People & Places: October 2018

GrantNicole Gross-Camp, visiting assistant professor of environmental science, has received a Darwin Initiative grant in conjunction with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. The £357,322 ($469,172) grant will support Gross-Camp and partners over the course of three years on their research project entitled “Realising sustainable, profitable and equitable community-based forest management in Tanzania” (ReSPECT). Gross-Camp’s portion of the grant is £45,000 ($59,086). Other partners include the Mpingo Conservation and Development Initiative (Tanzania), Tanzania Commission for Sciences and Technology, the World Wide Fund for Nature (Tanzania), Kilwa Women Paralegal Unit (Tanzania), and United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre.

Photo caption: Lasima Nzao, project manager and part of Mpingo Conservation and Development Initiative (MCDI); Antje Ahrends (Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh); Jasper Makala (CEO of MCDI); Nicole Gross-Camp; Gerard and Chiku (Kilwa Women Paralegal Unit in Tanzania) at MCDI’s office in Kilwa Masoko.


Talk AbroadThanks to the work of Department Chair and Associate Professor of Spanish Barbara Riess, with collaborators Laura Reeck, professor of French, and Nancy Smith, instructor of Spanish and French, the Allegheny College Department of Modern & Classical Languages has been awarded a curriculum development grant from TalkAbroad, a company which connects language students with trained native speakers in 15 countries around the world for live conversation. TalkAbroad evolved out of a not-for-profit organization in Nicaragua in 2009 and is now utilized by more than 100 colleges, universities and high schools. The grant will provide video training, instructional materials, and funding to department staff to implement a trial of the service free of charge to Allegheny students. The service will commence in select courses beginning in the Fall 2018 semester.


French Creek CleanupAllegheny College took home the $250 prize for the college or university with the most participants at the 2018 French Creek Watershed Cleanup on Saturday, September 8. Allegheny had 195 people cleaning the creek and helping at the weigh-in and picnic. Fourteen different groups from Allegheny College participated. The prize is sponsored by the Peter A. Yeager Memorial Foundation and goes to the science program of schools with the most participants. Other winners of the prize were Meadville Middle and High Schools and Seton Catholic School. This year’s cleanup removed 32,000 pounds of trash from the French Creek Watershed. The photo shows students in Professor of Biology and Environmental Science Scott Wissinger‘s Aquatic Ecology Seminar class.


Carl Olson, professor emeritus of philosophy and religious studies, has had a number of invited essays published recently. The essay “Demonic Devotes and Symbolism of Violence in Hindu Literature” appears in Modern Hinduism in Text and Context, edited by Lavanya Vemsani and published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018. A second essay entitled “Postmodern Approaches to Indian Philosophy” appears in History of Indian Philosophy as part of the series Routledge History of World Philosophies, edited by Purushottama Bilimoria and published by Routledge in 2018. He has also published 23 various essays on figures, religious rites, and sacred sites for the Encyclopedia of Indian Religions: Hinduism and Tribal Religions, edited by M. Jain, R. Sherma, and M. Khannaka and published by Springer in Dordrecht in 2018. This makes his career totals for journals, book chapters, encyclopedias, and book reviews 250 articles published.


Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Rod Clark presented a paper titled “Conditioning the Immune System: ABA Methodologies Applied to Treating Cancer and Addiction” at the 44th annual conference of the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) held in San Diego, California, in May of 2018. Clark also presented a poster co-authored by Jessica Parkinson ’19 and Alexis Sotelo ’19 titled “Fixed Interval Performance of Rats: A Comparison of VPA Autism Model and Neurotypical- Developing Rats” at the 40th Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior (SQAB) conference held in San Diego in May 2018.


Eric Pallant, professor of environmental science, was co-author on a manuscript recently published in the International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology. The article, “Planning and implementing sustainability in higher education institutions: an overview of the difficulties and potentials” analyzed sustainability education programs in higher education in the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Latin America.


Associate Professor of English and Director of Writing Alexis Hart was invited to be a Lead Scholar for the “access” motif at the Naylor Symposium for Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies held at York College of Pennsylvania September 26–29. The symposium took place on the fifth anniversary of the Naylor Workshop for Undergraduate Research in Writing as well as the 20th anniversary of the Boyer Commission report, “Reinventing Undergraduate Education,” and called together colleagues from all quarters of writing studies to discuss past and present praxes related to eight overarching undergraduate research motifs: mentorship, contribution to knowledge, research methods, dissemination, institutional support, curricula and co-curricula, impact, and access.


Richard Bowden, professor of environmental science, co-authored the paper “Litter to Soil: Insights into Soil C Cycling from Long-Term Input Manipulation and High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry,” in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The work, done at the Bousson Experimental Forest, describes the complexity of storing carbon in forest soils. Understanding forest carbon storage is important to evaluating the ability of forests to help mitigate climate change.


Assistant Professor of Art Byron Rich recently showed his work M-Ark I at the Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge University in the United Kingdon. On the same trip that brought him to Cambridge, Rich spoke at the European Week of Space Science in Liverpool alongside longtime collaborator John Wenskovitch. He also spoke to students about Epicurean Endocrinology, his latest project, at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Byron’s and John’s work was then shown at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in South Africa, followed by a lecture given at Border Sessions in The Hague, Netherlands. Following Border Sessions, Rich gave a lecture at Me Convention, where he was invited by Mercedes Benz and SXSW to discuss the future of our species, and whether that future lies in space. Rich gave a lecture on hacking hormones at BDYHAX at Protospace in Pittsburgh in late September. He will soon be traveling to Troy, New York, to give two lectures on biotechnical resistance and a workshop on DIY solid Phase extraction. On October 26, he will be heading to Toronto to speak about biotechnical resistance and show his work Epicurean Endocrinology. In November, Rich will be an invited speaker at Crossing Borders, a etch a culture conference in The Hague, followed by Taboo, Transgressions, Transcendence, an international conference on biopolitics in Mexico City in mid-November.


Julia Ludewig, assistant professor of German, has attended and contributed to two conferences recently: in September, she organized a panel at the German Studies Conference (GSA, Pittsburgh) dedicated to non-fiction comics. In conjunction with that panel and the launching of the GSA Comics Studies Network which Ludewig helped establish, she organized a reading with comic artist and Allegheny’s current Max Kade writer-in-residence Birgit Weyhe, who also attended the conference.

In October, Ludewig participated in the conference on “Migration in Comics and Graphic Narratives” (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities) where she gave the keynote lecture. Her keynote was entitled “Reporter with a Sketchbook: The P/Measures of Comics Journalism.”


Keystone Training AreaROTC cadets Gabriela Eberle ’22 and Xavier Weintraub ’22 completed a fall field training exercise at the Keystone Training Area with the Fighting Scot Battalion. They spent the weekend learning field craft and land navigation and experienced leading peers through a variety of challenges.

Photo caption: Gabriela Eberle (left) helps her team through a leadership obstacle challenge at the Field Leaders Reaction Course. Xavier Weintraub (right) rappels down a 40-foot tower.