People & Places: September 2018
Professors of Environmental Science and Sustainability Eric Pallant, Beth Choate, and Benjamin Haywood recently traveled to Penang, Malaysia, to showcase the innovative Allegheny Environmental Science and Sustainability (ESS) curriculum in front of an international audience at the 4th World Symposium on Sustainable Development at Universities. Professors Pallant, Choate, and Haywood discussed how Allegheny’s newly redesigned and nationally recognized ESS major provides students with an applied and experiential degree program ideally situated to launch careers or graduate research efforts that address the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Delegates from over 20 countries attended the bi-annual event, with Allegheny one of only two United States delegates in attendance. Their presentation, titled “Preparing University Students to Facilitate UN Sustainable Development Goals,” has been adapted as a chapter for the forthcoming book, Universities as Living Labs for Sustainable Development, part of the award-winning World Sustainability Series. It was selected as a recipient of the “Best Paper” award from over 50 entries.
Patricia McIntosh ’17 and Assistant Professor of Psychology Lauren Paulson presented on “Mental Health Literacy of OCD and OCPD in a Rural Area” at the American Counseling Association’s Annual National Conference and Expo in Atlanta, Georgia. The poster was based on McIntosh’s senior thesis at Allegheny and follow-up research as a graduate student at Northwestern University.
Twenty Allegheny psychology students participated in the 46th Annual Western Pennsylvania Undergraduate Psychology Conference (WPUPC) held at Penn State Behrend on April 14, 2018. They are (with their faculty advisors listed in parentheses): Caitlin Driscoll, Stella Goodworth, and Joseph Crouse (Lauren Paulson); Jordan Dilts and Maria Mervine (Patricia Rutledge); Alex Zielinski, Hannah Smith, Jacelyn Alberts, Carolyn Kirby, Gabby Griffin-Maya, and Maddie Archer (Allison Connell Pensky); Anthony Franco, Kierra Price, Nathan Coffman, Sarah Shaheen, Karissa Welker, Lucie Shiffman, and Alex Shreffler (Lydia Eckstein).
Goodworth, Shaheen, and Shreffler received awards for best poster presentation.
Professor of French Laura Reeck’s co-edited volume Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France (eds. Kathryn Kleppinger and Reeck) has been published with Liverpool University Press as the ninth installment of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies annual series. The volume aims to unsettle conceptions of difference and national belonging in the case of French-born ethnic minorities. Reeck also contributed a chapter to Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writing since 1945: Fourteen National Contexts and Beyond (eds. Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta) entitled “Somewhere between ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’: Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writing in France” and an article in a double issue of Romance Studies (ed. Christina Horvath) on cultural production in the French banlieues, “Gender and Genre in Banlieue Film, and the Guerrilla Film Brooklyn.”
Associate Professor of Biology Lisa Whitenack, with collaborator Joshua Drew (Columbia University), has published “Untangling the contribution of characters to evolutionary relationships: a case study using fossils, morphology, and genes” in the Journal of Biological Education. The paper details a teaching activity that uses sharks to teach about how using different data (teeth, physical body characteristics, and gene sequences) can lead to different ideas about evolutionary relationships of a group of organisms.
Judson Herrman, the Frank T. McClure Professor of Greek and Latin, held a research residency at the Fondation Hardt pour l’étude de l’antiquité classique in Geneva for three weeks in June and July 2018. With support from the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study, in July he also presented a paper on “The Timeliness of Hyperides’ Funeral Oration” at an international conference in Strasbourg on “The Athenian Funeral Oration: 40 Years after Nicole Loraux“; his paper will be included in a book based on the conference to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Guo Wu, associate professor of history, presented a paper titled “Ritual, Emotion, and Human Nature in Pre-Qin Thought” to the session of International Society for Chinese Philosophy (ISCP) in the 24th World Congress of Philosophy, Beijing on August 15. He presented another paper on pre-modern Chinese history, titled “Between Buddhism and Statecraft: Historicizing Xuanzang’s Writing of the Records of the Western Regions,” to the First International Conference on Xuanzang and Silk Road Culture while in China.
At the June 2018 City, Space, and Spectacle in Nineteenth Century Performance Conference held in Venice, Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies Mark Cosdon presented “The Hanlon Brothers and Chicago’s Columbian Exposition.” He chaired the John W. Frick Award honoring the best book in American theatre and drama, which was presented to Heather S. Nathans this past August at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Cosdon contributed research for HBO’s “The Deuce” which will be seen in this coming season’s episodes. With Professor Amelia Carr, Cosdon co-led this past May/June’s EL to Southern Italy.
Photo caption: Alleghenians in Pompeii’s Forum, with Mount Vesuvius behind them
In May 2018, Associate Professor of English and Director of Writing Alexis Hart, along with GLCA colleagues Harry Brown (DePauw) and Ian MacInnes (Albion), hosted a Digital Liberal Arts (DLA) Across the Curriculum workshop for faculty interested in introducing digital pedagogies in their classes and digital methods in their research collaborations with students. Sample assignments and other materials generated at the workshop can be found at dla101.org.
Tomas Nonnenmacher, Patricia Bush Tippie Professor of Economics, recently published Institutional and Organizational Analysis: Concepts and Applications with Cambridge University Press. His three co-authors are Eric Alston, University of Colorado, Lee Alston, University of Indiana, and Bernardo Mueller, University of Brasília. The book provides a toolkit for doing institutional and organizational analysis drawn from the disciplines of economics, political science, law and history. This toolkit is then applied to a range of case studies, including labor contracting in Yucatán, land titling in the Brazilian Amazon, judicial reform in Kenya, and changing beliefs in political inclusion in Ecuador.
Professor of Political Science Sharon Wesoky published an article, “25 Years of Feminist NGOs in China: Reflections on Neoliberalism and its Resistances,” in the June 2018 issue of the journal Mainland China Studies. This article was based on her invited presentation at the conference on “China and International NGOs” at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, in December 2016.
Richard Bowden, professor of environmental science, along with Sarah Wurzbacher ’12, Susan Washko ’16, Lauren Wind ’15, and Alexandrea Rice ’17 coauthored the presentation “Long-term nitrogen addition decreases organic matter decomposition and increases soil carbon in a temperate deciduous forest” at the North American Forest Soils Conference. The paper, based on a 25-year study at the Bousson Experimental Forest, demonstrates ways in which long-term acidic precipitation can alter soil chemistry and forest nutrient cycling.
Allegheny College received a $55,000 grant from the Petroleum Research Fund (PRF) of the American Chemical Society in support of Assistant Professor of Geology Katie Tamulonis’ project, “Relationship between Rome Trough Reactivation and the Distal Stratigraphy and Reservoir Quality of the Devonian Marcellus and Burket Formations of the Appalachian Basin.” The two-year grant will support two undergraduate students each summer to conduct research with Tamulonis, as well as funds for supplies, conference travel, and student and faculty fieldwork. The Petroleum Research Fund endowment is administered by the American Chemical Society. ACS PRF has supported “advanced scientific education and fundamental research in the petroleum field” for more than 60 years.