Faculty & Staff Notes Archives :: Summer/Fall 2004

Week of November 1, 2004
Juanita Karpf, assistant to the dean of the Conservatory, has won an Honorable Mention in the Pauline Alderman Article Competition, sponsored by the International Alliance for Women in Music. The Award Committee cited her article, "'As With Words of Fire': Art Music and Nineteenth-Century African-American Feminist Discourse," published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, as "an important contribution to the scholarship on women in music."

Week of October 18, 2004
Professor of Classics Thomas Van Nortwick recently gave an invited lecture, "Achilles at Work: Hector's Body and the Resolution of the Iliad," at Wesleyan University.

Van Nortwick also participated, along with Jennifer Sorrel, music director of Apollo's Fire and Catherine Turocy, founder and principal dancer of the New York Baroque Dance Company, in a panel discussion on Terpsichore in Greek myth, Baroque dance, and Handel's suite, Terpischore. The panel preceded a performance by Apollo's Fire at the Museum's Gartner Auditorium.

Week of October 11, 2004
Associate Professor of Creative Writing Pamela Alexander spent the month of August volunteering at a remote Canadian bird observatory and banding station on the Sibley Penninsula, near Thunder Bay (Ontario). A poet with a lifelong interest in ornithology, Alexander assisted the observatory's staff by recording the numbers and species of birds seen in the area, as well as capturing, banding, and releasing numerous birds.

An interview with Houck Associate Professor of Creative Writing Dan Chaon, author of the novel You Remind Me of Me, recently appeared in the "online only" edition of Poets and Writers Magazine.

Assistant Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand recently spoke at Hamilton College as part of the Winslow Classical and Archaeological Lectureship series. Ormand's talk, titled "Electra in Exile," focused on the meaning of setting in Euripides' version of the Electra myth.

Week of September 27, 2004
Wendy Kozol, associate professor of gender and women's studies recently had an article published in Meridians: Feminism, Transnationalism, Race, vol. 4, no. 2 (204): 1-38 titled "Domesticating NATO's War in Kosovo/a (In)Visible Bodies and the Dilemma of Photojournalism."

David Orr, professor of environmental studies, recently delivered a lecture on patriotism, politics, and the environment at Iowa State University as part of the P.H. Elwood Lecture in Landscape Architecture series. Orr has also been scheduled to speak about sustainable building practices at the seventh-annual Green Building Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, on September 30.

An article exploring the ancient Greeks' love of competition, written by Professor of Classics Thomas Van Nortwick, recently appeared online at Newsday.com.

Week of September 6, 2004
Gary Lee Nelson, professor of electronic and computer music in the TIMARA Department, has received a commission from the Boston Museum of Science (BOS) to create an interactive exhibit that illustrates basic concepts of genetic algorithms (GA) by means of music.  BOS contacted Nelson after reading papers on Sonomorphs that are available on his web site.

Sonomorphs are musical creatures that breed and mutate according to rules derived from the GA literature.  In each generation, museum visitors choose parents by listening to the music they make and by looking at a graphic made from the same numeric data as the music.  Parents are then asked to breed and a new generation ensues.  The visitor can guide and refine the population toward characteristics of their choice. The program contains the possibilities that the population can become extinct or overpopulated as a result of disadvantageous visitor selections.

Sonomorphs will be part of a major BOS exhibit on genetics that opens later this year.

Week of August 16, 2004
Professor of Economics David Cleeton recently returned from a short-term teaching assignment in Egypt. Serving in his role as an Adjunct Professor of Finance at the Maastricht School of Management (MSM), he taught a focused portfolio management course to MBA students through the MSM outreach program at the Regional IT Institute (RITI) in Cairo.

Week of July 5, 2004
Last semester the College's Committee on Research and Development distributed $29,762 in grants-in-aid among 15 members of the faculty. A brief description of each funded project is now available online.

"Going Home," a poem by Betty Gabrielli, was one of 12 poems selected by the Poets' and Writers' League of Greater Cleveland for its 2004 RTA Bus Card Project. Gabrielli is a writer in the Office of College Relations. The four-color bus cards will be displayed on over 700 Cleveland buses and will be unveiled at a kick-off party and reading to be held later this summer on Public Square, where a poetry bus will display the poems.

Week of June 28, 2004
Kathleen Abromeit, public service librarian in the Conservatory Library, recently contributed a chapter to the newly published volume, Music in Library Instruction (Scarecrow 2004), which is part of the Music Library Association's Basic Manual Series. Abromeit's contribution, "Reference Assistants on the Front Line in the Music Library," described the Conservatory Library's program for training music reference assistants. Deborah Campana, Conservatory librarian, serves on the editorial board for the series and edited this volume. Assistant

Professor of Physics and Astronomy Yumi Ijiri recently gave an invited talk at the American Conference on Neutron Scattering in College Park, Maryland. Ijiri's lecture was titled "Neutron Scattering Studies of Exchange Bias in Fe304/CoO Expitaxial Thin Films."

Week of June 21, 2004
The College's Committee on Research and Development recently distributed among 12 faculty members $39,996 in H.H. Powers travel grants. Six awards will fund travel for projects in Europe, two for research in China, two for research in Japan, one for research in South Africa, and one will fund research in South India. More information about each individual grant is now available online.

Assistant Director of Admissions James Knight '02 was heard on Cleveland's WCPN 90.3 FM during the past week. Knight's interview focused on his participation in an upcoming basketball tournament, sponsored by the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, to promote voter registration among Oberlin's youth.

Professor of Ethnomusicology Roderic Knight recently delivered a lecture on technology and power in traditional African music to visitors at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Week of May 31, 2004
Assistant Professor of Religion Anna Gade's first book, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur'an in Indonesia, was recently published by the University of Hawai'i Press.

Jed Deppman, assistant professor of comparative literature and English, and Anna Gade, assistant professor of religion, have received summer stipends from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support two consecutive months of research and writing. Deppman will continue an ongoing project, titled Redefining America: Whitman, Dickinson, and Their Dictionaries, while Gade begins a new project, Religious Revitalization and Recovery: Cham Muslims in Cambodia.