. In December, he was invited by the University of Southern California to present a talk on "AP Chinese and its Possible Impact on the Chinese Foreign Language Field." Marta Sierra wrote a chapter, "Cuéntame un cuento chino: la estética sin territorio de Luisa Futoransky," published in La palabra itinerante de Luisa Futoransky in November. In addition, the following articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals: "Las tierras de la memoria: las estéticas sin territorio de Witold Gombrowicz y Felisberto Hernández" in Hispanic Review; "De caníbales, piratas y polígrafas: escritura, obscenidad y mutilación en Alejandra Pizarnik" in Latin American Literary Review; "Mundo grúa: las paradojas del cuerpo y la máquina en la sociedad argentina de los años noventa" in Argentina en su literatura, Volume VIII; "Oblique Views: Artistic Doubling, Ironic Mirroring and Photomontage in the Works of Norah Lange and Norah Borges" in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos; and "Máquinas, ficciones y sociedades secretas: Caterva de Juan Filloy y La ciudad ausente de Ricardo Piglia" in Revista Iberoamericana. In October, she presented "Visiones desde el corner: Construcciones visuales y discurso literario en la producción femenina de la vanguardia" at the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Association of Hispanic Women Writers in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Sierra is working on a book project on travel narratives that focus on trans-oceanic trips between Europe and South America. The book will consider issues of exile and deterritorialization. She plans to review the literature produced in the ships that crossed the Atlantic, considering a wide array of manifestations (travel accounts produced by scientists and missionaries, travel journals by intellectuals, diaries by immigrants, and fiction and poetry written during the transoceanic passage) and exploring how they affected the national literature of Argentina.
Philosophy
Juan De Pascuale has been appointed by the National Research Council of the National Academies to serve as chair of the philosophy and religion panel for the Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship Program. This is De Pascuale's fifth year on the panel and second year as chair. Yang Xiao presented two papers last summer. The first, titled "The Power of Virtue," was presented at the Ninth East-West Philosophers' Conference, "Educations and Their Purposes: A Philosophical Dialogue among Cultures," at the University of Hawaii. He presented the second, "The Pragmatic Turn: Articulating Linguistic Practice in Early China," at the conference "Argument and Persuasion in Ancient Chinese Texts" at the Catholic University of Leuven in The Netherlands.
Physics
Benjamin Schumacher gave one of the four plenary lectures at the 2005 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Symposium on Information Theory in Adelaide, Australia, in September.
Religious Studies
Miriam Dean-Otting is on sabbatical leave this year. She is spending her time in Gambier working on a book on modern prophets. She hopes to finish the manuscript by March, leaving time for additional projects before her sabbatical concludes.
Sociology
Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Teaching Fellow Anna Xiao Dong Sun presented a paper based on one of her dissertation chapters at the 2005 Social Science History Association conference in Portland, Oregon, on November 5. She also chaired a session titled "The Lines of Secularism and Religion." When the acclaimed Chinese-American writer Ha Jin visited Kenyon as part of the Faculty Lectureship series November 14-15, Sun was one of the faculty hosts and she, along with Assistant Professor of Philosophy Yang Xiao, conducted a public interview with Ha Jin in Higley Hall Auditorium.
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