Faculty and Staff Notes

Marco Wilkinson, managing editor at Oberlin College Press, has been awarded a Hemera Foundation Tending Space Fellowship. The Hemera Foundation provides fellowships to artists and writers to engage contemplative practice as part of their creative practice. This fellowship will allow Wilkinson to attend a workshop at Zen Mountain Monastery conducted by noted translator and writer David Hinton. The workshop will focus on Daoist roots and concepts of wilderness in early Chinese Zen practice.

Professor Emeritus of Computer Science Richard M. Salter joined his colleague, Professor of Environmental Science Wayne M. Getz (University of California, Berkeley) to present a week-long workshop at Hong Kong University. The workshop entitled "Population Modeling/Quantitative Ecology Workshop using the NOVA Computational Software Platform," presented the mathematical techniques used in population modeling and demography, as well as resource, movement, and disease ecology, and showed how they can be applied to simulations created with Salter's Nova modeling system. Attendees were able to obtain hands-on experience with the new Nova 3 version of the software, which will make its appearance in Oberlin in the fall.

Salter is also continuing his collaboration with Oberlin College Professor of Psychology Nancy Darling. The pair are putting the finishing touches on a chapter that will appear in an upcoming book on collaborative modeling.

Associate Professor of German Elizabeth Hamilton delivered the keynote address at Bates College's May Conference on May 12, 2017. Hamilton's talk was titled "Universal Design and the Architecture of the Liberal Arts." This year's theme for the annual meeting on pedagogy and curricular design was "Beyond Compliance." The conference included small-group workshops on syllabus design and a student panel on learning styles and barriers to academic progress.

Lynn Powell, director of Oberlin Writers-in-the-Schools (WITS) in the Creative Writing Program, has been awarded the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry for her third collection of poems, Season of the Second Thought. Her book will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in the fall of 2017.

Sheila Miyoshi Jager, professor of East Asian studies, was commissioned to write a chapter in Cambridge University Press' major new four-volume reference work, the Cambridge History of America and the World, which will offer a capacious and comprehensive account of American engagement in the world from 1500 to the present.

Jager will write the chapter on United States' relationship with Japan, China, Russia, and other countries, tentatively titled "Competing Empires in Asia" for Volume 3, which covers 1900-1945. The General Series Editor is Mark P. Bradley (University of Chicago) and Vol. 3 will be edited by Brooke L. Blower (Boston University) and Andrew Preston (Cambridge University). The series is scheduled to be published in 2020.

Assistant Professor of Dance Alysia Ramos performed her duet Time Certainties Peace at The Ohio Dance Festival on April 29, 2017, in Columbus, Ohio. This work, inspired by Paolo Coelho's text "The Good Fight" was made in collaboration with Ghanaian dancer Mustapha Braimah. Through dance and text, the work addresses the challenge of enduring in the fight for one's dreams in spite of obstacles both without and within. Oberlin Conservatory students Aliya Ultan (cello) and Patrick Graney (percussion) composed and performed musical accompaniment for the piece.

Shelley Lee, associate professor of history and comparative American studies, gave a lecture to the history department at University of Denver entitled: “Immigration and History in the Age of Trump.” The talk on May 17, 2017, reflected her work as a historian of immigration and role as a citizen in the current political moment. It also built upon recent public intellectual and activist work in which Lee has engaged.

Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand gave three public lectures during spring semester. In February, Ormand was the keynote speaker at the University of Tennessee’s annual undergraduate conference in classics, delivering a talk titled “Sexualized Violence: the Eurymedon Vase in Context.” This talk presented the controversial “Eurymedon Vase,” an early 5th century Athenian wine vase (currently in Hamburg) in the context of sexual practices and their ideological depictions of Persians and Scythians.  In March, Ormand delivered “Helen in Fragments” to the graduate program in Classics at the University of Cincinnati. The paper explores the alternative traditions surrounding Helen of Troy and a possible intertextual allusion to the fragments of Stesichorus in a fragment from Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women. In April, Ormand initiated a new series of workshops for graduate students in Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, on job training, the job market, and professional development. 

Professor of Writing and Communication Laurie Hovell McMillin serves as the editor-in-chief for Away Journal. An essay in the publication, penned by Adriana Páramo, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

In April 2017, Assistant Professor of Classics Christopher Trinacty gave three lectures. The first, “Wild Nothing: Teaching Latin Intertextuality,” was presented at the annual Classical Association of the Middle West and South meeting in Kitchener, Ontario. This lecture detailed the way Trinacty uses pop music to discuss allusion in Latin poetry. A second paper, “Intertext to Intratext in Senecan Prose and Poetry,” was given at the Midwest Classical Literature Consortium in Athens, Ohio. This talk analyzed the way that Seneca the Younger utilized intertexts in different manners in his prose and poetry. The final talk, “C.H. Sisson in Exile,” was given as part of the conference Revisiting C.H. Sisson: Modernist, Classicist, Translator, at Kings College, London. This paper pointed out certain aspects of the reception of Ovid’s exile poetry in the works of the English poet C.H. Sisson.