People & Places: October 2022
People & Places is a monthly highlight of the ongoing professional activities and achievements of faculty, staff, and students of the College.
Associate Professor of History Guo Wu was invited by Professor of Chinese at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Dr. Hemant Adlakha, to participate in the 1st China’s Domestic Governance Conference organized by the Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi, in partnership with the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Wu presented his paper entitled “‘Historical Nihilism’ or Historical Authentication: Public Skepticism of the Party-State’s Narrative of ‘Heroes’ in Early 21st Century China” to the panel The Party in Primacy on September 9, 2022.
Professor of English and Director of Writing Alexis Hart and her international team of researchers published an article titled “Multiple Forms of Representation: Using Maps to Triangulate Students’ Tacit Writing Knowledge” in the most recent volume of Composition Forum. The article draws on examples of student interviews incorporating multiple modalities to explore students’ writing lives as part of a larger project focusing on participants’ writing experiences within and beyond the university.
Writing consultants Katie Wagner ’23 and Becky Pechmann ’23 were invited to the 2022 Naylor Workshop on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies, held at York College of Pennsylvania from September 29 to October 2. Professor of English and Director of Writing Alexis Hart served as a faculty mentor at the workshop.
During the workshop, Wagner and Pechmann met with other undergraduate researchers and faculty mentors to help refine their research questions and develop strategies that consultants can use to efficiently identify a writer’s needs and best tailor communication with the writer to determine research methods that might best help them answer their questions. At the end of the workshop, Wagner and Pechmann presented their refined research question and methods with a poster “gallery walk.”
Assistant Professor of Global Health Studies Pamela Runestad attended the Food Movements/Moving Food conference at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy, in June. The paper she presented was published by Food Anthropology in August.
Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability Delia Byrnes contributed a chapter titled “Ecocriticism and the Body” to the Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body, published in July 2022. Byrnes’s chapter examines the shifting figure of the human body in contemporary environmental literature and scholarship, emphasizing how race, gender, and ability impact experiences of bodily autonomy, toxicity, and more-than-human relations.
Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Religious Studies Matt Mitchell’s article, “Regulating Chance: Buddhist temple lotteries, government oversight, and anti-Buddhist discourse in early modern Japan,” was published in the Journal of Cultural Economy. Mitchell’s article outlines the history of lotteries in Japan, why and how Buddhist temples used them to raise funds for temple repairs in the early modern period (c. 1600–1868), and the larger moral-economic debates in which they became embroiled.
While lotteries are worth examining for their importance in maintaining Buddhist temples in the early modern period, their study also provides a window into the competing values and interests at play in Japan in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This affected how and when temples could use lotteries to raise funds and would eventually come to inform how modern scholars came to view early modern Japanese Buddhism.
Professor of Mathematics Rachel Weir was a guest on episode 80 of ASKPsychSessions, a podcast hosted by Professor Marianne Lloyd of Seton Hall University. The episode “How can I make changes to my grading to increase success in my courses?” features a conversation focused on Weir’s grading approaches in mathematics courses.
Department of Environmental Science and Sustainability faculty Jesse Swann-Quinn, Eric Pallant, and Richard D. Bowden, Director of Physical Plant Joe Michael, Sebastian McRae ’22, and Sustainability Director Kelly Boulton presented the paper “Growing a resilient campus forest: Opportunities, barriers, solutions” at the 5th World Symposium on Sustainable Development at Universities, held on Allegheny’s campus in June. The presentation describes recent efforts to grow a food forest on campus and to move the campus forest toward more use of native and climate-resilient tree species.
Caryl Waggett, professor of global health studies, and Kathryn H. Jacobsen, professor of health studies at the University of Richmond, led an expert webinar “Teaching Global Health to Undergraduates,” hosted by the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH), Teach Global Health, and Jones and Bartlett Learning.
The global webinar was targeted at educators at undergraduate-serving institutions around the globe, providing a discussion of various pedagogical approaches and curricular models across a range of institutional settings to position programs to engage their students to address domestic and transnational health challenges as public health practitioners; future medical clinicians, lawyers, policy experts, business leaders, and planners; and as educated citizens. The webinar reached more than 350 individuals from more than 30 countries.