People & Places: December 2021
People & Places is published during the academic year by the Office of Marketing & Communications. It reports on the professional activities of members of the College community and highlights student achievement.
Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability Richard Bowden was invited to serve as an editor of the journal Forests, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of forestry and forest ecology published monthly. Bowden also serves on the Board of the Foundation for Sustainable Forests, a nonprofit land trust that protects working forests through sustainable forestry, forest conservation, and responsible community citizenship.
Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies Mark Cosdon served on the doctoral dissertation committee of Chiara Pasanisi, who successfully completed her Ph.D. at the University of Rome — Sapienza. Cosdon has been named to the editorial committee for Mimesis International’s book series “Drammaturgie e Drammatica.”
Professor of French and International Studies Laura Reeck is invited professor at the Université Grenoble Alpes for the academic year 2021-22. She gave the first of a series of papers at “Making Kin,” a one-day international conference at UGA, “Interspecies relations in Arrival, and reflections on translation and hospitality upon arrival.”
Associate Professor of History Guo Wu published his third book, entitled An Anthropological Inquiry into Confucianism: Ritual, Emotion, and Rational Principle.” With a chronological arrangement and interdisciplinary approach, the book focuses on the interplay of “Ritual [Li]”, “Emotion [qing]”, and “Rational Principle[li]”, the three key concepts in the Confucian inquiry into the metaphysical and life worlds, and unravels the meaning of the revival of Confucian ritualism in the 21st century.
Professor of Political Science and International Studies Shannan Mattiace presented a paper at Claremont-McKenna College in California on October 22, 2021. The paper was co-written with Sandra Ley (CIDE, Mexico City) and entitled: “Yucatán as an Exception to Rising Criminal Violence in México.” The presentation was part of a two-day conference on Mexican Politics in honor of Roderic Camp, who celebrated 50 years of teaching and research on Mexican Politics.
Mattiace also presented a paper as part of the 9th Annual National Jesuit Summit–Mexico Province on November 19, 2021. Her presentation was entitled “Resistencia Social frente al crimen organizado: el caso de la CRAC-PC.” Jesuits and their community allies/organizers came together from across Mexico to talk about this year’s theme: Security, Armed Movements, and Territory. (Mattiace’s presentation was via Zoom.)
Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability Casey Bradshaw-Wilson and colleagues at Penn State coauthored the paper “Status of Freshwater Mussels (Unionidae) in the French Creek Watershed, USA at the Onset of Invasion by Round Goby, Neogobius melanostomus.” The paper quantifies baseline data on the contemporary diversity and abundance of unionid mussels in the upper French Creek watershed, and explores potential habitat factors that influence or limit the size of the mussel populations. The results regarding the locations of native mussel populations and characteristics of their habitat provide the needed insight for establishing priority areas for the conservation of freshwater mussels, facilitating planning for protection, mitigation, and adaptation as the invasive fish species, Round Gobies, continues its spread.
The second edition of Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies Carl Olson‘s Historical Dictionary of Buddhism has been published by Rowman and Littlefield. This book represents an expanded edition of the 2009 edition. Olson’s foreword to Awakening through Literature and Film by Jae-seong Lee, a scholar who teaches at Pusan National University in South Korea, has also been published. The foreword was requested by the author for his book.
Noelle Kidd ’24, Matt Rhodes ’22, and Assistant Professor of Geology Katie Tamulonis presented “Effects of an Igneous Intrusion of the Devonian Millboro Shale, Sugar Grove, West Virginia” at the Eastern Section of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists conference in Pittsburgh. Tamulonis also served on the conference organizational committee and presented additional research titled “Organic Source Characterization of the Utica, Marcellus, and Burkett Shales” with colleagues from SUNY Brockport.
Lauren Fugate ’20 and Assistant Professor of English John MacNeill Miller published an article, “Shakespeare’s Starlings: Literary History and the Fictions of Invasiveness,” in the latest issue of Environmental Humanities, an open-access journal from Duke University Press. It has long been common knowledge that European starlings are an invasive pest species that does serious damage to American agriculture and ecosystems. “Shakespeare’s Starlings” uses humanistic research methods to cast serious doubt on this common knowledge, cutting through the slew of misleading stories about starlings to highlight the importance of humanistic learning to the formulation of sound environmental science and policy.
In October, Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability Delia Byrnes, along with Dr. Brittany Davis, published an essay in the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s (AASHE) Anthology “No Sustainability Without Justice.” Titled “Sustainability Without Race?: Disrupting Whiteness at the Introductory Level,” the essay emphasizes the necessity of incorporating discussions of power, inequality, and anti-racism into all levels of the environmental curriculum so students are well-prepared to tackle the interconnected problems of environmental impacts and social injustice.
Professor of Spanish Barbara Riess published a scholarly edition of the 1961 Casa de las Américas prize-winning novel Maestra voluntaria by Cuban author Daura Olema (1933-2021). The project has its roots in a Mellon Undergraduate Research in the Humanities summer research project with Kaitlyn Torres ’14 that sought to answer the question “Why did Cubans believe in the revolution?” The critical introduction to this Spanish edition examines the portrait of uncertainty and heroism during the initial years of the Cuban Revolution in the novel, Cuba’s controversially famous Literacy Campaign (source of a social media storm even during the U.S. 2020 presidential campaign!) and the book’s mixed reception over the last fifty years. With support from Allegheny College, Riess presented her preliminary research findings at the 2019 MLA International Symposium “Recovering Lost Voices” in Lisbon and worked closely with Cuban scholars on the historical annotations to the text. At the behest of the author (via Turin, Italy) the edition of the book through StockCero Annotated Literary Editions is designed to be accessible to students of Spanish as well as scholars of the Cuban Revolution.
Associate Professor of Psychology Lauren R. Paulson presented a poster on the research she conducted with Caitlyn Davis ’21 at the annual International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) conference. IARSLCE is an international organization devoted to promoting research and discussion about service-learning and community engagement. The poster was titled “Community Voices: Exploring the Community Perspective of Community-College Partnership in a Rural Area.”
Assistant Professor of Political Science Tarah Williams published an article, “Getting the Message? Choice, Self-Selection, and the Efficacy of Social Movement Arguments,” in the most recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Political Science with co-authors from Brown University, Lewis-Clark State College, and the University of California-Merced. Their work finds that men who are inclined to be hostile toward the #MeToo movement become more receptive to the movement’s goals when they hear about the movement’s concerns from another man (as compared to a woman). Williams was also selected to take part in the Public Religion Research Institute’s Public Fellows Program. As part of the program, she will work with the fellows and PRRI researchers to generate public scholarship on religious, racial, and ethnic pluralism.
Business and Economics Professor Steve Onyeiwu‘s paper, “Institutions and Foreign Direct Investment Flows to the MENA Region,” was selected as the best paper (Africa Category) at the 14th annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), Washington D.C., November 13-15, 2021.
The article “Remembering Heathen Women in Medieval Icelandic Literature,” by Professor Emerita of Chemistry Ann Sheffield, appears in the 2021 edition of Scandinavian-Canadian Studies Études scandinaves au Canada. This themed issue focuses on the application of Memory Studies to medieval Norse literature and culture. The contents of this open-access journal can be accessed here.