Faculty & Staff Notes Archives :: Spring 2003

Week of May 26, 2003
Professor of Economics David Cleeton has been appointed to serve on the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), the group responsible for coordinating and conducting the initial screening of applicants for the Fulbright Senior Scholar Program. Cleeton will serve on the peer review committee that screens applications for the Fulbright Program in Belgium, Luxembourg, France, The Netherlands, and the European Union.

Week of May 19, 2003
T.S. McMillin, associate professor of English, was invited to speak at Brown University in April. His lecture. "Extremes Meet: Thinking in Palindromes," used palindromes to develop a reflective and imaginative way of thinking and reading that acknowledges complexity, especially the region in which "culture" meets "nature." Earlier in the semester, McMillin delivered a lecture to the Oberlin Unitarian Universalist Fellowship titled "Transcending Unitarianism: Emerson's Drift." In June he will speak on "The Flow of Transcendentalism: From the Concord River to the Beyond and Back" at Boston University for a conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

Week of May 12, 2003
On Thursday, May 1, Professor of Politics Marc Blecher presented the first Gordon White Memorial Lecture at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, England. The lecture accompanied the launch of Blecher's new book, Asian Politics in Development (with Bob Benewick and Sarah Cook), published in London by Frank Cass.

Assistant Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand recently published an article, "Oedipus the Queen: Cross-gendering without Drag," in a special issue of Theatre Journal dedicated to ancient drama. Ormand's piece explores the convention of men playing women's parts in fifth-century Athenian theater, and discusses the cultural meanings that such dramatic cross-dressing produced. In particular he argues that, for the Athenians, feminization had less to do with sexuality than with gender, and that Greek theater presents a paradigm of gender that is more flexible than our own. (Theatre Journal 55 (2003):1-28.)

Week of May 5, 2003
Beth Blissman, director of Oberlin's Center for Service and Learning, recently participated in a conference titled "Service-Learning in Environmental Studies." The conference, hosted by the Minnesota Campus Compact, was held at St. John's University in St. Cloud, Minnesota, last month. Blissman spoke about the CSL's efforts to infuse Oberlin's campus culture with ecologically-based approaches to civic engagement. She also joined other speakers to assist participating teams of faculty and staff members as they created plans to enrich service-learning projects with ecologically-based approaches on their home campuses.

David Macauley, visiting assistant professor of environmental studies
and philosophy, recently presented a paper at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. The paper, titled "Reconsidering the
Tragedy of the Commons: Philosophical Points and Policy Perspectives," critically explored Garett Hardin's well-known essay on the subject, and argued that the overuse and appropriation of common resources such as air or water needs to be redefined and broadened to include genetic material, silence, and the Internet, and that solutions must grapple with the displacement of indigenous commoners, the conceptual and physical enclosure of shared places through privitization, and the need for both global, local and "glocal" regulation. Earlier in April, Macauley gave a talk, "Learning Logic: Philosophical Foundations," at Penn State University.

Professor of Viola Peter Slowik presented the keynote address at the Australian String Teachers' Association National Conference in Canberra April 19. Subsequent appearances at the conference included several lectures and master classes, and a performance as soloist with the National Youth Orchestra in Berlioz '"Harold in Italy." While in Australia, Slowik participated in a series of recitals and master classes at the Queensland Conservatorium in Brisbane.

Week of April 28, 2003
Visiting Instructor of Expository Writing Noelle Howey was recently awarded the 2003 Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association for her book, Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's and Mine. Howey's book has gone into seven printings, and has been published in five countries, including Australia, Canada, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Week of April 21, 2003
Professor of Music Theory Warren Darcy presented an invited
paper at a February conference " held at the University of Minnesota. Darcy's paper, "The Abandoned Hero: Wagner's Changing Attitude Towards Siegfried," was based partially upon work he did with Wagner's sketches and drafts in the Bayreuth
Wagner Archives. Darcy's investigation of apparent inconsistencies in the character of Siegfried in the last two "Ring" operas suggests that Wagner's message in these works is far more pessimistic than is generally assumed. This Fall Darcy will deliver a paper titled "Sie bleiben wie Allen: Rotational Form and the Thematization of Failure in Mahler's Fish Sermon" at the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory.

Assistant Professor of Art History Erik Inglis recently published an article titled "Image and Illustration in Jean Fouquet's 'Grandes Chroniques de France'" in French Historical Studies, vol. 26, no.2.

Week of April 14, 2003
Director of Conservatory Media Relations Marci Janas gave invited presentations at the Juilliard and the Manhattan schools of music this past March. At Juilliard, she presented "To TBA or Not To TBA (And Other Deeply Philosophical Public Relations Questions for the Professional Musician)" at the school's Business for Musicians course, taught by Robert Sherman. On March 27, she presented "Catch and Release: Catch the Media's Attention by Writing Effective Press Releases," to doctoral students enrolled in a writing course at the Manhattan School of Music.

