Faculty and Staff Notes

In February, T.S. McMillin, professor of English and member of the environmental studies program committee, participated in the symposium "Navigating the Changing Nation: The River and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Art" at the Saint Louis Art Museum. McMillin lectured on the topic "'Strangers Still More Strange’: The River, the Steamboat, and The Confidence-Man."

The symposium was part of the exhibition Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River, which explores the life along the rivers of the new frontier through the masterworks of Missouri's most famous artist.

Ellis W. Tallman, economics department chair and Danforth-Lewis professor of economics, presented the paper "What Ended Pre-Fed Banking Panics" at Rutgers University as part of "Rockoffest," a conference to honor Rutgers University Professor of Economics Hugh Rockoff. The paper was co-authored by Gary Gorton' 73.

The paper "School Quality and Educational Attainment: Japanese American Internment as a Natural Experiment" by Martin Saavedra, assistant professor of economics, has been accepted by the journal Explorations in Economic History.

Tim Scholl, professor of Russian and comparative literature, gave the lecture "From Moscow and Back: Creating and Assessing the 'National' Ballets of Caucasia in the 1930s" at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University on February 13, 2015.

Michael Fisher, Department of History chair and Robert S. Danforth professor of history, made a "video provocation" at the Tate Britain symposium "The Black Subject: Ancient to Modern" on February 21, 2015. As part of the lead-off session, "On Presence and Absence," Fisher showed how Asians in Britain participated in the production of pre-Victorian British art.

Ellis W. Tallman, economics department chair and Danforth-Lewis professor of economics, organized a session at the Western Economic Association International's 11th International Conference (January 8-11, 2015) in Wellington, New Zealand. Tallman is a member of the Western Economic Association International committee.

For details on the conference, see the program.

Christopher Trinacty, assistant professor of classics, contributed a chapter on Senecan tragedy to the recently published book The Cambridge Companion to Seneca. The chapter investigates the competing methodologies for the understanding of Senecan tragedy, with suggestions for possible ways to resolve these views.

Trinacty also recently published book reviews for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) and the Ancient History Bulletin.

The book Wind Instrument by Kazim Ali, director of the creative writing program and associate professor of creative writing and comparative literature, is now available from Spork Press. Purchase the book on the Spork Press website.

Professor of Medieval Art History Erik Inglis recently published the article “Art as Evidence in Medieval Relic Disputes: Three Cases from Fifteenth-Century France,” in Matter of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Study of Relics and Relic Veneration in the Medieval Period, ed. James Robinson, Lloyd de Beer with Anna Harnden (London, British Museum, 2014), pp. 159-63. The article examines the way that late medieval viewers assessed the age of artifacts to determine their value as evidence.

Denise Birkhofer, Ellen Johnson ’33 curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM), has published an article entitled "'Le centre du milieu': Matta and the Exploding Dome.” The article appears in the 2014 special issue of the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas dedicated to Latin American art.

The article explores Matta’s later appropriation of architectural models to facilitate his exploration of fragmented or exploding structures. It considers a group of graphic works from 1943 and 1968 based on diagrams by architects Buckminster Fuller and Bernard Kirschenbaum—including one example from the AMAM collection—as case studies of the artist’s engagement with one of the seminal structures of 20th century architecture: the geodesic dome.