People & Places: January 2019
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Jewish Life Adrienne Krone attended the Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies in Boston in December, where she presented a paper, entitled “Farming and Feminism: Gender Dynamics in the Jewish Community Farming Movement.” An essay, “In the Weeds,” in which she reflects on the state of the field of Jewish studies, also appears in the fall 2018 edition of AJS Perspectives: The Magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies. In January, she presented “Taking Students into the Field(s): Teaching Jewish Environmental Ethics Through Co-Curricular Programs” at the Society of Jewish Ethics Annual Meeting in Louisville, KY.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies Matthew Mitchell‘s research on Buddhist nuns was recently published in the edited volume Buddhist Feminisms and Femininities, published in January 2019 by SUNY Press. Mitchell’s chapter, titled “Conflicts and Compromises: The Relationship between the Nuns of Daihongan and the Monks of Daikanjin within the Zenkōji Temple Complex,” is about the legal battles between monks and nuns at a single pilgrimage site in 17th–20th century Japan.
Associate Professor of Spanish Barbara Riess published an article in the latest issue of the Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies (MARLAS). An open-source peer-reviewed journal, MARLAS is featured and accessible on the Latin American Research Commons. The article, “‘Es mucho hombre esa mujer’: género y cuerpo en la literatura femenina de la Revolución Cubana,” is the seed for an article that examines the legacy of initial visions of the now 60-year old Cuban Revolution in a paper that was accepted to the 2019 MLA International Symposium “Remembering Voices Lost” in Lisbon, Portugal, in July.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Science & Sustainability Nicole Gross-Camp is a co-author on a recent publication in BioScience, entitled “Progress toward Equitably Managed Protected Areas in Aichi Target 11: A Global Survey.” The paper describes the result of interviews with key stakeholders involved in 225 protected areas worldwide and provides a multidimensional view of social equity. Findings suggest that the main challenges include: ensuring effective participation in decision-making, transparent procedures, access to justice in conflicting situations, and the recognition of the rights and diversity of local people. Results also confirm the persistence of the historical exclusion of relevant social actors and local stakeholder groups in the establishment and management of protected areas. The open access article is the result of a collaboration between several individuals and institutions including the University of Copenhagen, Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), University of Sheffield, Lille Catholic University, University of Madrid, and the University of East Anglia.
Professor of Philosophy Eric Palmer has published a special issue of the Journal of Global Ethics, working with guest co-editor Krushil Watene of Massey University. The issue focuses on transitional justice within war-torn and post-colonial states; it also features Indigenous conceptions of law and justice in the contexts of reconciliation with states and in competing ideals of Indigenous resurgence. Eric also continues as regular co-editor of the Journal of Global Ethics alongside Christine Koggel (Carleton University) and Martin Schönfeld (University of South Florida).
Palmer’s entry on “USA and Canada” was included this past summer in Jay Drydyk & Lori Keleher, eds., Routledge Handbook of Development Ethics. The brief study presents a comparative analysis of the current successes and shortcomings in human and social development for the two states.
Guo Wu, associate professor of history, will publish his second book, titled Narrating Southern Chinese Minority Nationalities: Politics, Disciplines, and Public History, with Palgrave McMillan in March 2019, as one of its series named New Directions in East Asian History. Based on fieldwork, archival research, and interviews, this book critically examines the building of modern Chinese discourse on a unified yet diverse Chinese nation on various sites of knowledge production. It argues that Chinese ideology on minority nationalities is rooted in modern China’s quest for national integration and political authority. However, it also highlights the fact that the complex process of conceptualizing, investigating, classifying, curating, and writing minority history has been fraught with disputes and contradictions. As such, the book offers a timely contribution to the current debate in the fields of 20th-century Chinese nationalism, minority policy, and anthropological practice.
Richard Bowden, professor of environmental science and sustainability, Sarah Wurzbacher ’12 and Susan Washko ’16, along with colleagues from the University of Toronto and Oregon State University, coauthored the invited presentation “Organic geochemistry of soil organic matter with long-term nitrogen enrichment: Molecular-level insights on impacts to soil” at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The paper, based on a 25-year study at the Bousson Experimental Forest, found that long-term N deposition from atmospheric pollution can negatively alter fundamental biogeochemical cycling of carbon in temperate forest soils by reducing the microbial community responsible for soil nutrient availability.
Professor of History and Global Health Studies Kenneth Pinnow presented a paper “The Soviet Doctor-Patient Relationship as Performance in the 1920s and 1930s,” at the 50th Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies in Boston. The paper is part of his ongoing research into the history of medical ethics in the Soviet Union.