People & Places: January 2022
People & Places is a monthly highlight of the ongoing professional activities and achievements of faculty, staff, and students of the College.
Professor of Biology Ron Mumme has been elected as a 2021 Honorary Fellow of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). Election as a Fellow honors AAAS members for distinguished efforts on behalf of science or its applications in service to society. Mumme, one of 141 Class of 2021 Fellows elected in the section on Biological Sciences and one of only five from primarily undergraduate institutions, was honored “for outstanding work in avian trade-offs in feather molt and parental care, in the challenges in social life histories, and excellence in teaching and mentoring.” AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.
Assistant Professor of World Languages & Cultures and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Rosita Scerbo published a chapter in the book Transgresiones en las letras iberoamericanas: visiones del lenguaje poético / Transgressions in Ibero-American Letters: Visions of the Poetic Language. Her book chapter entitled “Digi-poesía y ciberfeminismo: una aproximación teórica a los hipertextos y poemas perfomáticos de Belén Gache”/ “Digi-poetry and Cyberfeminism: A Theoretical Approach to the Hypertexts and Perfomatic Poems of Belén Gache“ explores the possibilities of the field of digital humanities as tools for women of color’s liberation. An example of this new instrument of emancipation is given by the digital poetry of the Spanish-Argentine writer and critic Belén Gache.
At a global level, there is still a great gender disparity within the issue of internet access and we are also witnessing a digital divide that confirms that different forms of technologies have an implicit gender content. In the digital age, Latina writers and artists face the challenge of visibility and recognition in two territories, that of technology and that of contemporary artistic creation. This chapter, through a critical and theoretical analysis of the poetics of Belén Gache, has the objective of investigating the way in which digital tools are being used by women of color in order to reconstruct their identities, make themselves visible, and dismantle a field dominated by men.
Professor Emeritus of Art George Roland exhibited works of computational art in two exhibitions.
- Pittsburgh’s AAP Gallery’s exhibition “111×111” from November 18 to December 28, 2021.
- Art Center Sarasota’s exhibition “Modes of Abstraction” from December 9, 2021 to January 15, 2022.
Professor of Global Health Studies Caryl Waggett co-authored an invited article published in January 2022 developing a model of global health education. The model identified five domains that are central to global health education and provides a comprehensive framework for core student learning objectives that can be applied to global health degree programs at the undergraduate through graduate and professional levels. “Global health education for the post-pandemic years” was published in the open-access journal, Global Health Research and Policy, and is available free of charge here.
Arthur E. Braun Professor of Political Science Sharon Wesoky was an invited participant on an international roundtable to celebrate the release of feminist scholar of China Tani Barlow’s new book, In the Event of Women. Originally scheduled for the Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association in Washington, D.C., the event has since been canceled and held on Zoom. It can now be found on YouTube. In true academic and plague-era fashion, the panelists plan to reconvene at next year’s MLA in San Francisco for further discussion.
Professor of French and International Studies Laura Reeck was nominated to join SOAS’s The Global Council for Anthropological Linguistics. She will serve on the Europe Regional Advisory Committee. Her chapter, “Imams and Audience in Kaouther Ben Hania’s Niche Filmwork,” and co-written introduction and conclusion have been published in Artistic (Self) Representations of Islam and Muslims: Perspectives Across France and the Maghreb. This is the second of three contributions Reeck plans to make on Ben Hania, the first Tunisian filmmaker to have a film nominated for an Academy Award.
Director of Writing and Professor of English Alexis Hart’s co-authored article “Defining Access to Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies: A Proposed Model for Increasing Support, Opportunity, and Participation” appears in the Winter 2021 volume of SPUR (Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research), a journal of the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR).
Robin Forsha ’22, Julie M. Holder ’22, Bailey Kozalla ’22, and Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability Richard Bowden published “Prescribed Goat Browsing to Control Invasive Multiflora Rose at the Erie National Wildlife Refuge” in the Fall 2021 iMapInvasives Newsletter, a publication of the Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program. The work describes the success of goats as a control for an invasive plant that threatens biodiversity at the refuge and was done by students in an Environmental Research Methods and a Forest Ecology and Management course.
Several Allegheny students presented recently at the 2021 Regional Science Consortium Annual Symposium, held at the Tom Ridge Environmental Center in Erie.
- Lizzy Russo ’22 presented their senior thesis, “Queering Conservation: How LGBTQ+ Leaders are Enhancing Conservation,” describing unique contributions by LGBTQ+ leaders to further conservation goals.
