Faculty and Staff Notes

This March, music education professor Jody Kerchner will participate in two panel presentations on the Choral Commons month-long series titled "Gather—Community Music Conversations." The Choral Commons is sponsored in part by the American Choral Directors Association and Chorus America. 

The first discussion, on Wednesday, March 10 at 8:00 p.m., features Kerchner's work with the Oberlin Music at Grafton Choir (OMAG). She will be joined by restored citizen and OMAG "founding father" Jerome Thompson. 

On Wednesday, March 17 at 8:00 p.m., Kerchner joins prison singing facilitators Cathy Roma, Mary Cohen, Amanda Weber, and Andre DeQuadros to further discuss prison music engagement.

The sessions are moderated and produced for Facebook by Emilie Amrein and Andre DeQuadros. These webinars are held live and recorded for later viewing on the Choral Commons website. 

The fifth book by Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies Carl McDaniel, Beauty Won Me Over: A Scientist's Life, was published in February 2021 by Austin Macauley. The book is a memoir about his life as a scientist. 

Assistant Professor of Physics Jillian Scudder was interviewed and quoted in an article in WIRED, commenting on astrophysical research: "Twinkling Black Holes Reveal an Invisible Cloud in Our Galaxy."
 

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Stiliana Milkova edited a special issue for Reading in Translation on the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg that features 15 essays, interviews, and two first English translations of works by Italo Calvino and by Natalia Ginzburg. Milkova co-translated Italo Calvino's essay "Natalia Ginzburg or the Possibilities of the Bourgeois Novel." 

Conservatory French horn professor Jeff Scott is also an accomplished composer. CSOtv, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s streaming platform, features his woodwind quintet work Startin’ Sumthin’ this February, part of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago’s Episode 2 broadcast. You can hear the performance at cso.org/csotv/features/black-history-month.

Jillian Scudder coauthored a publication recently accepted by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, assessing how different methods of calculating the metal content of gas in other galaxies convert into each other.

Margaret Kamitsuka, emeritus professor of religion, has been reappointed for another five-year term as the editor of the Academy Series of the American Academy of Religion. The series partners with Oxford University Press to publish promising new dissertations in religious studies.

The book launch of Elena Ferrante as World Literature (Bloomsbury Academic) by Stiliana Milkova, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, will be hosted by the Italian Cultural Institute in Dublin at 7 p.m. (GMT)/2 p.m. (ET) on Tuesday, February 23.

Elena Ferrante as World Literature studies Ferrante’s works as world literature—that is, as literature that circulates in translation outside its culture of origins. Beginning with the creation of the author “Elena Ferrante” and the figure of the translator, Milkova delves into the intricacies of Ferrante’s texts, offering both an introduction to and a sustained reading of Ferrante’s entire literary production to date. The volume will be presented by Dr. Enrica Maria Ferrara (Trinity College Dublin) in conversation with the Milkova and Ferrante's translator, Ann Goldstein. Register your attendance and receive a link to the event, which will be held via Zoom.

Professor of English and Comparative Literature Wendy Beth Hyman has given two recent invited lectures. The first, “How Sonnets Think,” took place remotely at Oxford Brookes University in the UK; and “John Donne’s Flea and the Scientific Revolution” was delivered to the John Donne Society. She was also recently interviewed by Jeffrey R. Wilson (Harvard University) for a forthcoming project called “An Oral History of Public Shakespeare.”

Associate Professor David Breitman has been introducing Oberlin Conservatory students to historical keyboards since 1991. In his new book Piano-Playing Revisited, What Modern Players Can Learn from Period Instruments, released this month by University of Rochester Press, Breitman acknowledges the dilemma of confronting historical repertoire with modern instruments, then shows how to apply insights from period instruments to practical problems on any piano. A series of videos that he recorded primarily in Oberlin's Clonick Hall illustrates the musical examples .