Faculty & Staff Notes Archives: Fall 2002

Week of November 25, 2002
Associate Professor of English Nicholas Jones recently delivered a lecture at the Ohio Shakespeare Conference that was titled "Taymor's Titus and the Horrors of Post-Tito Yugoslavia." The panel discussion afterward was chaired by Professor of English Robert Pierce.

Four members of the Conservatory’s division of Music Theory gave papers at the 2002 Annual joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, held October 31 through November 3 in Columbus, Ohio.

Brian Alegant, associate professor of music theory, presented twice at the conference. The first presentation, "Dallapiccola's Serial Odyssey," advanced a new way of looking at Luigi Dallapiccola's twelve-tone repertory and development, and demonstrated the slow but inexorable evolution of the composer's compositional style. Alegant also collaborated with Gordon Sly, of Michigan State University, in a presentation called "Toward a Strategy for the Analysis of Post-Tonal Music." The presentation was part of a special session sponsored by the Pedagogy Group of the Society.

Warren Darcy, professor of music theory, presented a paper titled "'Die Zeit ist da': Rotational Form and Hexatonic Magic in Act II Scene 1 of Parsifal." The paper attempted to synthesize the concept of rotational form developed by Darcy and James Hepokoski with neo-Riemannian or transformational theory, especially its hexatonic subset. Darcy's paper will be published in a book of essays on Wagner's opera Parsifal, edited by William Kinderman and Katherine Syer.

Jan Miyake, visiting instructor of music theory, presented a paper titled "Haydn and the Closing Theme." Drawing on the work of Warren Darcy and James Hepokoski, this paper showed a correlation between exposition types and the musical ideas found in closing zones.

Diane Urista, assistant professor of music theory, presented a paper titled "Beyond Words: The Moving Body as a Tool for Musical Understanding." The paper discussed the practical applications and advantages of moving-to-music for learning, analyzing, and communicating about music in a college aural skills and theory classroom. Videos were presented featuring Oberlin Conservatory students.

Week of November 18, 2002
Marc Blecher, professor of politics and East Asian studies, recently appeared on the BBC to discuss the Chinese Party Congress. The interview is now available on the BBC's web site.

Danforth Professor of Politics Sonia Kruks is currently at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics as a visiting scholar. Recently, she gave two invited talks, one in London at the Institut Français, and one in Gothenburg, Sweden, at the University of Gothenburg. Kruks' talks were titled, respectively, "'What Is a Woman?' Philosophy and Feminism in Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex,'" and "Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism."

In June, Professor of Viola Peter Slowik attended the 30th International Viola Congress in Austria, Vienna. Stringendo, the magazine of the Australian String Teachers' Association, recently featured on overview of the event, which included the comment: "Peter Slowik's masterclass clearly demonstrated a master mentor and profound pedagogue at work, combining a penetrating perception with an engaging and entertaining repartee."

The entire Neuroscience Faculty recently attended the 32nd annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Associate Professor of Neuroscience Lynne Bianchi presented an abstract titled "Patterning of Cochlear And Vestibular Hair Cells in Vitro," and Associate Professor of Neuroscience Jan Thornton presented a teaching poster titled "Science and the Mind: A Non-majors, Frosh Colloquium."

Week of November 11, 2002
On November 7, Professor of Politics and East Asian Studies Marc Blecher was an invited speaker at the Asian Studies Center at Case Western Reserve University. Blecher delivered a lecture titled "A World to Lose: Workers' Politics and the Chinese State," which is also the working title of his next book.

Leslie Miller, assistant to the director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, will have several pieces of her work on display in "Oberlin Artists," an exhibition at St. Paul's Espiscopal Church in Cleveland Heights. The show will run from November 1 through January 26, and will feature several other artists from the Oberlin community.

Week of November 4, 2002
Beth Blissman, director of the Center for Service and Learning, recently had her first article published in the American Association for Higher Education's series on Service-Learning in the Disciplines. Blissman's article, "Expanding the Horizon of Engagement: Pioneering at the University of Denver," appeared in From Cloister to Commons: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Religious Studies.

David Cleeton, professor of economics, recently served as the faculty host for the Oberlin Alumni Tours of Alsace. In addition to visiting the community where J.F. Oberlin served as pastor (the church, the parsonage, the grave site, and the newly refurbished museum), we toured Strasbourg, Colmar, and the surrounding countryside. The group also visited the European Parliament building and attended a court session at the European Court of Human Rights. In late October, Cleeton delivered a lecture, "The U.S. Corporate Income Tax and Export Incentives: The end of Foreign Sales Corporations?" at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.

