Faculty and Staff Notes

Associate Professor of Singing Lorraine Manz has been unanimously elected to membership of the American Academy of Teachers of Singing. Established in 1945, the AATS consists of nationally recognized teachers of singing and voice experts, as well as esteemed performers of classical and contemporary commercial music, noted authors, and voice science researchers. The academy consists of only 30 members, and all members are admitted solely by invitation. Manz will be inducted in a ceremony at Columbia University’s Teachers College on February 10.

On February 22, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art will host a symposium, Underground No More, that will explore Professor of Art and African American Studies Johnny Coleman’s installation, Flight: Requiem for Lee Howard Dobbins. The 4-year-old Dobbins died in 1853 in Oberlin, where he had arrived with his adopted mother after fleeing slavery in Kentucky.Composed of six tons of Ohio River rock and West African-inspired seats made of recovered oak, hickory, maple, and rusted tin, Flight also includes an audio recording of the woven voices of African American women from Oberlin speaking to the child and the sound of the first moment of the new day recorded just before midnight on Lake Erie’s Kelley’s Island. “The space is intended to be a place of rest,” says Coleman, “one within which this boy who died alone among strangers is claimed, his beauty acknowledged.”

Professor of Psychology Nancy Darling has received two recent honors. She was elected to the executive council of the Society for Research in Adolescence, an international, multidisciplinary society fostering the study of youth during the second decade of life. She also was awarded an honorary doctorate from Orebro University in Sweden for lifetime achievement. Darling’s most recent paper, “What’s in a name? Distinguishing between routine disclosure and self-disclosure,” was published in October in the Journal of Research on Adolescence.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics Simanti Banerjee is coauthor of a chapter, “Incentives, Private Ownership, and Biodiversity Conservation,” that appears in the recently published book Nature in the Balance: The Economics of Biodiversity.

Professor of Mathematics Jim Walsh was lead author on the paper “A dynamics approach to a low order climate model,” which appeared recently in the journal Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems Series B. The paper presented the mathematical analysis of a model focused on the extensive glacial events of the Neoproterozoic Era. Walsh also gave two presentations at the 2014 Joint Mathematics Meeting, held January 15 to 18 in Baltimore. The first talk, given in the AMS Session on Fractal Geometry, Complex Dynamics, and Dynamical Systems, concerned research with Chris Rackauckas ’13 on the Jormungand climate model. The second talk was given in an MAA Session titled Undergraduate Sustainability Experiences in the Introductory Mathematics Classroom.This talk recapped Walsh’s experience incorporating climate modeling into his MATH 234 course.

A Chicago Reporter article about junior ROTC programs in the Chicago public schools features an interview with Gina Pérez,the Eric and Jane Nord Associate Professor of Comparative American Studies. The article, “In Chicago schools’ Junior ROTC programs, some see a troubling trend”, notes that “Ninety-three percent of Chicago junior reserve cadets are African American or Hispanic, ... and more than 70 percent of junior reserve programs are offered in high schools located in majority-black or majority-Latino ZIP codes ....” Pérez told reporter Matthew Kovac that part of the program’s popularity in those segments of the population can be attributed to the fact that they allow “... working-class and minority youth an opportunity to dispel negative stereotypes and avoid profiling by associating themselves with one of the country’s most venerated.” Read the article.

A paper by Associate Professor of Economics Ron Cheung and two coauthors, “Do homeowners associations mitigate or aggravate negative spillovers from neighboring homeowner distress?”, was recently published in the Journal of Housing Economics.

Three poems from Sky Ward, Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature Kazim Ali’s newest poetry collection, were featured in THEthe Poetry’s Poem(s) of the Week section in December 2013. The poetics blog also featured an interview with Ali conducted by Jorge Rodriguez-Miralles. During January, Ali is the featured blogger on the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Jason D. Haugen and Miriam Rothenberg ’12 recently presented their joint research at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) annual meeting in Minneapolis. Their paper, “Allomorphy in the Classical Nahuatl ‘Nonactive,’” investigates the nature of verb-stem and affix alternations in Classical Nahuatl passive and impersonal constructions. This work extends research that began when Rothenberg was a research assistant for Haugen at Oberlin. Haugen also copresented a second paper, “Base-dependent reduplication and learnability,” with coauthor Adam Ussishkin, associate professor in the University of Arizona’s Department of Linguistics, at the annual meeting of the SSILA’s sister society, the Linguistic Society of America, at the same conference

Foreign Affairs magazine has chosen Associate Professor Sheila Miyoshi Jager’s newest book, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea, as one of three of the most important books on Asia reviewed during the last year. The books were selected by Andrew Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. The other titles are David Shambaugh's China Goes Global: The Partial Power and Sumantra Bose’s Transforming India: Challenges to the World’s Largest Democracy. .