Summer 2017 Faculty Updates

Visiting Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Gender and Sexuality Studies Anne Balay received an honorable mention from the American Studies Association for the Gloria E. Anzaldua Award. Balay also published "Sex and Surveillance on the Highway" in the journal Trans Studies Quarterly.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry Robert Broadrup, along with Christopher Mayack of Swarthmore, received a $500 grant from the Chester County Beekeepers' Association to develop a better way for backyard beekeepers to monitor hive health. Broadrup and Mayack were also part of a team, which also includes Associate Professor of Chemistry and Environmental Studies Helen White, that received a $1000 Tri-Co Seed Grant for work toward honeybee health research consortium.

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curt Cacioppo completed his cycle of seven motets dedicated to Women of Ancient Greek Myth. The 40-minute a cappella work sets texts by contemporary Italian poet Luigi Cerantola. In addition, he completed zero nonostante on a poem by another contemporary Italian colleague, Renzo Oliva. His Philadelphia Diary was performed four times on tour in South Africa by pianist Althea Waites in conjunction with the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, and his Contrapuntal Fantasy on John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” was performed in Nevada City, Calif., by pianist Charles Abramovic. Filmmaker John Thornton published a video realization of Cacioppo’s Eclogue: symphony for piano. Cacioppo himself released six new videos of his work as composer and pianist: Cantata of the Angels performed by The Crossing, “shards, angles and shadows” – Cacioppo plays Schoenberg, Cacioppo plays Cardona, Nel mezzo del cammin performed by organist Robert Gallagher, Hamlet Elegy performed by violinist Francesco D’Orazio, and Cacioppo plays Kay.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Lou Charkoudian published a manuscript, "P450 monooxygenase ComJ catalyses side chain phenolic cross-linking during complestatin biosynthesis" in the journal Royal Society of Chemistry Advances with co-authors Aurelio Mollo '17, Alfred "Niki" von Krusenstiern '15, Joshua Bulos '16, Professor of Chemistry Karin Akerfeldt, and Max Cryle (Monash University). She also gave invited talks at the "Women in Chemistry" session of the American Chemical Society Mid-Atlantic Meeting, at the University of Edinburgh, and at the University of Bristol.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Thomas Donahue revised and resubmitted the manuscript of his book, Unfreedom For All: How Global Injustices Harm You, to an academic press. He also prepared a chapter of the manuscript, "Solidarity against Injustice: A Matter of Shared Harm," for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, in San Francisco. In Mexico City in August, sponsored by the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, Donahue took a listening tour of the Casa de Los Amigos and its George Fox Library, perhaps the largest Quaker library in Spanish America. While there, he discussed with the CPGC's summer interns the projects they were undertaking at the Casa.

Professor of Biology Robert Fairman published a paper, "Sedimentation velocity analysis with fluorescence detection of mutant huntingtin exon 1 aggregation in Drosophila Melanogaster and Caenorhabditis Elegans," in Biochemistry. That paper, describing efforts to apply a new fluorescence biophysical technique to the study of human neurodegenerative diseases focused on Huntington's disease, was coauthored with, among others, his undergraduate students Surin Kim '15, Victoria D'Acunto '17, Jay Garcia '16, Nabeel Akhtar '13, Susanna Hoffman '14, Seema Doshi '15, and Kathleen Ulrich '14. The research currently underway in Fairman's lab was profiled in Scientia, which is published by an organization interested in dissemination of science to a broader audience.

Assistant Professor of Religion Molly Farneth published her book, Hegel's Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation, via Princeton University Press. Farneth also published an essay on Douglas Hedley's book The Iconic Imagination in the journal Modern Theology.

Janet and Henry Ritchotte '85 Professor of Asian Studies and Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures Hank Glassman attended two international scholarly gatherings in August. In Kyoto, Japan, he participated in a translation workshop hosted by Otani University’s Shin Buddhist Comprehensive Research Institute, the Centers for Japanese Studies and Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Ryūkoku University’s Research Center for World Buddhist Cultures. He then went to Korea to delivered a paper, "Stupas Inside Statues: Esoteric Buddhism and Image Consecration in Medieval Japan," at a conference on objects and texts contained within Buddhist sculpture in East Asia. The conference, "Consecrating the Buddha: On the Practice of Interring Objects [bokjang] in Buddhist Statues," was hosted by Ehwa University in Seoul, and afterwards, participants traveled around Korea on a study tour to museums and temples to examine artifacts discovered in statues.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics Heidi Goodson co-organized and moderated a panel, "Planning and Teaching Upper-level Courses," at the MAA MathFest conference in Chicago, Ill. Goodson also gave a research presentation, “Hypergeometric Properties of Genus 3 Generalized Legendre Curves," at the Modular Forms Are Everywhere conference at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany. She and Bryn Mawr College's Djordje Milicevic were awarded a Mellon Tri-Co Faculty Forum Seed Grant to support the Philadelphia Area Number Theory Seminar that they co-organize.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Myron Gray published "A Partisan National Song: The Politics of 'Hail Columbia' Reconsidered" in Music and Politics, and presented a paper, "Transnational Opera and National Identity: Der Freischütz in 1820s America," at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early Republic, in Philadelphia in July. Gray also gave an interview to WRTI on "How Music Helped Win the American Revolution."

