Faculty and Staff Notes

Emily Laurance, visiting associate professor of musicology, presented her paper "At the Nexus of Timbre and Nostalgia: the Pedal Harp in Eighteenth-Century France" at the Nostalgia, Music, and Music Studies Conference hosted by UCLA on May 3, 2022.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Robin Beth Schaer was selected for Creative Captial's 2022 Shortlist for her current project, a collection of poems and essays that explore art, erasure, and atrocity. 

Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón published El culto a la derrota, a translation into Spanish of Brian Price’s monograph “Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction: Failure, Trauma, and Loss.” 

Danforth Professor of Politics Emerita Sonia Kruks recently published a paper in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia. Her paper, “Alterity and Intersectionality: Reflections on Old Age in the Time of COVID-19,” uses the experience of old people during the epidemic to reflect on the social exclusion of the old and to criticize intersectional critical theory for its damaging failure to pay attention to old age as a site of otherness.  

Kruks also presented the “2022 Distinguished Lecture” at the School of Critical and Cultural Theory of Södertörns University, in Stockholm, Sweden. Her lecture was titled “Thinking about Old Age with Simone de Beauvoir.”

On April 22, Assistant Professsor of Sociology Alicia Smith-Tran delivered The Gene S. Uyeki Memorial Lecture at an event hosted by Case Western Reserve University's Department of Sociology. The lecture was titled "Private Troubles, Peer-Reviewed: On Personal Growth and Writing Sociologically."

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Allegra Hyde published a short story in the inaugural issue of CODE Lit, an online zine dedicated to exploring the full scope of possibilities for digital publishing. Hyde's story, "Eat Me (Alternative Scenarios in the Garden of Eden)", uses digital erasure to offer readers multiple versions of the same initial text.

Hyde was also recently interviewed by Dana Diehl for Long Leaf Review about her writing process and her novel, Eleutheria. Hyde additionally appeared on the Thresholds podcast, hosted by Jordan Kisner, to talk about her experience in utopian communities, and how they have since informed her writing practice.

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber published an encyclopedia article, "Buddhism and Medicine in Premodern Japan," for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.

Jennifer Blaylock, Visiting Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies, recently published the article "New Media, Neo-Media: The Brief Life of Socialist Television in Ghana" in the journal boundary 2. Television in Ghana was born at a radical time when Africans across the continent were boldly inventing systems of governance resistant to imperialism and racial inequality. Blaylock argues that this Afrofuturist period of Ghana's televisual past provides a counternarrative to media discourse from the colonial era that positioned African countries as the passive receivers of new media technologies. She shows how transnational influences were actively adapted by Ghanaian broadcasters to newly theorize the medium of television in opposition to racial capitalism.

Conservatory Librarian Kathleen Abromeit presented “Researching the Negro Spiritual” with Randye Jones. Originally presented at the Music Library Association Midwest Chapter Annual Meeting, October 2020. It was selected as best of chapter paper and presented at the Music Library Association Annual Conference in March 2022.

Abromeit also presented "Using Mindfulness to Beat Mid-Career Burnout" at the Music Library Association Annual Conference, March 2022.

Sandra Zagarell, professor emerita of English, published "Wiring the Midwest: Local Focus, National Apperl" in MidAmerica, The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, XLVII (2021). With Professor Jean Lutes of Villanova University, Zagarell presented a paper titled "Alice-Dunbar-Nelson's Archive: A Case Study in Unpublished Black Writing" at the J19 conference in March-April. The panel, "Unpublished American," was sponsored by the journal ALH.