Professor of Musicology Steven Plank was one of the cornettists for the first modern performance of Daniel Bollius' "Repraesentatio harmonica conceptionis et nativitatis S. Ioannis Baptista," presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Bollius' work, dating from the 1620's, is one of the first oratorios to have been written in Germany.

Week of April 7, 2003
Dan Chaon's short story, "Sorrow Comes in the Night," which appeared in the January 2002 issue of Book Magazine, is among the nominees for the 2003 National Magazine Award in Fiction. The award honors magazine editors in a variety of categories. Chaon, an assistant professor of creative writing, has also recently learned that his story "The Bees," published in McSweeney's, has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2003, edited by Walter Mosley and Katrina Kenison. The annual anthology is published each October.

Erik Inglis, assistant professor of art history, recently contributed an essay to the exhibition catalog for "Jean Fouquet, peintre et enlumineur du XVe siecle" at the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

Week of March 31, 2003
An article co-authored by Brian Alegant, associate professor of music theory, and Don McLean (of McGill University) appears in the most recent volume of the Journal of Music Theory. The article, "On the Nature of Enlargement," focuses on the technique of motivic enlargement in tonal, post-tonal, and twelve-tone music.

Week of March 17, 2003
Professor of Economics David Cleeton recently was appointed to the International Advisory Board of the journal Modern & Contemporary France (Carfax Publishing, Taylor and Francis Group). Founded in 1980 by the Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France, the publication offers a comprehensive scholarly view of all aspects of France from 1789 to the present day. It is a multi-disciplinary journal of French studies, drawing on history, the social and environmental sciences, women's studies, philosophy, education, language, literature, the arts, media and cinema studies.

David Macauley, visiting assistant professor of environmental studies and philosophy, recently presented a lecture, "Thoreau and the Mobile Earth," at Harvard University that examined Thoreau's practices of walking and idea of place inhabitation. Macauley also accompanied students to the Harvard Forest, where they learned about the biology of the area, sustainable yield forestry practices and historical changes to the landscape. The group climbed the snowy slope of Mount Wachussett, visited Walden Pond (which was covered in ice) and discussed
the Quaabin Reservoir, which provides water to the Boston region.
In late January, Macauley presented a talk at the University of Oregon entitled "Re-placing Environmental Philosophy," in which he argued for a new orientation for environmental ethics, environmental aesthetics and environmental politics rooted in a dynamic model of experiential place.

Week of March 10, 2003
An article written by Brian Alegant, associate professor of music theory, and Marcus Lofthouse '01 has recently been published in volume 40/2 of Perspectives of New Music. The article, "Having Your Cake and Eating It, Too: The Property of Reflection in Twelve-Tone Rows," is the culmination of a Perlik grant. It defines a specific property of certain twelve-tone configurations called "reflection," and enumerates and classifies the (previously unknown) universe of reflecting rows. Alegant has also been appointed to an editorship with Music Theory Spectrum, the journal of the Society for Music Theory, for three years.

Week of March 3, 2003
Assistant Professor of Art Erik Inglis recently presented a paper titled "Corporal Punishment in Late Medieval Secular Art" at the Annual Conference of the College Art Association in New York. Inglis' presentation was part of a session that examined representations of the body in medieval art.

Week of February 17, 2003
Professor of Politics Marc Blecher has hit the international conference circuit. In January, he presented a paper titled "A World to Lose: Workers, Work, Welfare, and the State in China: The Puzzle, Provisos, and Some Pieces" at a meeting of the Joint Project on China's Politics, Society, and Economy. The conference, sponsored by Keio University and the Japanese Ministry of Education, will meet in Oberlin next January and in China or the United Kingdom the following year. The purpose of the project is to promote collaboration among American, British, French and Japanese specialists on Chinese political economy, who plan to eventually publish their findings.

Week of February 10, 2003
Visiting Instructor of Rhetoric and Composition Noelle Howey '94 has been awarded a journalism fellowship from the Casey Center on Children and Families at the University of Maryland. Thirty journalists are selected each year to receive this national fellowship. The award will provide an opportunity for intensive training on reporting on issues of juvenile justice. Howey's most recent book, Dress Codes, which has been named as a Good Morning America book club selection, has also just won the American Library Association's 2002 Stonewall Honors Award for Non-Fiction.

John Petersen '88, assistant professor of environmental studies and biology, will travel to Sweden this spring to give a series of invited lectures at the University of Ulmea. His lectures will deal with how to extrapolate information from small-scale experimental ecosystems to nature. Petersen is also working on a book with a group of researchers at the University of Maryland. The book will summarize 10 years of research at the university's multiscale experimental ecosystem research center, where he is an adjunct faculty member.

Week of February 3, 2003
Professor of Viola Peter Slowik spent the second half of winter term performing solo recitals at Goshen College and the University of Iowa. Slowik also presented master classes at the Chicago College of Performing Arts, Wheaton College, and the University of Iowa; performed a week of subscription concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; and served as principal violist for a series of concerts with the Santa Fe (New Mexico) Pro Musica.