Faculty Digest
AnthropologyOn Saturday, May 7, the Department of Anthropology arranged a post-retirement celebration for Professor Emeritus Ken Smail , who retired in June 2004 after thirty-one years at Kenyon. In addition to preparing a "memory book" of letters and e-mails from more than forty of Ken's past students and dedicating a commemorative plaque in the Olof Palme House student lounge, the department hosted a dinner at Weaver Cottage. The meal was attended by fifteen former students (representing each decade from the 1970s through the early 2000s), current and previous anthropology faculty members, and members of Ken's immediate family. Former students who would like to add their reminiscences to Smail's memory book are encouraged to write him at the department or send him an e-mail (smail@kenyon.edu). Ken plans to continue residing in Gambier for the indefinite future.
Art and Art History
Eugene Dwyer was one of four keynote speakers at a conference in June in Cardiff, Wales, titled "The Fragmented Figure: A Conference with an Associated Exhibition Convened and Curated by The Centre for Ceramics Studies, Cardiff School of Art and Design." His paper, "From Fragment to Icon: Stages in the Making and Exhibiting of the Casts of Pompeian Victims, 1863-1888," will be published in a special issue of Interpreting Ceramics, an international refereed electronic journal. The journal may be found at www.interpretingceramics.com. Marcella Hackbardt has a photograph included in the "Close to Home" exhibition at the Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, Connecticut. Her digital photograph, "Release," won a national photography contest and will appear on the cover of the poetry journal Alligator Juniper, published by Prescott College in Arizona.
Biology
Wade Powell attended the Thirteenth International Symposium on Pollution Responses in Marine Organisms (PRIMO 13) in Alessandria, Italy, in June. He presented a paper titled "Mechanisms of dioxin insensitivity vary during development of the frog Xenopus laevis" based on the work of Blythe Philips '05, Emelyne Dengler '05 , and Thomas Susman '04 .
Chemistry
The chemistry department welcomes new faculty memberJohn Hofferberth. He joins the department from Kalamazoo College, where he was visiting assistant professor of chemistry for two years. The department will offer two new courses in the coming year: a non-majors course on topics relating to solar energy and an upper-level seminar on enzyme mechanisms. The department is also restructuring its introductory chemistry curriculum. There will continue to be two tracks of introductory chemistry in the fall semester, based on students' secondary-school chemistry and math preparation. But in the spring semester, lecture and lab courses will be offered focusing on the principles of chemistry as they apply to two different areas: (1) biophysical and medicinal chemistry, and (2) nanoscience and materials chemistry. Scott Cummings attended a National Science Foundation workshop on "Materials Science and Nanotechnology for Chemists" at Beloit College in Wisconsin in July to gather ideas and laboratory experiments for the new courses.
Classics
In June, Paolo Asso revised and submitted for publication in specialized journals several essays on Africa in Roman epic. These essays are part of a book-length project on Africa in the literary imagination of the Romans. From July 1 to August 15, Asso resided in Princeton, New Jersey, where he planned to complete a draft of his commentary on Book IV of Lucan's Civil War. Michael Barich celebrated the graduation from Kenyon of his son Daniel Slonczewski Barich '05 and continues to work toward publication of his translation of Valerius Flaccus' Latin epic on Jason and the Argonauts. During the fall semester, Robert Bennett is at the Newberry Library in Chicago, team-teaching a seminar on "The Problem of Slavery and Visions of Freedom in Western Culture." He will return to Kenyon for the spring semester. He played Armand in the Kenyon Musical Theater-Opera Workshop production of Once On this Island in May. Fred Drogula '92 received his doctorate in history from the University of Virginia in the spring and will teach Latin and Roman history in the classics department during the 2005-06 school year. Associate Professor Carolin Hahnemann completed her 2004-05 sabbatical by spending the month of July doing research and traveling in Greece with her husband Andrew Duffy '01 . She will chair the department in 2005-06. William McCulloh is thriving in retirement in Gambier, playing the viola with the Knox County Symphony and teaching Sanskrit. Former faculty member Harrianne Mills, who lives and works in Stanford, California, visited Kenyon in the spring with the baby she is adopting, Lucas Julian Mills, who was born in January 2005. Kenyon president S. Georgia Nugent has been lecturing on Ovid to alumni groups this year and will team-teach "Classical Mythology" in the fall with Paolo Asso. Amber Scaife spent the summer in Knox County continuing her research on Cicero's correspondence. The recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for 2005-06, Adam Serfass will be a visiting scholar this year in the Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Program at the University of California, Berkeley, where he will continue his research on ecclesiastical economics in late antiquity. Emeritus professor Clifford Weber lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He represented Kenyon at last winter's American Philological Association meeting in Boston.
Dance
Julie Brodie taught two master classes at the OhioDance conference at the University of Akron in June. She also performed in Columbus's first Fringe Festival with Kristina Isabelle's HighJinks Dance Company. In August, she presented a movement session titled "Labanotation and Technique: Bridging the Gap to Build Articulate Dancers" at the International Council of Kineto- graphy Laban annual conference in London, England. She has been invited to guest-edit a special issue of the Journal of Dance Education about incorporating somatic techniques into dance classes. She was recently elected a member of the Dance Notation Bureau Professional Advisory Committee.
Economics
Jay Corrigan published an article, "Is the Experimental Auction a Dynamic Market?," in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics. He has co-authored articles forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Education and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, "Local Residential Sorting and Public Goods Provision: A Classroom Demonstration" and "The Effect of Initial Endowments in Experimental Auctions."
