Faculty and Staff Notes

Assistant Dean and Director of International Student and Scholar Services Josh Whitson attended the 2024 NAFSA: Association of International Educators Ohio conference hosted by Ohio Dominican University on July 19 and presented an overview of the Fulbright IEA Program.

Chemistry and biochemistry faculty Will Parsons and Katelyn Bustin published an article titled “Activity-Based Protein Profiling of RHBDL4 Reveals Proteolysis of the Enzyme and a Distinct Inhibitor Profile” in ACS Chemical Biology along with Cassondra Davies ’24, Paul Kamitsuka ’23, Gabriel Negrao de Morais ’25, Regina Stasser de Gonzalez ’22, and collaborators from the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor of Comparative American Studies Gina Pérez was featured on The Revealer, an award-winning online magazine and podcast that explores religion and its many roles in society and people’s lives, to discuss her new book Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities.

Professor of Sociology Greggor Mattson won the gold medal for LGBTQ+ academic titles from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Who Needs Gay Bars? Bar-Hopping through America's LGBTQ+ Places (Stanford 2023). He was also elected 2025-26 Chair of the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association.

Senior Lecturer of Writing and Communication Hal Sundt wrote about tornadoes, storm chasing, and the movie Twisters for The Ringer.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Anna Lordan presented at the inaugural RUTA conference in the Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine, on exploring embodied knowledge with turn-of-the-20th-century Ukrainian writer Lesia Ukrainka, and facilitated a workshop in Lviv, Ukraine on "Writing: Becoming Our Own Mentor with students of the Invisible University," set up to support students whose studies have been impacted by the Russian invasion.

“Blue Hour,” a poem by Associate Professor of Creative Writing Chanda Feldman, was featured on The Slowdown podcast from American Public Media. Feldman’s poems “Blue Hour,” “Toured the Imperial Medieval Castle,” and “Palinode to a New Year of Trees” also appeared in issue 61 of the Harvard Review. Her poems “The Age of Discovery,” “The Dead Sea,” and “As a Side Note to a Side Note in the History” appeared in the spring 2024 issue of EPOCH literary magazine. Feldman’s poem “Demonstration” was anthologized in This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets.

Danforth Professor of Politics Emerita Sonia Kruks presented a paper titled "Varieties of Oppression in Beauvoir's Thinking" at the conference Simone de Beauvoir as a Moral Philosopher, held at the Free University of Berlin on June 28-29.

Assistant Professor of Politics Ali Masood recently published an article titled, "The Rule of Law in Red and Blue: Affective Polarization and Support for Legal Institutions in the United States" that examines how elite cues and affective animus impact public perceptions of the FBI, DOJ, and the U.S. Supreme Court in American Politics Research.

Lecturer of Creative Writing Amanda Hodes presented her paper "Extractive Poetics: Using Poetic Text Mining to Counter Extractivist Ideologies" at the 2024 International Digital Media and Arts Association conference hosted at Winona State University this past week.