Faculty and Staff Notes

Dang Thai Son, the conservatory’s newest member of the piano faculty—and a renowned teacher, performer, and interpreter of the Polish composers Chopin and Paderewski—traveled to Warsaw in September where he was awarded the “Zasluzony Kulturze Gloria Artis” (Gold Medal for Merit to Culture) by Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

Jared C. Hartt, associate professor of music theory, published an edited book, A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets (Boydell and Brewer, 2018). This volume of collected essays, the first to be devoted exclusively to medieval motets, features chapters by seventeen leading scholars from around the world. More information on the book and its contents can be found here.

Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón’s short story “Escena en un restaurante de comida rápida” was included in The Hay Festival’s anthology Bogotá39: Nuevas voces desde Latinoamerica. The anthology has been published in Spain, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Uruguay, Perú, and Ecuador by a series of independent publishers. It was also translated into English as Bogotá39: New Voices from Latin America and published by British imprint Oneworld Editions.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Cal Biruk presented at paper at the Society for Social Studies of Science annual meeting in Sydney, Australia and also presented work at the National Science Foundation-funded AfricaSTS pre-conference.

Visiting Assistant Professor Sam Berrin Shonkoff's edited volume on Martin Buber was published by Brill.

Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright performed as part of the opening plenary “provocation” panel at the Dance Studies Association conference in Valletta, Malta in July. The conference theme was “Contra: Dance and Conflict,” and the opening provocation was titled “Working It Out with The Flaming Bitches” in honor of her first feminist study group at Oberlin College in the early 1990s.

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.