Faculty and Staff Notes

Last fall, Manager of Social Strategy and Projects Ma’ayan Plaut presented at the national HighEdWeb conference on working with students and at Confab Higher Ed on making content more social. This month, she’s attending the Academic Impressions conference to talk about social media and enrollment and working with students and social media and the CASE Social Media and Community conference to talk about social media, narrative, and social content. Plaut was quoted in an article, “Go Viral”, published in the February 2014 issue of Currents, the magazine of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).

Associate Professor of Politics Michael Parkin recently coauthored an article, “U.S. Congressional Campaigns in an Internet Age,” which appears in The Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties. The paper shows how candidate use of the Internet is driven by such political considerations as the potential loss of message control, the candidate’s status in the race, and the employment of campaign consultants.

Cleveland NPR affiliate WCPN invited Professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies Steve Crowley to participate in a conversation about the political and security issues of the 13th Olympic games in Sochi, Russia. The program aired Monday, February 10, and is available for listening on the WCPN website.

Danforth-Lewis Professor of Economics Ellis Tallman is coauthor of an article, “Business Cycles and Financial Crises: The Roles of Credit Supply and Demand Shocks,” recently published in the journal Macroeconomic Dynamics. The paper explores the hypothesis that the sources of economic and financial crises differ from those of noncrisis business cycle fluctuations.

The Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which will officially open to the public in October 2014, has requested permission to use excerpts from Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History Shulamit Magnus’ translation and critical edition of Pauline Wengeroff’s Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews in Russia in the Nineteenth Century. The museum will use the excerpts to illustrate its audio-visual gallery focusing on changes in Jewish life in modernity. The museum also has invited Magnus to its opening and offered her a lecture opportunity.

Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand’s article, “Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Discipline of Classics,” appears in A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, published this year by Wiley-Blackwell. “The book makes an excellent Valentine's Day gift and is available at finer booksellers everywhere,” he says.

Professor of Psychology Nancy Darling’s work was cited in the January 12, 2014, New York Magazine feature article, “The Collateral Damage of a Teenager.” Exploring the idea that what adolescence does to teens is nowhere near as brutal as what it does to their parents, the author cited Darling’s “nuanced analysis of what, precisely, makes the adolescent struggle for autonomy so contentious. Most kids, she notes, have no objections when their parents try to enforce moral standards or societal conventions. ... What children object to are attempts to regulate more personal preferences, matters of taste: the music they listen to, the entertainments they pursue, the company they keep. ... The problem, says Darling, is that during adolescence questions of preference start to bleed into questions of morality and safety, and it often becomes impossible to discern where the line is.”

Longman Professor of English Anuradha Dingwaney Needham's essay “’Performing Women’ and the Gendered National Imagination: An Exploration of Shyam Benegal's Sardari Begum,” has appeared in a special issue of South Asian Review/ (34.3 [Winter 2013/14] focusing on gender and sexuality in South Asian literature and culture. The article draws upon a chapter from Needham’s recently published book New Indian Cinema in Post-Independence India.

Since the beginning of the fall semester, Professor of Hispanic Studies Sebastiaan Faber has published an essay about the crisis of the humanities in the Spanish magazine FronteraD; an interview with National Security Archive analyst Kate Doyle and two columns in the Spanish cooperative newspaper La Marea; an essay about Catalan exiles in Mexico in the journal Fractal; a review essay in the journal ALCESXXI; and two peer-reviewed articles: one on the legacy of Spanish Civil War exile in Mexico in Historia del Presente and another on postmemory in Pasavento. He also gave a keynote address in November at a conference in Madrid about fiction, justice, and historical memory. Earlier in 2013, he published an interview with LSE historian Paul Preston. The new edition of Guillermo del Toro’s 2001 gothic masterpiece The Devil’s Backbone that came out with the Criterion Collection this past July includes an interview with Faber in a 15-minute featurette about the film’s historical background; he was also interviewed in a documentary about war photographer Robert Capa, El món en què volíem viure (The World in Which We Want to Live), which was broadcast on Catalan television on January 14.

Associate Professor of Singing Lorraine Manz has been unanimously elected to membership of the American Academy of Teachers of Singing. Established in 1945, the AATS consists of nationally recognized teachers of singing and voice experts, as well as esteemed performers of classical and contemporary commercial music, noted authors, and voice science researchers. The academy consists of only 30 members, and all members are admitted solely by invitation. Manz will be inducted in a ceremony at Columbia University’s Teachers College on February 10.