People & Places: January 2020
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.
Assistant Professor of Global Health Studies Pamela Runestad presented a paper called “I can live a normal life: Living with HIV in Japan” as part of a panel session on HIV/AIDS at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Vancouver at the end of November.
Caryl Waggett, associate professor of global health studies, and Vesta Silva, associate professor of communication arts and global health studies, co-edited and wrote the lead article for the latest volume of AAC&U’s journal Diversity and Democracy. The special issue highlights the emerging field of undergraduate Global Health Studies—an area in which Allegheny College has become a national leader. The issue is co-sponsored by AAC&U and Allegheny College and features writing by global health scholars and students.
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Adrienne Krone’s research on Jewish community farms was published in the edited volume Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food by NYU Press. Krone’s chapter, “Ecological Ethics in the Jewish Community Farming Movement,” explores the core Jewish agricultural values and traditions and the subsequent development of contemporary ecological ethics within the Jewish Community Farming movement in North America.
Assistant Professor of Art Byron Rich was a visiting professor of art this past fall at Universidad de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico, where he gave a week-long series of workshops and classes and installed an exhibition in collaboration with Liz Flyntz on their collaborative project “Epicurean Endocrinology.” He also had his work “Alter/Altar” chosen as part of The Fuse Factory in Columbus, Ohio, which was on display until December of 2019. Rich’s work was shown this past fall at UsagiNY Gallery in NYC, GENSPACE in NYC, and FLUX Factory, also in NYC. He is currently part of a group exhibition at MOCA Tucson entitled “Groping in the Dark,” curated by Alex Young. Rich was an invited artist-in-residence at Cultivamos Cultura in Portugal, in addition to speaking at the New Media Caucus Symposium Border Crossings at the University of Michigan in November of 2019.
Three generations of Allegheny geology alumni have published an article in the journal Tectonics. Theresa M. Schwartz ’10, Professor Emeritus Robert K. Schwartz ’66, and Amy L. Weislogel ’98 are the authors of “Orogenic Recycling of Detrital Zircons Characterizes Age Distributions of North American Cordilleran Strata.” These research findings represent the culmination of more than 40 years of fieldwork in Montana by Professor Schwartz with more than 50 Allegheny alumni, including his coauthors.
Associate Professor of Biology and Geology Lisa Whitenack presented the final summary of the Allegheny College – Crawford Central School District Partnership at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) annual meeting in Austin, Texas, in January 2020. From 2014 to 2019, Whitenack directed the partnership, which matched Allegheny professors with Crawford Central School District teachers and Allegheny students to work together each summer on pressing issues in both the 7–12th grade and undergraduate classrooms. The partnership was funded by the John Nesbit Rees and Sarah Henne Rees Charitable Foundation. While at SICB, Whitenack also organized and ran a workshop called “Research & Working at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs),” served on a panel titled “Transitions in Science Careers,” and began her tenure as the chair of the SICB Educational Council and member of the Executive Committee.
Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies Carl Olson‘s essay “Playing in the Non-representational Mode of Thinking: A Comparison of Derrida, Dogen, and Zhuangzi” has been published in the scholarly journal Comparative and Continental Philosophy (2019): Volume 12/1, pp. 1–14. The theme for this issue is Derrida and Eastern philosophy.
Ken Pinnow, professor of history, participated in the roundtable “Health Care Then and Now: Imaginaries of Care and Visions of Justice in the Former Soviet Realm” at the annual conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in November. The roundtable sought to promote a dialogue between scholars of anthropology and history interested in Soviet/Russian health care, scientific practices, and statehood over time.
Aliza Legg ’20 was the 2019 recipient of the Champion Award from the Provident Charter School of Pittsburgh. The award recognizes individuals with dyslexia who have been very successful. Legg was honored for her academic achievements in both high school and college. She has received the John Dean Scholarship for academic achievement and the President’s Award for educational excellence. In addition, she authored a college essay titled “Dyslexia: My Greatest Gift” and received the Angel F. Miranda Achievement Award for facing life’s challenges with fortitude and perseverance. Legg, a neuroscience major with a minor in Spanish, is conducting research for her Senior Project on investigating the protocols in place for students with dyslexia learning a foreign language. Past recipients of the Champion Award include Kevin McClatchy, former owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Taylor Washington, who played for the Pittsburgh Riverhounds professional soccer team.
Richard Bowden, professor of environmental science and sustainability, along with Sarah Wurzbacher ’11, Susan Washko ’16, Lauren Wind ’15, Alexandria Rice ’17, Adrienne Coble ’04, Nick Baldauf ’04, Brittany Johnson ’03, and colleagues from Oregon State University, the University of Toronto, and Southern University of Science and Technology (China), coauthored the paper “Long-term Nitrogen Addition Decreases Organic Matter Decomposition and Increases Forest Soil Carbon” in a special issue of Soil Science Society of America Journal that featured papers presented at the 13th North American Forest Soils Conference. The paper, based on more than 25 years of study at the Bousson Experimental Forest, found that long-term atmospheric pollution slows the activity of soil biological and nutrient processes that are critical to forest growth. The research was highlighted in a cover photo of the Crop, Soil, and Agronomy News.
Assistant Professor of Biology Matthew Venesky recently published two papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The first paper is entitled “Female salamanders experience higher parasitism compared to males: a cost of female reproduction?” and it features Allegheny College student co-authors Joe DeMarchi ’16, Rachel Marbach ’16 and Keva Pariyar ’17 as well as collaborators from John Carroll University. This scientific paper will be published in the Journal of Herpetology. The second paper is entitled “A meta-analysis reveals temperature, dose, life stage, and taxonomy influence host susceptibility to a fungal parasite.” This collaborative paper is led by researchers from the University of Notre Dame and the University of South Florida, and it will be published in the journal Ecology.
Kathryn Bender, assistant professor of economics, recently published a co-authored peer-reviewed article in Sustainability entitled “Industry vs. Government Regulation of Food Date Labels: Observed Adherence to Industry-Endorsed Phrases.” The article reports findings from an analysis of three studies that finds industry adherence to endorsed guidelines on phrases is significantly lower than previously reported.