Faculty and Staff Notes

Conservatory Library Head Kathy Abromeit publishes book, Music Information Literacy: Inclusion and Advocacy, with coeditor Dyani Sabin ’14. In the face of the last decade’s events and increased public awareness of issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), we in music libraries can do things to create the space in our teaching for optimal creativity and connection by and with our library users. Multi-author collection by activist librarians.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey's book Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023), was named one of three finalists for the 2024 Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. The prize "honors a single-authored book focused on Africa and/or the African diaspora submitted by or on behalf of a scholar, activist, and/or artist who has not previously published a single-authored monograph."

Student Affairs staff Melanie Hawkins and Rebecca Morrow cohosted a roundtable discussion on learning and development at the annual Ohio College Personnel Association conference on February 10. Discussion points among the approximately 50 attendees included the incorporation of the ACPA/NASPA competencies as a framework for the development and delivery of ongoing training among student affairs practitioners.

Lecturer in German and Russian Olesya Ivantsova presented her paper “Submerging into the Shadows: Joseph Roth’s Travelogues from Post-Revolutionary Russia” at the 2025 Modern Language Association Annual Convention in New Orleans focusing on the notion of the subterranean in Roth’s travelogues and analyzing how the Austrian author’s travel accounts from the 1920s Soviet Union became crucial for his development as a writer.

Lecturer of Creative Writing Amanda Hodes won the 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for her debut poetry collection, Into the Into of Earth Itself (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2026). The national award is sponsored by Fresno State University’s Master of Fine Arts Program.

Over the first two weeks in January, Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright taught contact improvisation in Mexico City. While there, she participated in the presentation of her newest book, Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50, a collection of writings coming out of the five-day international celebration of Contact’s 50th anniversary in 2022. The book includes an essay by the Mexican feminist collective EPIICO.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Anna Lordan led an online workshop with the Nobel Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, Ukraine, on the poetry of Victoria Amelina, the writer and war crimes researcher who was killed by a Russian missile attack in June 2023.

Read more about Anna Lordan

Through the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity, Associate Dean for Academic Support, Chris Jenkins published a blog post titled “Radically Transforming Classical Music” on Medium, part of a larger set of works focused on exploration across musical genres. For the American Viola Society, he released a recording of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Blue/s Forms on solo viola, available on YouTube and Spotify.

An article by Multifaith Chaplain and Director of Sustained Dialogue David Dorsey on Oberlin’s Barefoot Dialogue was published in Unfolding: University Chaplaincy in Practice. Conceived by Dorsey 12 years ago, Barefoot teaches each individual to hold dignity for all in what is said, heard, experienced, and all that surrounds.

Assistant Professor of German Jessica Resvick published a chapter in the edited volume A Companion to the Works of Adalbert Stifter. Her chapter focuses on the first two versions of the novel My Great-Grandfather’s Notebook and traces out a particular orientation to the past that lies at the heart of the great 19th-century writer’s works.