News Center

Bonnie Cross ’11 presented a paper at Susquehanna University’s Department of English Undergraduate Conference. Her paper, which focused on the figure of the Fallen Man in Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, was based upon work done in a course taught by Professor of English Diane D’Amico on the Neo-Victorian Novel.

Two poems by Anna Rose Welch ’11 will be published in the Penguin Review, the literary journal of Youngstown State University.

Professor of Environmental Science Richard Bowden recently published a review of Pathways to Scientific Thinking by Ebert-May and Hodder. The review, “Teaching scientists to teach in the same manner that they conduct research,” was published in the Quarterly Review of Biology.  Bowden, along with Liz Fager ’10 and colleagues from the University of Michigan, also presented a poster titled “Decomposition of Roots and Leaves in a Northern Temperate Forest” at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Soil Science Society of America, in Pittsburgh. The poster describes initial results of a five-year study in northern Michigan examining controls on rates of leaf decomposition. The work presented included results from Fager’s senior thesis. Sandra Wayman ’10 also attended the conference to meet agronomy researchers with whom she worked on her senior thesis.

Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Theatre Mark Cosdon has published The Hanlon Brothers: From Daredevil Acrobatics to Spectacle Pantomime, 1833-1931 in the “Theatre in the Americas” Series at Southern Illinois University Press. A biography of the theatrical family, Cosdon’s book enumerates their many contributions to modern popular entertainment.

Professor of English Diane D’Amico has had her essay “The House of Christina Rossetti: Domestic and Poetic Spaces” accepted for publication. It will appear in the spring issue of The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies. The essay will include photographs of Rossetti’s 30 Torrington Square house taken by Professor of Psychology William DeLamarter.

Professor of Art Amara Geffen has collaborated with artist Angelo Ciotti, landscape architect Chris Brown and environmental engineer Steve Halmi on an innovative environmental art project that models new strategies for handling stormwater along federal highways. The project, a collaboration with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, merges land/earth art strategies with best management practices in the environmental mitigation of stormwater runoff. The resulting site installation includes a series of sculptural check dams, infiltration pools and earthen mounds that channel stormwater from the interstate through a natural stormwater retention and infiltration scheme, while also demonstrating creative reuse of the concrete from the demolished bridges and the use of native plantings to help improve water quality on site. The project, In Praise of Land and Water: Revisioning Stormwater along Federal Highways, recently received the Diamond Honor Award for innovation in managing water resources from the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Association of Engineering Companies. In Praise of Land and Water provides a regional and national model for creative collaborations on stormwater runoff, erosion, and other environmental and aesthetic aspects of highway projects that can inspire more federal highway projects that merge the best environmental and art practices in addressing water quality issues along our nation’s highways.

Professor of Art Amara Geffen and Assistant Professor of Art and Gallery Director Darren Miller, along with Gretchen Wood ’12 and Jess Longobardo ’09, co-presented at the Biennial Art Educator’s Conference on Art, Education and Social Justice at Edinboro University on February 26. The presentation, “Engineering Eden: Art, the Environment, and Social Change,” outlined strategies implemented during the fall semester 2009 that utilized the gallery as an interdisciplinary method for modeling creative visual investigations of human impacts on natural processes within a social, political and cultural context. Through this model, beginning-level studio art students were invited to develop works for inclusion in an exhibit featuring works by regionally and nationally known artists. The outcome of this collaboration was an unexpected, innovative pedagogical tool for training and motivating young artists.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Gregory M. Kapfhammer was recently chosen to serve as a co-chair for the 5th International Workshop on the Automation of Software Test (AST 2010) that is co-located with the ACM/IEEE 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2010) held in Cape Town, South Africa. In conjunction with his colleagues and fellow co-chairs, Dr. Wing-Kwong Chan (City University of Hong Kong) and Dr. Christof J. Budnik (Siemens Corporation, Corporate Research), Kapfhammer will handle all aspects of the AST 2010 workshop, such as organizing the program committee, writing the call for papers, reviewing the paper submissions, and coordinating each day of the actual event. Kapfhammer will also assist the steering committee of AST 2010 in the preparation of a special issue of the Springer Software Quality Journal that will feature extensions of the best papers that were accepted for publication at the workshop. More details about AST 2010 are available at the workshop’s Web site: https://www.cs.allegheny.edu/ast2010/.

Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of Black Studies Aisha Damali Lockridge received an honorable mention for the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowships for Junior Faculty.

College Chaplain Jane Ellen Nickell has earned her Ph.D. in the sociology of religion from Drew University. She defended in January and passed with distinction. Her dissertation, “We Shall Not Be Moved: Resistance to Changes in Methodist Leadership,” uses the theory of Pierre Bourdieu to explore sociological factors in American Methodists’ resistance to ordaining African Americans, women, and gays and lesbians.

Professor of Religious Studies Carl Olson‘s commissioned essay “The Sacred Book” has been published in The Oxford Companion of the Book, edited by Michael Suarez and H.R. Woudhuysen and published by Oxford University Press (pages 11-23). This is one of the longer essays in the two-volume work covering the sacred book in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In addition, Olson’s book Religious Studies: Key Concepts has been accepted for publication by Routledge in London for probable publication in the fall.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Bob Roos served as a judge for the 34th World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, held in early February in Harbin, China. Earlier rounds of the competition included 22,000 contestants representing 1,931 universities from 82 countries. This year 103 teams competed in the final round. This was Roos’s fifteenth year serving as a World Finals judge.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Araceli Valle has published a paper, “Developing habitual ways of reasoning: Epistemological beliefs and formal emphasis in parent-child conversations,” in the latest issue of the Journal of Developmental Processes.