Faculty and Staff Notes

Assistant Professor of Psychology Travis Wilson has published an article in the journal “Developmental Psychology”:

Wilson, T.M., Rodkin, P. C., & Ryan, A. M. (2014). The company they keep and avoid: Social goal orientation as a predictor of children’s ethnic segregation. Developmental Psychology, 50, 1116-1124.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Travis Wilson has been awarded a grant of $50,000 from the Spencer Foundation for his project titled, 'A Longitudinal Study of School-based Relationships, Academic Motivation, and School Outcomes among Low-income African-American Youth.' Wilson is examining developmental change and within-group variability among low-income African-American elementary school children in their academic motivation and relationships with peers and teachers at school.

Holly Handman-Lopez, visiting assistant professor of dance, performed with poet Esther Dischereit in Konstanz and Isny on April 3rd and 4th. The performance, “Flowers for Othello,” was based on Dischereit's latest book of poems. The poems focus on the current case, in Germany, of a neo-nazi group accused of a series of anti-immigrant murders.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Cynthia Taylor recently published an article in the journal "Computer Science Education." The full citation is: C. Taylor, D. Zingaro, L. Porter, K. Webb, C. Lee, M. Clancy, Computer Science Concept Inventories: Past and Future, Computer Science Education, Volume 24, Issue 4, 2014

Eric Estes, vice president and dean of students and assistant professor of comparative American studies, gave a campus talk titled “From Margin to Center: Building an Intersectional Movement for an Inclusive and Socially Just Campus” at Vassar College. He was also part of the team that attended the Conference on Campus Climate and Student Engagement sponsored by The National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. While at the conference, he had the opportunity to participate on a panel titled “Elements of a Successful Diversity Plan.” Both events were in November.

She will be traveling to the Netherlands to attend a course on computational modeling in adolescent development and to present work on the Nova software platform at the University of Grotenburg. She was interviewed for a piece on Les Racines de L'Obeissance in the November/December issue of the magazine, Le Monde de L'intelligence. In addition, a new version of her measure of parenting style was published in the Chilean journal Psykhe.

Denise Birkhofer, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, has authored the catalogue Latin American Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin College, 2014). The catalogue chronicles the development of the AMAM’s remarkable yet little-known collection of more than 200 works by Latin American and Latino artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. Birkhofer contributed entries highlighting the works of 35 artists as well as an essay chronicling the history of this diverse collection. In a second essay, Professor of History Steven S. Volk tells from personal experience how he has used the AMAM’s Latin American works to engage students in new ways. The catalogue accompanies the exhibition Latin American and Latino Art at the Allen, the first to showcase this important aspect of the AMAM’s collection as well as the first survey exhibition of modern and contemporary Latin American art in northeast Ohio.

Andria Derstine, the John G. W. Cowles Director at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, recently published the essay “Cultural Policy and the Palace: The French Academy in Rome”, in the volume Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550-1750, edited by Gail Feigenbaum (OC 1972) with Francesco Freddolini, and published by The Getty Research Institute. She additionally authored a catalogue entry on a painting at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, “Madonna and Child with Saint Francis, ca. 1285”, which has just appeared in the volume Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy, edited by Trinita Kennedy and published by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, with Philip Wilson Publishers, London. The AMAM painting is currently on view in an exhibition of the same title, along with another work from the AMAM collection, a manuscript leaf from a gradual that depicts the translation of the body of St. Dominic.

Invited by the University of Leipzig's Area Studies Center to participate in one of a series of events on “Critical Junctures of Globalization,” Professor of Politics Ben Schiff presented the opening address to the May 24-25 workshop on “Human Security/War on Impunity: Yesterday’s Discourses, Today’s Consequences.” Schiff's talk, entitled “The International Criminal Court: Global Order, Sovereignty, and Paradoxes of Legitimacy” launched two days of discussion among scholars and practitioners from the US, Canada, Germany and Denmark on international judicial and humanitarian interventions in conflict.

Professor of Physics Yumi Ijiri recently co-authored an article, entitled "Origin of Surface Canting within Fe3O4 Nanoparticles." The article is published in the journal Physical Review Letters and has been selected as an Editors' Suggestion for that issue. Kathryn Hasz '14, currently a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, is also a co-author, and the work was done in collaboration with scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Department of Energy.