Faculty and Staff Notes

Professor of Musicology Charles McGuire spent most of the month of January in the United Kingdom. After teaching the Music in London Winter Term Project to 16 Oberlin students, he traveled to Southampton, where he spent two days as the Hartley Resident. McGuire presented a paper entitled “Victorian Tonic Sol-fa Festivals: Building the Nation and Empire Through Sight-Singing;” co-taught a graduate seminar with Erin Johnson-Williams of Southampton and Ellan Lincoln-Hyde of King’s College, London; and was part of a roundtable discussion entitled “Music, Mission, Empire."

Professor of Music Theory Jan Miyake and Associate Professor of Music Theory Andrew Pau have contributed chapters to Modeling Musical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2024), a collection of essays written by minoritized scholars and designed to model analytical writing for undergraduate students. Miyake’s essay discusses the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, while Pau’s explores Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison’s 2005 opera Margaret Garner.

Studio Arts Lecturer in Drawing and Reproducible Media R Kauff received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, an award for outstanding work and grant for developing new projects.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies Yorki J. Encalada Egúsquiza's article "Desarrollo de una nueva consciencia mestiza a través de la valoración del arte comunitario fronterizo en la narrativa de Roberta Fernández" was published in Polifonía. The article explores how female solidarity and community border art expands Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of mestiza consciousness and its traditional identity crisis focus.

Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Comparative American Studies Yveline Alexis authored the book Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte (Rutgers University Press). Her book tour included a January stop at Possible Futures in New Haven, Connecticut, alongside Rhodes Scholar Nadine Pinede and poet Marilyn Pierre.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Francesca Chubb-Confer published an article in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East entitled "Remnants of Eternal Possibility: Iqbal and Lyric Time in the Ghazal." The article argues for a new way of reading the Persian poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, one of the most important figures of modern Islamic revival and reform.

Emeritus Professor of English Nicholas Jones has published The Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro: A New Translation with Commentary (University of Michigan Press, 2025). It is only the second translation into English of this classic Italian pastoral from 1504.

Emeritus Professor of Ethnomusicology Roderic Knight gave a video presentation and performance January 19 on Elisha Gray's musical telegraph, the world's first electric musical instrument. The event was a concert at the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, Illinois, held to celebrate the 150th year of the invention, December 29, 1874. Attendees heard a tune on Oberlin's working replica, built by physics department machinist Mike Miller.

Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón published two new scholarly essays. The first, “The Literary Labour of Ants Refabulation, Digression, and Utopian Form in Daniel Sada’s Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (1999)”, studies literary digression and the speculative potential of animals in fiction. The second, “La ortodoxa excentricidad de Daniel Sada: campo literario, recepción y las ansiedades de la crítica, 1979–1989”, examines the Mexican literary field of the 1980s, exploring how emerging writers navigated a landscape shaped by literary institutionalization and the restructuring of the publishing industry.

Check out Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Comparative American Studies Yveline Alexis's Café ak Conversations with professors Edwidge Danticat and Nadine Pinede about the book, When the Mapou Sings.