People & Places: February 2019
Assistant Professor of Environmental Science & Sustainability Casey Bradshaw-Wilson, along with colleagues, published a paper which will appear in the April 2019 edition in the journal American Midland Naturalist. The article title, “Documentation of Freshwater Mussels (Unionidae) in the Diet of Round Gobies (Neogobius melanostomus) within the French Creek Watershed, Pennsylvania,” highlights her ongoing research looking at the impacts of an invasive fish species introduced into French Creek. This is the first documented case of this species preying on native freshwater mussels.
Theatre Professor Beth Watkins collaborated with author Valerie Sweeney Prince to stage a 70-minute performance of Prince’s Waterbearer, about black women’s domestic work and the 1881 Atlanta strike of laundresses for higher wages. Waterbearer was performed in New Orleans on January 20 with a cast of performers from Maryland, Atlanta, and New Orleans at Cafe Istanbul in Treme/Marigny. The production incorporated original music by composer Talitha Gabrielle, vocalist Ursula Relaford, and choreography by Amanda Prince, who trained with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.
Associate Professor of English and Director of Writing Alexis Hart, along with GLCA colleagues Lynn Ishikawa from DePauw and Carla Reyes from Wooster, presented a panel titled “Creating, Sustaining, and Leveraging Multilingual Writing Support” at the Small Liberal Arts Colleges Writing Program Administrator (SLAC WPA) conference held at Davidson College in January. Hart, Ishikawa, and Reyes drew on research they conducted (along with Allegheny’s TESOL specialist Jennifer Franz and Tamara Stasik of DePauw) with the support of a GLCA New Directions in Global Scholarship grant. An annotated bibliography of resources for teaching multilingual students can be found on the GLCA/GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning website.
Associate Professor of English Matthew Ferrence‘s new memoir, Appalachia North, was released February 1 by West Virginia University Press. He’ll be reading on April 4 as part of our Single Voice Reading Series.
Assistant Professor of English Aline Lo recently published two pieces that help advance the burgeoning field of Hmong American Studies. The first is a co-authored entry on Hmong American Literature and Culture for the new Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature. The second is a published dialogue about the state of the field where leading scholars were asked to write informally about the challenges and innovations within Hmong American Studies. Prof. Lo wrote about exciting new works by Hmong American authors and the challenge of including orality into her research.
Assistant Professor of English John MacNeill Miller organized and moderated “Rotten Ideas: New Approaches to Decay,” a roundtable that took place at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Chicago in January. The event brought together an international group of literary scholars to explore how a focus on the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of decomposition might (paradoxically) offer new life to the study of literary genres such as biography and travel writing, as well as to interdisciplinary fields such as age studies and the environmental humanities.
Maxwell Steffen ’19 and Dana O’Connor ’19 published a review article entitled “Recent progress in block copolymer crystallization” in the journal Polymer Crystallization. The article is based on their research with former Associate Professor of Chemistry Ryan Van Horn.
Professor of Political Science Shannan Mattiace is the current editor, since 2012, of the Mexican Government and Politics section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, published by the Library of Congress. Her biennial annotations are available on the Library of Congress website and the accompanying essay, “Mexico Government and Politics,” will be published in Vol. 73 this month (February) by the University of Texas.
Students and faculty from the Law & Policy Program attended the Robert H. Jackson Center’s Jackson Day lecture featuring Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Max Baer on February 13 at the Warren County Courthouse in Warren, Pennsylvania. The lecture focused on the significant contributions of William Penn, John Marshall, and Robert H. Jackson to modern day concepts of constitutional democracy and the role of the judiciary. The event was held on the birthday of Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954), who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials following World War II.
Pictured above, from left: Robert G. Seddig Chair in Political Science Brian Harward, Aubrey Hall, Ashley Leonard, Daniella Clark, Justice Max Baer, Makayla Alicea, Brian Hill, Alex Yarkosky, and Greg Peterson ’73, co-founder of Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, New York.
Associate Professor of Political Science Shanna Kirschner published an article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution demonstrating that peacekeepers reduce combatant-perpetrated sexual violence in civil wars. The article, “Does Peacekeeping Really Bring Peace? Peacekeepers and Combatant-perpetrated Sexual Violence in Civil Wars,” was co-authored with Adam Miller ’18. It represents a major advance in our understanding of how peacekeeping missions can reduce violence against noncombatants and improve the chances for lasting peace.