English
Sarah Heidt presented a paper, "Composing the Carlyles," at the Northeast Victorian Studies Association's annual conference. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "Media in Transition" conference, she presented "Publishing Poverty: Contemporary Narratives of Social Suffering." During the summer, she worked on a book about Victorian autobiography and selfhood and developed new courses in Victorian poetry and Victorian world exploration. She traveled to Lancaster, England, for a conference on Victorian life-writing, where she presented "'The Materials for a Life': Collaboration, Publication, and the Carlyles' Afterlives." She also traveled to Santa Cruz, California, for the 2005 Dickens Universe.
History
Glen McNair will be joining Professor of Classics Robert Bennett in directing the Newberry Library's Seminar in the Humanities during the fall semester in Chicago, Illinois. The seminar brings together students from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) and Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) to grapple with large questions in the humanities. McNair and Bennett will be exploring "The Problem of Slavery and Visions of Freedom in Western Culture." More information about the seminar can be found at http://www.acm.edu/newberry/fallsem.html.
Modern Languages and Literatures
Mortimer Guiney is currently editing an issue of Yale French Studies titled "French Education, Fifty Years Later." It will commemorate the 1958 issue on French education of the same journal, and consists of contributions by French, American, and British scholars on the history, theory, and current state of literary pedagogy in the French educational system. In October, he will present a talk at the conference of Nineteenth Century French Studies in Austin, Texas, on "Reading Images and the Image of Reading in Popular Education: Larousse, Augé, Bruno." He will also help the modern languages and literatures department host the Claude Beauclair Theater Company, which will perform Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit at Kenyon on Friday, November 4, in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of Sartre's birth.
Music
Camilla Cai retired from the Kenyon faculty on June 30. Joining the faculty as her replacement is Victoria Malawey , who will teach music theory and gender studies. Cai is moving to Farmington, Maine, where she will continue to do research in music, while finishing an edition of piano music by Johannes Brahms as well as a book on Norwegian music in America.
Philosophy
Yang Xiao presented two papers this past summer. The first, "The Power of Virtue," was presented at the The Ninth East-West Philosophers' Conference "Educations and Their Purposes: A Philosophical Dialogue among Cultures" at the University of Hawaii on June 1. The second, "The Pragmatic Turn: Articulating Linguistic Practice in Early China," was presented at the conference "Argument and Persuasion in Ancient Chinese Texts" at Catholic University of Leuven on June 10.
Political Science
The Department of Political Science welcomes new visiting faculty members Abbie Erler (Yale University) and Ewa Atanassow (University of Chicago) to Kenyon. Erler will be teaching courses in American politics and Atanassow in political theory; both will teach "Quest for Justice." The department also welcomes its Bradley Fellow, Paul Kirkland (Fordham University), who will teach "Quest for Justice." Joseph Klesner will be a Fulbright Scholar at University College Dublin (Ireland) for the 2005-06 academic year. He will be collaborating with a group of scholars led by Chappell Lawson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a National Science Foundation-funded panel survey of Mexico centered around issue formation in the 2006 Mexican presidential campaign. His article, "Electoral Competition and the New Party System in Mexico," recently appeared in Latin American Politics and Society. His chapter, "Institutionalizing Mexico's Democracy," is forthcoming in The Changing Structure of Mexico: Political, Social, and Economic Prospects. It will also appear in Spanish in a Mexican edition to be published in early 2006.
Religious Studies
Miriam Dean-Otting was the Saul Reinfeld lecturer in Judaic Studies at Connecticut College in April. She taught a seminar on the Holocaust and theology and delivered a public lecture titled "Ever Greater Misery: The French Transit Camps, 1940-42." She will be on leave during the 2005-06 academic year writing a book on prophecy. Mary Suydam was a speaker at a conference on performance and performativity in the Middle Ages at the University of Chicago in May.
Sociology
John Macionis spent the summer with his family at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. While there, he spends much of his time assisting in the fundraising efforts of the Lake George Land Conservancy, which seeks to limit development of the basin in the interest of maintaining the lake's outstanding water quality. Although he is on sabbatical during the next academic year, Macionis will be teaching the sociology department's senior seminar in the fall. In October, he will be the keynote speaker at the Pennsylvania Sociological Society's annual meeting at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. The title of the talk is "Sociology Confronts the World: Past, Present, and Future." George McCarthy received a contract from SUNY Press for his tenth book, Between Traditions: Aristotle and Kant in Classical Social Theory. Over the summer, he prepared an essay for an invitation-only special edition on nineteenth-century philosophy for the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, New School for Social Research. The article is titled "In Defense of Classical Democracy: The Funeral Orations of Pericles and Marx." Anna Xiao Dong Sun gave a paper on religion and politics in China titled "Unsettled Controversies" at the Association for the Sociology of Religion annual conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in August. Jan Thomas led an off-campus studies program for the University of Kansas in Stockholm, Sweden, over the summer. The course, "Health Care and Social Politics in Sweden," included a variety of professional visits to hospitals, a primary-care clinic, public and private maternity programs, a social service agency for immigrants, a youth clinic, a child-care facility, an adolescent mental-health unit, the National Insurance Board, the Stockholm County Council, and the National Board of Health. Jan is spending her sabbatical year (2005-06) in Sweden conducting research on Swedish women's health services.
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