Faculty & Staff Notes Archives :: Summer 2003

Week of July 28, 2003
Professor of Politics Marc Blecher has recently been chosen to join the editorial board of the Chinese Journal of Political Science.

Week of July 21, 2003
Professor of Psychology Norman Henderson received the Dobzhansky Memorial Award for a lifetime of outstanding scholarship in behavior genetics at the 33rd annual meeting of the Behavior Genetics Association. Henderson is a past president of the association, and has served as executive editor of the journal, Behavior Genetics. At the meeting, he was cited for his pioneering research on the influences of gene-environment interactions on brain and behavior. Henderson's current research involves locating quantitative trait loci that influence anxiety.

Week of June 23, 2003
Professor of Economics David Cleeton was recently appointed to the Regional Advisory Board for the European Union Center and the Center for West European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. The EU Center is one of only 15 centers designated and funded by the European Commission. The Center for West European Studies is one of only five centers for West European Studies designated by the United States federal government and funded under Title VI of the Higher Education Act.

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.