Assistant Professor of Physics Daniel Grin attended a workshop, "After Inflation," at the Aspen Center for Physics, where he had many useful conversations about particles known as neutrinos and hypothetical particles called axions with participants from around the globe. Several new research directions are now under exploration thanks to this stimulating two-week sojourn in the Rockies. Grin attended sessions on active learning techniques in physics, physics education research, and computational pedagogy at the American Association of Physics Teachers New Faculty Workshop in College Park, Md. In late August, Grin spent two weeks at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a visiting KITP scholar, completing work on axion dark matter constraints with cosmological observations, and beginning new work on simulations of scalar-field dark matter, and exploring new probes of spatial variations in the fundamental physical constants.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Patty Kelly co-authored "Migrant bodies as targets of security policies: Central Americans crossing Mexico’s vertical border" with Christine Kovic in the journal Dialectical Anthropology.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Charlie Kuper was on a five-week fellowship, funded by Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, to participate in the Syriac Summer School held at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library of St John's University in Minnesota.                                                                                                                             

Professor of Computer Science Steven Lindell gave an invited talk, "Traversal-invariant elementary definability for logarithmic-space computation," at the AMS Special Session on Computability and Inductive Definability over Structures, which was part of the Spring Central Sectional Meeting at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Professor of Music Thomas Lloyd published articles in Choral Journal ("Edward Elgar's The Apostles - A major oratorio standing outside tradition") and International Choral Bulletin ("Singen, nicht hassen - الغناء، لا أكره - Let's sing, not hate - Berlin's 'Begegnungschor'").

T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth presented a paper, "Proof in Mathematics and in Logic,” at the 31st International Symposium Logica 2017, organized by the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and held in Hejnice, Czech Republic. Macbeth's paper “Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths” was published in Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Lina Martínez Hernández travelled to Chocó, a region in the Pacific Coast in Colombia to broaden her work on Afro-Colombian populations, their cultures, literatures, and music. Once in Quibdó, Chocó's capital, she established links with different cultural promoters, teachers, writers, and people in very few, but very important projects, working together to promote and protect Chocó's cultural patrimony.

Associate Professor of Classics Bret Mulligan launched the revised version of The Bridge, an on-line tool that allows students and instructors to generate customized vocabulary lists from its database of Greek and Latin textbooks and texts. He also co-led a "Creating Digital Commentaries" workshop for at the American Classical League Annual Conference in Grand Rapids, MI.

Associate Professor of Political Science Zachary Oberfield published Are Charters Different? Public Education, Teachers, and the Charter School Debate, via Harvard Education Press.

Visiting Assistant Professor of English Jaclyn Pryor published the book Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History via Northwestern University Press.

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and Professor of Literature Deborah Roberts gave a paper, "Complete and Unexpurgated: Paratext, Translation, and the Obscene," in a seminar on paratext and translation at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Adam Rosenblatt was an invited participant at an expert meeting on "The Search for Victims of Enforced Disappearance: Legal Strategies and Best Practices." The meeting, held in Berlin in July, was convened by a member of the U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances and supported by the German Human Rights Institute, the Heinrich Boll Foundation, and the Federal Foreign Office of Germany. At the meeting, he gave a presentation on "Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Enforced Disappearance: Translating Science into Politics and Morality."

Associate Professor of Chemistry Joshua Schrier, Associate Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sorelle Friedler received a National Science Foundation grant for $645,288 for their collaboration, "The Dark Reaction Project: A Machine-Learning Approach to Exploring Structural Diversity in Solid State Analysis," which runs through Aug. 31, 2020. In addition, Schrier gave talks on "Introduction to computational physical chemistry: Integrating computational method development into the standard undergraduate physical chemistry curriculum" and "The Dark Reactions Project: Undergraduate-driven discovery of new materials with cheminformatics, machine learning, and experiments (and robots) at a small liberal arts college" at the 254th American Chemical Society National Meeting in Washington, D.C. He gave a visiting faculty seminar, "Discovering the rules of organohalide hybrid perovskite synthesis with machine-learning and high-throughput robotic synthesis," at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he also gave a talk, "The Dark Reactions Project: A Machine-Learning Approach to Materials Synthesis," to the Inorganic
Nanostructures group at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Molecular Foundry.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics Eric Stachura gave talks at the "Great Lakes Mathematical Physics Meeting" at Michigan State University in June and the "SIAM conference on Industrial and Applied Geometry" at Pittsburgh in July.

Associate Professor of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Jill Stauffer gave an invited talk, "'The closest thing that comes to my mind': Law, Time and Decolonial Thought," at the Phenomenology Symposium in Perugia, Italy. She gave another invited talk, "Temporal Resistance: Law, Indigenous Land Claims, and the Politics of Reconciliation," at the Australian Research Council Workshop on “Resistances: Rethinking the Politics of Reconciliation,” in Prato, Italy.

Douglas and Dorothy Steere Professor of Quaker Studies David Harrington Watt published his book, Antifundamentalism in Modern America, with Cornell University Press.

Assistant Professor of Health Studies Anna West gave two conference presentations at Chancellor College in Zomba, Malawi: "Beyond Efficacy: Anticipating Externalities in Health Systems Design" at the Annual Meeting of Anthropology Southern Africa, and "The Art of Village Sanitation: Visual Culture and Symbolic Violence in WASH Work" at an international conference on medical humanities in Africa.

Associate Professor of Chemistry and Environmental Studies Helen White was awarded the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, which honors accomplishment in scholarly research with undergraduates and a compelling commitment to teaching with a $60,000 unrestricted research grant. White was also appointed to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering,
Medicine Committee on the Evaluation of the Use of Chemical Dispersants in Oil Spill Response. At the 2017 Goldschmidt Conference in Paris, Christopher Reddy (WHOI) presented "A biogenic input of heptadecane in surface waters prior to and during the Anthropocene," research that he conducted with White and her student Charlie Marx '20.