People & Places: November 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 Economics Kathryn Bender, along with co-authors at Ohio State University and Louisiana State University, recently had published an article entitled “Some Issues in the Ethics of Food Waste” in Physiology & Behavior. This paper discusses the ethical considerations involved in inducing behavioral changes and reallocating food resources.
This past year Mark Cosdon regularly achieved Genius on the New York Times Spelling Bee, a daily endeavor he took-up when a fellowship at the New York Public Library went belly-up. A visiting professorship at Sicily’s University of Palermo was postponed, but Mark did complete Duolingo’s entire Italian course. Each of the worms in Mark’s compost bin now have names and his freezer is chock-full of organic tomatoes. Since March, Mark has ridden over 1,000 miles on his bicycle, yet never journeyed more than 25 miles from his home. And, like most instructors at residential liberal arts colleges, Mark mastered the web-based learning management system Canvas. Mark continues as Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies. In March 2020 he directed the Playshop’s production of Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, canceled a week before greeting audiences.
An interview with Associate Professor of English and Director of Writing Alexis Hart and her co-author, Dr. Roger Thompson, titled “Veterans in the Classroom: Teaching Practices That Support Veterans and All Students” appears in the September issue of The Council Chronicle, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). An accompanying article titled “How Are Student Veterans Being Affected by the Pandemic?” appears on the NCTE blog.
Assistant Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty in International Studies Brian JK Miller was a member of the 2020 Middle East Studies Association’s panel on Displacement in the Un/Making of Turkey: Policy, Agency, and Coping Strategies. Miller’s presentation was entitled, “‘The first lesson was the Independence March’: Return Migration, Re-adaptation Programs & National Identity in 1980s Turkey,” in which he interrogated the terrain of Turkish return migration in the early 1980s and the Turkish state’s efforts to instrumentalize these returns as a means to refashion a notion of “Turkishness” in line with the ideology of the 1980 Turkish coup d’état.
Assistant Professor of Marketing and Neuromarketing Gaia Rancati published an article, “Humans Versus Robot Sales Assistants; The Impact of Immersion and Dwell Time,” in the October 2020 issue of Insights, a peer-reviewed magazine published by the Neuromarketing Science & Business Association.
Assistant Professor of English Mari Christmas has received a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. The awards annually recognize six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards program was established by novelist Rona Jaffe in 1995. The foundation notes that Christmas’s “fierce, darkly humorous, emotionally riveting work explores and embodies today’s world reflecting our deepest anxieties and the complexities of current-day feminism, motherhood, and modern love.” Christmas’s fiction has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, New Ohio Review, Juked, Fence, and Black Warrior Review.
Michael Michaelides, assistant professor of economics, co-edited with Rita Biswas the most recent volume 36 of the series Research in Finance, published by Emerald Publishing. This special issue compiles 11 articles, five of which were selected from the II International Conference on Economics and Finance, hosted by SVKM’s NMIMS in collaboration with The Indian Econometric Society in Bengaluru, India. The volume focuses on a gamut of topics ranging from monetary policy to corporate governance in emerging economies. More specifically, it presents papers on the role of board characteristics and sub-committees on firm performance, the impact of US quantitative easing on countries like India and China, public-private partnerships in infrastructure projects in India, and multinational banking evolution in Nigeria and India. The 11 articles are contributed by 24 authors from various institutions, including the Reserve Bank of India, Cairo University (Egypt), and Allegheny College (Stephen Onyeiwu, professor of economics).