Faculty & Staff Notes Archives :: Summer/Fall 2006

November 2006
Associate Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand presented a public lecture at Indiana University on November 16 titled "The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and the Mysterious Disappearing Hedna." Professor Ormand is currently writing a book on the Catalogue of Women, a fragmentary text from the 6th c. BCE that tells the genealogies of the Greek mythical heroes. Ormand ties this text to contemporaneous developments in social and legal history, especially the institutions and practices of marriage.

October 2006
“The Evidence of Things Unseen: The Sweet Gloom of Writers' House Museums,” an essay by Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition Anne Trubek ’88 appears in the October issue of the literary publicationThe Believer.

Published 10 times a year, The Believer also covers a variety of art forms and features articles about authors, artists, and literary issues of the past and present, often relating to politics and popular culture. 

Trubek is the co-author, with Evelyn Trimble, of Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age. The authors examine transformations in reading and writing from the oral traditions of the pre-print era to the hypertext of the digital age and analyze the impact of the changes on literate practices.

A member of the Oberlin faculty since 1997,Trubek also serves as the director of the College’s Community Academic Partnership Program and Ninde Scholars programs. Their dual aim is to help qualified Oberlin High School students gain access to higher education by improving their writing skills and learning how to negotiate the college admissions process.

September 2006
At the 2006 American Political Science Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, on August 31 to September 3, James Monroe Professor of Politics & Law Ronald Kahn was presented with the Teaching and Mentoring Award from the APSA's Law and Courts Organized Section. The award recognizes innovative teaching, instructional methods, and materials on the subject of law and courts. During a teaching career that has spanned five decades, Kahn has attained the highest standards in both scholarly work and the instruction and mentoring of students. He has received many prestigious awards, including Oberlin's Distinguished Teacher Award in 2001.

August 2006
Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Composition Laurie Hovell McMillin recently conducted several interviews about her book Buried Indians: Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town. She was interviewed on the At 10 show on WUVM 89.7 in Milwaukee, WORT 89.9 in Madison, and at the News and Brews bookstore in McFarland, Wisconsin. McMillin also spoke about her book at the Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa. Podcasts of her conversations with At 10 and the News and Brews bookstore can be found at http://www.wuwm.com/list_at10.php (the August 25 show) and http://www.newsnbrews.com/

Oxford University Press has just published Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata by Professor of Music Theory Warren Darcy '68 and James Hepokoski (Yale University). The product of twelve years’ work, this study considers not only sonatas but also chamber music, symphonies, overtures, and concertos; it outlines a new, updated paradigm for understanding the compositional choices present in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries. It also lays down a foundation for those working with later adaptations and deformations of these musical structures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Drawing upon contemporary genre theory, the authors map out the background terrain of historical norms at work in this music and provide a flexible mode of analysis for perceiving and assessing what happens--or what does not happen--in any given sonata-based composition.