Faculty and Staff Notes

Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Jason Dorwart wrote three essays in the book Disability Experience: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives. Each chapter in the book is an analysis of a piece of autobiographic writing from a disabled person. Dowart's chapters cover Michael J. Fox, Christopher Reeve, and German sociologist Helmut Dubiel.

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature Wendy Beth Hyman gave an invited talk, "Teaching Titus Andronicus when Sexual Violence is on the World Stage," in Cape Town, South Africa, at the Shakespeare and Social Justice conference. She also spoke on the conference roundtable dedicated to books in the field, introducing her co-edited collection, Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in October 2019.

Professor of Mathematics Jim Walsh gave an invited presentation on May 23, 2019 at the biennial SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems in Snowbird, Utah. Speaking in the minisymposium "Planetary Motion and its Effects on Climate," Jim presented new research on the mathematical modeling of the glacial cycles. These results were obtained in collaboration with the 2018-19 Department of Mathematics Lenora Lecturer Ester R. Widiasih, associate professor of mathematics at the University of Hawaii.

Meredith M. Gadsby was invited to edit a special cluster issue in the Journal of The African Literature Association about the scholarship of Carole Boyce Davies. Gadsby will write the introduction and anchor article.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Alice Blumenfeld performs in Tablao Flamenco: Del Campo at Playhouse Square.

Chanda Feldman, assistant professor of creative writing, published a new poem in the Arkansas International  Spring 2019, issue 06.

Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries Alexia Hudson-Ward has been appointed to the Advisory Board of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. The aim of the fellowship program is to reinvigorate bibliographical studies within the humanities by introducing doctoral candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty to specialized skills, methods, and professional networks for conducting advanced research with material texts.

Steve Crowley will spend June at the Aleksanteri Institute for Russian Studies at the University of Helskinki, Finland. There he will be working to complete a manuscript on "Sta­bil­ity Amid Stag­na­tion: The Polit­ics of Labor and Dein­dus­tri­al­iz­a­tion in Putin's Rus­sia."

John G. W. Cowles Director of Allen Memoria Art Museum Andria Derstine, Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries Alexia Hudson-Ward, Library/Museum Fellow Elizabeth Edgar, and Executive Director, Foundation, Government & Corporate Grants Pamela Snyder wrote the whitepaper "Academic Art Museum and Library Collaborations: Current Practices and Future Directions." The whitepaper was informed by the 2018 Academic Art Museums and Libraries Summit hosted by Oberlin College, which received support through an academic museum and library collaboration planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Cal Biruk’s book, Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (2018), was featured in a forum of books about global health in Africa. The forum includes a review of the book and a conversation between Biruk and two other critical global health scholars.