- Robin Forsha ’22, Julia Holder ’22, Bailey Kozalla ’22, Grace Hemmelgarn ’22, Megan Kresse ’22, Ally Martin ’21, and Danielle Studer ’22 presented the poster “Prescribed Browsing by Goats Controls Multiflora Rose in a Black Cherry-Red Maple Deciduous Forest at the Erie National Wildlife Refuge in Northwestern PA.” The presentation described work they conducted in courses to reduce the invasive plant multiflora rose at the Erie National Wildlife Refuge.
- Hemmelgarn also received first place in the Undergraduate Oral Presentation category for her presentation, “Juvenile Drift of Round Gobies in the French Creek Watershed as a Means of Range Expansion.” She described her thesis focused on understanding the spread of the invasive, non-native fish round goby in the French Creek watershed. She and Studer also gave a speed-talk, entitled “Using eDNA as an Indicator of Presence/Absence of Round Gobies in the French Creek Watershed,” describing a molecular technique to detect the round goby
- Hailey Stupay ’23 presented a poster, “Comparing Species Richness between a Restored and an Unrestored Farm in Northwestern Pennsylvania,” which examined efforts to revert abandoned farmland to active wildlife habitat.
- Sam Hall ’22 gave a speed talk, “Comparing Time Spent by Different Carnivore Species at River Otter Latrines,” that described efforts to quantify interactions among carnivores as a means to assist in their conservation.
Ryan Sesler ’23 and Associate Professor of Biology & Geology Lisa Whitenack presented their summer research “Chomping at the bit: the effects of wear on shark tooth puncture performance and morphology” at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting on Jan. 6, 2022.
Sesler examined the puncture forces and degree of wear in shark teeth from bull sharks, blacktip sharks, and sandbar sharks in fish prey. Forces and wear were measured over a series of 400 punctures per tooth, but the effects were seen as early as 20 punctures into the series. Some sharks can replace their teeth every few weeks, and these preliminary data suggest that it may be due to tooth wear. Sesler will use this preliminary data as the basis for his Senior Comp next year.
Professor of Business & Economics Tomas Nonnenmacher recently published a co-authored article titled “Who Should Own the League? Transaction Costs and the Structure of NBA Ownership” in the Journal of Sports Economics. He and his coauthor, David Gerard of Lawrence University, explore the forces that lead leagues to be organized as cooperatives of team owners and consider alternative ownership structures, such as investor or employee-owned leagues.
Professor of Mathematics Anthony Lo Bello is the authorized translator of Antonio Cardinal Bacci, Essays in Appreciation of His Life, His Latinity, and His Books (ISBN 978-1-98990-584-5), originally published in Italian by Pagnini Editore, Florence.
Antonio Bacci was the author of a famous Italian-Latin dictionary that went into four editions, and in 1953 he founded in Rome the journal Latinitas, now in its seventieth year of publication. Lo Bello also provided a fifty-page foreword for the book.
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Adrienne Krone published an article in a special issue of the journal Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology on Jewish Environmental Ethics. In the article, “Farming on the Front Lines: Jewish Environmentalisms and Kinship in the Chthulucene,” Krone draws on the work of multispecies theorist Donna Haraway and her ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Jewish community farming organizations all over North America to describe the ways in which Jewish farmers are “staying with the trouble” amidst the climate crisis.
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Global Health Studies Steven Farrelly-Jackson recently gave an invited presentation, “The Ethics of Continuous Deep Sedation in Care for Patients with Terminal Illness,” for the conference Ethical Issues in Oncology, organized by the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Bioethics and Health Law.
His article, “Intentions at the End of Life: Continuous Deep Sedation and France’s Claeys-Leonetti Law,” is forthcoming in The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. The paper examines a range of conceptual and ethical questions arising from a controversial French law giving terminally ill and suffering patients the right to be put into a state of unconsciousness until death. The original research was funded by Allegheny College.
Business & Economics Professor Steve Onyeiwu contributed an article, “The Nexus of Structural Adjustment, Economic Growth and Sustainability: A Case Study of Ethiopia,” in the edited book Financial Crises, Poverty and Environmental Sustainability: Challenges in the Context of the SGDs and COVID-19 Recovery. Editors include Andreas Antoniades, Alexander Antonarakis, and Isabell Kempf. The publisher is Springer (Sustainable Development Goals Series), 2022.
Professor Emerita of Psychology Juvia Heuchert recently had a chapter, and several other contributions, published in a personality psychology textbook through Oxford University Press called Personality Psychology.
Davies & Fahrner Assistant Director for Community-Based Projects Amber Pouliot published an article in a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts. The article, entitled “My Pandemic Garden,” questioned the journal’s theme — “Unprecedented Disruptions” — arguing that for adjuncts, graduate students, and other precarious members of the academy, the pandemic’s disruptions were far from unprecedented and instead merely accelerated existing conditions throughout the ecosystem of higher education. Pouliot has been invited to present this paper at a special round table session of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies conference in Salt Lake City this March.