Faculty and Staff Notes

Danforth-Lewis Professor of Economics John Duca presented results from two studies, coauthored with Kenean Kejela ’25, at a conference at the Bank of England (the U.K.’s central bank). They find that a more rigorous measure of money improves forecasts of GDP and inflation using deep learning models. Their AI results support the findings from Duca’s coauthored article “Broad Divisia Money, Supply Pressures, and U.S. Inflation Following the COVID-19 Recession,” published in the journal Macroeconomic Dynamics.

Assistant Professor of Data Science and Computer Science Joshua Davidson presented the paper “A classification methodology to prioritize roadways for traffic calming measures” at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in March. The paper was coauthored with Oberlin students Sydney Paunan ’25, Ezra Pemberton '27, Roman Lafia '27, Emmy Saarnio '27, and Jess Nadler '27, as well as Matthew Moss and Calley Mersmann (city of Cleveland).

Associate Professor of Voice Katherine Jolly released the album No Ordinary Woman (Navona Records/PARMA) in January. Her first release since her 2019 debut Preach Sister, Preach, the album features three song cycles that are intimate reflections on womanhood and different sorts of love. Learn more about the album and hear from Jolly on Oberlin.edu.

Head of the Conservatory Library Kathy Abromeit presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music in March. She discussed her forthcoming book, An Index to Spirituals (SUNY Press 2026), as part of the society’s Resource and Research Interest Group Panel on Spirituals.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Nicholas Anderman published "Tropicana, Tropicana, Tropicana: An Interview with Fred Moten" in the journal Qui Parle. It’s part of a special issue on sound studies edited and introduced by Anderman and Be Schierenberg. Learn more about the issue on the Duke University Press website.

On March 14, Longman Professor of English Emerita Sandra Zagarell presented a paper titled “Lewis H. Latimer’s Poetry: A Lens on Late Nineteenth Century Black Readers” at the biannual conference of C 19, the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Over spring break, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion Shari Rabin was an invited speaker at the symposium “Beyond Christianity: Religious Identities in the Premodern Anglosphere,” hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Her talk was titled “Hath Not a Jew Religion?: Governing Difference in the English Atlantic.”

The paperback edition of The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia, by Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager, has been published by Harvard University Press. The book received the 2024 Best Book Award in International History from the American Political Science Association and the 2024 Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History from the Royal United Services Institute. 

East Asian Studies Librarian Yilin La presented “The Life Cycle of a Digitization Project from a Spreadsheet to Active Learning” at the Digital Humanities and Digitization Workshop for Japanese Materials, co-hosted by the National Institute of Japanese Literature and the North American Coordinating Council of Japanese Studies. The presentation was a report on Oberlin’s 2024-2025 NIJL-NCC CDDP Digitization grant project.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Francesca Chubb-Confer delivered the lecture "Nightingales and Falcons: Iqbal, Metaphor, and the Poetic Imagination of Islamic Modernity" at McGill University's Institute of Islamic Studies. Chubb-Confer also presented the paper "World Literatures, World Religions, and the Translation of Islam" at a conference of the American Comparative Literature Association.