Faculty & Staff Notes Archives :: Winter/Spring 2005

Week of May 31, 2005
The current issue of The Journal of Finance features a study co-authored by Danforth Lewis Professor of Economics Kenneth Kuttner and Princeton University's Ben S. Bernanke, who are also colleagues at the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study assesses the impact of changes in monetary policy on equity prices and concludes that the equities market reacts strongly to unanticiipated funds rate changes, most often after an increase in expected excess returns. The Journal of Finance publishes leading research articles from the fields of finance and economics, and is one of the most widely cited academic journals of its kind.

Nita Karpf, assistant to the dean of the Conservatory, has won awards for three of her poems in a national creative writing contest sponsored by John Wood Community College in Quincy, Illinois.  Her haiku, "winter dessert," won honorable mention.  In the catagory of Non-rhyming Contemporary Poetry, "Selah!" also won honorable mention, and "species counterpoint" won second place.

Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies Wendy Kozol's most recent article, "Miss Indian America: Regulatory Gazes and the Politics of Affiliation" has been published in the current edition of Feminist Studies. Kozol is also the co-editor of a new book titled Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisims, and the Politics of Representation, which will be published by Rutgers University Press in July.

Week of May 10, 2005
Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright has received a series of grants this year, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on her forthcoming book, "Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loie Fuller." She has also received a Camargo Foundation Fellowship for a semester residency in France next spring.

This year, the Oberlin Schools Endowment Fund awarded a grant to support Cooper Albright's "Girls in Motion: Move Smart/Talk Smart/Be Smart," an after school program designed for girls at Langston Middle School. Cooper Albright also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund "Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy in America," a project that involves collaborator Ann Dils.

Choice Magazine has listed Associate Professor of Russian Tim Scholl's most recent book, Sleeping Beauty, A Legend in Progress (Yale 2004), as one of its Outstanding Academic Titles for 2005.

Week of May 2, 2005
Director of East Asian Studies Suzanne Gay has received a Short-Term Fellowship from the Japan Foundation for the upcoming academic year. Gay will use the 60-day stipend to read primary sources at Kyoto University as part of her current research on the medieval history of a shrine complex near Kyoto.

Oberlin College Professor of History Gary Kornblith and John M. Murrin of Princeton University co-authored the essay "The Dilemmas of Ruling Elites in Revolutionary America," which was recently published in the book Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy.

Barbara Sawhill, director of Oberlin College's Language Lab, has been appointed President-elect of the International Association of Language Learning Technology (IALLT), an international professional organization whose members provide leadership in the development, integration, evaluation, and management of instructional technology for the teaching and learning of language, literature, and culture. Sawhill will assume her new duties at the group's Biennial meeting August 5-10, 2005.

Week of April 18, 2005
An essay by Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies Abe Socher, titled "Grading Blues," was published in the recent edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Associate Professor of History Pablo Mitchell recently participated in a panel discussion on race, sexuality, and gender at Bowling Green State University. During the discussion, Mitchell addressed the topic of "Queer Border Control: Crime, Surveillance, and Sexuality."

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Lisa Abend and Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies Geoffrey Pingree co-authored an article titled "Homage to Catalonia" for the March 28th edition of The Nation.

Week of April 11, 2005
Professor of Economics David Cleeton has been invited by the European Commission's Directorate General of Economic and Financial Affairs to participate in the sixth annual Brussels Economic Forum on April 21-22, 2005. The purpose of the forum is to stimulate debate on economic policy at the European level.

Professor Cleeton has also been invited to continue his service for a third year on the Council for International Exchange of Scholars Peer Review Committee for Fulbright Awards to Benelux, France, and the European Union.

Professor of Environmental Studies David Orr has been invited to speak at the 9th East West Philosophers' Conference at the University of Hawaii at Manoa next month. Orr will present two lectures during the conference, titled "The Fifth Revolution and Education for Design Intelligence" and "What is Education For?"

Week of February 21, 2005
Ross Feller, assistant professor of composition, recently pulished a book chapter in A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches (Cambridge University Press 2005). The handbook explains how scholars and students should work with and think about the composer's working manuscripts, and includes important information on transcription, reconstructing sketchbooks, deciphering handwriting, and dating documents.

Week of February 7, 2005
Jed Deppman, director of the program in comparative literature, has been appointed the 2005 Lindberg-Seyersted Scholar in Amherst by the Emily Dickinson International Society. Deppman will use the award to complete a chapter in his book Postmodern Dickinson entitled “Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson.”  

Deppman is also the translator and coeditor of Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (University of Pennsylvania Press, March 2004).

Assistant Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand recently published an article titled "Marriage, Identity, and the Tale of Mestra in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women" in the
American Journal of Philology 125 (2004): 303-338.

Week of January 24, 2005
Assistant Professor of Comparative American Studies Gina Perez recently delivered a lecture as part of the University of Illinois Chicago's Latin American/Latino Studies Program's Lectures in the Community program. An article about her presentation later appeared in the Chicago Tribune and La Rasa.

Perez is the author of The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families, which was published by the University of California Press in October 2004.

Week of January 3, 2005
On December 16, 2004, Professors of History Gary Kornblith and Carol Lasser presented a paper titled "Elusive Utopia: The African-American Experience in Nineteenth-Century Oberlin and Russia Township, Ohio" to the American History Research Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London, England. 

Week of December 13, 2004
Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition Anne Trubek recently published an article about the Walt Whitman House in Camden, New Jersey, in Preservation Online, the online magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

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."