People & Places: September 2019
People & Places is published monthly during the academic year by the Office of College Relations. It reports on the professional activities of members of the College community and highlights student achievement.
Brian M. Harward, professor and Robert G. Seddig Chair in Political Science, has published Political Groups, Parties, and Organizations that Shaped America, a three-volume series that examines the multiple roles that interest groups and political parties have played in American politics since the nation’s founding. Many of the essays in the series are written by Allegheny faculty, including Andrew Bloeser, Zac Callen, Nathan Henceroth, Patrick Jackson, Angela Keysor, Tomas Nonnemacher, Vesta Silva, and several of their student co-authors. The essays analyze the emergence and impact of parties and interest groups in the American political system and explore the systematic and structural bases for interest group and party behavior. Each volume of the series opens with an introduction by the editors that provides a general overview of the eras and identifies important themes and events, laying a foundation on which the subsequent essays and primary documents for each interest group or political party builds. Narrative essays focus on how specific parties or interest groups have shaped or reflect a particular set of events or general themes in each of the eras in American political history. The set also includes primary source documents (e.g., letters, platform documents, court decisions, flyers, etc.) that reveal important dimensions of the corresponding group’s political influence. The series is published by ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Press.
Judson Herrman, the Frank T. McClure Professor of Greek and Latin, has completed his third book. In August 2019, Cambridge University Press published his edition of Demosthenes, Selected Political Speeches. In the fourth century BC, Demosthenes, as an emerging political leader, delivered a series of fiery speeches to the collected citizenry of Athens, attacking the Macedonian king Philip II as an aggressive imperialist bent on destroying Athens and its way of life. These speeches show how the foremost politician of the day presented his arguments, and how he eventually persuaded the voters to support his doomed militaristic position in preference to the policy of accommodation advocated by his political opponents. These speeches are invaluable sources for the ideology and political history of this crucial period, and they are the best examples of persuasive rhetoric in action from democratic Athens. Herrman’s book appears in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series, which is recognized worldwide as the leading venue for commentaries on classical texts. The series combines close attention to linguistic detail and sophisticated literary and cultural analysis, and its volumes are required reading for advanced students and scholars. Herrman presents 50 pages of Greek text together with 250 pages of introduction and detailed commentary. His book replaces standard commentaries from the 19th-century, and it may hope to enjoy a similarly long lifespan.
Richard Bowden, professor of environmental science and sustainability, along with Lauren Deem ’13 and colleagues from eight other universities, coauthored the presentation “The Detrital Input and Removal Treatment (DIRT) Project: Exploring Soil C Storage and Chemistry” at the Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Site 25-year Anniversary Conference. The presentation synthesized data from five temperate forests, including Allegheny’s Bousson Experimental Forest, showing how forest soils process and store carbon. Forests are globally important in removing carbon from the atmosphere, thus reducing effects of global warming pollution.
In June, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies Matthew Mitchell traveled to Japan to participate in the 23rd Annual Asian Studies Conference Japan. Mitchell organized the panel “A Place to Practice: Space and Place in Japanese Religions,” where he presented a paper entitled “Suing for Space: The Legal Battle to Maintain Sectarian Diversity, Ritual Space, and Administrative Power at the Zenkōji Temple Complex in the Eighteenth Century” on a series of lawsuits between Japanese Buddhist monks and nuns.
In early July, Mitchell was invited to teach a class for students in the International Master’s Program in Japanese Humanities at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. The intensive class on Buddhism and Business in East Asia was an expansion of a spring 2019 FS102 Mitchell taught at Allegheny College. Kyushu University is a national-level research university, and students in the course were from the U.S., Ireland, Belgium, and Indonesia. Being in situ allowed the class to explore how issues from readings played out in real life. One example was a trip to a local pilgrimage route to examine how village officials teamed up with Buddhist temple priests in attempts to revitalize a region. A second example was a discussion with a Buddhist priest at his Buddhist Bar (Vows Bar Kyushu) on why he opened the Bar to combine counseling with proselytization in a place that people find less intimidating than a Buddhist temple and how he has been affected by the “gig economy” as he provides rituals via the “Priest Delivery” service available over Amazon.co.jp.
Pictured above, left: Mitchell with students from the International Master’s Program at Kyushu University in front of a 41-meter long bronze Reclining Buddha statue at Nanzo-in Temple.
Pictured above, right: Mitchell at the Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine, which enshrines the Shinto deity of learning, Tenjin (the deified form of the 9th-century scholar Sugawara no Michizane)
GIS Manager Chris Shaffer and Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability Casey Bradshaw-Wilson, along with students Jennifer Tompkins (graduated), Cathlin Lord, and Kylie Wirebach, have published a paper titled “Reintroduction of the European Bison (Bison bonasus) in Central-Eastern Europe: A case study” in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. This article will be featured in the upcoming special edition of “Spatial Ecology.” This paper is the outcome of a project conducted in the Conservation GIS course taught by Shaffer and Bradshaw-Wilson in the spring of 2018.
Over the summer, Visiting Assistant Professor of Geology Matt Carter published a paper on his research entitled “An experimental investigation on fluid transfer mechanisms in ultramafic rocks” in the Journal of Structural Geology.
Pictured above: the natural rock sample and microscopic fluid bubbles that the authors experimentally trapped in the rock.
Associate Professor of History Guo Wu had a research article, entitled “Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed during the Cultural Revolution,” accepted for publication by the Journal of Contemporary China (JCC), one of the most prestigious journals in the field of China studies. He was invited by the Journal of Asian Studies (JAS), the flagship journal of the field to contribute a book review of Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution by Brian DeMare. The book review will appear in the JAS’s vol. 78, no. 4 issue of 2019.
Ryan Sayko ’17 published a paper entitled “Gluing Interfaces With Soft Nanoparticles” in the American Chemical Society’s journal Langmuir. The paper was coauthored with Dr. Zhen Cao, Heyi Liang, and Dr. Andrey Dobrynin, and is a result of the Research Experience for Undergraduates program at the University of Akron in the summer of 2016.
In July, Professor of Political Science Shannan Mattiace and her college mentor, Roderic Ai Camp, collaborated on the seventh edition of Politics in Mexico from Oxford Press.