Faculty and Staff Notes

Oberlin violin professor Francesca dePasquale is a featured teacher for the 2023 Starling-DeLay Symposium on Violin Studies—a biennial master class series for 12 highly accomplished young violinists. Held at The Juilliard School, the symposium is dedicated to fostering the legacy of the late renowned teacher Dorothy DeLay, a violinist who studied at Oberlin Conservatory in 1933-34.

DePasquale’s May 24 master class showcased her work with five students who brought performances of concertos by Wieniawski, Prokofiev, Sibelius, and Shostakovich, as well as the Bartok Second Rhapsody. It was covered by violinist and writer Laurie Niles in an insightful article for Violinist.com. It provides a window into how dePasquale teaches and thinks about how to deliver great musical performances—and her focus, in this class, "on finding the most ergonomic and tension-free way to play, harnessing the energy of performance, and zooming in on details such as rhythm and articulation to affect the larger musical picture."

Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager introduced her new book, The Other Great Game, at the Wilson Center through its Washington History Seminar program on Monday, May 22.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Shuming Chen has recently published two papers. "Expedited synthesis of α-amino acids by single-step enantioselective α-amination of carboxylic acids" appeared in Nature Synthesis. Coauthors include Drew Dansby ’24 and collaborators from Marburg, Germany.  "Chemo-, Stereo- and Regioselective Fluoroallylation/Annulation of Hydrazones with gem-Difluorocyclopropanes via Tunable Palladium/NHC Catalysis" was published in Angewandte Chemie. Coauthors on this article include Hieu Nguyen ’25 and collaborators from Renmin University of China.

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Allegra Hyde's new story collection, The Last Catastrophe, was named an Editors' Choice selection by The New York Times.

Evan Kresch presented his paper "What We Do in the Shadows: How Urban Density Facilitates Information Diffusion" in the NOVAFRICA seminar series at the Nova SBE in Lisbon, Portugal.

Grace An was commissioned to write a catalogue essay for the Cinémathèque Française, France's premier film institution, which is launching its first exhibition devoted to a non-male filmmaker: Agnès Varda. The essay explored Varda's "revolutionary" short films during the 1960s, including Black Panthers and Salut les Cubains. The exhibit will open October 2023 and close in January 2024.

An was also commissioned to write a short piece about the film Annie colère (Blandine Lenoir, 2022) for a special issue of Imaginaires (formerly French Film for Historians) dedicated to reproductive politics and care. An is a member of the journal's advisory board.

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Jillian Scudder was interviewed live on WWL radio for an hour on May 11 about all things space.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey contributed the chapter "Leave No Mark: Blackness and Inscription in the Inquisitorial Archive," to the volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World. Edited by Steven Nelson and Huey Copeland, the book emerged out of meetings held at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2018 and 2019. These meetings brought together leading scholars of Black art history to debate and remake the "boundaries of modernist art—its notions time and again focused on the singular white male European or American artist—with another set of imperatives, ethics, and histories, broadening our understanding of the past and present of modernism."

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey presented his paper "Fugitive Landscapes and the Challenge of Black Atlantic Cartographies: Brazil, 1763" at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Rarey's paper was one of eleven invited presentations at Dumbarton Oaks' Spring Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium, entitled "Environmental Histories of the Black Atlantic World: Landscape Histories of the African Diaspora," organized by N. D. B. Connolly and Oscar de la Torre. The symposium brought together archaeologists, historians, art historians, and landscape architects to discuss and debate place-based histories of landscapes, waterscapes, and environments of the Black Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the twentieth century.

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Allegra Hyde published an essay on "Exit Strategies" in fiction at LitHub. She also published short fiction titled "Mobilization," about a vast herd of RVs, in the latest issue of Story. In Conjunctions, she published a short story titled "Dear Employee" about a eco-utopian vision for job redistribution. "Dear Employee" will be reprinted in Harper's Magazine this summer.