Faculty and Staff Notes

Janet Fiskio and Chie Sakakibara were awarded a $40,000 National Science Foundation conference award for “Oral History and Local Knowledge: Methods of Resilience” in the Arctic Social Sciences Program. The grant supported a community history workshop in Africatown, Alabama at the historic Union Missionary Baptist Church. Approximately 40 community members, Inupiat elders, and Oberlin faculty and students participated in the workshop held during fall 2017.

Sebastiaan Faber, professor of Hispanic studies, co-authored a piece about Catalonia's relationship with Spain for the Nation, "Have Spain and Catalonia Reached a Point of No Return?"

Sheila Miyoshi Jager, professor of East Asian studies, was interviewed and quoted by USA Today in two articles about North Korea, "From Good to Bad: Five Possible Options for What's Next in North Korea-U.S. Standoff," and "North Korea Has Taken Provocatice Actions for Decades, but This Time Could Trigger War."

Assistant Professor of Physics Jillian Scudder has been a regular science contributor for Forbes since 2015. Astroquizzical is an online column dedicated to answering questions about space.

Associate Professor of Sociology Greggor Mattson's critique of a study about face recognition technology and sexual orientation was widely quoted. The study, conducted by two researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Business, claimed that artificial intelligence could detect gay and lesbian faces more accurately than humans and was evidence of a prenatal hormonal cause of homosexuality. Mattson critiqued the methods used to train the algorithms, the outdated concepts that motivated them, and "the stunning tone-deafness" of the authors' defense of their ethics. The piece was quoted by such English-language outlets as Inside Higher Ed, Vice's Motherboard, and Outline, and it was quoted in German by Wired and Süddeutsche Zeitung. Read Mattson's critique "Artificial Intelligence Discovers Gayface. Sigh."

Chie Sakakibara, assistant professor of environmental studies, received an award for “Best Paper” with her piece "No Whale, No Music: Climate Change and Cultural Resilience Among the Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska." The paper took top honors in Category 1: Oral Traditions and Expressions and was presented on September 6-8, 2017 at Sharing Cultures 2017—5th International Conference on Intangible Heritage in Barcelos, Portugal.

Drew Wilburn, associate professor of classics, archaeology, and humanities, gave two invited lectures in London during May 2017. At the British Museum, he presented his research on the archaeological findspots of magical papyri in Egypt, entitled "Investigating the Magical Papyri as Artifacts." This work is part of a larger project related to archaeological context and spell manuals that were used by specialists during the late Roman and early Christian periods (3rd-6th centuries CE). He also gave a public lecture at Treadwell's Bookshop, entitled "Archaeology of Spells: A Case Study from Karanis, Egypt." This lecture presented Drew's research on a magical love spell and a cache of more than 80 inscribed bones found during the University of Michigan's excavations at the Roman period site of Karanis.

Assistant Professor of Economics Evan Kresch was a discussant at the Liberal Arts Colleges Development Economics Conference that took place September 8-9, 2017. 

Sandra Zagarell, professor of English, presented a paper "Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Archive and the Places of Regionalism" at the American Literature Association's Symposium "Regionalism and Place in American Literature" on September 9, 2017.  

Greggor Mattson, associate professor of sociology, presented about the decline of gay bars on a panel at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference in London. Mattson examined the characteristics of bars in small cities as a corrective to research that overwhelmingly focuses on LGBTQ places in large metropolises with gay neighborhoods. Based on site visits and interviews with bar owners, he shows how these bars' successes provide insights for those other bars which are a small minority of the total number of gay bars. Read the abstract of his talk and slides.