Week of October 28, 2002
Deborah Campana, conservatory librarian, was recently elected to the board of the American Music Center (AMC), a nonprofit organization based in New York City. The AMC includes 2500 composers, artists, organizations, educators, and patrons dedicated to promoting the creation, performance, and general appreciation of contemporary American music. In August, Campana delivered a paper titled "Libraries in Music Teaching Institutions in the United States" at the annual conference of the International Association of Music Libraries in Berkeley, California.

David Macauley, visiting assistant professor of environmental studies and philosophy, recently attended two conferences in Chicago. During these conferences, held by the International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP) and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), Macauley participated in panel discussions that examined environmental virtue ethics.

Bruce Simonson, professor of geology, is giving an invited talk on impact spherules at the Geological Society of America's annual convention in Denver this week. During the conference, he will also present a joint lecture with Dawn Sweeney '02. Recently, a letter that Simonson co-authored with Scott Hassler '82 was accepted for publication in Science magazine. The letter, "Evidence for Early Impacts in the Earth's History," dealt with Simonson's study of spherules.

Week of October 14, 2002
Mary Garvin, assistant professor of biology, was invited to present her research on viral infections in wild birds at the North American Ornithological Conference held recently in New Orleans. The quadrennial meeting was a joint conference of the American Ornithologists Union, The Cooper Ornithological Society, the Society of Canadian Ornithologists/Société des Ornithologistes du Canada, the Raptor Research Foundation, the Mexican Ornithological Society (CIPAMEX), and the Society for the Conservation and Study of Caribbean Birds (SCSCB). Garvin's presentation, "The arthropod-borne viruses in the birds of North America" reviewed the current knowledge of viruses transmitted among birds by mosquitoes, mites, and ticks. The review included her current research with Oberlin students and suggested priorities for future study.

Yumi Ijiri, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, recently contributed an article to the Journal of Physics, Condensed Matter. Ijiri's article, "Coupling and interface effects in magnetic oxide superlattices," highlighted advances in the study of magnetic oxide multilayer films. The article appeared in the September 23 issue of the journal.

Week of October 7, 2002
Jill Medina, senior assistant director of admissions, recently attended the 58th National Association of College Admission Conseling (NACAC) Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she presented a workshop entitled "Asian Pacific American Summit." This workshop focused on understanding the impact that the model minority myth has on Asian Pacific American students during the college search process.

Week of September 30, 2002
Roland M. Baumann, archivist and adjunct professor of history, recently attended a conference and workshop at Wesleyan University, where he presented a paper, "Looking Through the Arch: Finding Meaning in Oberlin's Missionary Past in China." The paper focused on Oberlin's historic relationship to China and on the meaning and symbolism of the Memorial Arch to present-day Oberlin undergraduates. The conference, which was attended by archivists and historians from 12 liberal arts colleges, was underwritten by a grant from The Henry Luce Foundation.

Week of September 9, 2002
Warren Darcy, professor of music theory, presented a paper entitled "Rotational Form and the Thematization of Failure in Mahler’s Fish Sermon" last May at the Annual Meeting of Music Theory Midwest in St. Paul, Minnesota. This fall he will present a paper entitled "’Die Zeit ist da': Rotational Form and Hexatonic Magic in Act II Scene 1 of Parsifal" at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory in Columbus. The paper attempts to synthesize the concept of rotational form developed by Darcy and James Hepokoski with neo-Riemannian or transformational theory, especially its hexatonic subset. The paper will be published in a book of essays on Wagner’s opera Parsifal edited by William Kinderman and Katherine Syer.

A paper written by James A. Walsh, associate professor of mathematics, recently appeared in the August/September 2002 issue of MAA FOCUS, the newsletter of the Mathematical Association of America. The paper, "A new look at an old question: Is (pi) normal?"is a written version of the talk Walsh delivered at the Department of Mathematics' student/faculty luncheon series last year. The article, intended for a general audience of mathematicians, describes the connection between base-b normality of fundamental constants such as (pi) and chaotic dynamical systems recently discovered by the mathematicians David Bailey and Richard Crandall. A second paper, coauthored by Gamaliel Lodge (OC '01) and Mark Kramer (OC '01) and titled "A trilinear three-body problem," has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos.