Faculty and Staff Notes

Professor of Voice Timothy LeFebvre sang the title role in Verdi’s Rigoletto with Tri-Cities Opera in Binghmamton, New York, as part of the company’s 75th anniversary season. LeFebvre is a frequent performer with the company, having sung more than 15 leading roles with them during the last 35 years.

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber was awarded a subvention grant from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies (administered by American Council of Learned Societies) for the publication of his book Cadaverous: Postmortem Contagion and Ritual Immunity in Medieval Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2026).

Professor of Statistics Jeff Witmer was selected to receive a Founders Award from the American Statistical Association, one of five such honorees nationwide for 2025.

Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science Joshua Davidson published two papers: "Is This Your First Time Here? Older Adults and Mode-Switching on a New Local Bus Route in Philadelphia" (coauthored with Julene Paul of the University of Texas at Arlington) in the Transportation Research Record; and "Cycling in a Crisis: Employing Quasi-Experimental Designs to Estimate the Effects of Provisional Bicycle Infrastructure" (coauthored by colleagues from Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of Pennsylvania) in the Journal of Planning Education and Research.

James Monroe Professor of Politics and of East Asian Studies Marc Blecher and Philippe Schmitter published السياسة علمًا: مقدمة نقدية (al-Siyāsa ʿIlman: Muqaddima Naqdiyya) (Doha: Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies), the Arabic translation of Politics as a Science (2020).

Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Communication Nathan DeProspo received the Best Paper Award (Early Career Researchers Category) from the Centre for Research in Posthumanities for the paper "Animality and/as Alterity in (Post)Humanist Thought."

Professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies Cindy Frantz was quoted in the April 2025 Guardian article “Activate climate’s ‘silent majority’ to supercharge action, experts say.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Francesca Chubb-Confer gave talks about her scholarly work on the poet, philosopher, and Muslim modernist thinker Muhammad Iqbal: at the University of Minnesota (“The Ghazal Guides the Way: Iqbal, Rumi, and the Poetics of Inspiration”) and a keynote address in Urdu for the community-run Urdu Institute of Schaumburg, Illinois.

Sam Adams, the Ellen Johnson ’33 Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, joined 57 curators from 13 countries for the 2025 Curatorial Forum, hosted by Independent Curators International and EXPO Chicago. Adams was presented with the Barbara Nessim Curatorial Travel Award, given annually to one curator in recognition of their work advancing the work of woman-identifying artists.

Articles by Emeritus Professor of History Steven Volk were published in The Nation (”Chile in Their Hearts,” April 29, 2025) and The Routledge Companion to Cultural Text and the Nation (“Constituting the Nation: Chile’s Constitution and the Reimagination of National Identity,” New York: Routledge, 2025), edited by Sheera Talpaz and Anuradha Dingwaney.