Faculty and Staff Notes

Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager's latest book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013) was reviewed by the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden, the Netherlands).

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Stiliana Milkova coedited a special issue of the journal Romance Studies (41.4, 2023) where her article "The Trauma of Language Learning and Self-Translation in Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri” was published. Milkova also published a peer-reviewed personal essay in Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts reflecting on student and faculty vulnerability post-Covid.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Anna Levett reviewed Mark Polizzotti’s new book Why Surrealism Matters for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Jillian Scudder contributed a talk on recent and upcoming work, “Conversions between gas-phase metallicities in the nearby Universe,” at the Chemical Abundances in Gaseous Nebulae workshop in São José dos Campos, Brazil. The workshop was hosted by Universidade do Vale do Paraiba.

Associate Professor of Creative Writing Emily Barton reviews Lina Wolff's new novel, The Devil's Grip, for the Times Literary Supplement (London).

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine participated in a panel titled “Short Stories: A Slice of Life” at the L.A. Times Book Festival, where his story collection Dearborn was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Dearborn was recently selected as the New York Public Library’s Book of the Day and was also longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. The story collection was awarded the 2023 Khayrallah Book Prize and included in Kirkus Reviews’ “20 Fiction Breakthroughs That Live Up to the Hype.” The book has been named a 2024 Michigan Notable Book, a 2024 American Library Association Notable Book, and a Best Fiction Book of 2023 by Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, the Chicago Public Library, Powell’s, and the Writer’s Bone, and a Good Housekeeping Best Book of Fall and a Washington Post Best Book of September, among other honors.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Jessica Madison Pískatá was interviewed for an episode of the University of Toronto’s Buddhist Studies Footnotes podcast on the intersection of poetry, geology, Buddhism, and more-than-human sociality in Mongolia.

James F. Clark Professor of Mathematics Robert (Bob) Bosch ’85 was one of two plenary speakers at the 39th Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Conference. While there, Bob unveiled two pieces of mathematical artwork that had been commissioned by the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Mathematics Department.

On May 1, 2024, the Texas National Security Review, founded by University of Texas at Austin and War on the Rocks, published a roundtable review by four reviewers of Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager's recent book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023).

Emeritus Professor of Comparative American Studies Wendy Kozol’s new book, The War In-Between: Indexing a Visual Culture of Survival (Fordham UP, 2024), examines visual representations of banal and quotidian aspects of military violence. Artifacts ranging from photograms and videos to data visualizations and fabric art provide alternative ways of witnessing both the everyday experiences of militarism and the enduring impacts of physical and emotional trauma.