Faculty and Staff Notes

Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright published the essay “Touching History” in The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory published by Wesleyan University Press.

Associate Professor of Religion Margaret Kamitsuka presented at the Societas Ethica Conference in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Assistant Professor of Physics Jillian Scudder’s book, Astroquizzical: A Curious Journey Through Our Cosmic Family Tree, was reviewed in the August edition of Physics World.

Cynthia Taylor published a paper titled "Identifying Student Difficulties with Basic Data Structures" in the proceedings of the 2018 International Computer Education Research Conference (ICER) in Espoo, Finland, August 2018.

Associate Professor of Sociology Greggor Mattson presented two papers and was on one invited panel at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the pre-conference of the ASA Section on Sexualities, August 9-14, 2018. His research papers covered his current book project on gay bars in the United States, including the fates of bars in small cities and those owned by or serving LGBT people of color. The panel was about how to share sociological insights with the general public via blogging and journalists.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Cal Biruk was awarded an Engaged Anthropology grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Global Public Health Evangeline M. Heiliger presented her research, “Cancer Femme as Biopossibility: Queer Feminist Science Studies, Transfeminisms, Audre Lorde, and Breast Cancer Surgery” at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference. She also presented “Polar Bears and Electric Plugs: Twenty-First Century Queer American Masculinities.” at the 26th Annual American Men’s Studies Conference. The theme of the conference was Bodies, Sexualities, Masculinities.

Associate Professor of History Shelley Lee co-edited A Companion to Korean American Studies, an interdisciplinary anthology of essays by more than 30 authors.

Professor of Physics Yumi Ijiri gave two presentations on manganese ferrite nanoparticles and chaired a session at the International Conference on Magnetism, held in San Francisco, CA from July 15-20.  Oberlin students Jane Hsieh '20, Ian Hunt-Isaak '17, and Hillary Pan '17 were co-authors on the presentations, along with scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

Professor of Mathematics Jim Walsh's paper "Neoproterozoic glacial ages in a nonsmooth conceptual model" has appeared in the Journal of Physics Communications. The paper concerns a nonsmooth geometric singular perturbation problem that arises in a mathematical model of the great glacial ages of the Neoproterozoic Era.