Faculty and Staff Notes

Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Global Public Health Evangeline M. Heiliger presented her research, “Cancer Femme as Biopossibility: Queer Feminist Science Studies, Transfeminisms, Audre Lorde, and Breast Cancer Surgery” at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference. She also presented “Polar Bears and Electric Plugs: Twenty-First Century Queer American Masculinities.” at the 26th Annual American Men’s Studies Conference. The theme of the conference was Bodies, Sexualities, Masculinities.

Associate Professor of History Shelley Lee co-edited A Companion to Korean American Studies, an interdisciplinary anthology of essays by more than 30 authors.

Professor of Physics Yumi Ijiri gave two presentations on manganese ferrite nanoparticles and chaired a session at the International Conference on Magnetism, held in San Francisco, CA from July 15-20.  Oberlin students Jane Hsieh '20, Ian Hunt-Isaak '17, and Hillary Pan '17 were co-authors on the presentations, along with scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

Professor of Mathematics Jim Walsh's paper "Neoproterozoic glacial ages in a nonsmooth conceptual model" has appeared in the Journal of Physics Communications. The paper concerns a nonsmooth geometric singular perturbation problem that arises in a mathematical model of the great glacial ages of the Neoproterozoic Era.

Renee Romano, the Robert S. Danforth Professor of history, gave interviews and presentations about her new co-edited collection, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past. The book explores the musical’s historical accuracy, whether it’s revolutionary, and why it has been so incredibly popular. Romano did an interview about Hamilton for WCPN Ideastream’s The Sound of Applause on July 16, a day before the touring show of Hamilton opened in Cleveland. The collection has been featured in stories on Smithsonian.com and in the podcast, In the Past Lane. Romano and several of the volume’s contributors conducted a panel discussion at the Society of Cincinnati in Washington, D.C. on August 2, 2018.

Michael Parkin, professor of politics, coauthored an article in the Social Science Computer Review on how congressional campaign insiders viewed and used the web in 2016. The article, titled "Resisting the Opportunity for Change," shows that congressional campaigning on the web is largely driven by stable factors that transcend technological advancements and shifts in the political environment.

Cynthia Taylor published the paper "A Multi-Institution Exploration of Peer Instruction in Practice" in the proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE).

Clayton Koppes, professor of history, presented a paper titled "Hostility, Heroism, and Hope: How to Have History in an Epidemic" at the Australian History Association annual conference  on July 5 in Canberra. David Kelly, an independent scholar from Palm Springs, California, coauthored and co-presented. The paper covered the history of HIV/AIDS in the United States.

Jody Kerchner, professor of music education, was elected to serve as a board member of the International Society of Music Education (ISME).

Stephen Crowley, professor of politics, was interviewed for WCPN’s The Sound of Ideas and WVIZ’s Ideas to provide perspective on a summit between President Trump and Vladimir Putin.