10 Faculty Members to Conduct Research with Students under McGregor-Oresman Grants This Summer and Fall By Linda Grashoff
			MAY 18, 1999--With support from the McGregor-Oresman Fund, 10 members of the Oberlin College faculty will team up with 10 students to conduct research this summer and fall. The McGregor-Oresman Fund promotes close intellectual collaboration between faculty and students with $75,000 received in a grant from the McGregor Fund, matched by Donald Oresman '46. Brian Alegant, associate professor of music theory, and Marcus Lofthouse, a sophomore from Waukesha, Wisconsin, will work on the 12-tone music of Luigi Dallapiccola this summer. They will analyze selected passages of Dallapiccola's compositions and identify specific features in selected compositions. Lofthouse will keep bibliographic records and help Alegant compile annotated bibliographies, transfer analyses and score reductions to Finale, a music-software program, help Alegant prepare handouts for conferences next fall, proofread articles Alegant plans to submit at the end of the summer, execute computer programs Alegant has written for musical analysis and sorting the results, and scan score segments and text and make photocopies. The project, says Alegant, will immerse Lofthouse in the music of one of the century's greatest composers, give Lofthouse a thorough grounding and deep understanding of 12-tone music, which will open him up to new compositional mind-sets and sophisticated compositional techniques, help prepare him for graduate study in music by honing his bibliographic, analytical, aural, and editing skills (and perhaps improves his writing skills), and teach him the nature, process, and product of music-theoretical research. Beginning in the fall Roland Baumann, archivist and adjunct professor of history, will have Rebecca Johnson, a sophomore from Cincinnati, help him on two projects. Together Baumann and Johnson will produce an annotated edition of early Oberlin College president James Fairchild's 1895 address on the Underground Railroad to the Western Reserve Historical Society. The other project is the creation of an anthology of documents on Oberlin's commitment to educate African Americans. The anthology will appear in paper and digital format and may become the basis for an exhibition on the Archives web site for Black History Month in February 2000. Also beginning in the fall Marc Blecher, professor of politics and East Asian studies, and Ingrid Yinghao Huang, a junior from Baltimore, will extend the work they are doing now. Huang will classify and summarize clippings from the Tianjin Evening News and other Tianjin newspapers and magazines that Blecher is collecting now in China, translate transcripts of interviews with workers, government officials, and intellectuals conducted for Blecher in China as well as those Blecher will conduct this month and next, work with Blecher at the University of Michigan to collect clippings from the Workers' Daily since 1989, continue to survey books on workers' politics procured during Blecher's 1997, current, and forthcoming research trips, summarizing key sections and alerting Blecher to those he should study in detail, code and help analyze data from quinquennial national surveys of worker attitudes done by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which Blecher plans to collect in China this spring, help with correspondence with Chinese colleagues and research assistants who will be sending new materials throughout 1999-2000, and survey materials Blecher will collect this spring in Xinji Municipality for a separate research project that will produce an article updating his Tethered Deer: Government and Economy in a Chinese County (Stanford University Press, 1996), including coding data in hand on the career pathways of several thousand graduates of the famed Xinji Middle School. This summer and fall Dolsy Smith, a junior from New Orleans, will help Arlene Forman, associate professor of Russian, produce a new video component for Russian 101 and 102. Mary Garvin, visiting assistant professor of biology, and Alex Koeppel, a junior from North Conway, New Hampshire, will work together this summer on a teaching project. "The biology department has a diverse and valuable collection of invertebrate specimens and 35-millimeter slides for teaching advanced and introductory courses," says Garvin. To enhance the accessibility of the collection for students and faculty, Koeppel will help Garvin curate and organize the collection, scan the slides into digital format for use during lecture and out-of-class viewing on the course web site, and construct a computer-based relational database of all the specimens and images. During the summer Elizabeth Sapir, a junior from Charlottesville, Virginia, will help Roderic Knight, professor of ethnomusicology, with several projects involving hands-on experience in archiving and annotating sound recordings and preparing notations for teaching. The projects will focus on preparing tape copies and field notes from Knight's 1982 research in India for deposit at the American Institute of Indian Studies archive in India, annotating and completing a database-in-progress of the ethnomusicology LP recordings in the Conservatory Library (some of which were never fully catalogued when acquired), and publishing the database on a web site, assembling unpublished teaching materials from Javanese Gamelan specialists at other institutions in the U.S. for use by the Oberlin Javanese Gamelan, and preparing notations and step-by-step recordings for instruction on the kora, a 21-string African harp and principal instrument of the Oberlin Mandinka Ensemble. Judith Beinstein Miller, professor of psychology, will work with Beth Brdlik, a sophomore from Moorestown, New Jersey, in the fall to extend Miller's research on information-processing consequences of attachment beliefs in adulthood. The two will investigate the effects of college students' expectations for love on the way they process attachment-related information. "We are interested in the extent to which their anxieties and comfort in love relationships create information-processing biases that reinforce and maintain their expectations," says Miller. In summer research, Karla Parsons-Hubbard, assistant professor of geology, and Melissa Berke, a junior from Gahanna, Ohio, will analyze sea-urchin skeletons. Robert Thompson, professor of chemistry, will team up again with Ruth Hook, a junior from Warminster, Pennsylvania, this summer to develop more crime scenarios for use in analytical chemistry. (They carried out their original project last year.) "Hook will write at least two more engaging mystery stories and prepare the evidence and documentation to support them," says Thompson. "Ultimately, we would like to prepare a CD for distribution (sale?) to analytical-chemistry educators so that others may enjoy the benefits of this approach to laboratory instruction." Geoff Chaplin, a senior from Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, will work with Grover Zinn, Danforth Professor of Religion, this summer to edit a 12th-century Latin text--"De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris" ("Concerning Sacred Scriptures and Sacred Writers")--and prepare it for submission to an editor. The two will compare the texts of several 12th- and 13th-century manuscripts of the work. They will enter the texts with their variants and abbreviations in a specialized text-editing computer program called Collate, written by Peter Robinson at the Oxford University Computing Center. The text produced will be used as the basis for translations into French and English. The text being edited is important for the literature of Biblical interpretation in the Middle Ages, says Zinn. Hugh of Saint-Victor (d. 1141), a leading 12th-century Biblical exegete, theologian, and mystic wrote it. "The text," Zinn says, "can be considered an introductory handbook for a student just beginning the study of scripture. Modeled on handbooks that introduced students to works of literature, it was in the forefront of pedagogical and scholarly developments in Hugh's day."
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