Faculty and Staff Notes

Home Affairs, a collaborative exhibition between Associate Professor of Studio Art Nanette Yannuzzi and Turkish-born artist Arzu Ozkal, was on display May 10-June 7 at the Art Produce Gallery in San Diego, California. The ongoing collaboration intends to challenge mainstream representations of motherhood though a photo-based, screen printing project.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics Bogdan Popa has been awarded the 2015 American Political Science Association Kenneth Sherrill Best Dissertation Award for his PhD dissertation. The Kenneth Sherrill Best Dissertation Award recognizes the best dissertation on sexuality and politics completed and successfully defended in the previous two calendar years.

Popa will be teaching courses in political theory at Oberlin during the 2015-16 academic year.

The exhibition Even If by Assistant Professor of Studio Art Kristina Paabus is on view at Fernwey Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, May 15-June 14. In tandem with the show, Fernwey Editions published a series of lithographic prints, and Lauren Fulton wrote the essay “Data Mining: Kristina Paabus Mapping the Game.”

Paabus also recently had her work selected from the permanent collection at The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts for a group show, The Residents, which took place in Stalder Gallery at the Falls City Library and Art Center in Falls City, Nebraska.

An article co-authored by Sebastiaan Faber, professor of Hispanic studies and chair of Latin American studies, and Bécquer Seguín was published in the Nation. The article, "In Spain’s Seismic Elections, ‘It’s the Victory of David Over Goliath’," discusses the shift in Spain's local and regional elections, which have changed the country's political landscape beyond recognition.

The article “Americans, Abroad: Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady” by Sandra Zagarell, Donald R. Longman professor of English, has been published in Teaching Transatlanticism, edited by Linda Hughes and Sarah Robbins (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

While James's' novel is commonly read as a representation of how Americans fare when they travel to the sophisticated “Old World” (Europe), this article and a companion piece Zagarell published in 2014 approach Portrait of a Lady as a keen-eyed study of postbellum upper-class Americans that "Europe" serves primarily to backlight.

Jason Haugen, assistant professor of anthropology, and Benjamin Kuperman, associate professor of computer science and chair of the computer science department, presented their research paper “A New Approach to Uto-Aztecan Lexicostatistics” on May 8 at the 18th annual Workshop on American Indigenous Languages at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The paper was co-authored by and co-presented with Michael Everdell ’13.

Alberto Zambenedetti, visiting assistant professor of cinema studies and Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow, delivered the lecture “A Proud Immigrant: Renegotiating FIAT’s ‘Ethnicity’ Question” on May 9 at the 2015 Toledo Automobile Film Festival and Academic Conference.

Qiusha Ma, associate professor of Chinese; Steven Wojtal, professor of geology and associate dean for curriculum; and Barbara Sawhill, director of the Cooper International Learning Center, presented “Oberlin’s Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment (LIASE) Grant: Connecting Languages with the Study of the Environment in Asia” at the Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum Annual Conference at Denison University on April 16, 2015.

Eve Sandberg, chair of the politics department, was a speaker for World Press Freedom Day, an event hosted by the U.S. Embassy Information Resource Center. Sandberg's talk, titled "Zambian Voices in a Globalizing World," was delivered May 4 in Lusaka, Zambia.

The book Stealing All Transmissions: A Secret History of The Clash by Randal Doane, assistant dean of studies, has received a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award (silver) in the popular culture category. (See No. 65 on this website.)