Faculty & Staff Notes Archives :: Spring 2004

Week of April 26, 2004
Associate Professor of Russian Tim Scholl recently presented the lectures, "Creating a Dance Heritage: The Case of Azerbaijan," at the Nordisk forum för dansforsking in Reykjavik, Iceland, and "George Balanchine, A Life's Journey in Ballet," at the Harvard Theater Collection in Boston, Massachusetts.

Week of April 12, 2004
Kathy Abromeit, public services librarian for the Conservatory Library, and Victoria Vaughan, assistant director of opera theater, recently published "Info Lit and the Diva: Integrating Information Literacy into the Oberlin Conservatory of Music Opera Theater Department" in Notes, Vol: 60, Issue: 3, March 03, 2004.  The article is also available via the Electronic Journal Center (EJC).

Nita Karpf, assistant to the dean, Conservatory, recently attended the conference of the Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society, held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she presented a paper titled "'Strangely Touched and Drawn Together': E. Azalia Hackley [1867 1922] and Music Activism in African-American Communities, 1914-18."

Danforth-Lewis Professor of Economics Kenneth Kuttner recently spent two days as a visiting scholar at the Banco de Portugal in Lisbon, where he presented a paper titled "The Role of Policy Rules in Inflation Targeting."

Week of March 29, 2004
Assistant Professor of Economics Sylvestre Gaudin and Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics Yingchun Liu recently attended the annual Midwest Economics Association Meetings, where they presented papers titled, respectively, "Transparent Prices for Municipal Water: Impact of Pricing and Billing Practices on Residential Water Use" and "Consumption, Risk Sharing and Limited Market Participation."

David Orr's latest book, The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror, will be published by Island Press in April 2004. Orr is a professor of environmental studies, as well as director of the environmental studies program, at Oberlin College.

Week of March 7, 2004
Director of Recreational Sports Betsy Bruce currently has a "one-artist" show of fiber arts (hand-dyed and handwoven yardage and garments, as well as a few pieces in progress) on display at Kendal at Oberlin's Langston cafeteria.

Jed Deppman, a visiting assistant professor of English and comparative literature, has received a summer stipend grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award will support his project, "Redefining America: Whitman, Dickinson, and Their Dictionaries."

Associate Professor of Russian Tim Scholl was recently appointed docent of theatre research at Helsinki University (Finland). The position is an adjunct position, made at the senior level. Scholl is the department's only dance expert. During the summer, Scholl serves as the head of course for the university's "Dance on Baltic Shores" program, which draws participants from all over the Baltic region (Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Estonia) who are advanced undergraduates and graduate students in dance and theater.

During the past year, Scholl has also delivered several invited lectures, including "A Georgian Source for Serenade?" and "From the Maryinsky to Manhattan, George Balanchine and the Transformation of American Dance" in October 2003; "Sleeping Beauty and St. Petersburg" and "St. Petersburg through American Eyes" in November 2003; and "Sleeping Beauty: Historicism and Eclectisism" in February 2004. Scholl's latest endeavor, a book titled Sleeping Beauty, A Legend in Progress, is scheduled for publication in April 2004 (Yale University Press).

Week of February 23, 2004
Frederick B. Artz Professor of History Leonard Smith recently gave two invited talks that drew from his current monograph project on French soldiers' testimonies of World War I. The first, "Jean Norton Cru and The Subjectivity," was delivered to members of the history department at the University of California at Berkeley. The second, "The Genre of Consent," was presented at the Stanford French Studies Colloquium at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Week of February 9, 2004
The January 19th edition of Newday featured an opinion piece by Assistant Professor of Art History Erik Inglis. The article, "'Absence' Gives Emotions a Presence," explores the controversy surrounding the design of the World Trade Center memorial.

Associate Professor of Mathematics James A. Walsh presented three invited talks at the recent joint meetings of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. Walsh's first talk, "Manufacturing Systems, Invariant Measures, and Undergraduates," recounted his efforts to bring the traditionally graduate-level topics of invariant measures and Birkhoff's Ergodic Theorem into his real analysis course. The second presentation, "Discrete Dynamical Systems," covered Walsh's use of discrete dynamical systems as part of the department's discrete mathematics course. Walsh's final talk, "An Air Pollution Transport Model," explored a model he has used as the basis for a group project in his differential equations course.